Umuganda

Umuganda is a great concept that would NEVER fly in the United States. On the last Saturday of every month, every able-bodied person in the entire country is expected to work for three hours in the morning on some kind of community project. The community leaders have the authority to choose the project and everyone in town is expected to show up. Those that don’t are fined a rather hefty fee. Of course, being an umuzungu, no one really expects you to participate since the hefty fee is totally affordable for foreigners. But since Partners In Health is so integral to the community here, and we wanted to do something worth talking about, we participated with gusto.

The day started out EXTREMELY rainy, which rather affected the general level of enthusiasm in the area, but we persevered. The task for the day was cleaning off and fixing up the road that leads into town. Now, as a non-kinya-speaking umuzungu, I had a little trouble trying to figure out what the hell we were doing. I thought that since erosion is a giant problem with the roads, we’d want to KEEP the plant-life growning on the sides of the road. Simultaneously, I though that perhaps creating a drainage system might help – perhaps cleaning out the ditch along the side of the road would allow it to collect water in lieu of having a natural ditch create itself erratically across the middle of the road. I also figured creating controlled trenches across the road to guide rainfall into the roadside man-made river (and cover those trenches with wooden slats, much like what I did while in France) would help to create a more permanent solution to the eroding roads. But well, I was obviously mistaken as to our objectives. Instead we cut back all the plant life, killing whatever could possibly help to keep the road in place. We did clean out the ditch, but then spent a significant amount of time moving the recently-deceased plant life across the width of the road, (probably with the objective of dumping it over the side of the mountain) which effectively left piles and piles of dead grass and leaves and whatnot all over the road. I can just see the rainfall tomorrow moving it all right back into the ditch. Yeah, I didn’t get it at all. But hey, I was participating nonetheless. Of course, my skills with the hoe left a bit to be desired.  I couldn't tell if all the attention I was getting was because I was white and participating, or if it was because I was absolutely useless with the tools I was given.  Notice how graceful I look here [above left], and my devoted audience.  I eventually got a lesson on how to hoe properly from a dude who wanted to marry me until he found out I was WELL beyond child-bearing age. [right.]

Anyway, what made the whole event even more exciting was having Oliver there. Oliver has been in Rwanda off and on for over 5 years now, and actually speaks a decent amount of Kinyarwanda (although he didn't help us understand exactly what our umuganda objectives were). He was socializing with the soldiers/community leaders in charge of the event and getting the crowds to sing and dance to random American tunes they had never heard before. Peter took some footage on a video camera that was such a hit, the kids were going crazy. Since the little ones aren’t expected to participate in umuganda, they mostly just hung around being jealous or watching the abazungu (that’s plural for umuzungu) super-intensely. [right]