The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World Read Online Free PDF

like shadows, fully veiled in black. A woman's black chador opened to reveal a sheath of bright red silk underneath. Overhead, a parrot flew, as if to show that even bright red silk was no match for his beauty.
    At night, I ate a plate of fresh barracuda and rice with a glass of lime juice, all for less than $2. My dollar-a-night room at the Hotel Salama was cramped, so I climbed the stairs to the roof, where I found a little bed among brightly colored bougainvillea. As I lay in the light of a full moon, listening to a group of young people a few rooftops over strumming guitars and singing Cat Stevens songs, I fell asleep thinking about what I might do to improve my situation.
    I was awakened before dawn by the call to prayer, and in the cool of the morning, realized I had no choice but to do the only thing I knew how to do well-I would just work. And then work some more. And try to pay attention to whatever the work was teaching me.

    Two experiences in particular changed the way I thought about the world in those first months in Africa. The first had to do with befriending a wonderful young woman named Marcelina-Maz for shortwho was a junior office girl in the place I was working. She wore her short hair in little braids around her head. Her uniform was a blue skirt and a white blouse with a navy V-neck sweater over it. She lacked all pretentiousness, and her good nature hid whatever hardships she had at home.
    We had little in common, but we found ourselves stealing time to talk each day. Maz loved coaching me in Swahili. She would point to an object around the office and ask me the word for it, always with the patience of Job.
    I often talked to her about the work we were trying to do to strengthen women's economic opportunities and about the importance of women having their own bank accounts.
    "I've never walked into a bank before," Marcelina told me shyly. "They don't want people like me in there, and I don't even have enough to start an account anyway."
    I promised to give her the minimum balance of $50 if she agreed to save regularly. The next morning, we walked through the doors of one of Kenya's largest financial institutions, an old-fashioned bank with tellers behind barred windows. The Kenyan bank manager approached me with a welcoming look, but my attempts to move the conversation to Maz-who apparently had not entered his field of vision-failed completely. Though obviously fluent in Swahili, he refused to talk to her directly, speaking only to me.
    When we finally opened the account, Marcelina told me she would cry tears of joy to fill the Indian Ocean. I began to see what it meant to put into practice the idea of extending basic services as simple as bank accounts that the middle class took for granted to people who are often invisible to those in power.
    The other experience that affected my worldview came during a visit to Uganda. I had gone there to meet a wonderful woman named Cissy, one of the nation's first women bankers. Uganda's president, Museveni, had come into power after a brutal guerrilla war in January 1986, and the country was still in shambles. I tried to push down my nervousness about what I might find there by focusing instead on what I'd heard about its artistic community, its poets and intellectuals who were famous in East Africa.

    As the plane flew into Entebbe Airport, I looked out the window at its green lushness, thinking of Winston Churchill's words that this was "the pearl of Africa." But minutes after landing, all I could see were guns in the hands of young boys, bombed-out buildings, streets filled with potholes and broken glass. I wondered how a nation could plunge so quickly from being a paragon of success to becoming a cauldron of despair. Twice young boys dressed in fatigues and carrying machine guns stopped Cissy and I for "routine checks," searching bags and looking through the trunk of Cissy's car.
    Despite the destruction in Uganda, the people were divine. Cissy herself was