The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (9 page)

"Of course they're capable," one woman shot back.

"Then let's give them a chance to prove to us-and to themselves just how capable they are. In time, they'll be able to borrow larger amounts of money. They'll have a track record for the first time in their lives."

Against local conventional wisdom, our founders' group bet on the strength of the women and the belief that ultimately they belonged in the formal economy. We decided to charge interest at near-commercial bank rates.

The organization was beginning to take shape, but the most important work was establishing the political goodwill to give the institution grounding. Our biggest asset in getting started was the commitment of the three most powerful women in government. Prudence, Agnes, and Constance, the only three female parliamentarians in the country, had emerged from the first generation of women given a chance to succeed in a society where modern political leadership was in its infancy in 1987.

Rwanda had been independent for less than 30 years, and women still had many fewer rights than men. Though they were a tiny minority in the 60-person Rwandan Parliament, these three strong, visionary, capable individuals were paving the way for generations of Rwandan girls and women.

Of the three, Prudence seemed the most grounded, dynamic, and authoritative. She came to every meeting prepared with facts, always knowing the various players involved in any decision we needed to make. She reminded us that opening banks to women would be threatening to the status quo, so we should remember to tread lightly, but with savvy.

"I dream of a day," she told me, "when women will have more power, when they will be afforded the respect that men receive. And you know, I can see it coming," she said, always with a twinkle in her eye.

I adored her.

Prudence delighted in visiting the rural areas with me, always wearing long dresses on her sturdy frame, carrying herself with a regal air that was never at odds with her kind nature. Her soft, melodic voice narrated local stories peppered with colloquialisms that gave the poorest women of the hillsides permission to have a sense of hope. Though I understood barely a word of her speeches because she always spoke in Kinyarwanda, I loved watching her in action, feeling the confidence she exuded and the sense of warmth and comfort she imparted to the women around her.

Prudence and Rwanda's then president, Juvenal Habyarimana, both hailed from the north of the country, so she had some access to high circles. She was also aware of the power of her feminine wiles and unafraid to use them. "To get a man to trust you," she once advised me, her black eyes sparkling behind thick-framed glasses, "wipe off a bit of imaginary dust from the shoulder of his jacket. It will communicate that you notice and that you care-and might slightly disarm him, which can be a good thing, yes?"

If Prudence was the visionary spokeswoman, Constance was the workhorse-a nun with circular, wire-rimmed glasses sitting on round cheeks, always dressed in her brown habit, deeply committed to serving the poor through action, not just prayer. Although she served in Parliament, she spent at least part of her days working more actively with the church and the women's groups she loved. Once when I needed to discuss our new organization's operational structure with her, she told me to come to her parish. She was busy doing something that she wanted me to see.

Boniface drove me to the outskirts of Kigali, where we saw the brick church standing tall amid fields of sorghum and sunflowers. We parked the car and I walked instinctively toward the sunflowers, looking for my favorite parliamentarian in a nun's habit. She walked with a jump in her step, waving her hand back and forth like a fan the way the children did, her bespectacled face beaming.

"Those sunflowers are no competition for the brilliance of your smile," I called out.

Constance laughed. "Oh no, oh no! I am just so happy today. Just you come and look at these sunflowers," she called. "They are magnificent, yes?"

"Yes," I laughed with her. "They are wonderful! But what are you doing here?"

Constance didn't respond, but pulled me by the hand so that we skipped like schoolgirls past the fields, where I had to tell her again how beautiful the sunflowers were, and then inside the barn, where boys were riding stationary bikes to fuel a rudimentary contraption that pressed sunflower seeds into oil.

"Good exercise, yes?" Constance grinned.

"Constance! Is this your business?"

"Not my business," she said. "But you know I am supporting women's income-generating projects through the church. It is my real passion and the reason I am so supportive of our work to create a microfinance institution for women in this country. Here these women are growing sunflowers and then they are pressing the seeds into oil so they can sell it. Maybe it will be a model for what our organization supports, don't you think?"

"It seems interesting," I said. "But I don't understand any of it. Does the church own the land? Do the women share the profits or do they at least earn a wage? Do you know what kind of price you can earn from just selling the sunflower seeds? And then again, do you know the price you will get from the sunflower oil?"

Constance looked crestfallen. "We don't have the answers. But look at the women working, and the boys, too. You see, they need jobs and now they are doing something for the community."

"Constance," I said as I smiled and put my arm around her. "I'm not saying this isn't a worthwhile project. I just want to understand how the numbers work a little bit better to make sure that, first, the women and boys really can expect to be paid and, second, that it is a project that can last more than one season without the donor's support. That's why loans are so important. If you depend on grants each year, then the sunflower project will only work if the donors keep giving. If we can make this profitable somehow, then the project can continue whether or not anyone wants to give you money."

"That would be a good thing," Constance said. "I may not have much of a head for business, but I like to see people working."

I told her I'd take a look at the economics involved in growing sunflowers and pressing the seeds into oil to determine if the project could grow strong enough to justify a loan. I'd seen too many well-intentioned projects like this one fail, in part because the donors weren't interested in seeing it become sustainable. They would insist on doing projects that had little to do with making a business work. But I was still hopeful.

Constance was right: She had no real head for business, but her heart was made of gold, and her spiritual commitment to seeing God in work and not just prayer was one I deeply admired. But running a business requires a tough side, too. It turned out that the idea for the sunflower project came from a Canadian donor, and Constance was happy just to try it with his money. When we looked at the economics of her small field against the price of sunflower oil, it quickly became clear that this couldn't be more than a charity project unless we expanded the land significantly.

"Unless the donor is willing to pay a large amount every year, this project won't succeed for very long right now," I told her.

"But God will provide," she said.

"Ah, that is a different story," I said.

In the end, Constance decided she wanted more for her people as well. The sunflower project, she concluded, was indeed a lovely way to teach women how to grow and process the seeds, but it wouldn't succeed in the long term. It also wouldn't fit the criteria for our new organization, for we were going to concentrate on small businesses that could be run by and for Rwandans and could make a long-term difference in people's lives.

And we would make loans, not grants. "It doesn't feel as good as grants," Constance told me, "but the women will learn more and grow stronger." From then on, Constance became a great storyteller for our new organization, helping wealthy and poor alike understand the power of giving each individual the tools of credit so she would have the potential to change her own life. "We are not handing out gifts," she would say, "but are bringing forth the gifts inside the people themselves."

Agnes, the third parliamentarian, was the true politician of the triumvirate. Not one to be seen with her hands dirty, she would nonetheless often travel to the rural areas to give speeches and what she called animation-talks of encouragement. She was always kind and extremely disciplined in her commitment to the organization, but she struck me as someone who loved the trappings of her office-the title, the pageantry, the feeling of holding an audience in her thrall as she spoke. Her desire to raise women's economic and social statuses was authentic, but vanity and a focus on the self were equally parts of her.

The leader, the dreamer, and the politician: These three women gave political heft, visibility, and heart to our new organization. UNICEF's backing bolstered our credibility as well, and there were a lot of other individual supporters. Notable among them was Annie Mugwaneza, a white Belgian woman with straight red hair in a pageboy cut that framed her freckled face. Annie never wore a trace of makeup on her heavily lidded eyes fringed with blonde lashes, and her daily uniform was a blue cotton skirt and either a white, button-down blouse with a Peter Pan collar or a T-shirt, everything as plain and understated as she was.

Annie Mugwaneza, born Annie Roland, had lived in Rwanda nearly 20 years by the time I met her. She had come to the country as a missionary and then fallen in love with a tall, handsome Rwandan named Jean Mugwaneza. After the two decided to marry, Annie never left. Marrying a Rwandan meant that if she ever left him, she would have no right under Rwandan law to raise their children outside the country without her husband's permission. Legally, the children were the father's property. I never asked Annie how much she'd thought about the future when she married Jean. She always seemed to enjoy her life and was fully committed to Rwanda.

Annie had several sons, which gave her some measure of stature in a society where boys are the preferred gender. She was a good mother, a good wife, and someone who could be outspoken while working on behalf of all women, not just the privileged ones. This little band of women led our charge as we lined up potential funders and gained commitments from various agencies to help with business planning and training. We created bylaws and drew up a work plan for the next 6 months. I had already extended my stay, and UNICEF agreed to cover my additional expenses. I moved from UNICEF's guesthouse to a rented room in a Canadian aid worker's airy home that featured a zebra skin on the wall, a garden out back, and the occasional friendly snake that made its way inside.

I continued to learn about business as usual in the development world. Once, as part of a "social mobilization" effort, UNICEF hired an expensive Italian designer to create a poster campaign aimed at convincing women to vaccinate their children. The posters were gorgeous photographs of women and children with simple messages written in Kinyarwanda about the importance of vaccinating every child. They were perfect, except for the fact that the extremely low female literacy rate in Rwanda made it likely that words written even in Kinyarwanda would have little impact. Much better would have been pictures that told stories-or even better, messages integrated into songs that could have been sung by the women and passed from one to another as they walked the hillsides. Just seeing this process, though, helped me to think differently about how to design future messages and programs, how to move away from our own view of how things should be done and observe how people live and communicate with one another.

My learning curve could not have been steeper, but I was coming to relish this new country, feeling like an explorer on weekends, surrounded by eclectic friends who were adventurers living life to the hilt. Most were young and, unlike the ones I'd met at that first dinner, all were hopeful and hardworking, a mix of North Americans, Italians, French, and one outlandish Zairean musician named Leonel who wrote a song called "Fucking Cozy Kigali." We'd all dance to it and other music at Cosmos nightclub, a dark, cramped box of a place in Nyamirambo.

At Chez Lando, a local hangout, we ate shish kebabs and grilled bananas and washed down our meals with Rwandan beer. During lunch breaks, I would run up and down the hills of Kigali with children scampering behind me laughing and shouting, "Muzungu, muzungu," or "white person." The European expatriates thought I was insane for running in the midday sun to the tunes on a Walkman, but they chalked it up to my being American.

I was living in borrowed houses as I'd kept my inexpensive one-bedroom flat in Nairobi. Since I'd originally come to Kigali for just a 3-week feasibility study, my plans to stay always hinged on the next phase of work: I'll do this for another 6 months until things are stable was my mantra. Envisioning only a short tenure, I tended to stay with friends in their homes or rent big, empty houses by myself.

With neither a telephone nor a television, I did a lot of reading: Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. I fell in love with African writers, captivated by the starkness of their words and the richness of their worlds. On weekends, my friends and I would pile into jeeps and drive for hours. It was nothing to drive 7 hours oneway early Saturday morning to visit the green, lush hills of Massissi in Zaire and then turn around on Sunday night and drive back home. We would go windsurfing and fishing in gorgeous Lake Kivu and drive through Akagera National Park, which was largely destroyed during the genocide in 1994. We made our way to Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and would wander through the streets and eat tiny fried fish and French fries on the shores of the lake. For elites, Rwanda offered great adventures in some of the world's most beautiful settings.

But Rwanda is a place of highs and lows: The juxtaposition of some of the most wonderful experiences of my life with the everyday realities in Kigali created, at times, a jarring sense of schizophrenia. Starting anything new is an all-encompassing proposition, and typically I worked 16-hour days. Doing this in a different language, in a place far from home, where navigating even simple things could thwart the best intentions challenged me to my bones. There were plenty of nights when the sheer injustice of the world in which I lived would come crashing down. With no means of communication other than letters, a sense of isolation would envelop me, and there were nights that ended in tears of tiredness and sadness for a world that didn't seem to want to see the possibilities right there in front of it. In those times, I would turn to music. Peter Gabriel, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Cat Stevens began to feel like good friends on lonely nights.