The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (7 page)

After scheduling a meeting with the director, I walked into her office with an air of professionalism and optimism.

I started with the positive: "Your organization is incredibly important to women in Kenya, already reaching hundreds in the slums. This is an exciting time for development and for women, and I'm proud to be working with you."

She smiled. I took a deep breath.

I told her that I'd balanced all of the financial records and completed an accounting of every loan. Then I presented her with a system in great order that would allow for stronger management over time.

She was still smiling.

"At the same time," I continued, "this diagnostic, if you will, revealed some problems to be addressed. Over 60 percent of the portfolio is in serious arrears. I'd suggest you write off 20 percent completely, put 20 percent on a watch list, and expend a lot of effort on the healthiest 20 percent of your problem loans. Of this group, the majority of borrowers are related to your board members in some way, so this is a problem you'll need to address, as well. The good news is that the organization is young and can do something now to stem the problems and turn operations around to become a great organization." I smiled weakly, trying to look positive and upbeat.

Her smile morphed into a straight line. I felt my heart rate pick up and I continued, this time at a quicker pace. "Don't worry," I said. "I have a plan for sorting this out. The first step in solving any problem is to identify and name it."

She looked at me and stared. Now it was her turn to take a deep breath.

After a long, palpable silence, she thanked me for being so helpful and diligent. She needed to reflect on the findings, she said. She wanted to study the report.

"Then we'll have a conversation about what to do," she added. "Why don't we plan to meet with everyone next week?" One of her colleagues walked into the room and she spoke to her for a long time in Swahili, her face guarded and stern. I knew I had done something wrong again.

Somehow, I'd returned to the same bad dream, playing the same role in a different scene.

I waited for a week with no word. Nervously, I met with the director and asked whether she'd had time to think about my report.

"I've been meaning to talk to you," she muttered, not looking at my face. "Your very good report has been lost. We can't find it anywhere. I'm so sorry after all that work you did."

In that precomputer age, I had written everything by hand except for my typed summary, which was worthless without the backup data. It had all been destroyed.

My heart dropped and I fought to hold back the tears, gripping my chair with both hands as I listened to her. "We can start over," she said in a calm voice, "but we think you will help more doing other things. Why don't we wait another week, see if we find it, and revisit our next project?"

I didn't say a word, couldn't really, at least not without betraying how much it hurt. That night as I lay in bed, I wondered why the executive director hadn't just told me I wasn't needed. I ached down to my bones.

"Maybe they didn't really want to change," I thought to myself.

Or maybe I'd been too direct, too bright and sunny for my own good. Maybe the executive director was sick of smart foreigners who thought they had all the answers. The fact remained that the organization's operations were disastrous. But again, my ability to solve the problem did little to help if the women themselves didn't want to implement a solution.

The next morning I awoke to the sounds of a Kenyan dawn. The noise was so extraordinary that I laughed aloud, thinking it was easier for me to sleep through the sounds of the New York City streets than the waking of life in this country, where birds call loudly to one another, monkeys fly from tree to tree, insects buzz amid the dewy grasses, and flowers blow perfumed kisses to the bees. The cacophony told of a wild party of seduction and courtship, of lovemaking and nourishment-a feast for the senses. The sheer beauty and sensuality of Kenya dampened the hurt of a second failure, at least for this morning.

By midday, numbness was setting in again: I felt helpless, unable to make things work. I thought I'd learned humility and this time had really felt I was bringing my skill set to the table in a way that could be useful. But the director of the organization had rejected all that I'd done. I had been unable to communicate my honest desire to help fix a broken system without judgment; or maybe the Kenyan director herself just hadn't wanted to see what needed mending. In that way, she wasn't very different from complacent bankers I'd encountered elsewhere.

I wanted to help, but that didn't matter to anyone but me. Finally, I began to see that I should have been clearer about having a mandate first and gotten real buy-in, not just a perfunctory agreement, and then brought the right people along throughout the process so there were no surprises. The question was one of leadership, of having the patience and skills to bring people with me-and I had yet to learn that fully.

I also began to reflect on how to build accountability into nonprofit organizations. Donors could convince themselves to give to nonperforming organizations based on hearing a few good stories. The world needed something better than that.

I never worked with the organization again, but about a year later, I heard through the grapevine that the microfinance institution was in serious financial trouble. A year after that, a group of Kenyan women, including several of the board members, came to its rescue, working closely with foundations, restructuring the board, and putting the organization back on its feet-through the power of local ownership.

Twenty years later, I met with one of those women, who told me the organization now serves more than 100,000 women across Kenya and is one of the most highly regarded institutions for the poor in the country. Back in 1987, I couldn't help but feel devastated. Now I understand that it can take years for a new kind of organization to get on its feet and a few years after that for it to walk. The key is to find local leaders who own the dream and will make it happen.

ABOUT A MONTH LATER after I'd done the project with the Kenyan organization, Veronique, the woman I had met at the conference for women and credit, walked into my office in Nairobi. She hadn't called in advance, but had simply shown up.

"I am in Nairobi for meetings and hoped you would be here," she said. "In Rwanda, we have been talking about you and hoping you might help us to study whether it makes sense to start a credit program for women and how we could move forward if we decided to do so."

I didn't hesitate. Though I wasn't exactly sure what she wanted me to do, the invitation was clear. Already, our interaction felt different, unclouded and concrete. I felt a surge of gratitude and a chance to prove myself. I told her I'd be there that same month.

She promised to send me the terms by which I could be hired. When I asked how long I would need to stay, she looked at me, drew a breath, and said, "Three weeks."

It sounded like heaven.

For the next week, I could barely sleep, but I managed to read a bit about Rwanda, pack a small bag, and get myself to the airport. I knew I would not be returning to Nairobi for a while, though I kept my apartment there. I was determined to stay in Rwanda until I had made something happen.

CHAPTER 3

CONTEXT MATTERS

"Hope is a path on the mountainside. At first there is no path. But then there are people passing that way. And there is a path."

-LU XUN

he 2-hour flight from Nairobi to Kigali begins over the wide-open expanse of the Kenyan savanna and ends among the mountains of Rwanda. I stared out of the plane's window, enraptured by Africa's shifting landscape, repeating the capital city's simple, lyrical, and lovely name to myself: Kigali, Ki-ga-li. It rolled off my tongue like the hills that surround it. Kigali-it could be a woman's name. I liked the sound of it.

We flew through a full blue-gray sky hovering over a tremendous charcoal river that coiled through undulating hills like a giant cobra in the grass. The view was breathtaking. Every inch of land was cultivated in neat squares of banana, sorghum, maize, coffee, and tea patched together by red dirt roads, like an enormous quilt in shades of green draped over the land.

We landed at Kigali's sleepy airport, which had one main terminal shaped like a square crown of pale yellow pillars bent and reaching outward, topped with a flat burnt-sienna roof. Scores of people stood on the observation deck, waving eagerly at the arriving passengers. In fact, the plane had so few people on it that I'm sure there were more waiting than coming. I looked up to see who might be standing there, though I knew I wouldn't recognize a soul.

With so few of us disembarking, it took only about 5 minutes to reach the baggage belt, where a tall driver named Boniface in a blue United Nations (UN) uniform was waiting to take me to the UNICEF office. He was dark-skinned, with a broad nose and a wide, pockmarked, happy face that was at once boyish and manly. He spoke French with a heavy, lilting, singsong African accent that lifted the end of nearly every phrase.

"What do you know about Rwanda?" he asked. Before I could answer, he jumped in: "You should try to visit the mountain gorillas, the national park, and the beautiful lake region."

"What about work?" I smiled.

"Oh, yes, you can work, too," he answered.

I laughed. "This could be a very good life-work during the weeks and explore the country on weekends!"

"Mais, bien sur," he said with a wide grin. "Rwandans don't go to those places because they are so expensive. But I can take you, a foreigner."

On the 15-minute drive to town in the white, UN-issued four-wheeldrive vehicle with the familiar pale blue UNICEF logo on the side, I saw flowers blooming everywhere, and the main road was smooth and clean, though I could see red dirt streets and paths running across the hillsides of the city like the loose weaving of a child's pot holder. Square little houses in Candy Land colors-bright pinks and blues and yellows-sat back from the roads, each with its own little garden. Billboards for condoms and soap, for car repair and face bleaching creams stood alongside the road, advertising goods the poor could spend money on to become whiter and more Western. And this was a country without television. In 1987, the consumer culture hadn't even begun to penetrate it.

We dipped into an industrial area filled with trucks and cement factories and then climbed a hill toward town, where the world turned suddenly, shockingly greener. Bright red flame trees, purple jacaranda, yellow angels' trumpets exploded in a profusion of colors. The sweet smell of frangipani wafted through the air, and the hips of women with baskets and bananas on their heads swayed to and fro. The streets were lush and redolent with flora and birds swooping through green canopies: a pocket of paradise.

Once we got into central Kigali, we drove up the long hill past an imposing church to the main roundabout, where the post office stood next to three small banks, all native to Rwanda. I was struck immediately by how clean and organized the city was. A big, yellow hospital, the parliament building, and an entire row of international aid organizationsthe United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank-lined the main avenue. Kigali stood apart from other African capitals in its quaintness. With a population of just about a quarter million then, it lacked the grandeur and ostentation of Abidjan, the urban intensity of Nairobi, and the feeling of destruction in bombed-out Kampala.

On the side roads were embassies hidden behind brick walls and metal gates, including those of Germany, Belgium, France, Russia, China, the United States. You could discern the colonial history of this country in the names of the nations represented. Though Rwanda has no substantial natural resources or port access, it is a helicopter flight away from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire), one of the world's most resource-rich countries, with reserves of plutonium and uranium. In the chess game of the cold war, Rwanda had thus occupied a privileged position with superpowers that wouldn't otherwise have noticed its existence.

We drove up a dirt road to the UNICEF office, a white, two-story building with arched rooftops behind a metal gate. Next door, a schoolyard filled the air with noises from uniformed schoolchildren, the girls in bright blue skirts and the boys in khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirts. A shirtless boy by the roadside in ragged shorts herded a half dozen longhorn cattle. We were driving behind a white Mercedes, the first of many we saw on the roads, standard issue for government officials and distinguished diplomats. For most people, walking seemed to be the primary mode of transportation. The roadsides were packed with women carrying their wares on their heads, schoolgirls holding hands, men walking arm in arm. I liked the sleepy, easy feeling of the place.

On my first afternoon in the office, Boniface explained the UNICEF system for employees: "Everyone without a car-in other words, most Rwandans-is picked up by UNICEF's vans in order to arrive at work before the starting time of 7:30 a.m. There is a 2-hour break for lunch, when everyone is transported to and from their neighborhoods to eat at home, and then the vans drive everyone a fourth time at the end of the day-back to their neighborhoods once work ends at half past five."