Eat, pray, love... in a blue sweater

Apologies for blogging so much of late.  I'm just feeling that loquacious these days, it seems.
So I have a lot of bees and a lot of bonnets, but my current bee/bonnet juxtaposition has to be centred around the book that I'm scheduled to review this Thursday (even though I'm only half-way through it): "The Blue Sweater" by Jacqueline Novogratz.
I'm on page 144 out of 284 and I just can't get past the sad similarities that this book shares with "Eat, Pray, Love" which I eviscerated in 2009 because it was a condescending book about a privileged woman trying to find herself in a myriad of other countries.
Interestingly, this book was written in the same year, so it appears that 2009 was a year of soul searching, the pursuit of the meaningful, and the expansion of boundaries for a lot of women. 
Cough. 
And some of us write books about magra-falsa,  and some of us write books about bridging the gap between the rich of the poor, and some of us write terribly trite and self-indulgent blogs about first world problems.
Before I continue I will say that I admire Novogratz for her significant and important efforts.  She accomplished more than I likely ever will before she even hit my ripe old age of 36.
My problem with the book is that, like "Eat, Pray, Love" "The Blue Sweater" still can't shake that first person narrative, which is bad enough on its own, but when coming from a Western perspective and attempting to relate to a third world country's way of life and issues, comes across nothing short of supercilious.
You've got the quintessential story of a Wall street banker leaving her impressive and upwards reaching career to help create Rwanda's first micro finance institution.  Not insignificant, by any means.  And here I was patting myself on the back for the few hundred dollars I donated to charity last year.
And perhaps the issue at hand is really that Novogratz isn't a very strong writer or that she had a less than stellar editor.  On page 62 and 63 she informs the reader of "bride price" a "long-held tradition whereby a hopeful groom provides a settlement to the father of the bride.  In Rwanda, the bride price might be three cows, an enormous sum given how much people typically earned... grooms from poorer families ended up paying off that price to their in-laws forever.... Women suffered, being treated as chattel while their husbands spent their lives 'paying off' their fathers-in-law for what they legally owned."
One of the author's associates, a parliamentarian, is deliberately killed after being part of an effort to reduce the bride price to the equivalent of "three garden hoes".  She is run over in the street by a pick up truck.  She continues to lament her "beloved" friend's death until the next page.
Roughly halfway down page 120 she's deciding to climb Mount Nyiragongo before returning to the States.  She's going with her "Canadian friend" Charles.  Their trip, listening to Bob Marley and Cat Stevens, dining at a hotel, going to a night club, having a breakfast of mangoes and bananas, having more beers, clubbing some more, and finally climbing up to the volcano takes up five and half pages.
And then, later: "one morning I walked past the corpse of a man who'd been 'necklaced' the night before. Thugs had thrown a tire filled with gasoline around his neck and set it on fire.  A group of men stood around the charred body, which smelled indescribably profane.  When the body was removed, its image still remained scorched into the ground itself".
Who where the thugs?
Who was the individual that had suffered at their hands?
Was any justice lauded out?
Her subsequent second class travels by train (while other, more petulant Americans decried the heat and conditions) and her return to Stanford where she would become friends with former secretary of health, education and welfare John Gardner who, when seen walking with a former secretary of state "would call me over and give me a hug, even if I tried to walk by without him noticing, not wanting to interrupt his important matters", take inherently more page space and serve little more purpose than to perpetuate how much of a trooper and how endeared Novogratz is.
I'm not sure that I will finish this book because of its grandiose nature.  I hope that the massive (and to me: surprising) popularity of this book will effect some change and so it will have been worth it, but in the interim I will be waiting for a book which divests the nostalgic, autobiographical details from that which is about altruism and selflessness.