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.
Liliane and Julien moved to a new house. Julien loved his work with an international NGO as a doctor focused on AIDS. Liliane was about to take a break from her work to focus on family, though she said she would seek consultancies. Because she wasn't as occupied with the office, she had time to cook. She spoiled me with nine different courses of Rwandan food, including fried tilapia and green beans, plantains and rice, meat stew, fried potatoes, and salad.
Together, Liliane and I visited the Genocide Memorial Center in Kigali, along with our young Tutsi taxi driver whose uncle is buried there. We held one another's hands as we moved through the rooms recounting the country's history and displaying photographs of loved ones lost, as well as testimonials from survivors.
Afterward Liliane told me, "I think we will not see another genocide in this country. If we have learned anything, it is the horror that can happen when people don't think for themselves, but instead follow authority blindly. We have to teach our children judgment in our schools and our businesses if we are to thrive truly as a country."
As for Prudence, unable to find a job after the genocide, she had returned to school to earn a law degree. Now she oversees standards at a major coffee producer in Kigali. On my last night in the country, I met her and her husband, Ezekiel. After about 30 minutes of small talk and beers, I asked her what she had learned since I'd last seen her.
"Before everything happened," she said, "my family and I had everything: a big house, two cars, four beautiful children, wealth, status, and even the title of being a parliamentarian. And then we lost everything. I was imprisoned, our things were taken, but most important, two of our children disappeared in the march back from the refugee camps. We never saw them again."
She went on to say that her time in prison was terrible for her, but it also was a time that allowed her to reflect on what was important and to develop a deeper faith inside herself.
"When you have everything," she went on, "you start to think that material things are most important. When you lose them all, at first you think you have lost yourself, as well. But with faith, you begin to see that it is only those things that you build inside-those things that no one can take away from you-that matter. Now we try to live from a place of love. And we understand that you can only have great joy if you also know great pain."
Though their children are both studying abroad, Prudence and Ezekiel will stay in Rwanda. "We can't imagine ourselves as refugees in another country," Ezekiel explained. "This is our home and we will stay here and grow with it."
Duterimbere had invited Prudence, one of the organization's founders, to attend its 20th anniversary celebration.
"I couldn't make it," she said, "because I had to work. It was still early days, and I was proving myself at the coffee company. But I have the certificate proudly displayed in my living room. Those were the best days of my life."
A hopeful little organization built to support women's economic activities 20 years ago has made a difference. The founding members of Duterimbere also helped create PROFEMME and the Women's Network and other enterprises that together advanced the women's agenda in a society that had little official place for them for generations. Hundreds of thousands of people have been touched by the loans made by the women's bank, and some of them have gone on to create real businesses that provided income and a sense of greater purpose to the borrowers and their families.
When I first moved to Rwanda, I could barely find it on a map. Today, Africa is on the front page of newspapers and talked about at family dinner tables across the world. Celebrities travel there, and many want to help, as do young people focused on learning and service. We are connected in ways we could never have imagined.
I will forever be grateful to Duterimbere and to Rwanda for teaching me about possibility, about the power of markets, the need for smart and carefully invested financial assistance, and the constant hope for rebirth. I learned that microenterprise is an important part of the solution, but it is not the only part. I also learned that traditional charity alone can't solve the problems of poverty.
Before we made the blue bakery a business, the women were demoralized, dependent, and still desperately poor. Big flows of aid can create as many incentives for corruption and mismanagement as for change. Markets alone won't solve the problems of poverty. Low-income people are invisible to most entrepreneurs, who don't see them as paying customers. Poor distribution, lack of infrastructure, and corruption all add up to a failure of markets to deliver to the poor what they want and need at prices they can afford.
What is needed going forward is a philosophy based on human dignity, which all of us need and crave. We can end poverty if we start by looking at all human beings as part of a single global community that recognizes that everyone deserves a chance to build a life worth living.
CHAPTER 13
THE EDUCATION OF A
PATIENT CAPITALIST
"In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now."
-WANGARI MAATHAI
n the final years of the 20th century, the dot-com boom was in full swing, 20-something-year-old millionaires were being minted on a daily basis, and interest in philanthropy was on the rise. At the end of 1999, I was sitting with the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Sir Gordon Conway, in his 22nd-floor office overlooking Manhattan, sharing my frustrations about traditional philanthropy, remarking that it often lacked clear measures and accountability and seemed at times more focused on making donors feel good than on effecting change.
The world needed a new kind of institution, I said, one built on the best lessons and precepts of philanthropy but also utilizing business approaches and concepts. I'd seen the rise of socially oriented companies and felt that deep changes were under way in both business and philanthropy. Leaning back in his chair, he looked at me as I spoke, listening intently, one eyebrow raised in a way that communicated either interest or skepticism, or perhaps a little of each.
I was breathless with excitement, dreaming about a different kind of "fund," one that would amass philanthropic money, have the flexibility to make grants or investments in both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, take a few big bets on enterprises that delivered critical services to the poor, so to ensure low-income communities could actually be part of the solution. We would build more transparency and greater accountability into the work at all levels and treat the poor as customers with a real voice, not as passive recipients of charity.
"How different is it from the work of foundations today?" he asked.
"The biggest difference," I said, "is that we wouldn't simply make grants, but we would invest in entrepreneurs who have vision and the ability to solve local problems with market-driven ideas and approaches. We would hire creative people with the ability to read financial statements and balance sheets, not just budgets. We wouldn't focus on specific `projects,' but instead direct our efforts toward building strong organizations that we would gradually help bring to financial sustainability."
The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World Page 25
