Rwanda

Buhoro Buhoro Hamwe

I went to Rwanda through Georgetown the summer between my sophomore and junior year with a company called Think Impact. I was born thin-slicing everyone and everything around me- I hear one thing and make my assumptions about the rest of the story. Case closed. Naturally I went into the progam thinking I was going to change these people's lives an create something that would help them enter the west's interpretation of the future. Obviously, I was very wrong... ignorant if you will (but don't because I can be naive at times but I wouldn't call myself ignorant).

The mission of ThinkImpact is to take entrepreneurial-minded students from the US who have a passion for social innovation (SSIR definition: A novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, sufficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals) and put them in various countries in Africa to work WITH local people to help create a sustainable business or product that helps the community from the inside out. The idea they coined was asset-based community development: being a facilitator to people that possess all skill, talent, knowledge, and resources to create a business solution to a problem that THEY deem relevant to tackle.

I think we tend to underestimate other people's knowledge when they show complete generosity to outsider's thoughts and ideas. I never met so many people that sincerely listened to what I had to say. There was nothing preconceived about about their reactions when the translator took my words and transformed them into Kinyarwandan. At the time I was 20 years old- no one should have listened to anything I was saying. But they did. And I am a better person because of it. Knowing that I had the trust of people who couldn't be living a more different life made me want to actually say something when I talked. Any conversation we had with each other, we were learning completely new knowledge. To be complentely and utterly ignorant of something and thirsting to just listen is a feeling that everyone needs to experience.

I asked 6 different people, who held 6 completely different roles in the town to join me in learning about asset-based community development. These 6 people met with me and my partner (a graduate student from the University of Denver named Kylee) 5 days a week after they had already spent their entire day doing their jobs, taking care of their land, and watching their kids. The process proved to be successful after taking away assumptions. We used the 5 Whys to figure out a way to retain the health of chickens and increase their productivity over their lifetime (which in turn, leads to healthier, happier people: nutritious variety of food). We started out thinking the problem was keeping the chickens in one place in order to properly raise them for food eggs and meat (i.e. the first iteration of our business solution was building affordable chicken cages/pens made from bamboo). The real problem was the price and access to chicken feed- it was too expensive for people who owned chickens to not allow them to roam off and find free food for themselves. Through the partnership of all 6 members, our team put together ingredients for a healthy chicken feed created with only components grown within the town. The product was grown or secured through people from the village and the process was created with these same local people. Kylee and myself left without bringing or taking anything that had to do with the success of this. And that is exactly how it's done. It is viable, efficient, and completely sustainable. The idea of removing myself as an integral player of a project for it to be an accomplishment was foreign, but now something I am happy to bring into new areas of my life (you never know when you won't be a part of a team, situation, or project anymore- your presence shouldn't be the only factor that brings something to life).

The process and project was great, but it was just one small part of this experience for me. The place and people were everything.

My favorite people on this planet might be the group of kids that followed us around. They would be there first thing in the morning when we met up for stretching and yoga under this gigantic tree. They would be there when we walked around meeting people with our translators. They would be there when we ate lunch in the middle of the town. As cheesy as it sounds, they were there as soon as we got out of the vans yelling "Mzungu!" to the moment we loaded up and left 9 weeks later. We would practice our Kinyarwandan on them and they would practice their English on us. I felt like a proud dad after seeing some kids playing duck duck goose by themselves after I taught it to a few kids in my back yard one evening after working. Each of the kids reminded me of my nephew who was 4 at the time.

The older kids would meet up with us after they got out of class to catch up on what we were doing with the older people and got involved wherever they could. They also got so good at frisbee that Brad or Chad from SigEp would shit his Chubbies. These same kids were the ones leading the dances around the fire at a party we were invited to the night before we had to pack up and go to Kigali before flying back to the US. I will not try to describe how well they did everything and how quickly they picked things up because it just wouldn't do it justice. I also will not shit on Western ways of life that are bogged down in technology and phones and computers and television and blah blah blah. It's simply just two different ways of life and I am lucky to have gotten the opportunity to experience both even for just a summer.

The backdrop of Kigali, our township, and every lake we visited were these incessant rolling hills that spanned from east to west and north to south (Rwanda actually means Land of a Thousand Hills). During the week we would walk down to the local river to get water for the day and on the weekends we took boats to islands to explore everything the country had to offer. It always felt extremely calm and mysterious without being eerie or ominous. The landscape played off the people and I believe the people played off the landscape. Every new place we went to felt like it wanted us to relax, learn, and see a thriving community that most people only associate with one of the worst genocides in history. Rwanda is so much more than that thanks to the people that lived through it and the government that refused to let the country perish. 1994 should never be forgotten, nothing in history should, but it should not define the people who are trying to make an honest living and raise a generation who will never have to suffer the way they did. It was just so calm. Everywhere we went. Everything that was dropped into any scene made an impact that symbiotically added to the serenity. If it weren't for the scars on so many of the people, you might think nothing evil has every stepped foot in the country. The scars speak for themselves and there isn't any reason to go further with that. It is just so damn peaceful.

This was my first real experience abroad and it made the thought of sitting still repulsive. Not only were we visiting other countries, seeing animals in the wild, learning a new language, and creating something with our hands, we were constantly moving from sun up to sun down. I don't know if I will see any of the people that I met that summer, but I am going to try whenever I can get any significant time off from work.

P.S. Bring gatorade powder packets and gum. You will thank me later.