Umuganda


 

Saturday morning.

It is a bit cloudy and cooler than yesterday. Ideal to work in the garden before the sun burns too hard. I hear some birds whistling in the bushes. Nothing else.

Not the sound of the heavy traffic on the connecting road across the valley. Not the voice of the woman who passes by in the street, loudly praising her goods which she carries in a basket on her head. No children playing. I hear no snatches of the gliding exercises with which the choir of a church a little lower on this hill warms up the voices. No drums or percussion either. It is silent.

It is the last Saturday of the month. It is umuganda.

Umuganda refers to community work that contributes to the development of Rwanda. Every last Saturday of the month, economic life falls silent from 7:00 to 11:00. During this time, everyone has to work in their community: cleaning, helping to build a school, constructing terraces, fighting erosion, you name it. The system has existed since the last century, when everyone was asked to contribute to the community every week. After the genocide, it became one of the strategies to rebuild Rwanda and to get communities working together again. It is not only about working together, but it also provides an opportunity for local leaders to provide information to residents.

Umuganda is compulsory. But not for foreigners, although they are welcome to participate. If we don’t, we are expected to stay at home.

And that is what I do. Time to take care of my garden, while listening to a great podcast which takes me all the way to Ghent.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remember

Image
(Visual graphic from https://www.kwibuka.rw/)   Good Friday is a day of silence for Christians worldwide, the day when the death of Christ is remembered. This year, Good Friday was on 7 April. Here in Rwanda, 7 April is a day etched in the collective memory. It is the day of the start of the genocide against the Tutsi, 29 years ago now. In 1994 a ruthless massacre took place. The immediate trigger was the shooting down of the plane in which the then president was returning from peace talks. The plane's debris landed in the garden of the presidential villa. However, the cause was much more complex and had its roots in years of abuses, attacks, discrimination, exile, bad governance both before and after the colonial period. On 8 April, 10 Belgian paratroopers were killed. Belgium decided to withdraw its troops from the peacekeeping force that was already here, making the UN peacekeeping mission even more flimsy than before. It opened the door to an unprecedented and very well pla
Read more

Hear, the rain is coming

Image
  A phenomenon I experienced here for the first time is the fact that you can hear the rain coming. Yes, you read that correctly. You can hear if rain is coming. In this region, rain often falls in heavy downpours. Tropical showers with a force you rarely see in Europe. In Rwanda, het country of the thousand hills, those showers can be very local. One hill is transformed into a muddy mush and on the hill next to it the dust is still enthusiastically blowing in your nose. But usually that storm moves gradually over the city. Where I live I look straight at Kyovu, another hill. That's where the business heart of the city is and therefore where most of the tall buildings are located. When a storm hits that area first, that stretch of hill just disappears from view. The heavy rains form a curtain with no see-through. But even when I am not standing on my terrace watching the curtain closing, I can hear that the rain is coming. This is how it works: the rain falls with force on th
Read more

Termites

Image
  Anyone who has ever lived in the sub-tropics or tropics knows them: termites. Small, industrious creatures with shiny heads and pale bodies. They are often mistaken for ants, but they are not even related to those. They make beautiful castles of sand and earth, where the colony -in an ingeniously created microclimate- works and lives in an intricate society. But they are not only found in those beautiful termite mounds. I have a small vegetable garden. There, I grow tomatoes, which are tied up on canes. Those canes get shorter and shorter. Because they get eaten at the bottom, the part that sits into the earth. Hungry termites in action. In big concrete boxes, I also have strawberries, or at least, I try to grow strawberries there. But there are many competitors around. Snails love the unripe fruit. After they have made their move, fruit flies finish their work. Then, when a fruit does escape those predators and shines red between the green leaves, a mouse bird will come and st
Read more