Maybe don't rely on DHL in Cyangugu, Rwanda

I was in Cyangugu all week for my mid-service training. Spotted this near the border with Congo.

Umuganda, village style

The primary school in my village (years 1-6) is expanding to include the first 3 years of secondary school, meaning it will provide all of the free “basic 9” years of education. The secondary school is targeted to open with the new school year in January, so umuganda in my village has become a weekly activity that occurs mostly on Thursdays, as far as I can tell. A month ago and today I participated by carrying giant pieces of stone to the latrine hole, down a steep 100-meter slope covered in underbrush and stumps of eucalyptus trees (the air given a healthy perfume for the workout as the tree trunks are burned nearby to produce charcoal). Each time I’ve hauled my fair share of stones down the hill, a great cardio and arm workout. The first time I was feeling great about my contribution until a young woman in flipflops with a baby on her back passed me carrying a humungous stone weighing at least 40 pounds on her head.

Three Thursdays ago there was a different activity: helping to lay the brick walls of the 4 new classrooms. That day I attended umuganda without a translator and there were many more participants to gawk at me. Through hand motions and Kinyarwanda littered with building vocabulary I do not possess I came to understand that I should take a trowel and scrape the 6 faces of the homemade bricks before handing them off to men who’d lay them in cement. At first I thought this activity was rather pointless, then I thought it might be good to dislodge loose irregularities from the bricks so they’d better stick in the cement, and then I went back to thinking I was useless when I saw that some brick layers skipped this step and my bricks were usually done again.

I wasn’t entirely useless, though - not only is it good community relations for me to participate in umuganda, but I provided much needed entertainment for various workers and allowed a soldier who was helping out (at least he was helping, others lingered idly on the hillside) to practice his pickup skills - and believe me, they needed practice. In the end I went and held an umbrella for my friend as she used a homemade notched metal grabber-thingy (see, I even lack the English vocabulary!) to bend pieces of metal around nails into squares that would be used to shape cement pillars. I made a quick escape around noon as I saw my soldier-suitor approaching.

An atypical day in the life

I had to see the doctor Thursday in Kigali, so I left Kinihira Wednesday morning to run some errands in Gisenyi in preparation for moving next week. I traveled to Gisenyi in 2 overcrowded taxi-vans (matatus), which was relatively comfortable compared to the alternative: the puke-green bus of death.

In amongst arranging to buy some furniture I’d been eying for a while (a cushioned chair and a few coffee tables, one of which will be a book shelf on the cheap), I visited the post office. I got my parents’ Halloween package, as anticipated, but there was no sign of my absentee ballot - way to go MA! However, there were about 14 newly delivered mailbags, so I asked if I could wait and see if there was anything more for me.

Although they weren’t doing anything else, it took the post office employees 30 minutes to get around to opening the mailbags. I occupied with fresh copies of the New Yorker, courtesy of my grandparents, then turned to watch as they dumped the bags unceremoniously onto the floor with painstaking slowness. The bags themselves were quite interesting: they originally came from France, with a few from Great Britain and the US, but seem to have been appropriated by the Rwandan Posita. There was still no sign of the absentee ballot, but my parents’ Thanksgiving package had made it to Rwanda in about 16 days - a record! The post office workers kindly offered me a French mailbag so that I could carry both packages home, and allowed me to trade it for an American one (which has a neat little Velcro closure at the top). After a 30 minute climb uphill I made it home with the USPS sack of packages slung Santa Claus like over my shoulder just as it started to rain. Phew!

At dusk I went and picked up the remainder of my furniture and as I was going to buy cushions in the market had to fend off a teenaged ass-grabber with a slap. But the excitement was only just beginning.

That evening I went to my old boss’s new mansion for dinner. Much to my surprise I found a new used car in the driveway! Papa Rene, as he is called, is a proud member of Rwanda’s NGO-funded upper-middle class. Although I was 45 minutes late, I still waited over 20 minutes for he and his wife to come home from work, which I occupied with phone calls to friends, wowing the housegirls with my rapid English, and by playing with the cutest 3-year-old on earth, Glory. When Papa Rene arrived he informed me that before dinner they’d be visiting his family in Brasserie (where the brewery is, 6km away) and said “I think we can move together,” indicating that I was to join them in the car.

Much to my surprise his wife (who is about 26 and the mother of 3, the oldest of whom is 8) got into the drivers’ seat. “Does Mama Rene know how to drive?” I asked. “She knows buhoro buhoro,” said my boss. If you don’t recall, buhoro buhoro means slowly by slowly and is the phrase I use to describe my Kinyarwanda abilities. Did I mention it was dark out? Needless to say I found the only working seatbelt in the backseat, buckeled up, and made the 3-year-old who preferred to tumble all over the backseat sit on my lap where I could keep a firm grip on her.

The car stalled 5 times as she backed it out of the gold-painted gate and up the steep street, and another time as she attempted to pull into traffic. With Papa Rene calmly coaching his wife in Kinyarwanda, we made it out of Gisenyi town and turned up the hilly and curvey road to Brasserie. For the next 6km I texted goodbyes to a few friends as Mama Rene slowly wound her way to our final destination, the outer tires running off the road only a few times and the breaks being slammed once as she got scared by oncoming headlights, though they were safely on the opposite side of the road.

We finally arrived at the family’s house and I unclenched my fingers and texted news of my ongoing existence to a friend. At the family’s house, I introduced myself, showing off my Kinyarwanda, and then accepted a Fanta and mostly tuned out the conversation in favor of children-watching. Papa Rene’s 3-year-old was playing with her cousin, an 18-month old, precariously feeding him orange Fanta straight from the bottle as mothers sometimes do to their young children. Note that mothers usually have a lot more arm strength and coordination and do not attempt this act over their shoulders. Miraculously she didn’t’ spill any before her mother stepped in with a plastic mug. The 18-month-old was playing with a plastic toy truck, which was marked UN in large letters, I kid you not.

After the Fantas were empty and family business was concluded and a bag of eggs was given to my boss’s family (they gave it to the tired 3-year-old to carry, and I carried her) we returned to the car. I was dismayed but not surprised to see the tired and slightly frustrated Mama Rene slip back into the driver’s seat for the trip back to Gisenyi.

When we’d safely made it back inside their gate and Mama Rene had almost but not quite hit the side of the house as she brought the car to a stop, Papa Rene turned around and said “You see, Agatesi, she knows!” “Yes, she knows!” I agreed. 8 months in Rwanda have at least taught me to lie as well as Rwandans.

Dinner was delicious and thankfully it was my boss who drove me home, otherwise it might have ended up all over the new-used backseat of the car.

As a postscript, today I found my ballot in the Peace Corps office in Kigali, shipped by UPS express. The address was my Gisenyi PO and didn’t mention that I’m a PCV so I have no idea how it found its way to the PC office, but I guess MA is no longer as delinquent as I thought. I’d already voted by email, though.

A flat tire

It’s always an adventure. Today we were supposed to swing by a remote health center to drop off a list of children we sponsor whose health insurance we’d paid for before meeting up with other colleagues at a cooperative training in a different, slightly less remote sector. We of course started the day delayed, and we were very late by the time we left the health center. Rather than passing back through Gisenyi to get to the second destination, we attempted to take a remote back road. The roads in this part of the country are hazardous; volcanic rock juts out everywhere and makes for a bumpy ride.

Soon enough we had a flat tire. Although it seemed like we’d just left the town with the health center and the only bike mechanic around, it was a 50 minute walk back. My coworker paid a teenager to push the bike. I wasn’t about to take out my camera in the middle of nowhere and prolong our hike, but some images stick out for me: a hill that was completely cultivated in neat rows until the top, where there was an afro of trees. The crazy drunk lady who followed us for 10 minutes trying to talk to me, telling my coworker to “shut up, Satan” when he intervened. Kids “helping” to push the moto by hanging onto the back of it and running.

Fixing the flat involved: using a piece of volcanic rock to jack up the motorbike; using a metal rod to pry the tire from the tread; inflating the tire with a rubber tube that had no needle or clasp to attach it to the tire with, but somehow worked; finding the leak by sight and sound; patching it by irritating the tire with a saw, spreading some super glue, and slapping on a piece of an old tire; inflating the tire to test the patch; and finally wrestling it back inside the tread. Of course my skin and ridiculous helmet attracted much attention, and I let the assembled crowd of teenage bike repairmen and curious villagers gawk and talk for the whole time, letting on only at the end that I spoke Kinyarwanda when I uttered a complicated goodbye. I had to entertain myself somehow.

I didn’t get any pictures, but here are some more recent pictures of a car tire being patched; the story of that epic adventure will be told by email upon request.

Some things are universal

Flirting with a police officer apparently gets you out of trouble in a traffic stop in Rwanda, just like everywhere else....my colleague who was driving a moto without a permit owes me one.

Cell phones in Rwanda

Everything you wanted to know about cell phones in Rwanda, and then some:

- The most basic phone models start at about $15, and have indispensable flashlights at the top. 35% of Rwandans have phones, says the BBC. I'd have guessed it was higher, but in rural areas it's probably very low.

- With rare exceptions, cell phones are pay-as-you-go: you buy airtime in the form of a 500 or 1500 franc card and use the card’s code to add credit. Those who don’t have 500 francs at once can buy credit in any amount by paying an phone card guy who will then send credit to their phone (pictured below, yellow vest).

- Credit can be sent from one phone to another, so if you leave your phone unattended, you might find it empty (if you find it at all)!

- Many middle-class Rwandans have two phones. I noticed this phenomenon first at meetings: many people had two phones in front of them at the table. (Two phones would make things awfully crowded in your pocket, wouldn’t they?) They have two because MTN has the widest coverage but the worst prices. So those who live in the ever-expanding areas that get Tigo use their Tigo phone for most communication, but have an MTN phone to receive calls and messages from their MTN-bound contacts. It’s still cheaper to reply to MTN with Tigo, so someone might receive a message from an MTN contact on their MTN phone and respond to the same person from their Tigo phone. Those who are really fancy have a phone that holds two sim cards, usually with two different call buttons on the front!

- Sample prices for MTN and Tigo (exchange rate is about 570 RWF / $1): MTN-MTN text: 30rwf. MTN-Tigo text: 53rwf. Tigo-MTN text: 25rwf. Tigo-Tigo text: 3rwf (raised last week from 1rwf – either way less than a cent). MTN-MTN call: 120rwf/minute. Tigo-MTN call: 90rwf/minute. Tigo-Tigo call: 10rwf/minute (less than 2 cents). I’ve entirely switched to Tigo.

- Many people go online with cellular modems that plug into a computer’s USB port. At my office, we have one MTN modem that gets passed around to several computers. It’s an old model, so to add airtime you must put the sim into a phone; with new models you can add airtime online. The internet is slow but does the trick so long as you aren’t uploading or downloading big files. That is, of course, if the network is up.

- Text message spam is alive and kicking in Rwanda – multiple times a week I receive messages enticing me to enter contests or offering me jokes, news, or romantic advice – all for a fee (~$0.12).

- Cell phone etiquette is a bit lacking here. I’ve seen people answer phones in church, in meetings, while leading a meeting, a waitress while clearing a table at a restaurant…the list goes on. Sometimes they step away, but usually they just cup their hand around their mouth and talk quietly into the phone. There are even those who take calls while driving motos….

Rwanda has issued cell phones to community health workers, speeding the process of getting rural people to hospitals. It’s a trial program currently focusing on maternal health workers in Musanze (a district near mine), especially important when maternal mortality here is 7.5/1000 women – one of the highest in the world.

Garbage day in Gisenyi

It was garbage day in Gisenyi today. The standard price for trash pickup is 1000 francs; we paid 500 francs (a bit less than a dollar) because we have very little garbage. Most people put their garbage in plastic sacks that formerly held rice, flour, sugar, etc, but we use paper bags. Although we paid around 8:30 am, by nightfall the trash on our street was still sitting outside of people’s gates and doors (see picture, from a gate on my street – it was picked up the next day).





When school got out for lunch just before noon, I noticed children clad in school uniforms sorting through garbage bags to retrieve anything of value. In a corner of the market, a crowd of people stood around a garbage mound, clamoring over old shoes covered in trash – I suspect this had something to do with trash collection day, although I’ll keep my eye out for it on other days.

So what happens to the sacks that get left outside doors and, for those who have them, gates? The garbage gets carted away in trucks rented cheaply from the Congo. It gets dumped in a field about 7km away from town, with no treatment. This means chemicals from batteries and all sorts of other crap leaches into the soil. I hope to visit the dump when I get my bike in a few months.

I’ve heard some rumors about trash in Gisenyi (I haven’t been able to double check these, but then this is a blog and not a newspaper so journalistic standards don’t quite apply). The government owes the trash company lots of money that maybe was collected in taxes. Before the government stopped paying, trash pickup was free for all, but now they only collect from those who can pay (the money going towards truck rentals and salaries). What happens to those who can’t pay? According to one person I talked to, “it is necessary to pay” and if someone can’t, “they must move out of town to the village.” When I pointed out that this wasn’t practical, he argued that if you can’t afford to pay for garbage collection, you can’t afford to live in town. In reality, those who can’t afford the fee are forced to burn their trash, which is also how people in rural areas deal with their garbage. Burning trash presents both health and environmental issues.