The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (19 page)

I asked a young girl who looked on from a distance what had happened.

"He tried to rob one of the houses on the hill," she told me. "But the guards heard him and sent the signal for other guards to come and help. They hit this man with their machetes, but he didn't die yet. The people, they are waiting for him to die."

In Rwanda, when guards called for help, it was expected that everyone nearby would join in. Not coming signaled that you were somehow complicit in the crime. Frantically, I ran to UNICEF and called the police, but it took hours for them to retrieve the man, who was no doubt dead by then, having been convicted and punished on the spot by the neighbors. Damascene, the office's assistant, confirmed the man's death.

I asked if any charges had been made against his killers.

"Oh, no," the very sweet and soft-spoken man answered me. "The man who died was a bad man. He was robbing a house. The people were just punishing him for his crime."

I was shocked less by the inhumanity I saw than by the black-andwhite approach to judging and punishing his crime. There was no question here of innocent until proven guilty. The guy was presumably caught in the act, and a harsh, cruel form of justice was meted out on the spot. Children saw their parents accepting and participating in the accused's fate, and no one seemed to consider whether he might just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The big question for me was how to strike a balance between the quest for order-clearly a priority in this country-with the human craving for freedom. It was this lack of freedom and of trust that permeated most parts of life in Rwanda in the 1980s. Though I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, it was this shadow that would come to haunt the country and then feed the flames of genocide only a few years later.

During that same period, Charles told me that the handsome young tennis pro I'd met had left Kigali and was dying of AIDS. "They said he has malaria," Charles explained, "but everyone always says it is malaria. He must already have been sick when you played with him."

In the late 1980s, fully one-third of all adults in Kigali were HIV positive-one in three. But no one talked about it. The deaths of people I knew, the silence about the disease, and the callous qualities of Rwandan society were causing a growing weariness in me.

I STILL ENJOYED MY days and felt deeply for many people in Kigali, but it was time for me to go home at least for a while. I had spent more than 2 years living in Africa and, despite a rocky start, had helped build what I believed would become an important local institution in Rwanda. I loved the group of founding partners. They did the work, owned the institution, and would carry it forward. Prudence, Ginette, and Liliane were a powerful triumvirate. The future looked bright. The bakery, too, was thriving. My work was done.

I shared my thoughts with my friend Dan; we were completing a study of microcredit and what it meant for a family's ability to buy food. Dan was becoming known for his work on "household food security." He'd recently been in Malawi, a country that had exported maize while the poorest among its population, including refugees from nearby Mozambique, nearly starved. Dan wanted to know what we could do to ensure that families could take care of themselves.

We had long talks about the complexity of food aid and about how the United States and Europe protected their farmers so that during times of crisis, the only food distributed was food grown with tremendous subsidies in the United States and Europe. How could we convince bigger institutions that a better way of keeping people fed might be to give them the tools to feed themselves? What would it take to move food away from a charity mentality to one that empowered the farmers in Africa themselves?

I knew I wanted to get smarter and find a way to do more. Dan listened to me as I shared my thoughts about what I might do after Rwanda-go to school or start a business that employed low-income people. He suggested that we put that conversation on pause and stop for just a moment to celebrate what we'd accomplished in Rwanda and the rich life we had here, despite the difficult parts.

He proposed that we cook a fancy dinner, wear nice clothing since I'd just restocked my empty closet with a few dresses made by a tailor in Nyamirambo, and drink champagne.

We walked into AliRwanda, a luxury store for expatriates that featured a wide selection of goods at exorbitant prices, and headed straight for the seafood counter, buying two frozen lobsters flown in from overseas. Tilapia wouldn't do it tonight. Croissants and crackers, nuts and olives also found their way into our basket. There was a small but high-quality wine section, with wines from France and Italy and Chile. We were in heaven.

When Dan reached for two bottles of Moet champagne and put them in our basket, I cringed, not daring to ask the price.

The cashier, a large woman with thick forearms and a blue scarf around her head, stared at me intensely with her enormous eyes. Mine glanced downward in a rush of shame as I acknowledged to myself that I'd momentarily shifted into a New York way of being, where buying expensive food for wonderful meals was part of what it meant to be part of city life. The woman's look, though, was enough to bring me back to the local context: At $60 each, two bottles of champagne cost more than many Rwandans earned in a year at the time.

"Please remove the bottles from the bill," I told the cashier.

Looking at Dan, I added, "This is just too much, Dan." Though the food wasn't inexpensive either, in my mind the champagne tipped us over to the truly decadent.

Gently, Dan put his hand on my arm. "We said we were having a feast with champagne. You love champagne. And this is a first. Let's just have fun tonight."

He moved the bottles back toward the woman.

I shifted them the other way.

"I'm not sure I even want the champagne, Dan," I said. "I feel a little ashamed by it. I just don't know if it is right to be doing this while we're living here."

Dan looked at me. "I know it doesn't make a lot of sense on one level. We're working with the really poor, and you and I couldn't be more privileged in relative terms. But don't pretend to be someone you aren't. If you were at home, you'd celebrate with champagne. If you want to remain happy and alive in this work, you need to reconcile this part of who you are and understand the inconsistencies with the work you do and how it all fits into your whole way of being."

I looked at my lovely friend. As a young man, he'd lost his brother and had already endured great sadness in his life. His commitment to social change had never wavered. Maybe he knew something I didn't.

"Besides," Dan added, a devilish look in his eye, "our other choice is the Algerian red antifreeze we normally try to convince ourselves is drinkable wine. You decide."

I laughed out loud. We bought the champagne. On the drive to his house, we talked about choices and how they would just get more complex as we grew older. We lived with enormous privilege in all aspects of our lives. We had drunk fine wine at the French embassy's parties and already had traveled the world. Most precious of all were our passports that would allow us to leave the country whenever we wanted and our sense of empowerment that led us to believe we could accomplish the impossible. The challenge wasn't whether to buy a couple of bottles of champagne; it was instead not to take our privilege for granted and to use it in a way that served the world and our highest purpose.

Later I set a little table with a colorful cloth outside in the garden while Dan created a true feast on the tiny kitchen stove. The sky dressed in its finest for us, a blaze of crystal lights creating a heavenly chandelier. We put candles on the table and all around the ground and delighted in the thick, sweet nocturnal fragrance of frangipani. Mozart filled the air while we toasted to life and its contradictions, to doing what we could on Earth, and to avoiding complacency at all costs. Later we danced to reggae music as the meanness of small-town life melted away.

The next morning, on a long run, I thought about what made Duterimbere successful and what I wanted to do next in my life. I decided to apply to business school. When we ran Duterimbere like a business, though we raised charitable money, we succeeded. When we acted more like a typical nonprofit, neither holding ourselves to our mission nor measuring results, we usually failed. I wanted a better understanding of management and how to build businesses. This was what was missing when it came to the poor. In Rwanda, individuals got rich by going into government, not by taking an entrepreneurial risk (of course, there were always a few exceptions). I'd seen the incredible potential of the poorest people-the poorest women, who just needed a chance, not a handout.

Of course, applying to a US business school from a country like Rwanda in the 1980s was no simple matter. Just getting the physical application took weeks. Asking people to write recommendations meant sending letters and then waiting and hoping they would arrive or making expensive phone calls. Luckily, Prudence agreed to write one for me. Then there was the question of the GMATs, the entrance exam for business school. Since I'd missed the date for the exam in Nairobi, I decided to go to the next closest place, New Delhi. It would be a chance for adventure, as well.

Having prepared neither for the exam nor for India, I flew to Nairobi and then took the overnight flight to Delhi. The city's tangy, spicy smell enchanted me the moment I stepped off the plane. I was overwhelmed with color, beauty, sensuality, and scent. Even in the airport, the women sparkled like jewels, draped in fuchsia, lime, bright red, and yellow: I was going to like it here.

How you see where you are always depends on where you've been. In Delhi, I stayed at the YMCA, a clean place with $20 rooms clustered around a flower-filled courtyard. There I met an American couple who did nothing but complain. They found the heat oppressive, the city dirty, the people untrustworthy, the food too spicy. My experience couldn't have been more different. I would spend hours in textile stores, listening to proud tailors talk about different weaves. I found an incredible spirit of generosity and thrived in the chaos of the markets. And I felt intoxicated just by breathing in the colors and silks, the jewelry and makeup on the women, the multitude of spices in the food. How could so much variety and exuberance exist in one place?

I traveled to Agra to visit the monumental Taj Mahal, which inspired me to sit and stare for hours, wondering about the Mughal civilization that had constructed this masterpiece more than 300 years earlier. The beauty of the marble walls and feminine domes, the Byzantine patterns of lapis and ruby and other gemstones inlaid into the walls, the changing color of the mausoleum against the setting sun-all of it astonished me. I couldn't help but think of this accomplishment being achieved at a time when the United States was in its infancy and compare it as well to what had gone on in Rwanda at the time. What kinds of monuments and symbols would Central Africa create? Perhaps they wouldn't be physical structures, but rather human achievements of the heart and mind.

I spent a few weeks journeying across Rajasthan by train, second class, no air-conditioning. Despite the heat, I was mesmerized by this land of exotic cities like Jaipur, blushing pink from the palace walls, where elephants rambled through the streets and even poorer women wore the most fabulous jewelry I'd ever seen.

The train broke down in jodhpur, a smaller city west of Jaipur. I left the train station with my backpack and found myself wandering through the Brahmin part of town, a collection of little concrete houses painted in traditional violet-blue. I'd wanted to travel all the way to Jaisalmer and join a camel safari in the desert for a day or so, but when I returned to the station in the late afternoon, I learned that there would be no service for a day or two.

At a local guesthouse, I fell into a conversation with the innkeeper and related my frustration at being stranded in jodhpur despite my plans to continue onward to Jaisalmer. He suggested I hire his friend to take me through the desert on his motorcycle to the place where the safaris started. He seemed like a good, honest man, and so I agreed, though it would take more than a day to get there and another full day at least to return.

My guide's name was Chowdhury. He was a stocky man with a fringe of black hair that nearly reached his dark eyes and a neatly trimmed but abundant handlebar mustache, necessarily wide to span his large face. A jocular sort, he commented on everything, including the women walking with big pots of water on their heads. "Here water is life, you know," he said.

I told him water was life everywhere, thinking of Mary Koinange in Nairobi's slums.

"But it must be women's work to carry the water," he added. "I think they have stronger necks in proportion to their size."

"Nice excuse," I teased, deciding not to start our trip with a political argument, for I wanted to savor the beauty of the drive. We passed tiny villages and emerald rice fields and saw every imaginable vehicle on the road: carts drawn by donkeys and oxen, huge trucks, white Ambassador automobiles, and colorful rickshaws. Finally, we reached the desert and continued to drive until the sun was setting. Our destination was the small home of a family who would allow us to sleep beneath the stars in their courtyard.

Spotting a man holding a camel on a leash at the side of the road, my guide stopped the motorcycle. "Let's go on a short ride now as the sun is setting," he suggested.

If only to get a rest from the back of the motorcycle, I agreed, and off we went. As the camel lumbered easily through the sand, I felt sublimely lost in the vastness of the desert with its beautiful patterns and dunes, so different from the terrain of East Africa.

After about a half hour, the camel came to a halt at Chowdhury's command. We sat on the ground, and Chowdhury offered me a drink of water as we listened to the sounds of the desert. Suddenly, he said, "Jacqueline, can I ask you something?"

"Sure," I said, "what is it?"

"Will you write your name in the sand?"