The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (39 page)

We passed the Lahore Fort, an impressive citadel built in the 1500s, and the breathtaking Badshahi Mosque, whose towering walls and onion domes glow magnificently at night in a sea of lights. All of us remarked on the many beautiful minarets, the mix of modern and ancient, the beauty of Islamic architecture, and how we might one day integrate more of that beauty into the housing we were building.

As we had the first time, we turned off a dirt road at a blue sign for Saiban, passing fields of wheat, some of it harvested into neat bales. On this quiet afternoon, farmers walked alongside buffalo and sheep as old men cycled past. Again, we walked through the little village and came across the giant field where the housing development was scheduled to go. But this time, there was actually a single house, beautiful and glorious at least to our eyes.

"That's ours," Jawad said excitedly, "but you might not want to walk down the path to get there."

Normally dry, the dirt road slicing through the rice paddy was full of mud from recent flooding. "We can just look at it from here," he added.

But we'd been waiting a long time to see that first house, and we wanted a closer view. Jawad laughed as we gingerly followed him barefoot through the mud after taking off our shoes and rolling up our pants legs.

I loved the sensual feeling of soft earth squishing between my toes and the movement of water across my legs, though I imagined myself falling splat into the muck in the dress pants and pale blue silk jacket I'd worn to a morning meeting. A dark-skinned boy in a turban cut a dramatic figure in tangerine orange as he sat on his haunches at the edge of the rice paddy. Huge, horse-drawn carts of grass rolled along, slowing near the horizon as cormorants swooped back and forth across the bright green fields.

It took maybe 10 or 15 minutes to reach the house, and we couldn't have been prouder. At 500 square feet, it was large enough for a family, with two rooms, two bathrooms, a small kitchen, and a courtyard. We must have snapped a dozen pictures in front, which was already painted with the rules, like Saiban's main office outside Karachi.

When I put down my camera, I looked at Ann and Misbah and Jawad with their shoes in their hands and so much pride in their faces. I thought of what these children of Pakistan-so incredibly bright, competent, and committed-could have been doing with their lives instead of being here in a field, working to surmount enormous hurdles to build houses for the poor. I reflected for a moment on how lucky I was to be able to work with them and how much I wanted to support them as leaders. Their generation is the future of Pakistan.

We congratulated the men working at the demonstration house, but refused an offer of tea. The sun was setting, and I wanted the team to return before dark. As we walked across the field, we spoke about the importance of this first house-how crucial it was to come and celebrate because life is short, victories are hard-won, and hope comes not from playing it safe, but from working on good in the world, as my angel had reminded me at the airport.

Suddenly, BOOM. Gunshots rang out from behind and young men flew past us, obviously panicked. I grabbed Misbah's hand and we quickened our pace. With the bullets coming more rapidly, we moved as quickly as we could, planting one foot at a time in the mud, trying desperately not to slip.

In the village ahead, we could see a man in a pale blue shirt shooting high into the air, surrounded by young men. Our choices were limited: We were in the middle of a narrow, muddy road cutting through a field of rice paddies, caught in cross fire. There was no going back. Though it didn't seem that anyone was shooting directly at us, men with guns were running toward us from both directions, and the sounds of bullets flying seemed to be everywhere. We kept moving forward, running as fast as we could.

As we neared the village, we saw a group of men grab a young man in a black shirt with a red stripe down the front. Everyone was yelling, and the man looked terrified. I assumed he was somehow a culprit, but we didn't stop to find out. We raced through the narrow walkways in the village. Misbah, still holding my hand, suddenly told me to stop.

"What is it?" I asked her.

"Pull down the legs of your pants," she said. "You never know who or what is causing the trouble right now. If we look disrespectable, we'll stand out even more than we do now."

Meanwhile, Ann said he could hear people shouting that there were foreigners in the village. We walked rapidly while trying to hold ourselves with some semblance of calm, focusing on the path ahead, though my brain seemed to split apart as if I were watching what was happening to us from above-a coping mechanism.

I focused mostly on getting my young team out. As we moved, I felt a profound feeling of love for them. At the same time, I watched the little girls in dresses running behind the boys with guns rather than seeking cover. To them, these boys were not frightening. They were heroes and guardians of their security.

We escaped safely, and it was only later that we learned that a group of four or five robbers had driven in a small car to the far village, vandalized some of the houses, and then jumped back into the vehicle for their getaway. The car got stuck in the mud along the path, and the robbers jumped out and fled in every direction. The villagers chased after them, calling men from the distant village for help by shooting in the air-not unlike the whooping I remembered being used as a signal by the guards in Rwanda when trouble occurred.

No one in the village was hurt that night. With no police force on which they could count, the villagers took protection into their own hands. Most households seemed to have a gun. Poverty is about not only income levels, but also the lack of freedom that comes from physical insecurity.

After the incident, the villagers decided our group was no fly-by-night shop: We were committed. When Jawad came to work that next morning, he was greeted by many fewer skeptical eyes. Within days, the first person signed up to buy a house. Jawad and Saiban were on their way.

Sales were slow at first. Very-low-income people can't afford to think far into the future and rarely have the savings for a down payment. Because this project was built on private land, a down payment for each plot was three times what it had been in Karachi-nearly $600, a princely sum for most people in the target market. And Lahore's community orientation made it harder for people to leave their homes, however inadequate they were, to take an uncharted course alone.

Potential buyers also feared a 15-year mortgage. One severe sickness befalling the family breadwinner could put the entire family behind. Though the Saiban mortgage payments, about $30 to $35 a month, were less than what people paid to rent in the slums, the concept of a longterm loan was frightening.

But Jawad kept talking to people and, one by one, they began to come.

Fast-forward to late 2007. We drove from Lahore back to the village again, but this time we were able to drive along the dusty access road to see the first 50 dwellings on two blocks, housing nearly 300 pioneering residents. A park stood in the middle of the first block, a perfect square of well-kept grass ringed by pink and white flowers. Benches lined either side, and many of the home owners had planted flowers beneath their windows. I wondered aloud whether we would ever be able to measure the changes in how human beings see themselves in the world.

I met a man I guessed to be about 60 because of his pure white hair and weathered face, but he was closer to 40. He'd lived in the slums for most of his life and came to Saiban to start a new chapter with his family. He also laid claim to being the first person in the development to take a mortgage.

"The people here, they are very patient," he said. "At first, I asked them why would I take a loan for one amount and then have to pay you several times that amount back over the next years? They tried explaining this over and over but never made a good argument."

"And how did they convince you, finally?" I asked.

"I used to pay about $38 a month for my rent in Lahore. And I never owned any property. Now I pay $30, but this time it is helping me buy my own house for my wife and children. I am thinking about the future."

Fifty feet from the houses stood a one-room brick schoolhouse. Tiny shoes were piled outside the door as the schoolchildren sat on the floor with books in hand, reciting English words for their three young teachers. In the midst of turbulent times in Pakistan, a country in a race between extremists and leaders building the framework for a more civil society, the school was a profound symbol of progress and achievement. After 3 years, the project was assuming the shape of a real community.

DR. SONO KHANGHARANI UNDERSTANDS community. He was born one of Pakistan's roughly 2.5 million Hindus. Nearly 80 percent of the Hindus living there are from the Dalit caste, the lowest social group, historically consigned to serve as leatherworkers, carcass handlers, street cleaners, and landless laborers.

While the caste system is no longer as prevalent in Indian urban areas, even today in many rural areas Dalits are excluded from living in some places and attending certain schools. Some rural teahouses even keep special cups and utensils for them to use so that higher-caste people won't be sullied by touching the same items. It was this fear of touching that led to the common name for Dalits, Untouchables.

Dr. Sono's father was a cobbler, and by tradition, the son should have followed in those footsteps. But a twist of fate occurred during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1948. Thar, the vast desert region where Dr. Sono was born, is so remote that many Hindus remained in Muslim Pakistan. Dr. Sono completed university and, though faced with opportunities unimagined by his parents, nonetheless chose to return to his community, where too many people still work as bonded laborers toiling in brick-making and carpet-weaving factories or farming tiny plots on feudal lands.

What brought Acumen Fund to this desert place where the poor live in mud huts, own just a few pots and pans, and eke out hardscrabble lives on and land? The story actually started in India with another social entrepreneur. My colleague Yasmina Zaidman and I met Amitabha Sadangi in 2004, when Acumen Fund was starting to build a portfolio focused on bringing water to the poor. Amitabha, in his forties, had been working for nearly 20 years with poor farmers in India, designing and distributing affordable implements to increase their productivity.

His organization, IDE India, had distributed hundreds of thousands of treadle pumps, rudimentary devices that farmers connect to water sources and activate by standing on them, pumping their legs as if they are on StairMasters. These simple technologies were helping farmers triple and quadruple their income levels, so Amitabha was encouraged to design something for farmers who had access to only minimal levels of water-the poorest of the poor.

Amitabha has one of the world's great smiles, at once conspiratorial and sparkling. He is a solid, sturdy man with a trimmed beard and flashing black eyes. Despite his diamond bracelet and gemstone rings, his laughter and easy way with farmers-and, most important, the way he listens-elicits trust in the most rural areas. Amitabha is always who he is, without ever trying to be someone else.

I was excited by his can-do attitude and pragmatic approach to farming.

"Did you ever see drip irrigation in Israel?" he asked me. I had indeed. Drip irrigation was simply a matter of connecting long, skinny pipes to a water source and then extending them down the length of a field, each one along a row where seeds will be planted. Extending from the pipes are microtubes, tiny straws that drip water by the stalk of the plant. The concept was brilliant, but it was designed only for use by large-scale farms, where the systems could be most profitable.

Amitabha looked at the technology and determined that he needed to make it affordable for the poorest farmers. "We needed to follow three core principles," he told me. "The system would have to be so affordable that the farmers could cover the entire cost from the sales of their harvest in less than a year. Second, it had to be fairly easy to use. And third, it had to be infinitely expandable. If the poorest farmers had funds to irrigate only an eighth of an acre, that would be fine because once they earned income, they could buy a second system to double the amount of land irrigated and take themselves out of poverty."

He was frustrated that several of his donors loved what he was doing but hated that he was selling the systems to such poor farmers and that the manufacturers of the system, as well as the distributors, were making a profit.

"How can I explain to them that there are 260 million smallholder farmers in India? We have so many millions living on less than $1 a day-and to reach them, we must focus on providing financial incentives to ensure systems are well built. There is charity involved, no doubt, but we need to build systems that will last."

Yasmina and I agreed wholeheartedly and Acumen Fund supported Amitabha's work, eventually helping him to create a for-profit company. Over the next 4 years, Amitabha's organization would sell more than 275,000 systems and see nearly all of the farmers who used them double their yields and incomes, and some even more than that.

I shared Amitabha's story with Dr. Sono in Pakistan when I first met him in the Unilever offices in Karachi. I was struck by his amiable face, the way his eyes smiled, his salt and pepper hair parted on the side and his obvious delight in just about everything. Dr. Sono's eyes widened as we described what drip irrigation was doing to help Indian farmers change their lives. He could imagine a partnership with Unilever, as the company was committed to working in Thar, and with Acumen Fund because the farmers were so eager to change their own lives.

Immediately Dr. Sono decided he wanted to try introducing drip irrigation to the farmers in Thar. We agreed to try our first technology transfer from one investment to another, this time from India to Pakistan. It would be challenging, partially due to the political tensions between the two countries, but we also believed that fostering this kind of learning and trade was a powerful way to build relations. And Dr. Sono seemed to be a great bet. Like Amitabha, he loved working with poor farmers, had built a community of trust, and had committed his life to his work. And like Amitabha, his eyes sparkled when he spoke.