The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

by Jacqueline Novogratz

  Lisa and I were most devastated by the gambling industry's impact on low-income people. In 1990, Mississippi was the first southern state to legalize gambling, justifying the casinos as sources of jobs and tax revenue for the state. But the wages paid were low, while the toll gambling took on local communities was immense. In the Tupelo casino, Lisa and I saw mostly low-income people sitting in front of machines literally throwing away their meager earnings. And we saw this again and again in every casino we visited across the state.

  At the catfish factories, we saw firsthand what an unfettered private sector can do to poor people in the name of job creation: All but one of the 400 catfish processing factories in the Mississippi Delta were owned by white men, and 99 percent of the workers were black women. The women earned minimum wage and typically stood in ice-cold, bloody water for hours cutting fillets of catfish, with few breaks for lunch or the bathroom. Until the late 1980s, workers were commonly maimed or killed by slipping inside ice-chopping machines. Many had to leave the job because of severe carpal tunnel syndrome.

  As we approached a giant factory, Lisa pushed me to register with the guard at the metal gate. "Tell him you're a student," she whispered. "Otherwise, he'll think you're a spy. Tell them you're a student working on a paper about catfish."

  "You've got to be kidding me," I replied.

  When the guard sternly asked what I was there for, I nonetheless responded obediently, "Student"

  On a quiet late afternoon, we walked into the front offices, where a uniformed, overweight woman in a white cap approached. "We are studying the catfish industry," Lisa told her when she offered to help. "We want to know how conditions have changed in the past year or so and take a look at the factory itself." She never asked the woman's name, and it wasn't offered.

  When the woman asked if we had permission to visit the line, Lisa shook her head. The woman silently motioned for us to follow. Inside the factory, where the workers on the line sliced fish at rapid-fire pace, the din was fearsome. Though we wore rubber boots, sloshing through the freezing red water made me want to vomit.

  Back in the front offices, the woman invited us to sit down at a white Formica table. Still, she didn't give us her name. Her massive hands were folded in front of her, and her lips stayed pursed together. Lisa told her stories of organizing in the Delta with the Children's Defense Fund, talked about her favorite foods and why she loved Mississippi. Finally, the woman began to soften.

  "Things are a lot better now," she told us after a minute or two of silence.

  "Why?" Lisa asked.

  "The line is safer now, we can take breaks, and our hours are not as bad as they used to be. People aren't getting hurt as much."

  "What happened?" Lisa pushed.

  Leaning over the table, she looked at us and with her index finger traced a big, invisible U for "union." In whispers, she talked about how young Easterners had come down to Mississippi to discuss the power of unions.

  The workers had risked everything, she said. "Some of us were fired and, you know, we didn't have no cushion to keep us eating. But we helped each other, and we kept at it, and we made it."

  Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the country. At least one in three black men in his twenties at that time was under some sort of criminal supervision. The graduation rate for black male high school students was abysmally low, and the public health system was in shambles. This was another side of America, one that took Hurricane Katrina for the rest of the country to begin to see.

  The Delta also reminded me of how easily capitalism can be manipulated to oppress the most vulnerable. Good public policy must accompany market-oriented solutions that are undergirded with an imperative of moral leadership. We need to ask more questions about who is awarded public contracts, who gains, who loses, and whether or not our public funds are doing the most possible for the most people rather than benefiting just a few. The premise of the Next Generation Leadership program was one that made me proud, but how could we extend the principles to a much larger group of leaders?

  After running NGL for 2 years, Lisa and I both went on to build new organizations, mine focused on global issues, hers, on young people in Washington, DC. During late-night calls from our offices, we would commiserate about the long hours and loneliness. When we talked about the personal price we sometimes pay for trying to change the world, Lisa would remind me of one of her favorite songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock: "We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For."

  "We can't wait around for someone else to change things," she would say. A week after I advised her to take it easy, to take time to relax and regenerate, she died of an asthma attack. Lisa was taken too early from a world in desperate need of individuals with such courage, heart, intellect, and stamina, the ones who carry wisdom the way Maha Ghosananda had taught.

  Knowing Lisa and visiting South Africa and Mississippi with NGL made me think about Rwanda and inspired me to return. If leadership was about having vision and the moral imagination to put oneself in another's shoes, then I had to try and understand what had happened in a place where I'd lived and worked, but might never fully know. I had to return and see what had happened to the women I knew. In 1997, I returned to Kigali, where I had learned firsthand the difficulties of navigating across difference. When all was said and done, here was a country destroyed because people feared one another.

  When I boarded the plane at JFK, I expected to see the trees in Kigali weeping and the flowers all dead. I had an image of postgenocide Rwanda as a place that would seem perennially gray and depressed. After all, 800,000 people had died on its rich soil in a 3-month period.

  But I was mistaken. Mother Nature had left nary a dent: The physical world was unchanged. Though memories would linger in the very air the people breathed, earth itself forgot the mass destruction in an instant. Of course, man-made structures suffered-churches and houses across the country had been destroyed. Buildings were riddled with bullet holes, and uniformed boys with machine guns stood at every corner. Barbed wire was wound atop high brick walls where wooden fences used to suffice, sometimes wrapped almost metaphorically by pastel morning glories slinking around sharp metal. And the light-filled sky was as blue as it had ever been.

  I drove straight to UNICEF to find my friend Boniface the driver, who seemed so much older and more tired. "I found God after the war," he said, "and stopped drinking altogether. I nearly killed myself with too much beer trying to forget how badly people treated one another." A tiny Bible sat on the seat beside him and a rosary hung from the rearview mirror.

  When I asked him to take me to the bakery, he protested: "Everything has changed, you know."

  As we drove to Nyamirambo in silence, I thought about how much I liked Boniface, as well as the other drivers, now all dead-either from the genocide or AIDS. We passed the candy-striped mosque, a beacon above the area's rambling streets. The Muslims were the only group who didn't fight during the genocide, and the number of Muslim converts had risen significantly since then. A few Islamic schools stood by familiar little shops. Religion had played such a tragic, disappointing role: When thousands of people fled to the churches for safety, they found not sanctuaries, but killing fields. Some priests and nuns became modern Judases, and the masses, previously so beholden to authority, ensured that neither house of God nor shrine was sacred.

  In a world turned upside down, I had come to see what was left of the Rwanda I had known. Just the sight of the mosque comforted me. I knew that Duterimbere had survived, but where was the bakery? Boniface and I walked down familiar streets, past tailor shops and video stores, until he finally pointed to a patch of blue paint by the roadside.

  I knocked on the door, tentatively at first, but no one answered. When I knocked again, louder this time, there was still no response.

  I had nearly given up when the door opened a crack and a skinny hand appeared. A young, birdlike woman with a red scarf wrapped around her head emerged slowly from the shadows.

 
I introduced myself in French. She just stared at me.

  I repeated myself-to silence once again.

  "I speak only English," she finally stammered. A refugee from Uganda, she must have moved here after the genocide and taken over the empty house. Perhaps she feared I'd come to take it back.

  She said she hadn't heard of a bakery being on this spot.

  Somehow it perturbed me to speak in my native tongue: "How long have you lived here?" I asked.

  "Two years," she responded. "I sell milk from my house."

  My house? I was sure the woman was squatting, having found the bakery empty after the genocide. This was happening all across Kigali, though I knew President Kagame was trying to address the problem. But this time it all felt so personal. I didn't like her possessive tone, though I also knew that she could have lost everything herself and was just trying to survive.

  "Do you know your neighbors? Did any of them live here before?" I persisted.

  She shook her head and closed the door before I could thank her.

  I stood there in silence.

  Blue paint on the road was all that remained of the bakery-blue paint that should have been green. For one brief moment, there had been a pocket of joy here in a place where women dared to have aspirations, to make their own decisions on their own terms. With the bakery gone, so were most of the women who worked there, I assumed. I thought of the Jewish concept of memory: Who will tell the stories so that people don't forget?

  Though the bakery was destroyed, its lessons would go on and infuse other work-certainly my work. In an instant, a patch of blue paint made me want to do more. My prayer in response to what I saw after the genocide would manifest itself in a new organization yet to be invented.

  As I stared at the blue paint on the road, what made my head spin was the fact that the women I'd known and worked with for years-Hono- rata, Prudence, Agnes, and Liliane-had played such dramatically different roles in the genocide as victim, bystander, and even perpetrator. I wanted to understand their stories, and from 1997 to 2000, I visited those women four times. What they shared with me changed how I think about any human crisis, be it genocide, the spread of HIV/AIDS, or the ravages of chronic poverty. To this day, they live inside me.

  CHAPTER 10

  RETRIBUTION AND

  RESURRECTION

  "When I despair, I remember that all through history, the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a long time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it-always."

  -GANDHI

  fter learning that the bakery had been decimated, I feared discovering the fates of the women who had helped found Duterimbere: Honorata, Liliane, Prudence, Agnes, and Annie. I gave myself only a week on my first trip back, for I wanted simply to discover what had happened to the people I knew.

  Once I learned that they'd played every conceivable role in the genocide, I decided to come back year after year just to try and understand, though I doubt I ever will.

  On my second visit back, the first person I went to see was Honorata, Veronique's old sidekick who had helped guide me on visits with so many women's groups and had first introduced me to the blue bakery.

  "God sent you back to me!" Honorata squealed almost exuberantly in her white cotton blouse and navy skirt, a tropical-patterned lemon yellow scarf wrapped around her head. This was not the Honorata I'd visited 2 years after the genocide had ended, when we'd both stood and wept, holding on to one another for dear life. Then she'd seemed a worn, weary, wilted stem and had uttered not a word of hope, nothing but despair. I remember seeing her walk toward me out of the shadows of her darkened office, seeming ghostlike, barely there.

  This time, she was a magnificent blast of energy and light. Her eyes shone like the sun, and I couldn't help but smile just at the sight of how beautiful she looked.

  Honorata's little pink house stood across the street from a giant, shimmering eucalyptus tree in her neighborhood of Nyamirambo, not far from where the bakery once stood. We sat in her small, clean, simple living room with walls painted robin's-egg blue and furnished with a plastic couch positioned in front of a small wooden table as well as a single bed covered by sheets printed with cartoon Smurfs. A large bowl of mangoes, bananas, and passion fruit and a vase of flowers adorned the main table-signs of life and renewal. On another table stood a large picture of a white, blue-eyed, thorn-crowned Jesus Christ, a plastic Virgin Mary, and a framed prayer about the need to trust God in all things.

  God was everywhere in Honorata's life. She thanked the Lord in nearly every sentence she uttered, attributing everything good to Him. I respected her faith yet also wondered whether any unspoken doubt lingered alongside her deep conviction. Many Rwandans had concluded after the genocide that no benevolent God could have allowed such an atrocity, but if any uncertainty resided in Honorata, she didn't show it. And regardless of whether or not I shared her religious faith, it was undeniable that her strong belief imbued her with remarkable courage.

  "Most of the women from the bakery were killed," she told me. "Now I spend a lot of time helping a women's group. I'm a widow now, like many of them. We accompany each other. It gives me great strength to work with those poor women-so many returned with nothing in their lives."

  I thanked her for all she'd taught me when we worked together. Honorata's eyes welled up: "That was the belle epoque, when we believed anything was possible. It was a time when women began to open their eyes to the external world, to see their lives in the context of something bigger. From 1986, we learned about other realities and other people. We shared the little we had for the common good, not caring whether a woman was from one ethnicity or another.

  "The problems started around the time you were leaving the country," she told me.

  In October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a small but effective rebel army led by Paul Kagame, entered Rwanda from Uganda. The RPF's stated mission was to remove Rwanda's president and make it possible for exiled Tutsis to reclaim their citizenship. At the same time, the international community was pushing Rwanda for democratic reform.

  This marked the beginning of fear. And with fear began the disinformation campaigns, the lying, and the manipulation by Rwanda's leaders to instill even more defensiveness-and paranoia-in an already insecure citizenry.

  For the next 5 years, the question would be asked over and over: "Are you a Hutu or a Tutsi?" As tensions between the two groups increased, a growing hatred began to permeate everyday life.

  I had never known Honorata's ethnicity, but if I'd been pushed, I would have guessed she was Hutu, just because she fit the stereotype of being a short woman with a broad nose. In truth, physical characteristics revealed little about ethnicity. I did know her mother was Tutsi-but ethnicity is handed down patrilineally in Rwanda. I'd also known that the genocide had taken scores of members of Honorata's extended family-nearly everyone on her mother's side-as well as her beloved husband and her identical twin sister.

  Though she and her family were clearly targeted, Honorata and I never discussed her specific ethnicity, nor did we talk about our multiple identities: Honorata was also Rwandan, female, a social worker, and a mother. That's a conversation I would like to have had with her.

  Instead I asked her to tell me her story. Holding my hand and taking a deep breath, for 3 hours she spoke, often in the third person. Maybe this was the only way she could bear to say the words aloud.

  In childhood, there were three important women in her life. Her identical twin, Anunziata, was like "another branch on the same tree," her soul mate, her rock: "The most time we were separated was in the 15 minutes between our births," she told me.

  The two spent much of their childhood searching fruitlessly for their mother, Collette, a woman known for her classic beauty, who had abandoned her family when the girls were young, possibly during the pogroms of the early 1960s. Or perhaps she fled to escape the girls' stepmother, who treated her with const
ant disrespect. After Collette left, the twins' stepmother abused them, forcing them to work like servants, showing them no affection.

  "We used to pray to God," Honorata told me, "`Please show us where our mother is, even if she can be found only in the traces of a tree or a rock"'

  Loss and redemption were lifelong themes for both Honorata and her twin sister.

  Ultimately, when the girls were adults, they discovered their mother in Zaire, living quietly in a village, having had no further children of her own. Around the same time, Honorata also found the love of her life in a young engineer named Theodore. The young couple found a way to bring her mother, Collette, to Rwanda, married, and had four children, three girls and a boy. Anunziata married one of Theodore's close friends and moved to Butare, 2 hours away from Kigali. Still, the twins saw one another almost weekly. Eventually, Theodore was issued a house in accordance with his midlevel government position and Honorata's mother was able to move into the couple's old house in Nyamirambo, which she turned into a boardinghouse for young women. Finally, Honorata's yearning for family and closeness was fulfilled.

  "Theodore promised he would love me forever," she remembered tearfully, "and in this he never failed me for a moment throughout his short life"

  In 1994, as tensions rose in Rwanda, Honorata and Theodore discussed leaving the country, but were prevented from doing so by the impossibility of securing visas for everyone in their family. On April to, 10 days after the genocide began, the Interahamwe marched into Honorata's neighborhood violently and unannounced. She and Theodore gathered their children and neighbors and immediately headed south to Butare, the only place in Rwanda not yet ripped apart. It was also the most educated part of the country, with a Tutsi majority-and Anunziata was there. The roads were too dangerous to drive to her mother's house in Nyamirambo, and Honorata's heart broke at the thought of leaving her, but she could see no other choice.