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ARTUR OLIVEIRA: Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you all so much for making it out.
My name is Artur Oliveira.
I'm on the authors at Google team.
And it is my pleasure to introduce your speaker today.
A lot of you might be wondering what
does serving great guacamole have
to do with eradicating poverty?
And the thing is, I don't know.
That's why we have Josh Ruxin here,
who is here today with us to talk about his brand new book
"A Thousand Hills Through Heaven,
Love, Hope, and a Restaurant in Rwanda."
Now, the "New York Times" called it an
observing and affecting narrative.
And the book has been receiving a lot of praise recently,
so this really is a treat.
Josh is on faculty at Columbia University,
and he's been living in Rwanda since 2005.
So without further ado, if we could please welcome up Josh.
JOSH RUXIN: Thank you, Artur.
[INAUDIBLE]
Hi, everybody.
So, this whole story actually starts about 30 years ago.
I was a high school student at the height
of the Ethiopian famine.
I didn't really know much about it.
But there was a really cute upper class woman
who I saw go into some meeting after school.
And I thought, huh, I wonder where she's going,
so I followed her in and started to learn
about this incredible catastrophe that was costing
of course millions of lives in Ethiopia.
This was back 1984, 1985.
And that was actually the very beginning of my interest in it
all.
A couple years later, it led to a trip to Ethiopia.
I was just a teenager.
I'd never been outside of the country before,
and ended up taking a little plane to the middle of nowhere
in northern Ethiopia, get out of the plane on a grassy field.
And everybody dropped their plows
and came over to look at this white teenager
from Connecticut.
And a teacher came over and started to translate
and asked all the kids who were gathered around,
how do you think this kid and the other students got here?
And one kid raised his hand and says, by mule?
And then another kid points at me and says, come, in Amharic.
And so I end up walking with these kids about a mile up
to this mud-walled classroom.
And there's a poster, which has got pictures
of this club from high school from three years earlier
that we had sent with an aid worker years before.
And that for me was that aha moment that I'm sure all of you
have had in one way or another about how very, very
small this planet is, how you're only ever
24 hours away from the poorest places, the most
desperate places.
And I decided then, hey, I want to make
some sort of contribution.
I want to figure out how to make a difference.
And the next 30 years have been spent
trying to figure out how the heck to do that,
because it's not as easy as just having your heart into it.
So, about eight years ago, now nine years ago, my wife and I
were just about to be married.
And we were given a very unusual sendoff gift.
A very wealthy donor and fundraiser said to us, hey,
I've seen a really interesting poverty reduction
program in Kenya and some other places,
but it's not happening in Rwanda, and it should be.
So why don't you, Josh, and with your new wife Alissa,
head to Rwanda and get it going.
At that time, my wife had a public health degree
from Harvard.
She was sick and tired of taking the subway down to Wall Street,
where she was running a executive public health
program at Goldman Sachs.
And she said, sure, let's go.
We'll go for a year or two.
And we never came back.
We got to Rwanda just 10 years after the genocide.
And I'm sure when most of you think about Rwanda,
that is what you think about, the "Hotel
Rwanda," the senseless horrible slaughter of over
a million people in a hundred days back in 1994.
But we actually arrived in a country
that, while it certainly bore the scars of the genocide,
was clean, secure, beautiful, with wonderful,
welcoming people that was very much on the move.
It was actually even then growing at rates
that would make this administration very jealous,
nearly double-digit economic growth rates every year.
So I arrived to start working at the Millennium Village
site, which is just down south of Kigali in a place
called Mayange.
And it was not booming.
It actually was suffering from a horrible famine.
The health center as I found it back then,
this was actually the ambulance at the health center.
Most days it was shut.
The doors were just not open.
And I asked, how do you get a nurse?
And they said, well, you can go find her
if you've got money to go find her.
And then compounding everything, the land had no topsoil.
All the topsoil had rolled down the hills
because of deforestation.
And people were literally starving
because they couldn't produce enough food to eat.
So with my colleagues, we started at the very beginning,
which was, as long as people are dying from starvation,
no one's really going to want to listen to a word
that we have to say.
So we started working on progressive terracing and line
planting.
And pretty soon, those very hills--
this is a picture taken from the same exact angle--
started to green up and started to produce food.
And that was actually the very first harvest.
That ended up changing everything,
because lots of our thinking around building community
grew out of the notion that you need
to have an integrated set of interventions
in order to reduce poverty ultimately.
And I'll never forget, one day, one
of the early adopters in the community-- who this might well
have been her field.
I can't remember.
Her name's Jacqueline-- she came up to me, and she said,
you know, Josh, I'm really angry with you,
because for years I was the funeral director here.
And we had deaths all the time.
And I actually made a decent living
directing those funerals.
But you've put me out of business.
No one dies here anymore.
And that was the moment that the whole community really
started to take over its development interventions,
completely own it.
And today, we've basically scaled down that project.
And if it's any sign of the reduction
if not virtual elimination of poverty,
the real estate prices have gone up fivefold
since the bottom in 2005 when people were literally just
leaving because there was no reason to be in Mayange.
Oh, that's Jacqueline, by the way.
So meanwhile, my wife was in Kigali,
and she was working with the orphans of the genocide.
And she was working on a program called Generation Rwanda
helping some of these kids get access
to scholarships for university.
But the vast majority didn't have access to scholarships.
There weren't enough donors to pay for them.
And Alissa had a huge insight, which was these kids need jobs.
And with jobs, they're going to be
able to put themselves through university.
I said, great, honey.
What do you propose?
She said, well, how about we just open a cafe?
There's no good place to get a cup of coffee around here.
So, being a supportive husband, I said, that sounds great.
I had this vision of plastic chairs,
and plastic tables, and maybe a really nice espresso maker.
And then some investors put millions of dollars
behind a Starbucks-style cafe in Kigali.
And she said, OK, second thought,
let's do something different.
Let's build the best gourmet restaurant in East Africa.
So this is actually the building site.
Alissa found this land.
It's literally just two blocks away from the famed hotel
Rwanda, the Hotel des Mille Collines.
And this is construction back in 2007
when my wife was pregnant with our first child.
And this is the construction of the magnificent deck
overlooking all of Kigali.
And eventually Heaven emerged.
That's what it looks like today just before service.
Most nights we have a lot more customers than in that picture.
And it's been an incredibly rewarding but on a daily basis
hugely challenging endeavor.
From the very beginning, most of our servers, most of our chefs,
most everyone who works at Heaven
had never had a job before and had never
even set foot in a restaurant.
So the training element of this hospitality business
has not gone away.
In fact, we have rotating chefs and rotating
front-of-house managers.
So if anyone has any friends out there, every six months or so,
people cycle through, usually from the States and Europe,
to really invest in the team at Heaven.
I can send you the job description
if you're interested.
So what does, I mean as Artur set this up,
what does serving up great guacamole
or great filet mignon have to do with poverty reduction?
That was something that I started
to figure out very early on in the enterprise.
One of our first cleaners was a woman named Solange.
Solange, I don't even think I knew her name back
in 2008 when we opened up.
And one day Alissa found Solange in the kitchen,
like around 11:00 or so, preparing food.
But she was the cleaner.
And Alissa came home, and she said,
you won't believe who was in the kitchen cooking.
I said, who?
She said the cleaner was.
This is ridiculous.
We've got to sit down with the staff.
We've got to sit down with the chefs.
Why are they pawning off the work onto Solange?
So that night, we sat down with the whole kitchen staff just
before service.
And I said, what are you all doing?
Why was Solange in here cooking?
And they replied, well, she was just making staff meal.
I said, yeah, but that's your job.
They said, yeah, but she's the best cook.
So Solange today is actually the sous chef at Heaven.
She's worked under Michelin-star chefs.
She makes the best squash risotto you've ever tasted.
She can knock out without even planning for it--
for some reason, when people come into Heaven,
they don't make reservations.
So people will think nothing of walking
into this restaurant in Central Africa with 30 people
and expecting world-class service and world-class food.
And Solange is actually able to knock those meals right out
of the kitchen with no problem.
That's Heaven by night out on the deck.
That's Solange.
Solange, by the way, is the very first member
of her entire family to go to university.
There's about a dozen kids and family at home
who are completely supported by her income.
She pays for their health care.
She pays for their education.
And yet Solange doesn't receive a charitable contribution.
She doesn't receive a 501(c)(3) annual check.
She's working for pay.
And that lesson about financial sustainability
really changed my outlook about how
to think about what I've been doing in the public health
sector.
So in public health, I've got this organization
called Health Builders.
You can check it out, globalhealthbuilders.org.
And we do two things.
We actually take lessons from Heaven in accounting,
and human resources, and in management.
We go into health centers.
We help them improve these public health centers
to the point where they are cash flow positive.
They're real functional businesses.
And then we do something landmark.
We actually let them go.
Because that's one of the keys to doing development right
is knowing when you've done your job
and when everyone can take over and manage
the future of the health center or the restaurant.
Though we're not there yet with Heaven.
And this is an example of that thinking
around financial sustainability put to use.
This is a health center right up by the mountain gorillas up
in the northern part of the country.
It was co-financed by a donor, a very generous donor,
and by local funds.
So we put together a public contract and built it.
And then we trained the staff up and opened the doors.
There's no plaque there that says Health Builders.
It is a government of Rwanda health facility,
and it runs on its own.
So that's really the way that I see
the future of development happening
is that in countries like Rwanda, where
the government cares about the public's health
and really cares about real development and poverty
eradication, it's going to be between the public sector
and the private sector.
The very first night that Heaven opened,
my country director for the health work
is a guy named [INAUDIBLE] Carabucci, huge guy,
really tall.
He says he's 6 foot 6.
I think he's over 7 feet.
And he walks in, looks out over 150 customers in Heaven,
grabs my wife, and says, we don't need aid anymore.
We don't need donor assistance anymore in Rwanda.
What we need is a thousand Heavens.
We actually need lots of businesses
like this that are investing in management training, that
are generating salaries.
That's what's going to change this country.
That's what's going to change the world.
And actually that was the working title
for a while for the book.
So, I know that a lot of people often ask me, well,
how do I have impact?
I want to become a doctor.
I want to become a nurse.
Or I want to go to public health school
because I want to make a difference.
And my top-level advice on that front
is, you don't have to do those things in order to have impact.
And for that matter, you don't have to become a martyr,
sacrifice yourself, in order to have huge impact.
I think that's a little bit of the conventional wisdom
is you've got to give everything up
in order to reduce poverty and have social impact.
And our experience has been much different.
We have a good life.
We've got three kids.
We have high stress, high anxiety, just like everybody
does with their jobs.
But we feel really lucky to live in Rwanda
and to have the opportunity to make a contribution
in a way that is dignifying and in a way that
is led by the Rwandan people and by our friends.
So with that I wanted to open it up to all of you
and have a little bit of a discussion about this very
large restaurant.
We can seat up to 200.
In fact, there were 200 people in last night, called Heaven.
AUDIENCE: So, it's a high-end restaurant, and it's serving,
I'm assuming, wealthier people.
Are the people that mostly come in native Rwandans
or more tourists?
JOSH RUXIN: It's a split.
So, about a third of our clientele
are tourists who have come to see the gorillas in the mist.
And about a third are expats.
There's over 3,000 Americans, for example,
who live in Kigali.
And about a third are Rwandans, mainly higher class Rwandans.
But if it's Mother's Day, if it's a birthday,
if it's Christmas Eve or New Year's, it is a total mix,
and it's almost all Rwandese.
Rwandans actually-- this has been a real challenge for us--
don't have a culture of food.
And eating was actually something
done at home, done behind closed doors.
Maybe that grew out of the scarcity of food
over generations.
And so you will find Rwandese who drive in Porsche Cayennes,
but they insist on eating at home.
So it's been a challenge for us to really teach and educate
the market about great food and what that tastes like.
AUDIENCE: And then, just a quick follow-up,
I guess what I was wondering is did you
get any backlash in terms of having people lift themselves
out of poverty but also with this kind of contrasting
high-end restaurant, so the idea of people
taking jobs to lift themselves out
of poverty by serving people that are wealthier than them?
JOSH RUXIN: No.
AUDIENCE: I mean just in terms of a class issue.
JOSH RUXIN: No, I don't think over
the years we've ever seen that class issue.
AUDIENCE: So the focus is just really positive on the job
creation and everything that's going on?
JOSH RUXIN: Absolutely.
AUDIENCE: That's awesome.
JOSH RUXIN: Yes.
AUDIENCE: I have two question.
The first one, you mentioned that you left to Rwanda
and never came back.
So the first question is, what happened
with the rest of your family, extended family, friends?
Were they supportive?
JOSH RUXIN: Oh, the family back here--
AUDIENCE: Yes, exactly.
JOSH RUXIN: Oh yeah, I was just about to say,
that whole family's in Kigali right now.
AUDIENCE: No, exactly, that's the first one.
And the second one is that because of those connection,
maybe, did they help either via donation
or some of your friends decided to go there and help you?
Or did they just say, hey, good luck.
We wish you the best.
JOSH RUXIN: Well, we are not independently wealthy
and when we were building Heaven ran
into cost overruns, cost overruns.
We had actually taken out a second mortgage
on our apartment back in New York City, which of course we
had had every intention to return to.
And then we burned through that second mortgage
and then contacted our immediate family
and asked them to help us out and write some checks.
And then we burned through all that.
And we were feeling very sheepish before even opening
the doors and turned to friends and had
them write checks, not as donations.
And over the course of the first two years,
we actually paid off all the friends and family,
and then just last year paid off the rest of the debt.
So that's the debt situation, which isn't really
what your question was referring to.
In terms of family and their reaction,
they come and they visit.
They always expected that we would come back.
But here's something interesting,
which is, when I started working in development
back when I graduated from university,
I remember this is the early '90s,
and I was living in Bolivia.
And I would receive a letter and read the letter every day
for a month and a half until I got another letter.
And my kids on a weekly basis get
to use Skype video with their grandparents.
I get to see my friends all the time.
It is completely transformed what that experience is.
Literally distance has been destroyed.
And it's so much easier than it ever was before to do it.
Of course, when I tell my wife that who's
about to board 32 hours of transport
with the three kids this Friday evening, she says,
no, it's not any easier.
Can't we just go on holiday break in the neighborhood?
But outside of that, the families
have been incredibly supportive.
And they love Rwanda.
I mean, everyone has fallen in love with Rwanda.
It really is this incredible jewel.
And I think they all see our hope, and our dream,
and our imagination, which is, let's not
leave all the great things in Rwanda in Rwanda.
Let's expand it.
Let's expand the health work to other countries.
Let's expand Heaven to other places.
Actually Alissa opened up a little boutique guest house
just last year.
It's been one of the best parts of the whole business,
and she wants to expand it to create more jobs
and hospitality to really get a feel for the whole spectrum
of what international consumers are looking for.
AUDIENCE: So you hear a lot in Uganda and Nigeria
about sort of the problem with brain drain and people
having aspirations to leave the country for education
and maybe having intentions to come back.
I know Rwanda's a little different
with the recent history, but how is the education
infrastructure?
Do a lot of people want to leave Rwanda for education?
JOSH RUXIN: They certainly do.
But first off, Rwanda is a tale of exceptionalism
because the genocide didn't just happen in 1994.
You've got to go back to 1959 to see its roots.
And from 1959 to 1994, you had hundreds of thousands
of people who left the country.
Some lived in refugee camps in Uganda and elsewhere.
But some made their way to the States, to the UK, to Belgium.
They got educated, and as soon as the war was over
and the genocide was over, they started coming back in.
And so you literally had this case
of the reverse of brain drain.
You had incredibly skilled people
who were exposed to the outside world.
Bear in mind, you saw the map before.
Rwanda is landlocked.
There's no poor.
It was never on a spice route.
And so critically, that is in part
where the prosperity and the future of Rwanda
has been pinned, all these people who actually came back
with real knowledge about what's going
on in the outside world, what's happening in technology, what's
happening in business.
So today what happens, certainly, I
know lots of students who have gone abroad and stayed abroad.
But I also know a whole lot who have gone abroad and come back
for jobs in tech and jobs in banking.
I wish they would come back for jobs at Heaven,
because that level of management is really needed.
It's needed at Heaven.
It's needed in the health sector.
It's needed in all those areas.
And it is building.
But Rwanda is essentially a new country, so reborn
just 19 years ago.
The 20th anniversary is coming up of the genocide.
And I think a lot of people with Mandela's death
are starting to think about that and remember,
oh yeah, when Nelson Mandela was elected president-- that
was in April 1994-- all eyes were on that
while the genocide was unfolding in Rwanda.
And I think that it's unfortunate
that we look to Africa now, and we think about Mandela's legacy
and overlook the fact that one of the best
stories of leadership, and growth, and prosperity,
and stability on the entire continent
and in the entire world is up to the north in the place
that I call home.
AUDIENCE: Hi, I just want to say I was in Rwanda in 2008,
and I went to your restaurant.
JOSH RUXIN: Thank you for being a patron.
AUDIENCE: And it was one of the most memorable experiences
I had in Africa.
And I also wondered if you had any experience starting
restaurants in the US and if you ran into any reluctance
from the local people about an American starting a business.
Because when I was there, I was under the impression
it was an African-owned restaurant.
Because we were told it was run by orphans.
And it didn't have the feeling of an American
or a foreign-owned business.
JOSH RUXIN: That's good to hear.
I guess I wasn't working that night.
So, I suppose if we had had any restaurant experience,
we might not have been so naive as to have gotten
into this business in the first place.
It's the world's hardest business.
And Alissa outside of a short stint as a barista
had no experienced in any related industry.
I actually was always the one who
wore the apron in the relationship.
She's cooked, in the course of our marriage
and our relationship, exactly one meal for me.
And that was very early on.
I've done all the cooking ever since.
And in the early days, I actually
did a lot of the cooking and a lot of the training
back in the kitchen.
I love food.
I love cooking.
I am not a chef.
I recognize my shortcomings, and that's
why we started bringing on international chefs
to think about the management.
And there's so much to think about in terms
of inventory and planing.
And as Americans in Rwanda starting up a business
and starting up a restaurant, we were embraced.
I mean, it took no more than 48 hours
to incorporate the business.
Anyone, any one of you can come to Rwanda.
If you've got a business idea, you
can literally go to the Rwanda Development Board,
incorporate your business, and get moving.
It is effortless there.
So they really are welcoming private investment
and bringing entrepreneurial skills and management
to the country.
AUDIENCE: So you said you weren't there yet
in terms of handing off Heaven to be owned maybe
by the people that work there.
Are there plans to do that?
What's the timeline?
What does that look like?
JOSH RUXIN: Well, I think we're in an interesting position
right now.
The restaurant and the inn are doing well.
But it still does take an enormous amount of effort
from my wife, and on a really busy night from both of us.
It's sort of still all hands on deck because
of the unpredictability of the business.
And it's very hard to build that management set in Heaven staff
and bring them up to that management level.
We're constantly working on that and aiming for that.
And I think one of the solutions for it
is Heaven actually needs to grow to be a little bit bigger
as a business in order to have international trainers
constantly on board, constantly on staff,
so that we can move on and do other things
and not be as engaged in day-to-day management.
That said, compared to back in 2008,
when Alyssa and I would be at the restaurant until 1:00
in the morning every single night,
and then I went to my day job, which was in public health.
Compared to those days, we are very, very far
advanced and much, much closer to the realization
of that sustainability.
But the restaurant business is a little tricky.
It doesn't matter where you are in the world.
You know when the owner is not around.
That's just the nature of the beast.
And I hope that we can really get to that point.
At the same time, Heaven has become this incredible platform
for Alissa in particular to build out her ideas.
So last Saturday, she hosted on that beautiful terrace
the very first farmers market in Rwanda's history
and got all sorts of organic growers and people
producing really interesting products
to come in and do that.
There's theater that happens that she brings in
and art exhibitions.
And so it's a lot more than just dishing up food and dishing up
a great customer experience.
It's also about serving as a real cultural venue
to show off all the great things that are happening in Rwanda.
AUDIENCE: So I was actually born and raised in Kigali,
and I'm half Rwandan.
And I went to your restaurant in 2011.
It was really good.
And I want to thank you for spreading the gospel.
But my question was, you have mentioned many times
how exceptionally run Rwanda was and how safe it is.
What are your thoughts on aid for places
that aren't run like Rwanda?
JOSH RUXIN: So as you will read in the book,
I have pretty strong views on this
that when you think about aid and the level of aid,
for example, of the US government in Rwanda,
it's been well placed and well positioned.
Rwanda is famous for having some of the world's lowest levels
of corruption.
And I'm all for that kind of aid.
Because when the government in particular
cares about the public's health and the public's development--
you haven't been there since 2011?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
JOSH RUXIN: Wi-Fi is on the public buses now in Kigali.
It's just extraordinary the ambition of the place.
But I've worked in so many other countries
where government officials have asked me
for bribes, where I felt as though the work of Health
Builders just could not take off because
of the corruption of the public sector.
And in a world where realistically, we've
got finite resources, sadly, for doing things
like public health, I would much rather
see those funds channeled to countries like Rwanda that
have a plan for sustainability, that have a plan for not
accepting donor aid in the future
in building out a tax base to do it on their own.
And I get enraged when I see countries
which have the resources, have the means, have the wealth
and just aren't doing it and yet are
receiving big chunks of aid.
As a humanitarian, I'm compelled and feel enormous sympathy
for the poor.
But at the same time, I feel as though we
need better systems and better milestones
in order to get the governments to take
this type of development on, and internalize it, and build out
what has happened in Rwanda.
In my book, I refer to five lessons.
And my lesson about what to say to those countries that
are incredibly corrupt that are looking for aid
relates to the middle finger.
AUDIENCE: So you said in the beginning
there was no local cuisine because people just
don't eat out.
What is your cuisine?
And what have you done to maybe tease out
the locals to participate?
JOSH RUXIN: So we've done a combination of things.
So the main local cuisine when Rwandese go out
for a traditional meal, it might be goat brochette, rice, beans,
relatively simple food with piri piri,
really spicy sauce, and also maybe
some matoke in a tomato sauce.
We have a very eccentric menu.
We have got probably our signature dish, which
has been on the menu now since we opened, is our filet mignon.
You want to talk about green, pasture-fed cows,
I mean, you're not going to find more sustainably raised cattle
than what you'll find in Rwanda.
It is a fabulous piece of beef.
And then we smother it in a cassava chimichurri sauce.
So we take cassava leaves, which are often
served as a local food in the form of a sombe, which
is with palm oil.
And we do it with olive oil, some garlic, and onion.
And then sometimes we'll actually take the matoke.
We'll take cream.
We'll take green bananas, and we'll mash them up
with some butter instead of potatoes.
So it has these local flavors, but it is clearly
an international dish.
And then I got to confess, probably
our most popular dessert over the years
has always been our molten chocolate brownie
with our homemade ice cream.
Anyway, well, it is so great to be here with all of you today.
And I want to welcome you to Heaven.
Come on in.
You can have a mojito on me.
And come out to Rwanda, and come have the experience
of seeing this country that has so much to show the world.
Lots of people say, oh, can I come on,
and can I volunteer for two weeks or three weeks?
And I say, don't think that you need
to come out as a volunteer to have impact.
You can have impact by coming out as a tourist,
spending money, eating in Heaven,
eating in other restaurants, giving good customer feedback,
and spreading the word.
Because that is a massive source of national income is tourism.
That really is one of the top still growing
exports in the country.
So that is a great way to be helpful.
Thank you so much.