11 months ago, it was January, and I was beginning the winter quarter of my third year at SCU. It was my first time on campus in seven months. In that gap I had spent three weeks on an Immersion trip in India and 4 months studying abroad in Paris, France. To say things had changed since the last time I was at Santa Clara would be an understatement. It was a very confusing time for me. I was in a major transitional state. I was processing all the changes and growth of the previous seven months, trying to integrate that into my old reality at Santa Clara, and also trying to look forward and make decisions about how I would spend the upcoming summer and the rest of my time at SCU. The Global Social Benefit Fellowship had been tucked away in a corner of my mind for a while. I’d been curious about social entrepreneurship for about a year and was very interested in the fellowship. But I never considered it long enough to say “I want to do this.” For the most part I think that boils down to a lack of self-confidence. I felt like I wasn’t qualified and so there wasn’t a point in really going after it. I was also unsure if another experience abroad was really what I was looking for. I had barely gotten back to the U.S. I hadn’t had a chance to process my experiences and the way they applied to my life at home. How was I supposed to know where I would want to be 5 months from then? At the same time, though, those transformative experiences I had in India and France had really gotten the gears turning for me. My time in India sparked a passion in me to contemplate my vocational journey more intentionally. I left that trip frustrated by how helpless I felt when faced with deeply ingrained, systemic social justice issues. I was hungry to explore ways of initiating systematic change to address such injustices. While my time in India inspired me to start questioning the world and my place in it, the growth spurred from my time in France was much more personal and inward-looking. During those three months, I experienced immense happiness. I saw what it was like to live a life free from my usual stressors and fears. I was immersed in history and art while creating beautiful new friendships. I also discovered a strength in myself that I hadn’t realized before. I learned that not only could I survive in a foreign country for an extended period of time, I could thrive.
According to Gregory Dees, a key component of social entrepreneurship is “engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning.” Over the past 9 months, I’ve learned that this is the type of environment that I can truly thrive in. It’s the type of environment that feeds off of my skills and talents for empathy, critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving. In Rwanda, Nick and I operated in this type of environment full-time. For each community visit, we would arrive with a lesson plan that we worked together to create. As we interacted directly with the cooperatives, we had to adapt those plans to best fit the co-ops’ needs. We were constantly learning; we’d leave every visit knowing something that we didn’t know when we had arrived earlier that same day. This process of creating, adapting, and learning encapsulated our entire experience in Rwanda. Our work was never finished, and while we would leave our visits with answers, we’d also left with even more questions. And I loved it. Joy is the delight one takes in being dissatisfied. It’s the deep delight that one feels in being called to something still before you. Reflecting on my experience, I realize that it was indeed a sort of “dissatisfaction” that contributed to fueling the joy I felt. Since our work was never finished, since there were always more questions to be answered, we were constantly “being called to something still before [us].” I was overcome by a delightful restlessness. And this restlessness was coupled with a newfound confidence. Since the work I was doing fed on my talents and my skills, I’d realized a sense of self-efficacy I’d never experienced before. Just a few months prior, I was hesitant to even apply for the fellowship because I felt like I wasn’t qualified. In the field however, all of that insecurity had vanished. My Marketing education; my experiences in India and France; my work as a writing tutor and peer educator; and my skills for empathy, adaptation, and collaboration had all prepared me to successfully fulfill my role in this research project alongside Nick. We filled in each other’s gaps and worked together to accomplish what we had set out to do. I went from doubting my own abilities a few months earlier to knowing that I was the best person for the job I was doing. I combined my skills, talents, and passions together to address a real and meaningful need while working directly with others in a collaborative learning environment. And from that sprouted pure joy and restless desire to continue learning and growing. From my time in India and France to my GSBF experience, this past year and a half has been the most transformative of my life. The growth I’ve undergone has been at a rate unlike anything I’ve experienced before, and as a result, the growing pains have been brutal at times. However, I’m watching myself emerge from it stronger and more in-touch with myself than I’ve ever been before, and that is irreplaceable. It confuses me a little bit, how a few months from now, I’m supposed to graduate and then begin a job where I’ll be doing the same thing for three to five years. In January of this year, I didn’t even know that in just five months I’d be spending my summer living in Rwanda. It scares me—the thought of committing to doing one thing for so long, when I’m so used to constantly pursuing new experiences. This fear constantly looms over my head as I contemplate my future. After spending the last four years doing so many different things, chasing such a wide array of adventures, how am I supposed to just do one thing for so long?
It’s funny because, when I look back on my time in India, France, and Rwanda, countless memories of true, unadulterated stillness come rushing to the forefront of my mind. It’s true in fact, that these “adventures” of mine were actually ripe with stillness. The nights in India when I’d sit in my room with no phone, no roommate, just myself and my thoughts. The Tuesdays in Paris when I’d get out of class at 10am and spend hours sitting in the corner of a café reading, writing, doodling. The mornings in Rwanda that I’d wake to watch the sunrise by the farm or journal under a shaded tree. These are just snippets of the countless ways I experienced stillness in each of these places. I’ve seemed to master stillness in all of these adventures, yet I haven’t figured out how to integrate it into my life back in the U.S. It’s funny because in India, France, and Rwanda, stillness was never a goal. I was never conscious that I was being “still.” It’s only now as I reflect that I am noticing the role stillness played in many of my favorite memories. In contrast, I have made many failed, conscious attempts at stillness at SCU. I’ve tried to force it, but I guess maybe it is something that cannot be forced. In all of these abroad experiences, I’ve been able to let go of many of the stressors, fears, and baggage that I have at home. As a result, I’ve been more authentically me. I’ve been able to be still, to focus in on the present moment, on the types of things that truly fill me up rather than overcommitting my time with meaningless tasks and activities. While I look to my future, while I confront the fear of committing to something for several years, I will keep this realization alive in my mind. For a long time, I always thought “growing up” happened in your childhood and teenage years. I imagined I’d come out of college a full-blown adult, the kind of adult that my 12-year-old self-imagined had it all figured out and knew the answers to all of life’s questions. I see now that all the growing I’ve done is just the beginning. And I’m excited to put in the work so that, hopefully, ten years from now, my 30-something-year-old self can look back thankfully for the steps I took to make her the woman she will be.
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10/20/2019 0 Comments Unlocking JoyJuly 22nd of this summer was the beginning my 6th week in Rwanda. I reflected in my journal that afternoon that “I feel the most in touch with myself that I’ve ever felt in my life. I feel in ‘flow’. Like the walls around my soul have been torn down and I’m free to feel every deep, passionate, aching feeling possible.”
During my time in the field, I had the unique opportunity that many teams don’t have to form close bonds with the communities I worked with. Our research was centered around two PICO cooperatives, Nyange and Mumeya, whom Nick and I met with on a weekly basis. Going into this summer, I knew we’d be working closely with the two communities, but I never expected that we would form such close relationships with those them. After all, we couldn’t even communicate without an intermediary. They speak Kinyarwanda; I speak English. Every exchange of ours would be somewhat impersonal and would always have to pass through a filter. I couldn’t have been more wrong. One of the biggest lessons the cooperatives taught me this summer was how verbal communication is only a minor component of human connection. I formed true, genuine friendships with these people. We laughed together and have inside jokes. And we can’t even speak the same language. What, if not verbal communication, facilitated the creation of these deep emotional bonds? During our first visit with Mumeya, the cooperative members took us to the grand opening of a nearby school they had helped get under construction. Using skills they acquired through PICO trainings and uniting to hold their local governments accountable, they had worked together to see these classrooms to completion. Now, instead of having to walk miles and miles to school, local girls and boys had classrooms right in their backyard. After doing our initial introductions, they were eager to get to the celebration. We piled into our van with the cooperative members and started bumping along the red dirt roads, up and down the hills through and endless sea of banana trees. At last, we drove down the hill into a dense crowd of vibrantly colored, flowing dresses as the whole community danced and sang. As soon as we stepped out of the van, Nick and I were greeted with smiles and pulled into the middle of the circle. We twirled and clapped and laughed and did our best to sing along.
I was endlessly inspired by the chance to witness the miracles PICO is performing in Rwanda first-hand. Also during my 6th week in the field I wrote, “Today Nick and I had a meeting with Fr. Innocent that was just another reminder to me about how moved I am by the work PICO is doing here in Rwanda. I don’t know… I guess, I guess maybe there’s just a sense of comfort or hope that comes from the proof of what people in the deepest poverty can do to improve their quality of life if they are given the tools to recognize and unlock their own potential and decide to join together to work towards a common goal. It’s so simple yet so abstract that it seems too good to be true. But it is true. I get to witness it with my own eyes.”
I am so endlessly inspired by the drive and hard work of my friends in Nyange and Mumeya. The days of our field visits could be very taxing. I’d normally wake up sometime between 5 and 7 am, grab a quick breakfast, and then be on the road. Nyange was a 1.5- to 2-hour drive and Mumeya was anywhere from 3 to 4 hours. On the drives, Nick and I would review the lesson plans we created for the day and run them by Kiki for any additional input. I’m definitely not a morning person, and it was hard getting myself out of bed in the mornings. During the drives to the cooperatives, I was sleepy and often on edge. As soon as we would pull up to the cooperatives, everything completely changed. I immediately turned on. Working with them lit a fire inside of me. It was complete joy. I loved it. I was absolutely in flow. I got to take all the business knowledge I’d accumulated in the classroom over the past three years and share it with others in a tangible and meaningful way. I got to work closely with people I deeply cared about. I got to see the gears turn and to experience the happiness of watching the faces of my friends change when a difficult concept finally clicked for them. I got to work in a dynamic learning environment where everyone came to the table driven by an intrinsic passion and excitement. It's not an entirely new feeling. It's the same way I feel when a student comes to me in the writing center with a paper they're really passionate about, or when I get a minute to sit outside with my watercolors and escape reality, or when I would spend mornings tutoring a high school English class, or when I get to put a pen to paper and absolutely lose myself in the process of translating ideas and memories and emotions into the written word. Over these past three years, and especially this summer, I've discovered how it feels to pursue experiences that I'm truly passionate about, and I'm addicted to it.
I’m incredibly thankful for this experience because it’s taught me the overwhelming joy that comes from living out my vocation. It’s an infectious feeling that I crave relentlessly. And now that I know what it feels like to experience this vocational joy, I am going to seek it out tirelessly. I’m realizing that it may not have been that I was “happier” in Rwanda. In fact, I experienced plenty of moments of sadness during my time abroad. Rather, I was experiencing a deep and fulfilling sense of joy unmatched by anything I’d felt prior. Never had I experienced that joy sustained for so long. All of my previous encounters with it have been brief moments in my day-to-day life where I’ve felt the flutter of a spark in my heart. This summer was 8 weeks of a full-on fire. While I was preparing to leave Rwanda, I thought coming back to SCU’s campus was going to seem foreign, strange, and distant to me. The reality ended up being much more discomforting. When my Uber pulled up to campus, everything was perfectly familiar. It was as if I had never left, but I had left. Nothing around me felt different, but I felt different. My time back has been met by many emotions. There’s the frustration of not being able to adequately communicate the ins and outs of my experience to everyone here at home. There’s the uncertainty of what the future and post-grad has in store for me. And more than anything there’s a gaping emptiness. Being back, I’ve wracked my mind over all the discomfort and emptiness I’ve often felt. I think in many ways I’ve been going through a sort of withdrawal since nothing in my life right now quite compares to the level of joy I was immersed in just a couple months ago. 7/31/2019 0 Comments A Week in the LifeMy life here in Rwanda exists at the horizon line of a familiar sky and a spontaneous sea. My days and weeks operate in a pretty regular routine, but within the blank spaces of that routine have been some of the most unexpected, chaotic, comical, and memorable moments of my life.
Our community visits to Mumeya and Nyange are typically on Thursdays and Fridays, so our Mondays-Wednesdays consist of visiting new cafés and working on our laptops to research literary sources related to our work, prepare for our upcoming visits, and develop PICO Rwanda’s upcoming crowdfunding site. Kigali Art Café is one of our favorite spots to grab a meal, coffee or smoothie, and sit for hours working through our to-do list. The Women’s Bakery is another favorite. It has some of the best bread I’ve ever tasted, comfortable chairs to sink into while staring at our laptop screens, and it’s less than a five-minute walk from where we live. Mondays often mean trivia night at Sole Luna. We got second place our very first time which means-drumroll-free drinks! We haven’t been quite so lucky since then. On Tuesday nights we have weekly Zoom calls with Ron and John, the big bosses out in Faith In Action’s Oakland offices. 7/16/2019 0 Comments My Weeds and My SeedsTraveling inevitably means abandoning my comfort zone. And abandoning my comfort zone means meeting myself. Out here in Rwanda, I’ve left behind the routine, the familiarity, and the comforts of home. Eliminating all those constants, I’m just left with myself. My gifts and my flaws are raw and exposed. It has been a unique opportunity to look inward and reflect on the seeds that I want to water and the weeds I want to toss.
The Weed Time moves slower in Rwanda than what I am used to in the United States. 9am comes around sometime between 9:45 and 10:30. Walking down the street at the comfortably brisk rhythm I’m accustomed to back home makes me appear abnormally frantic here. I need to go slower, slower, and slower still. I didn’t know my limbs could move so patiently. It’s been a difficult transition for me at times. I often find myself frustrated at the uncertainty of operating in an environment where schedules are fluid suggestions. My professors cautioned my class that this may happen, that we may find ourselves uneasy with the slower pace of life, but I didn’t truly comprehend what they meant until I got here. In my personal life, I’m actually rather schedule-adverse; however, when it comes to a work-environment, I like to have a plan. And I don’t like to linger on any one thing for two long. “Rwandan Time” has pushed me further out of my comfort zone than any other aspect of life out here. I’m really struggling to accept it for what it is. I want to be able to slow down, to appreciate the local attitude towards time, to see the beauty in being present and enjoying the moment. But I haven’t been able to get to that point yet. I haven’t been able to put aside my own obsession with being productive and successful and just busy. As long as I hold onto these obsessions, I’ll continue to be faced with frustration whenever my plans get pushed back an hour or a meeting starts later than scheduled. When I reflexively respond with this toxic frustration, my mind becomes too cluttered and clouded to recognize the light and beauty of these situations. I’ve begun looking inside myself to try and uncover where my inability to slow down stems from. It may all come down to a need to prove what I am capable of, not to others so much as to myself. Or perhaps I do recognize what I am capable of and therefore fear of achieving anything less than my best. Most likely, it’s a little bit of both. Either way, it's something I need to address. I'm working to consciously recognize the moments when I feel frustration boiling up inside of me. When it does, I try to take a breath and ask myself what is triggering this emotional reaction. Inevitability, I don't have complete control over every single force acting on my life, but I do have control over how I react to those forces. I'm making a conscious effort to learn to deliberately yield the reigns of my emotions. By doing so, I hope I can learn to slow down, be present, and enjoy the moments in life that operate outside of my schedule. The Seed Over the past 5 weeks, I’ve also recognized many things that I love about myself, energies and attitudes that I want to help blossom as they grow more intricate and complex and wonderful. Four years ago, I was entering my senior year of high school. I was completely lost and out of touch with myself. Any mention of the future felt like a flame to my skin. I resisted change with every ounce of my being and hated the idea of growing up. Even happy changes were met with a wrenching discomfort and fear of abandoning the familiar for the unknown. Questions about what I wanted to major in and what career path I wanted to pursue made me feel lost and confused because I didn’t know myself well enough to answer them. Now, I’m different. I’m learning to trust myself. I’ve noticed that I'm less resistant to change. I’m beginning to appreciate life’s moments for what they are--moments, not forevers. I am comfortable with the fact that things end because I know I’ll be able to create countless beautiful beginnings for myself. With the work I get to do here in Rwanda, I've been in constant flow-state. I absolutely love it. Sure, I'm still pretty grumpy when I wake up to my 5:15am alarm clock to get ready for a four-hour commute. But all of that frustration immediately washes away the very moment that we arrive at Nyange or Mumeya. I'm so inspired by these groups, and their drive drives me. I love getting to share the lessons I've learned in my business classes with them, and I love discovering all the lessons that they have to teach me as well. It's not a new feeling. It's the same way I feel when a student comes into the writing center with a paper they're really passionate about, or when I get a minute to sit outside with my watercolors and escape reality, or when I would spend mornings tutoring a high school English class, or when I get to put a pen to paper and absolutely lose myself in the process of translating ideas and memories and emotions into the written word. Over these past three years, and especially this summer, I've discovered how it feels to pursue experiences that I'm truly passionate about, and I'm addicted to it. My future is no longer a dark and distant cloud. It’s a rainbow. Sure, there might be a pot of gold waiting for me at the end of it, but why worry about that unknown when I have all these colors right in front of me to enjoy? Questions about what I want to do with my life do not suffocate me like they used to. I’m confident in myself and in my heart. I know what creates a pure, racing, and passionate joy inside of me. I no longer feel like I have to have an answer for others because I am confident in myself. I feel the need to prove myself to them anymore. I do not know everything that I’m going to do, but I know that I’m going to figure it out. And that’s all that matters to me. Next time someone asks me what I want to do with my life, the answer is pretty simple: “A lot of different things.” 7/8/2019 0 Comments FearlessPICO encourages an attitude of ‘you’re going to do this by yourself, and for yourself, and the gains are yours.’ - Callixte, Nyange co-op advisor Our jaws dropped as the van rounded the corner to the Nyange cooperative’s plot of land. It was Friday, June 28, when Nick, Kiki, and I arrived for our second meeting with the group. A handful of the cooperative members were gardening with plows on the edge of the property. Swinging the wooden sticks over their heads and then pounding them back down, they worked the land up into round piles of earth to plant vegetables in. Across from them, where the edge of the land cascades into the valley, four helmets disappeared into a huge dirt hole that men were shoveling out for the toilets. When the cooperative members told us the previous week that they were going to break ground on their toilets before our next visit, I’ll admit that I was doubtful. Sure, that’s easy to say in the moment, but is it practical? Standing there under the mid-morning sun, I truly couldn’t believe how much the land had changed in just a week’s time. Any doubt I had previously harbored now cowered away in defeat. It was during that second visit that I truly witnessed Nyange’s unwavering determination. In an interview that the co-op’s president Mediatrice did with last year’s fellows, she described herself after joining PICO as “fearless”. What I saw being done by the cooperative that morning truly was fearless. They needn’t fear because they know that they have the power and capability within themselves to take action and make change. If they want to see the toilets come to reality, then they know they better start digging. PICO unlocked this fearlessness within them. They know that they can do this for themselves, and if they keep at it, the gains are theirs. Over the past three weeks, we have gotten to know the Nyange cooperative as the driven, ambitious, and humorous group that they are. With each consecutive visit, they continue to display their dedicated work ethic and go-getter attitude.
Callixte keeps pages and pages of well-organized daily records documenting every detail of the co-op’s operations. After seeing his notebook, we gave the group homework to go through their records and total up their revenue from the previous year. When we came back the following week, they had done ten times what we asked of them. Sitting in a circle outside their workshop, Callixte listed off their units produced, their total revenues, their operating costs, their final profit, and more. Scribbling each number down in my notebook, I couldn’t help but smile. Their dedication is inspiring. Their passion is infectious. Later that day as we were preparing to leave, they asked us to give them more homework to prepare for our next visit. Nick and I smiled for a startled moment and then began flipping through our notes and arranging their next task. Just when I thought they couldn’t surprise me anymore, they did it again. They are fearless. 7/2/2019 0 Comments Meeting MumeyaIn the class we took to prepare for this summer, there was one lesson our professors taught us that rose above the rest: Be flexible. Well, last week was quite the exercise in flexibility, and Nick and I have witnessed the immense beauty that can come when you’re open to a little change of plans. Initially, we had scheduled to have our first visit with the PICO Mumeya cooperative last Tuesday. However, the night before we got a message from Father Innocent that the cooperative said a Thursday visit would work better for them. Wednesday night came around, and we decided that we’d leave at 6:30 the next morning. As we were having our pre-dawn breakfast on Thursday morning, Father Innocent walked in to inform us that there had been a slight hiccup in our plans. We’d been invited to attend the opening of a new school that PICO Mumeya members helped organize and build, and since it started later in the day, we wouldn’t have to leave for another 2 hours. Sitting at the breakfast table at 6:30am, Nick and I just smiled at each other and laughed, “Keith told us to be flexible!” Driving to Mumeya later that morning, I was astounded by how different the scenery was from our previous drive to Nyange. While Nyange is located in the Western Province, Mumeya is in the Eastern Province, about 30 miles from the Tanzania border. As our van chugged along we passed truck after truck carrying goods from one of Tanzania’s ports into the landlocked country. The hills are different in the east than they are in the west. In the west, twisting gravel roads hug the edge of the hills so tightly that they almost disappear into the landscape. In the east, the hills are flatter and the red roads wider and more intrusive, like a long carpet rolled out over the waves of land. Outside my window, we speed past hundreds of blurred banana trees. Sometimes the trees would clear away, and I could see the hills drop down into a shallow valley of rice plantations in the middle of harvest. “Wow, it’s a good rice crop this year. Wow! A really good rice crop,” Fr. Innocent chirped with each plantation we passed. Mumeya is a four-hour drive from Kigali, so halfway through the commute we stopped for lunch. Father Innocent pulled into a small dirt clearing at the edge of the hill overlooking a waterfall of greenery. We hopped out, popped open the truck of the van and devoured our chicken burgers and fries. As we ate, men passed with their bare backs hunched over bikes loaded with bunches of plantains (a fruit that looks like an extra-large, green banana). One arm on the bike’s handle bar and the other on the seat cushion, they trudged along as they pushed their bikes up the steep road. After our rest stop, we got back on the road. For the last twenty minutes of the trip, we drove up the road the Mumeya group had created as one of their cooperative’s very first projects. At 12:30 sharp, our van pulled up next to the legendary PICO tree. Seeing the PICO tree for the first time looked like something out of a legend or a fairytale. The tree is simultaneously confident yet welcoming, strong yet unintimidating, still yet dynamic. It’s trunk is wide and twisted and it’s thin leafy layer stretches out like a giant umbrella.
Mumeya was the first community Pastor John ever worked with. Back in 2006, he journeyed out to the area with the hopes of sharing the community organizing model he learned in Oakland with his fellow Rwandans. He tracked down the local leader, Ezra, and asked if he could speak with the community about how he could help them help themselves. Ezra gathered everyone under this tree for that very first conversation, and just like that, PICO Rwanda was born. Working through the PICO framework with Pastor John back in 2006, the community identified their most pressing need: a health clinic. Even has much of Rwanda is developing, Mumeya is so hard to reach that the area is often overlooked. The nearest clinic was miles and miles away, and many people died of treatable complications just because they couldn’t get to medical care soon enough. One of the most common fatalities was mothers passing away during childbirth. While prepping for our work this summer, Nick and I had heard a lot about the Mumeya health clinic, but what we saw that day surpassed any of our expectations. It was massive and incredibly well-managed, all the way down to the landscaping. (The corners of every bush were perfectly squared and there wasn’t a blade of grass out of place.) Within the clinic there were child and adult check-up rooms, sick rooms for men and women, a space for sex education, a maternity ward, a pharmacy, and clean running water and electricity. It took us a good 30-45 minutes to tour the whole thing. The waiting room was packed with several dozen people, and I couldn’t help but imagine the painstaking journey they’d have to go through to get any help if this clinic wasn’t here. Along with the clinic, the cooperative planted hundreds of trees in the surrounding area. Across the street, the co-op built a classroom where it can welcome guests and hold meetings, lessons, and advising. Walking from the clinic to the classroom, we took our seats around a table with PICO Mumeya’s leadership team and exchanged introductions. As providence would have it, we learned during our conversation that the previous day, June 26th, had been the 13th anniversary of the cooperatives founding. After our meeting, the co-op leaders joined us in the van, and we drove to the school’s opening celebration. When we arrived, there were already over a hundred people gathered around the building, singing and dancing to traditional Rwandan music. The women wore vibrant patterned dresses that draped over one shoulder and fell to their ankles, tickling the ground as they danced in circles. As soon as we got out of the van, Nick and I were grabbed by the wrists and dragged out into the middle of the circle. We waved our hands and attempted to sing along as we skipped around with the crowd. As the afternoon continued, students from a neighboring school came out and performed traditional dances and songs. The young girls locked their elbows and twisted their shoulders and wrists in unison to mimic the horns of the native cows while the bells tied around their ankles jingled with every step. It was a gathering of love and hope. It was a local victory, one that served the children and thus the entire community’s future. There was a ribbon cutting, and the elementary school kids flooded into their new classrooms to sit at the desks for the very first time. Local leaders spoke about how the students and their teachers used to walk miles and miles to get to the nearest school. Young children would drop out of school because they refused to do the grueling walk every single day. Now, thanks to the community’s work constructing these three classrooms, they can receive their schooling right in their very own village. The entire celebration lasted over three hours. A couple government officials spoke, including the Vice Mayor who used to grow up in this village and did the long daily journey to school. He promised that these three rooms would not be the end, and the local government pledged to help the community build even more classrooms so that even more children in the area could have accessible education. The sky was fading to a grayish purple as the celebration came to a close, and we piled back into the car. On the 4-hour drive back to Kigali, we had plenty time to reflect on the events of the day. 12 hours earlier, I woke up expecting to spend an hour or so meeting the Mumeya cooperative. As it turned out, our meeting time with them was cut rather short, but instead we got to spend hours with the community in song and dance and celebration. It was one of the most beautiful days I’ve ever experienced, and it’s all thanks to a little change of plans. 6/26/2019 0 Comments People Who Come TogetherRwanda is called the land of a thousand hills for a reason. Driving through the country I can almost see the hands of the creator descend from the sky and haphazardly pinch the earth up from the ground, over and over in a miraculous fury. Then, taking a step back from the madness, he runs his calm palm across the land, smoothing over every jagged edge into the perfectly rounded hills of Rwanda.
It was Wednesday, June 19th. Nick and I had only been in Rwanda for one day as we journeyed up, down, and around the country’s hills on the 2-hour carride to our first cooperative visit. Our boss, Father Innocent, drove the car with Nick as his copilot. I was glued to the window in the back seat next to Kiki, our translator and friend. It was around 10am when we pulled off the road onto the cooperative’s plot. The land is carved into the edge of the hill, and the edge drops into a shallow valley that juts up again along the edge of the neighboring hill. As we stepped out of the car, the cooperative members made their way over to us for introductions. Grasping onto each other’s forearms, we exchanged three alternating cheek kisses, repeating the custom with each of the members. They carried out two wooden benches, and we all sat facing each other. Once we had settled, the co-op’s leaders shared the story of their cooperative with us. It was founded in 2012 after the local mayor met Pastor John and introduced him to the community. PICO refers to the group as the Nyange cooperative because it is located in the Nyange sector. However, the cooperative’s official name is Abisunganye Gagaseke, which means “the people of Gagaseke who come together.” Before the cooperative was founded, many of the members were local farmers whose operations weren’t profitable. Then they met Pastor John. PICO’s framework encourages cooperative members to have 1-1 conversations about their community’s needs. The members list out their needs and then decide which need is the most pressing. When the Nyange cooperative was founded, 85% of the members didn’t have homes, so the group decided that building homes for those members would be their first priority. Three of the members were trained on how to make tiles and came back and taught the rest of the cooperative. Working together, they constructed a tile kiln and a workspace where they prep the clay before placing it into the kiln. The cooperative is currently comprised of 13 people. Along with building their kiln and workplace, they have constructed three homes, planted 1,500 trees in their area, and cleared a trail for carrying clay. They sell their tiles and bricks to local construction projects. They have also gained the confidence to approach and work with local leaders and microfinance institutions. And they’re not slowing down anytime soon. The land that the Nyange cooperative operates on was gifted to them by the local sector. Aside from the kiln and workplace, the rest of the land is undeveloped. Located right off of a fairly busy road, the members have a vision of transforming the area into a car stop. They want to build a parking lot, have benches where visitors can sit, and sell beverages and produce. However, before they can do any of this, they need running water and modern toilets. Nyange had tried constructing the toilets last year however there was a large mudslide during the rainy season that erased all of their progress. Now that the dry season has returned, they’re determined to get these toilets up and running. By the end of our visit that morning, they were already beaming about bringing out the sector’s engineer to give them advice. They decided that they’ll break ground on the toilets before our next visit the following week. Our skin was baking from the midday sun when we said our goodbyes and piled back into the car. As we began our journey back to Kigali, my mind returned to its transfixion with the hills. This time, however, I was seeing them in a different light. When reading testimonies from people who have undergone PICO’s training, they often describe themselves as timid and afraid before they met PICO. After receiving the training, they understand their own power and ability. They are confident, and they realize they are not alone. The Nyange members joined together and began constructing their toilets. But Rwanda is a country of hills, and those hills, at times, are unforgiving. With a single mudslide down the hill, all of their hard work had been wiped out. Yet, they did not give up on their project. They did not recoil into timidity or fear. Rather, they lived up to their name. They picked up the pieces and reunited in their determination and dedication to their project. They acted has a community of people coming together. |
AuthorEmily Fagundes | Marketing Student & Global Social Benefit Fellow at Santa Clara University Archives
November 2019
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