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CH A P T ER 5

THE BLUE BAKERY

“Poverty won’t allow him to lift up his head; dignity won’t allow him to bow it down.”

— M A DAG A S Y PROV ER B

In meeting women in and around the markets of Kigali, we rarely found a business that employed more than one woman and maybe

one or two of her youngsters. I wanted to know what it would take to build a business that actually created jobs for poor people. There had to be something more than selling tomatoes or rice or baskets; besides, I wanted to see for myself what it would take to make a business work in Rwanda. I started asking around to see if anyone could point me to a business with more than a few workers.

Honorata, the shy woman who worked with Veronique, told me about a project she’d helped create for single mothers in Nyamirambo, the popular section of Kigali where lower-income people lived. When Prudence overheard us, she whispered in my ear that the women were prostitutes. I shrugged but didn’t really pay attention, as it seemed to me the word was used too easily in Rwanda. Women who danced late at the same nightclubs I did could easily be labeled wan-ton or worse. Besides, I was eager to visit any legitimate business with potential for real growth.

Boniface drove us through the wealthy neighborhood of Kiyovu, down Avenue Paul VI, and into Nyamirambo. The day was hot; the air, heavy; the streets were jammed with cars crawling along, manuevering around potholes. Women walked hand in hand carrying enormous

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bundles on their heads. Small shops stood one after another, almost always doubling as homes. Kiosks, tailors, hair salons, pharmacies, stores that played videos at night were painted blue, green, yellow, orange, though the paint had worn off over the years and the colors had faded. The unpaved side roads were filled with old auto parts and the burned-out bodies of ancient vehicles. At the top of the hill stood a large mosque painted white with stripes of bright green. It reminded me of a wedding cake, a small oasis rising out of its chaotic surroundings.

The “kiosk Allah”—a little shop selling sundries—and an Islamic school were located next to the mosque, where the streets divided. Nyamirambo had a sizable Muslim population for a country that was mostly Catholic at the time. Turning right, we passed a tailor shop, a clothing boutique, and a shoe repair store, in front of which stood a 3-foot-long wingtip oxford shoe on a tall stick. Two doors down stood our destination: a singularly unimpressive gray cement build-ing that housed Project AAEFR (Association Africaine pour des Entreprises Féminins du Rwanda).

“I’ve worked with them for years,” Honorata told me. “The women have such good intentions, and you will like them, I am sure.”

All I could hear was my mother telling me that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Her moral philosophy was that we show the world who we are through our actions, not merely through words or intentions. The detritus, disasters, and despair unwittingly created by well-intentioned people and institutions across Africa were evi-dence that my mother was right.

The group known as the Femmes Seules (or single women, code for unwed mothers) was one of many women’s groups organized in part by Honorata and Veronique’s Ministry for Family and Social Affairs. The women, among the city’s poorest, would gather for training and some form of income generation. This particular group focused on a “baking project,” which consisted of making and then selling a few goods in town and sewing dresses and crafts on order. In a moment, it was clear to me that “income generation” was a misnomer. Only one woman was sewing at all; the rest were simply sitting quietly.

There were about 20 of them in the cramped front room, all identi-cally dressed in green gingham short-sleeved smocks, sitting on two long wooden benches in front of a pine counter with empty shelves

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behind it. There were no baked goods to be seen and no sign advertised what the group did.

“How long have they been waiting for us?” I whispered to Honorata.“I don’t know,” she responded, “but they are used to waiting for

visitors.”I hated that dynamic: powerless women just sitting, waiting all day

if a donor was expected to visit, hoping someone might come in the door with help but feeling powerless to do anything for themselves.

I looked around at the women appreciatively. Bowing my head slightly, I said hello: “Amakuru.”

Faces lit up, and one woman held her hand across an otherwise unfettered smile. In unison, the women responded “Imeza,” meaning “fine.” When one or two began talking to me in Kinyarwanda, I looked around awkwardly at Honorata and felt great relief when she began to translate. Any small effort to communicate on my part elic-ited gracious appreciation. Kinyarwanda is complex and difficult, and has what seems like four or five syllables in every word. The women applauded when I used some Swahili, for at least most of the Muslim women spoke that language. Still, I knew my African-lan-guage skills were on a child’s level at best.

A solid, affable-looking woman named Prisca, also dressed in the green checkered uniform, stood in front of the group. With smiling eyes, a square jaw, and a wide, open face, she reminded me of my great-aunts who were built like tree trunks, with strong hands that knew hard work and sweat. She took my hand.

“Welcome,” she said. “We’re happy you’ve come to visit.” She was hoping I would bring resources, preferably money, but her warmth was genuine.

While Prisca and I spoke French, the women stared. In Rwanda, children of the elites were taught French from a young age, but the poor learned only Kinyarwanda in primary school. Most of these women had spent only a year or two in school at most and couldn’t speak a word of French. They seemed to range in age from 18 to their late twenties and carried themselves with an air of innocence and simplicity, wearing not a speck of makeup, jewelry, nail polish, or revealing clothing. Most women wore flip-flops, and their dresses could have passed for prison attire.

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I thought of the word prostitute and the distancing power of lan-guage. Women with no money and few options are too easily catego-rized as throwaways. The poorest women in Africa often raise children while their husbands work in other places—if they even have husbands—and their poverty sometimes causes them to sleep with a landlord when they can’t afford the rent. It is an act driven not by commerce but by the need for survival in a cruel market. Whether or not any of the women in this project ever did this was not a con-cern of mine. I was infuriated by the license people felt to brand women who, though incredibly disadvantaged, shared the dreams of everyone else.

After I introduced myself, the women shyly revealed their names: Marie-Rose, Gaudence, Josepha, Immaculata, Consolata—names that reminded me of doilies and lace, not business. There was gentleness in the way each responded, and I wanted to find some way to be of service.

I could see that the sewing project was going nowhere, especially with the country’s burgeoning secondhand clothing business. I asked Prisca to help me understand the baked goods project. First, she gave me a tour of the little two-room building where the project was housed. In the back room, an electric oven stood alone, flanked only by a table and a waffle iron. Outside, several pots filled with samosas shimmying in oil sat on handmade stoves. The women were preparing a snack for us, though we’d come with no money and no promises.

I asked Prisca how the project operated. “It’s simple,” she said. “Each morning, several women come very early to prepare the day’s selection. It is always the same, but the people like that.”

I would come to know that selection better than I ever wanted to: beignets (fried lumps of dough), batonnets (the same dough molded into sticks and fried), samosas, tiny waffles, and hot tea with milk and sugar. The women would take the goods to the government offices in the middle of the morning and sell them for 10 francs each. They’d then come back with whatever cash they’d earned and give it to Prisca, saving whatever food wasn’t sold for the next day.

In concept, I liked the idea. I knew from my own experience at UNICEF that people would get very hungry by 10:30 or 11:00 in the morning because everyone arrived at work at 7:30 and didn’t have a

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break until lunchtime. There were no little stores selling snack foods on the corners, and people rarely brought treats from home. The problem with the “project mentality” was that the quality of the goods was mediocre, and there didn’t seem to be a system for deliveries.

“How can I be of help?” I asked.Prisca answered, “The women are too poor. They earn too little

money. They work every day, but the project is losing money every week.”

Honorata nodded in agreement.“How much do the women earn?” I asked.“Fifty francs a day,” Prisca responded—50¢. “And most are raising

multiple children.”“How much do you lose?”Prisca took out the big green ledger in which she carefully

recorded every franc spent, earned, and paid to the women. On average, the project was losing about $650 a month.

“Who covers the losses?” I asked.“Two charities,” Prisca said. “But I don’t know how long they will

renew our funding.”“They shouldn’t renew it,” I wanted to say but held my tongue. Six

hundred and fifty dollars a month in charity to keep 20 women earn-ing 50¢ a day. You could triple their incomes if you just gave them the money. It was a perfect illustration of why traditional charity too often fails: In this case, well-intentioned people gave poor women something “nice” to do, such as making cookies or crafts, and subsi-dized the project until there was no more money left, then moved on to a new idea. This is a no-fail way to keep already poor people mired in poverty.

I wondered aloud why the charities didn’t get tired of keeping the enterprise going just to employ a group of women for so little income. How would this survive in the long term? How would the women ever really change their circumstances?

Prisca shrugged. “People get by.”“Prisca, that’s not enough,” I said.“No,” she said, visibly embarrassed, “it isn’t.”I was foolish to start with criticism. This is where so many West-

erners fail: After a quick appraisal, we’re ready to tell people in low-

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income communities not only what’s wrong with what they’re doing, but also just how to fix it.

I apologized and tried again: “Could you be selling more? Could you cut costs?”

They already had, Prisca explained. “It is easier to find more peo-ple to buy than to cut costs.” She looked at me as if the ball was now in my court.

I thought for a moment. “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said slowly. “If we drop the charity and run this as a business, I’ll help make it work.” I held out my hand. “Are you okay with this?”

Prisca lifted her left eyebrow in surprise. When she took my hand, she emphatically responded “Sana,” meaning “very much” in Swahili.

Our goals would be those of any business: to increase sales and cut costs. We’d start tomorrow, and we’d turn this project into a real enterprise with profits and losses.

As Honorata and I climbed into the jeep, I looked at her and laughed. “Who would have thought that I, who cannot cook to save my life, would end up helping a group of women with a bakery in Nyamirambo? Honorata, do you think the women will be up to the task of running this as a business instead of a charity project? Do you think I’ll be able to teach them to sell? I mean, the women themselves hardly said a word, mostly looking at the floor while I spoke. I don’t think this is going to be easy.”

She looked at me with an impish smile. “Maybe the good Lord wants to teach you something, too.”

I started early the next morning. The women greeted me warmly, smiling broadly. Without a common language, we communicated through gestures and sprinkled words of French or Swahili. While the women prepared for the morning, I reviewed the books more thor-oughly than I had the previous afternoon. The bakery had a long way to go, but the feeling of starting something that might change people’s lives invigorated me. The world had written off this little group, yet they had a chance to do something important for themselves, and in doing so, maybe they would change perceptions of what the poorest women are capable of accomplishing.

Because we started with 20 women, it made sense to expand our revenues quickly to cover costs. Rather than convince our few current

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customers to buy more doughnuts each day, we needed to increase the number of people we served. And at that time in Kigali, the only way I could think of achieving this was to go door-to-door, targeting agencies and institutions with enough employees to make it worth our while to visit.

I asked Prisca to translate for me: “Who will volunteer to come with me and speak with ambassadors and agency directors in town to see if they will offer our bakery services to their employees?” Twenty faces all turned downward.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll do the talking, but you need to learn to market, and it will be fun.”

No movement.Consolata, a tall, thin woman whose long face reminded me of a

Giacometti painting despite the wide gap between her teeth, made the mistake of glancing up before the others did. I chose her to be my partner. The other women laughed and clapped to think of their shy friend knocking on office doors in Kigali.

Consolata was an elegant woman of few words who always wore a jean jacket over her gingham dress. She sat next to me in the backseat of the UNICEF jeep as Boniface chatted in French up front. Consolata could only understand when I stopped him to ask him to translate.

“What do you normally say to people in the offices when you want to sell to them?” I asked her.

“Normally, I don’t say anything,” she nearly whispered. Boniface had to ask her to repeat herself before he could translate. “I just walk through the government agencies and everyone knows what I’m carrying, so they call me over.” Honorata had convinced the entire Ministry of Family and Social Affairs to allow the women to sell, and it was the project’s biggest client.

We discussed what it takes to find a new customer—how to estab-lish a relationship, build credibility right up front, and provide the potential customer with a sample of the goods. Though Consolata looked at me like I was crazy, she listened to every word.

We visited five embassies and most of the UN agencies that first long day. Though Consolata said little, we made progress. After the French Embassy agreed to invite the women to their offices the next morning, I gave her a strong hug and, after a moment of shock, she laughed and

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hugged me back. We arrived at the project in Nyamirambo as the sun was setting, exhausted, both of us content. We had doubled the number of customers—and we had gone well beyond the Rwandan government departments to supply UN agencies and a number of embassies, too. We were in business.

The next morning, I arose earlier than usual to jog through the misty, leafy suburb of Kiyovu to Nyamirambo, where the world was waking. The equatorial sun had barely risen. Women with baskets of bananas on their heads with their small children beside them walked like shadows in the soft morning light. It took less than half an hour to arrive at the project, where I found the women already hard at work, squatting on their heels, cooking doughnuts in a traditional woklike pot over an open fire while hurling gossip back and forth, producing an enchanting melody to accompany the crackle of hot oil shimmying as the lumps of dough hit the pan.

By 8:00 a.m., others began arriving to clean, help with cooking, and then organize the freshly made goods into bright orange plastic buck-ets. 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

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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 combi-nation 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 borrow-ers 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 expecta-tions and how we were all in this together. If there were profits, every-one 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 ven-ture 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 rela-tionships, 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 proj-ect’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

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Gaudence, the gloomiest of the group, to be the saleswoman. Gaud-ence had close-cropped hair and the droopiest eyes I’d ever seen. Mak-ing 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 some-thing 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 lad-der 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

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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 competi-tions 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

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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 enthusi-astic salespeople, they were becoming known around Kigali for their bright orange buckets and affordable snacks. More and more institu-tions 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 fever-ishly 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 mat-ter-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 tell-ing 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

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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 Nyami-rambo 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. Con-sciously 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 mak-ing 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 cur-tains, 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 bak-ery of Nyamirambo. The signs were written in French for prestige, though most people in Nyamirambo could understand only Kinyar-wanda, and many couldn’t read. Status counted for a lot.

When painting day arrived, everyone turned out to help. My friend

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Charles, a tall, lanky, 25-year-old French Canadian who worked for the United Nations Development Program, arrived dressed in his sig-nature 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 straight-forward, 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 out-side. 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 accom-plished. 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.“She thinks it is very nice,” Prisca translated, “but you know,

Jacqueline, our color is green.”Gaudence had been the only one courageous enough to tell the

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truth about the paint color, but she’d waited until it was too late. We all agreed that the color of the bakery would have to be blue—but the women would continue wearing their green gingham uniforms for contrast.

I walked home alone from Nyamirambo that evening, covered in paint, feeling tired, elated, and also perplexed that I’d tried so hard to listen and still ended up choosing the wrong color. On one hand, I hadn’t wanted to wait for months until the women made a decision. On the other, I began to understand that I could have listened better, for listening is not just having the patience to wait, it is also learning how to ask the questions themselves. People who’ve always been dependent on others for some kind of charity or goodwill often have a hard time saying what they really want because usually no one asks them. And if they are asked, the poor often think no one really wants to hear the truth. I had to admit to myself that I was still building trust.

The reality of our beautiful new bakery didn’t stop the setbacks, of course. One morning I walked into the offices at UNICEF and was told by a frantic Damescene, the office assistant, that half of Kigali had called. “It seems that everyone in the city is suffering from eating the baked goods,” he said.

“What do you mean by ‘suffering’?” I asked.He looked at the floor in embarrassment. “You know,” he said gen-

tly, “maybe they are having pains in their stomach, and many are going home sick.”

Feeling like Typhoid Mary, I called all of the embassies and gov-ernment offices to apologize and promised to take care of the prob-lem. Boniface and I drove quickly to the bakery and approached the women cooking in back.

“Everyone is sick with the runs,” I said. “Did you do anything dif-ferently?” They shook their heads.

I asked to see what they were preparing. The smell was stale, sour, and rancid.

“When did you last change the cooking oil?” I asked.“Oh, never,” Josepha answered gleefully. “We have been adding

just a little more each day. We are keeping costs low so that we can have high sales and more profit.”

Next lesson: quality control.

The Blue Bakery 87

Despite the bumps in the road, within a few months we had cor-nered the snack market in Kigali, expanding beyond our repertoire of fried dough in a variety of shapes to making cassava chips and banana chips (thinly sliced, fried in oil, dusted with salt and chili powder, then placed in plastic bags) and peanut butter. When we purchased plastic containers from the local honey factory for the latter, I began dreaming about starting a factory to create hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs, for I’d witnessed the difference the bakery had made in those 20 wom-en’s lives. Few investors or donors were prepared to invest in Africa, yet I was seeing tremendous potential for change. I told myself that at some point in my life, I would come back with more experience to start a factory or do something more directly focused on large-scale private enterprise that created new jobs.

But for the moment, my life when I wasn’t working with Duterim-bere was focused on ensuring the bakery was a success. The cassava and banana chips turned out to be favorites with the locals. We sold our spicy chips to most of the retail stores, and people would drop by the bakery in Nyamirambo to pick up packets, as well. I still did too much of the marketing, but in time the women gained the confidence to venture into stores to replenish orders. Sometimes, a few of the women and I would walk through little shops in town just to point proudly to our products on the shelves. Together we had created a new product that hadn’t existed before—and people liked it! Nothing could be more satisfying.

Within 8 months or so, the women were earning $2 a day—four times more than when we started together, and much more than most earned in Kigali; and in some weeks, they earned more than $3. Few people earned that kind of money in Rwanda, certainly not women. For the first time, their incomes allowed them to decide when to say yes and when to say no. Money is freedom and confidence and choice. And choice is dignity. The solidarity of the bakery also gave them a sense of belonging that made them even stronger.

Once the bakery cornered the market for snack foods, we decided to focus on bread. The bread in Kigali was generally atrocious. The United States and a number of countries in Europe were dumping surplus wheat grown by heavily subsidized farmers on countries like Rwanda, so that rich and poor alike had little choice but to buy

88 The Blue Sweater

bleached white, weevil-ridden flour. A few stores in town made their own bread, but it was often stale. At the same time, sorghum fields abounded in the areas around Kigali, and the price for it was low—possibly the key to creating a rich grain bread.

Prisca and I discussed the value of bringing nutritious bread to the market, especially for low-income women who would benefit from the lower cost. An Italian woman gave her a recipe, and she experimented until she’d baked a delicious whole-grain bread. We tried selling it in Nyamirambo, but quickly met with failure. Poor urban Rwandans pre-ferred the white bread, not because it tasted better but because it was a symbol of luxury, of something imported. It didn’t matter that it was more expensive—in fact, the higher price made the imported bread even more desirable.

Despite the many experiments, the failures, and the setbacks, the little bakery continued to flourish under Prisca’s leadership. She created at least one place in Nyamirambo that operated on its own merit, covering its costs with the products it sold while teaching the women that they could control their own lives. It operated for a long time after I left—until the genocide destroyed so much of what was beautiful.

The story of the bakery was one of the human transformation that comes with being seen, being held accountable, succeeding. I had the privilege of watching the women acquire a sense of dignity once they were given tools for self-sufficiency, and I learned that language is per-haps only half the equation in how people communicate with one another. I discovered the power of creating a business with real account-ability. And I learned to be myself and to laugh at myself, to share in the women’s successes, and, maybe most importantly, to listen with my heart and not just my head.