The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (4 page)

I entered the Intercontinental Hotel where some of the most powerful women on the continent had gathered and were talking and dancing together. Mary, the first woman bank manager in Kenya, more than 6 feet tall with a regal but kind air, welcomed me. She told me to try and meet as many of the women in the room as I could, emphasizing that it was important that they accept me. A Ghanaian woman with a tiny face under a brightly colored turban danced beside her. She'd started in business by making a dozen jars of marmalade and was now one of the wealthiest industrialists on the continent, focused on improving women's situations. An enormous Senegalese woman wrapped in pale pink silk, wearing huge rings and radiating confidence, completed the picture. What a different world from the nearly all-male bastion of Wall Street!

I found the swirl of color and music and the confidence of the African women exhilarating, overwhelming, exciting, and unsettling. Compounding my anxiety and uncharacteristic shyness was the inescapable drabness of my Wall Street navy jacket and skirt in comparison with the gorgeous dresses worn by the women who filled the room with such flair that it looked like a butterfly convention. No one seemed able to distinguish me from the only other white woman in the room, a shorter, more fulsome Italian with black curly hair and Abyssinian eyes. I was taller and more slender, with longish brown hair and blue eyes. Still, everyone confused us, thinking we looked exactly alike-poetic justice.

I found myself standing against the wall like a timid girl at a high school dance. Finally I asked the requisite introductory question of a tall African woman standing next to me who looked as awkward as I felt:

"Where are you from?"

She just looked at me. I tried asking again, this time in French.

She answered, "Rwanda"

"Uganda?" I asked. "How exciting-what an amazing place!" I'd read all about Idi Amin and the revolutionary Yoweri Museveni, who had just taken over the country and was promising peace and prosperity, and about the country's reputation for poetry and a more open media.

"No," she repeated in a heavy African accent. "Rwanda."

"Oh, Luanda," I said, "the capital of Angola."

"No," she said patiently. "Not Angola. Rwanda."

I was stumped. Though I'd been studying "Africa" for months now, I knew little about most of the continent's 54 diverse countries.

"Oh, Rwanda, yes," I muttered as my brain went into overdrive sorting, sifting, trying to find the country somewhere in the disorganized flurry of names and places in my head. Finally, I remembered: Rwanda, a thimble-size country at the center of the African map; one of the poorest countries in the world; known for its beautiful geography and mountain gorillas; tribal tensions flare periodically between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis. Whew.

I was a typical American: Give me a few facts about a country and I felt perfectly comfortable commenting on the place. I remembered that Rwanda was right next to Burundi, a country that had seen mass killings of educated Hutus by the ruling Tutsis in 1972. Since this didn't seem like a good conversation starter, I opted to skip it and simply asked her name, this time in French.

She looked at me again, always waiting before answering.

"Veronique," she said slowly, enunciating each syllable, perhaps now thinking I was hard of hearing or a little daft. Though she was probably not much more than 34 or 35, maybe a decade older than me at the time, somehow she reminded me of my grandmother, with her thick hands, broad shoulders, and feet settled in sensible shoes. She wore a brown and green cotton, African-print dress with billowing sleeves. Oversize, boxy plastic glasses accentuated her square face. Her hair stood on end, flopping this way and that in cadence with her exuberant speech. I liked her immediately.

My grandmother Stella once wore a housedress to the wedding of one of her sons because she'd forgotten her fancy dress back home in Pennsylvania. I could imagine Veronique doing the same sort of thing.

She waxed eloquently about her country. "It is called the Land of a Thousand Hills, and that is what it is." She paused to smile. "Hills grow on hills, and it is a very green place. You would like it there."

As it turned out, Veronique was a midlevel official in Rwanda's Min istry of Family and Social Affairs, one of the weaker ministries in the government, which focused on women's status, family planning, and other "soft issues," and thus was the one where women across Africa usually found themselves. She was attending the conference in order to explore what other countries were doing to bring women into the economic mainstream.

As was the case in a number of African countries at the time, Rwandan law prevented women from opening a bank account without their husbands' written permission, Veronique explained. The country was still governed by the Napoleonic Code, a colonial holdover written in 1804 that gave women the status of minors and the mentally impaired. The idea of women borrowing money on their own terms was simply out of the question. Only recently had Veronique and other leaders made any movement on the issue at all.

"We are changing the laws now," she assured me, "and need to be ready for this." She had the confidence of someone who knew she was making history.

We spoke for a long time about her hopes and dreams, and it was clear that Veronique was more activist than academic.

"You will see one day that our women are so strong! They do so much of the work and take care of the children, but they are kept too far down by the fact that they have so few rights. You know, we need to find a way to let them borrow money for their businesses, to send their daughters to school, to be able to dream of the things we know they can do. If Rwanda is to develop, then its women must have more opportunities, don't you think?"

I laughed and said, "Of course! The question is how to change the environment so that women can be seen by both men and women alike for what they can contribute."

"Yes," she said, "and you will help us."

"That would be wonderful," I responded. In truth, though her blend of ambition and earnestness appealed to me, I assumed we'd never follow up after this chance meeting. Little did I know that her country would come to play a leading role in shaping my life, my views on human nature, and my ideas for what it takes to solve the big problems of world poverty.

The rest of the conference was a nightmare. The African women made it clear in a public way that I was neither wanted nor needed as an ambassador in West Africa. A woman from Cote d'Ivoire was introduced as someone who could be of assistance to me once I'd moved to her country to set up the regional office, but she clearly had no interest in talking to me. She snapped, "We have women who can and should staff that office and help us build the West Africa region. I don't understand why anyone thinks we should have a young girl who is not even African!"

The public nature of the conversations was humiliating. I knew the women had a point about it being preferable to have an African in the office, though I understood that I was to be a liaison between Africa and America, and I also knew that after several years of trying, not a single West African office had been built. I'd been hired to jump-start the actual work, to make sure offices were put on the ground. I knew I would work hard and include whoever wanted to work with me. But I didn't know how to confront their fears head-on and instead tried being sweet and sounding smart, hoping the West African women would come to like me.

They didn't.

The morning after the conference ended, I was told that plans had changed and I'd now be staying in Nairobi for a few weeks. The ultimate plan was the same. I was still to go to the African Development Bank in Cote d'Ivoire, but the office wasn't ready-or at least the women weren't ready for my arrival.

Had I known what was really in their minds, I might have terminated my foray into Africa then and there. As it was, I had some time to fill.

Since I had no place to live in Nairobi and no map for the work I was going to do, I decided to go to Lamu for the weekend. I'd heard it was one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Lamu, a tiny island just off the coast of Kenya, had been a stopping-off point for Arab traders over the centuries. I roamed the island's narrow streets under a bright blue sky, looking out at the ocean, exploring the trinkets and spices and woodwork in little shops owned by Arab traders whose wives floated like shadows, fully veiled in black. A woman's black chador opened to reveal a sheath of bright red silk underneath. Overhead, a parrot flew, as if to show that even bright red silk was no match for his beauty.

At night, I ate a plate of fresh barracuda and rice with a glass of lime juice, all for less than $2. My dollar-a-night room at the Hotel Salama was cramped, so I climbed the stairs to the roof, where I found a little bed among brightly colored bougainvillea. As I lay in the light of a full moon, listening to a group of young people a few rooftops over strumming guitars and singing Cat Stevens songs, I fell asleep thinking about what I might do to improve my situation.

I was awakened before dawn by the call to prayer, and in the cool of the morning, realized I had no choice but to do the only thing I knew how to do well-I would just work. And then work some more. And try to pay attention to whatever the work was teaching me.

Two experiences in particular changed the way I thought about the world in those first months in Africa. The first had to do with befriending a wonderful young woman named Marcelina-Maz for shortwho was a junior office girl in the place I was working. She wore her short hair in little braids around her head. Her uniform was a blue skirt and a white blouse with a navy V-neck sweater over it. She lacked all pretentiousness, and her good nature hid whatever hardships she had at home.

We had little in common, but we found ourselves stealing time to talk each day. Maz loved coaching me in Swahili. She would point to an object around the office and ask me the word for it, always with the patience of Job.

I often talked to her about the work we were trying to do to strengthen women's economic opportunities and about the importance of women having their own bank accounts.

"I've never walked into a bank before," Marcelina told me shyly. "They don't want people like me in there, and I don't even have enough to start an account anyway."

I promised to give her the minimum balance of $50 if she agreed to save regularly. The next morning, we walked through the doors of one of Kenya's largest financial institutions, an old-fashioned bank with tellers behind barred windows. The Kenyan bank manager approached me with a welcoming look, but my attempts to move the conversation to Maz-who apparently had not entered his field of vision-failed completely. Though obviously fluent in Swahili, he refused to talk to her directly, speaking only to me.

When we finally opened the account, Marcelina told me she would cry tears of joy to fill the Indian Ocean. I began to see what it meant to put into practice the idea of extending basic services as simple as bank accounts that the middle class took for granted to people who are often invisible to those in power.

The other experience that affected my worldview came during a visit to Uganda. I had gone there to meet a wonderful woman named Cissy, one of the nation's first women bankers. Uganda's president, Museveni, had come into power after a brutal guerrilla war in January 1986, and the country was still in shambles. I tried to push down my nervousness about what I might find there by focusing instead on what I'd heard about its artistic community, its poets and intellectuals who were famous in East Africa.

As the plane flew into Entebbe Airport, I looked out the window at its green lushness, thinking of Winston Churchill's words that this was "the pearl of Africa." But minutes after landing, all I could see were guns in the hands of young boys, bombed-out buildings, streets filled with potholes and broken glass. I wondered how a nation could plunge so quickly from being a paragon of success to becoming a cauldron of despair. Twice young boys dressed in fatigues and carrying machine guns stopped Cissy and I for "routine checks," searching bags and looking through the trunk of Cissy's car.

Despite the destruction in Uganda, the people were divine. Cissy herself was elegant, focused, and determined to create an organization to help women lift themselves out of poverty. She spoke for nearly the entire hour it took to drive to her family's home, thanking me all the while for ignoring the international media's warnings about Uganda and coming to see her country anyway.

Cissy and her husband lived in a modest three-bedroom house with their two young daughters. When we arrived, the little girls were dressed in white frilly dresses that looked like little brides' gowns.

"Why are you so dressed up?" I asked them. The elder daughter, 8 years old, replied that the soldiers had taken all of their dresses in the war; now they wore their very best dresses for every day because you never knew when you might lose them.

The girls did their homework at the kitchen table, one of the few pieces of furniture in the living room. It was really more of a card table, but as Cissy said, it would do. Twice already, the soldiers had ransacked their home and taken everything. There were still bullet holes in the broken bedroom doors, and every window had been smashed. Not a single picture hung on a wall. The plumbing didn't work, but there was a well outside where we could get water and take a cold bath with a bucket. As Cissy explained everything to me, she smiled with no hint of apology: This was simply part of her everyday reality.

We set the table with a hodgepodge of plastic plates and cups that Cissy had purchased at a gas station in Kenya.

"I'm not ready to invest in anything permanent yet," she told me, pausing before adding, "but nothing really is permanent, is it?"

Dinner was simple but abundant: matohe, a green plantain staple; millet; a bit of fish; bitter eggplant; and fruit.

"The most we can offer you is our food and hospitality," Cissy told me. "But nothing else has much value, anyway," she laughed. "Especially not here, especially not now."