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.
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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. |
AuthorEmily Fagundes | Marketing Student & Global Social Benefit Fellow at Santa Clara University Archives
November 2019
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