Blue Sweater (Pt.1)

Jacqueline Novogratz, the author of Blue Sweater, showed us what is a real social enterprise. In the first half of the book, she mainly described her experiences to open up a micro-financing organization in Rwanda, Africa. I was very impressed by her decision because she graduated from Stanford MBA, and worked in New York city afterwards. She said she was a "middle-class kid" so pursuing after a nonprofit organization would seem too challenging for her. When she interviewed with a bank, she was asked why she wanted to become a bank. She directly answer, "I don't want to be a banker." Not a lot of people had the courage to directly speak of their dreams about changing the world during an interview but Jacqueline did. When she moved to Chase, she was given a chance to work in Africa. She made a quick decision without hesitating that if she wanted to change the world, she needed to work in Africa. I admired her courage of chasing after her dream at all costs. And that's every college student should have learned - be brave enough to chase after one's dream.

The following chapters each told a story of the difficulty she encountered in developing business in Africa. I respect her enthusiasm and her energy that she put under such poor circumstances. She heard a 8-year-old girl saying that solders had taken all of their dresses in the war, so these young girls wore their best dresses every day in case they were going to lose them one day. She couldn't find anyone to support her as well since in Rwanda, African women were against girls from other countries. They thought one shouldn't deal with their issues if she was not an African. A lot of people were trying to poison her in order to scare her away from work even though she was working for women rights. After all, she realized that compassion was not enough to change the problems in Africa. She had to devote herself in so that people would respect her work. I think this book gave us the power to work in a startup since all startups started from many problems. One would only succeed if he/she learned how to put all efforts in and how to sacrifice.