The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (33 page)

"Yes," she affirmed, "but we're through that and are looking forward to more successful times."

In the third-floor library, a simple room with wooden, glass-fronted bookcases on the perimeter and chairs for meetings in the middle, Dativa found the training manual I'd written. She explained that recently Duterimbere had updated it to reflect the country's current realities. Eagerly I turned the pages of the earlier version, seeing my younger self in handwritten phrases and overly earnest explanations of business finance, such as the difference between current liabilities, debts the women could pay off quickly, and long-term liabilities. Unable to imagine that I actually went into this level of detail with our mostly illiterate clients who typically sold vegetables in the marketplace, I apologized to Dativa for all the poor women I'd tortured with my Wall Street credit training. We both laughed as she gave me a high five.

As we giggled at my expense, an affable-looking 50-year-old with straight black hair flecked with gray, wearing a long, traditional cotton dress in black and yellow and green, entered the library. Anne Marie, one of the earliest managers at Duterimbere after the genocide, was in charge of all training and program activities and would be my guide for the day. I liked her energetic style and smile.

I asked Anne Marie if she had grown up in Rwanda. She raised an eyebrow and smiled: "Already, you are placing people. Now I know you know Rwanda," she said, as if I had broken a code.

Sheepishly, I responded that the country still seemed very complicated; I was just trying to make some sense of things.

"Complicated, yes," she said. "No doubt. And it is good you understand it instead of ignoring the cultural context and realities of Rwanda. But there is more hope now, more of a sense that we can do something important. This is our chance. But we have to help one another live together as one people. We are trying."

Born and raised in the Republic of the Congo by Rwandan parents, Anne Marie had been living in Rwanda since a month after the genocide ended. She described coming to the country in 1994: "Kigali was in chaos then, and I was looking for an organization where I would feel proud to work," she told me. "I had experience with cooperatives and believed in women working together. My mother always said `In union we are strong,' and I thought of her when I first saw Duterimbere's logo with the women marching together toward the bank."

I recalled the days when Dieu Donne had created that logo, working with Ginette and me, how he had laughed and said he agreed with Prudence that the women walked more like me than Rwandan women. I thought of so many struggles to conquer oppression or just survive. In union we are strong-all of us.

Anne Marie continued: "At the end of 1994 when I joined, everything was daunting, overwhelming really, but we pulled together. No one was without great suffering, but there was also no crime, nor were there voices raised in anger, even. We all helped one another. Sadly, since then life has changed."

The group of women members and borrowers who rebuilt Duterimbere went first to UNICEF for support and received a small fund to provide rehabilitation loans to solidarity groups, each formed by four or five women survivors. The group could borrow up to $50 for each woman on a no-interest basis. When all of the women repaid, they could borrow more. Duterimbere's team would "accompany" women borrowers trying to re-create their lives, giving them ideas for businesses, at times holding their hands to help them get through the really bad days.

One of those early borrowers was Charlotte, now the proprietor of an established restaurant in Kigali. Tall and fit with high cheekbones and black hair neatly pulled into a long braid down her back, she carried herself with no-nonsense professionalism in her matching black-andwhite top and skirt. Anne Marie introduced me as one of the founders of Duterimbere, and Charlotte greeted me with the characteristic warmth of Rwandans: three strong kisses on the cheeks, each time accompanied by a hug in the direction of the kiss, and then completed with a handshake in a gesture of solidarity. Though she must have been in and out of her restaurant's kitchen all day, I was surprised neither by her freshly scrubbed scent nor by her firm grip, for everything about her seemed well cared for in a no-fuss way. We sat down at one of the white plastic tables on the back terrace to talk over a cup of coffee.

Her story began with 4 liters of milk.

"I had absolutely nothing but the clothes on my back after the genocide," she told me. "I was starving to death, and my daughter and I were eating grass around the abandoned house where we had taken refuge. But a friend in Kigali had heard of my plight and came to me and gave me 4 liters of milk. I handed one glass to my daughter to drink and sold the rest to a nearby cabaret that had been set up in town. I began to see what I had to do."

A year before the genocide, Charlotte had discovered she'd contracted HIV from her husband, and that through pregnancy she'd transmitted the disease to at least three of her four children. They and her husband all died of AIDS in 1993. "I am a fearful woman, not a courageous one," she told me through bursts of tears, "and I could only imagine death for myself then."

She paused to catch her breath and then said, "I am Tutsi and there was so much hatred then. How could I want to live?"

I had no words.

"In fact, when the fighting started," she continued, "I thought it better to die from a bullet than AIDS. I would walk into the streets when I saw the men with guns coming and ask them to kill me. They said they didn't want to waste their bullets on me. They knew I was going to die anyway ... they didn't want to waste their bullets....

"My daughter was safer because she was Hutu, given my husband's ethnicity, and so she stayed with my in-laws. I should have been a victim. I hid when I saw machetes but not when I saw guns."

With the $3 she earned from those first 4 liters, Charlotte bought more milk, earning enough to buy stock for the next day and to keep herself and her daughter alive. While visiting a friend's husband in Kigali's Central Prison, she met a woman from Duterimbere who told her about the rehabilitation loans. The next day, she formed a solidarity group with four women and took a $50 loan to buy more milk, a few glasses, and a table. Finally she was in business.

She sold milk from a roadside stand. Over time, Charlotte repaid her loan and then borrowed again, repeating the cycle several times over until she found herself able to operate a small cafe. She graduated from Duterimbere to its for-profit credit union COOPEDU and then to the commercial bank in her effort to buy shares in the cooperatively owned building that housed the restaurant. Duterimbere helped her with business planning and encouragement. She did the rest.

In Charlotte's busy open-air restaurant on the second floor of a building overlooking one of the main industrial market areas at the edge of Kigali, men and women sat at white plastic tables with red umbrellas, talking and laughing, sipping Fantas, drinking beers, and eating samosas. We nodded to the customers, said hello to the young woman behind the cash register, and walked into the kitchen, where a dozen men wearing blue cotton jackets stirred steaming pots of meat and vegetables, fried potatoes, chopped vegetables, and washed dishes.

Charlotte showed us the kitchen with a flourish of her hand and a selfsatisfied it's-been-a-long-time-coming expression. The main cook took orders from the waiters through a hatch in the wall, the kind you see in diners the world over. Serving 250 meals a day, Charlotte's restaurant attracted lines of customers that ran down the stairs and into the street. In addition to the successful restaurant, she was running a catering business on the side. A government ministry rented one of the rooms for daily breakfast for 40 of its workers. She rented out chairs for events and owned the majority of the multistoried building housing her restaurant. She keeps growing the place, she said, to give herself "a sense of security."

I pushed her on what security really meant, and she told me she was not a philosopher. "I must spend a lot of time focused on remaining healthy," she said. Though antiretrovirals were free in Rwanda, she said, only Indian generics were available under that program, and her body would not absorb them. Her income from the restaurant enabled her to pay for European generics-but doing that entailed keeping her income level fairly high.

To grow her business, she was always seeking loans, but the banks rarely lent to HIV-positive borrowers, according to Charlotte, and they demanded 150 percent collateral. "So I found the collateral, purchased life insurance, and got a letter from my doctor explaining that I had been healthy for a decade." Ultimately, she borrowed more than $30,000 to continue her expansion: Charlotte would not wait for handouts.

Awed by her discipline, ambition, and audaciousness, I teased her for describing herself as a fearful soul. Charlotte smiled a gap-toothed grin. "My friend, I did know fear and wanted to die, but I am strong now and have my own business and hope for the future. Still, I have known every kind of prejudice. I was hated because I was Tutsi, hated even more because I was married to a Hutu, hated because I was HIV positive, judged because I was a woman. What does it matter who accepts me? Most of all, I must accept myself.

"I am not a philosopher," she continued. "I have only a simple dream: to get old without ever having to beg and to live without having to see that terrible violence again."

As I sat across the table and peered into her eyes, so full of life, I thought about how my dignity rests on hers and hers on mine. Though I wanted to collapse into a puddle of tears, I was glad I'd come back to this complicated land that had witnessed some of humankind's cruelest acts, but also some of its most courageous, generous, and beautiful.

I was astonished by what she had overcome and wondered how many Charlottes there could be. I knew I would meet Duterimbere's success stories, but what about the bigger impact a single strategy to make small loans available to the very poorest people so they could improve their lives had had? Charlotte was a true entrepreneur made even stronger by the trauma of having survived genocide. But real entrepreneurs account for a small percentage of the population. Most people are uncomfortable taking continual risks and imagining a future others cannot see. Microfinance is one important part of the solution, but it is not the only one.

My questions would have to wait a few days until I'd met more borrowers-and most of these women were successful, too. Alphonsine, stocky in stature and huge in personality, lives outside Gitarama on a farm where she raises European cows, pigs, and chickens and grows sorghum, bananas, tomatoes, and eggplants. After losing her husband, she started raising ducks in 1996 with a small loan, but no one in the marketplace wanted to purchase them. Though she lost money, she repaid the loan anyway and started borrowing to produce other agricultural products. Today, Alphonsine is one of the wealthiest members of the community. She told me she feels so lucky that now she spends a large percentage of her time training and showing other women how to build their businesses.

Asumpta, strong and straightforward with a decidedly urban image, returned from the refugee camps with no home, no goods, and few skills, but with a caring, stable husband by her side. An uncle loaned her money to buy a few pieces of children's clothing, which she turned around and sold for a few francs' profit. Over time, she expanded her business, always with loans and management support from Duterimbere. Today she travels twice a month to Dubai to procure at least some of the products she sells.

Proudly, Asumpta showed me her recently purchased SUV outside her tiny shop. "None of this would have been possible without those loans," she stated.

"Things used to be easier," she told me, "but now people like me who are just making it to the middle class are feeling so many stresses, yet we are the lucky ones. The poor are suffering more than they used to, and they are feeling poorer all the time. My old customers can't afford to buy children's clothes anymore. I'm worried that more must be done to help the people."

I thought back to the day in Veronique's living room when we had shared so many big dreams. Now the women who had dared to open bank accounts without their husbands' signatures for the first time in their lives were running the banks and holding major positions in government and business. Women could inherit land from their fathers for the first time. At least part of the change we had only dreamed about had happened.

Still, how could we reach the very poor with greater opportunities? I visited a few borrowers who were still making baskets and selling them to charities at a profit level that would surely keep them living in poverty for the near future. I met with people who bragged about fairtrade coffee projects as if they were the only answer to poverty in Rwanda, and yet history has taught us that change is rarely so straightforward.

Recently I heard a fair-trade promoter say in a speech, "You can change the world by drinking a cup of coffee." Those simple slogans are great for marketing, but should alert people to something false in easy promises. Poverty is too complex to be answered with a one-size-fits-all approach, and if there is any place that illustrates this complexity, as well as a better way forward, it is Rwanda.

Technology is one of the greatest drivers of change. When I moved to Rwanda 20 years ago, the tiny landlocked country had one radio station, no television, and a single newspaper that was printed weekly. People were more provincial because the exchange of ideas had been paltry. Everywhere I went recently, I saw young people with computers and MP3 players talking about international politics and thinking about a different kind of future.

Before coming, I'd e-mailed Liliane to ask her what gift I could bring for her. She begged me not to give her anything, so I asked on behalf of her children. The next day I received an e-mail that "Augustin had inquired about a new musical instrument called an iPod."

Though it took 13 hours to download iTunes, Augustin could now listen to his favorite music, Snoop Dogg and Tupac, though he was just learning to speak English. On the walls of his room were small posters of Nelson Mandela and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. This child who spent his fifth through seventh years in a refugee camp was growing up to be like kids on every continent in the world and to know and share many of their myths and music and ways of communicating.