The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (14 page)

By 8:00 a.m., others began arriving to clean, help with cooking, and then organize the freshly made goods into bright orange plastic buckets. Each woman was responsible for taking what she could sell and returning the leftovers. I watched Josepha and the others choose their selections, the orange buckets a lovely contrast to their green gingham dresses. They would pick up a thermos of tea as well, walk into the street, and disappear into a crowded white minibus, juggling their wares on their laps as best they could. For at least some, the new day took courage, for they were going to embassies and other places where they'd never been before.

Sales jumped in the first week, but not as much as they should have. Something was wrong with our inventory accounting. We just didn't make enough money at the end of the day in relation to what had been prepared in the morning. When the women returned their buckets and gave us the cash they'd earned, Prisca and I couldn't account for more than a third of the goods produced. My heart sank with the knowledge that the women were stealing. We were putting so much goodwill and trust into this-into them. Didn't they owe us some level of appreciation or accountability?

Apparently not from their perspective. For example, one woman had told us she'd sold 10 products, but by our calculations, she had taken 23. She was either eating a lot of greasy doughnuts herself or selling them and keeping the money. I was crushed; Prisca was more sanguine, reminding me that Consolata, Gaudence, and a number of other women were being completely honest.

I tried not to take it personally, though I knew the women were testing my mettle. We couldn't count on their being honest out of appreciation alone-they'd seen too many like me come and go. The bigger question was how to fix the immediate problem and then create the right incentives for the business to sustain itself long after I'd left.

The existing bookkeeping system had been built entirely on trust and lacked any checks and balances for accountability. No one had noted how many goods each woman took in the morning, making it impossible to calculate whether they were returning the right combination of cash and unsold goods in the afternoon. As it turned out, some of the women were simply keeping the money they collected, not thinking about the consequences. I realized that some women didn't take the system seriously because they didn't see us taking it seriously.

I had seen this dynamic play out already with some of the borrowers at Duterimbere. The women were testing us, and this time I knew what we had to do in order to show them that we cared.

Prisca and I stayed up late crafting a simple system that would ensure accountability and reward individual behavior as well as group success. In the morning, we delivered a stern talk about high expectations and how we were all in this together. If there were profits, everyone would share in them. If there were losses, everyone's pay would be reduced, accordingly. The women would be paid a base wage and then earn a commission on total individual sales. The success of this venture would become the responsibility of the women themselves.

I was becoming clearer in setting expectations; more importantly, the women began treating me with a greater degree of respect. Human beings establish rules of interaction early in almost all relationships, and we still had work to do in breaking the charitable project mentality and turning this into a business.

Every Friday we gathered as a group in the front room of the project's building for a combination of Business 101 and a pep talk. Often I would ask the women to role-play with me. One week, I volunteered Gaudence, the gloomiest of the group, to be the saleswoman. Gaudence had closecropped hair and the droopiest eyes I'd ever seen. Making her smile became one of my goals. While I didn't exactly see her as the group's natural extrovert, no one else came to mind, either.

"Okay," I said in French, always with Prisca translating for me. "I'm from the neighborhood and I smell samosas cooking, so I come inside. What do you do?"

Gaudence looked down, holding her hands behind her back. She stood still and said nothing.

I took a deep breath.

"Let's talk about eye contact," I continued. After discussing the basics of making customers feel welcome, I tried role-playing again and got little response. Gaudence was miserable. The women howled with laughter.

I decided to try again with someone else. "Consolata, I'm sitting next to you on the minibus, feeling hungry. Can you sell me something before I get off the bus?"

When Prisca translated, the room erupted with giggles that flowed like just-opened champagne.

Consolata just shook her head and mumbled.

Prisca smiled her oh-poor-you-who-have-so-much-to-learn smile.

"Why?" I asked.

Prisca didn't wait for the women to respond. "Because women do not just ask strangers to buy things on buses," she said with an air of exasperation.

"Why not?"

The women burst out laughing all over again. They tried to be formal, but this was too much fun-for them.

Prisca explained, "Because it is not polite."

Not polite: a perfect euphemism for "it is not done here." In other words, women who saw themselves on the lowest rung of society's ladder would never have the confidence to interrupt someone on a bus to try to sell him something. It just wasn't done here, and the women knew it. Though I understood the custom, I wanted to push the issue to see if I could instill greater confidence in these women who had such potential for growth.

We returned to our class on customer relations and building a market where everyone knew our goods and wanted to buy from us. The more animated I became, the harder the women laughed.

Seeing that I was not attuned to the women, Prisca said kindly, softly, "Jacqueline, you are so American. Here, women won't look someone in the eye, won't talk to someone they don't know. You have to accept it, for that is how things are done."

"I know that, Prisca, I really do," I said, exasperated. "I just want to give the women a fighting chance. I have never unquestioningly accepted the status quo, so why should we do that here in Rwanda, where change can be a good thing? It isn't like I'm asking the women to do something wrong. I'm just trying to nudge them a bit to think about how we might turn our project into a real bakery, with real incomes for all of them. That means getting a little bit uncomfortable, but we don't have to break all sorts of customs."

"I understand you," Prisca said, "but change is slow here. You have to give the women time."

"Measuring success through our profits can be a great incentive for change, Prisca," I said.

She just looked at me and shook her head kindly.

"Okay, just watch this," I said. Grabbing an orange bucket filled with little doughnuts and waffles and samosas, I marched up the stairs to the sunlit street. Standing out front, I talked to the people passing by and in no time sold 10 doughnuts, more than some women had sold all day. Then I turned around with a flourish, marched into the room, and took a bow.

The women clapped and chortled, waving their hands in the air. In contrast, Prisca held her face in her hands and shook her head again. "Jacqueline, no one will say no to a tall American girl selling them things on the streets of Nyamirambo!"

Finally conceding defeat, I decided to save lesson two for another day.

But I would not acquiesce. To try and increase sales, I ran competitions for the women to see who could sell the most (no one would participate). I held training sessions on how to treat customers (the response was tepid at best). I continued the pep talks every Friday and reminded the women that we were going to create a real bakery and not just a project, that we would bring quality snacks to people all over Kigali. Prisca would translate and the women would smile patiently, and though I wasn't always sure they understood what I was saying, sales began to improve. Finally, something was working.

Within several months, the project was profitable. The women were coming to work on time and, though they still weren't enthusiastic salespeople, they were becoming known around Kigali for their bright orange buckets and affordable snacks. More and more institutions signed up for deliveries, and the women began to see-for the first time in their lives-a real correlation between the effort they put into their work and the income they earned. They began to believe the organization could succeed and that they themselves would play a key part in that success.

Still, for every two steps forward, there was often one back. One afternoon, I received a call from a friend who had expected the women to deliver an order of goods for a party; nothing had arrived. I called Prisca. She informed me that none of the women on duty had shown up. This was in the age before cell phones, so it took a while to track down Consolata, Josepha, and the others. Finally, we learned they'd all gone to the funeral of a friend, thinking the order for baked goods could wait.

I drove to the bakery project with Boniface to find Prisca and a few of the women she'd tracked down in the neighborhood working feverishly to fill the order. We were nearly 2 hours late to the party, but my friend at least pretended to understand. Still, I was livid and Prisca was embarrassed. The next morning we asked the women who had attended the funeral what had happened. They answered very matter-of-factly that their friend had died and the lady with the party would have to wait.

That Friday, we called a meeting. The women gathered on the benches and sat silently, most just staring ahead. We talked about promises made and the importance of promises kept. "We're not telling you not to go to the funeral," Prisca told the women, "but there are enough of us here that you can find a replacement for yourself if for some reason you can't work. Remember this is your business."

The women were only beginning to internalize that the success of the project was really up to them. For it to succeed, everyone had to see it as a full-fledged enterprise. We had enough customers to turn a profit, and it had become time to claim ourselves to be a legitimate business. Though I'd told the women this on my very first visit, it was several months before they began to believe it.

I shared with Prisca an idea I had to turn the little house in Nyamirambo into a real bakery from which we could sell our goods directly to neighborhood customers. Townspeople already referred to the project as a bakery, but it didn't have a main store, a place where people could drop in to buy our goods. The women would still go into town to offices each morning with their buckets, but once we had an actual store, we could increase sales, build our brand, and begin to expand into other product lines. Prisca loved the idea.

The first step was to give our building a fresh coat of paint. The exterior had been painted a dull gray stucco; the interior beige walls were smudged and scratched. Everything needed sprucing up. Consciously trying to learn to listen and not just hand out my own ideas, I offered to pay for the paint and other materials, but insisted that the women choose the color themselves.

When they would not offer an opinion on the color, I resisted making my own suggestions, knowing the women would try to please me instead of saying what they really felt. I told them repeatedly that this was their bakery, on their street, in their country, but my words seemed to land on deaf ears.

"What do you think?" they would ask.

One week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks passed. Each week, I asked the same question. Each week, I got nowhere.

Finally, at the end of the third week, I gave up, unable to take the waiting anymore. "What about blue?" I asked.

"Blue, blue, we love blue. Let's do it blue."

At the only paint store in town, I purchased a bright blue paint, picked up blue-checkered cloth for curtains, and found several big pieces of plywood to make into signs. The women sewed perfect curtains, and I spent an entire night painting signs to hang inside and outside the bakery so that we would have an identity as the blue bakery of Nyamirambo. The signs were written in French for prestige, though most people in Nyamirambo could understand only Kinyarwanda, and many couldn't read. Status counted for a lot.

When painting day arrived, everyone turned out to help. My friend Charles, a tall, lanky, 25-year-old French Canadian who worked for the United Nations Development Program, arrived dressed in his signature wrinkled oxford shirt and khakis. The women warmed to him the minute he turned on the music and Aretha Franklin's rhythmic melodies and golden voice filled the streets. Together, we looked at the color in the paint cans-it was a pure blue, bright and straightforward, and everyone liked it.

The original idea was to paint the interior walls bright white and use the blue for trim, both inside and out. But this approach was not as satisfying as painting a wall blue like a morning sky. We even painted some of the windows blue. The women danced, laughed, and painted the world. Gaudence's short hair became speckled with blue paint. Parts of the sidewalk out front were painted bright blue, and little blue freckles appeared on the face of the gray stucco walls outside. Above us, the clear sky felt like a giant crystal dome, and a gentle breeze seemed to tinkle blessings upon this forgotten corner of the world.

A neighborhood crowd gathered to watch the phenomenon of women wielding blue paintbrushes, refusing to acquiesce to little boys begging for turns to paint. Onlookers munched on waffles and people danced in the street. When Aretha shouted "R-E-S-P-E-C-T," hips and paintbrushes moved to the rhythm. Even Gaudence was smiling.

After more than 8 straight hours of painting, we were finished. I joined the women outside in the street to look at what we'd accomplished. We were hot and hungry and covered in blue. For a minute we didn't say a word.

It was so beautiful.

The color was perfect, I said. Most of the heads around me nodded in agreement-except for that of Gaudence.

I looked at her as she sucked in her breath. "What?" I asked with my eyes.

She whispered to Prisca, who shook her head slowly.

"What?" I asked again, one eyebrow raised.