The last Saturday of every month is umuganda, community service. Everyone, from the president down is obliged to participate, but things like wealth, gender, age, all come together to play a part, and you generally just see able bodied men, some crazy old men with bad beer breath, and a scattering of trainees. If you’re Adventist you don’t do it until Sunday because of your religious beliefs, but then usually Sunday rolls around and they are nowhere to be seen.
What ends up happening during umuganda varies by village. What I’ve done the past two times is clean out the same ditch on a road, supposedly to prevent erosion from happening, but it has not been clearly explained to me how what we’ve done isn’t actually erosion on crack. But the thing about Rwanda is that the way things are done here is the only logical way things can be done. Who cares about how we do it in the US, it’s wrong. Also, things here run drastically more slowly than the West. I hoed for about ten minutes then had the hoe taken away and spent the next two hours watching because my host dad told me I was tired.
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