Serwanda: Umuganda

Something I love about Rwandan culture is Umuganda. Umuganda is a once month mandatory community service in place of taxes. Even though it is mandatory most people skip it. So obviously it is not enforced very well and the people who do show up to participate are more there because they want to help than any other reason, but the police are there and they are supposed to arrest those who refuse to help (except in the cities where it is enforced and that is how they are able to keep them really clean). Living in Pittsburgh, for a long time I volunteered with an organization called the L.I.V.I.N.G. Ministry. L.I.V.I.N.G. is an acronym that I have heard many times, but can never remember what it means. What they do is care for the homeless. They are located in Pittsburgh’s North side and do stuff like provide food, clothes, job opportunities and more importantly in my opinion spiritual guidance and prayer. These guys depend on donations for their salaries and need a lot more help than I do because they don’t have a government that supports them. Instead they need to depend on God to provide for them and while I can live comfortably making under $3000 in a year they live in America where the necessities are more in both cost and quantity. I feel like they are braver than I am because not knowing when you are getting a paycheck is scary. I grew to know everyone who works for the L.I.V.I.N.G. really well after volunteering for them so long and taking every opportunity I had to help them. One of the founders, Mike, who I got to know very well through a discipleship group my senior year, left last year to try to further his education which he told me only one year before that he hated school. I wish I could call him and see how he is doing. His leaving opened up a position for one of my best friends, Jenna, to be the Volunteer Coordinator and I know she is doing a great job. When I was leaving for Rwanda she gave me a deck of cards with their logo on it and a t-shirt that I regrettably left at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia when I was trying to make my luggage lighter to avoid any kind of hassle when I left the US.

I got involved in the L.I.V.I.N.G. Ministry because my friends were involved with them and volunteering with your friends is fun. They just finished a project last year that they were working on for about four years. It is a halfway house for the homeless. They bought a condemned house and completely rebuilt it using mostly donations and volunteers. When I am doing umuganda I feel like the same way that I did when I was working on that house. The biggest difference is that there isn’t free pizza after you finish working. Since finishing this house they bought the house next door and are making the North Side a better community a little bit at a time. There are a few other organizations in Pittsburgh North Side that do similar work and the difference that they are making is incredible. I would hate to see Pittsburgh without these organizations because I know those people would be completely neglected otherwise.

The first umuganda that I went to at my site I wanted to get stuff done at my school. I saw some work that needed doing so I showed up to that with a plan. First thing was to try to get the basketball court playable. Devin came with me and we took my new hoe that I had just bought because I was planning on gardening, and since then we have with success with carrots and cilantro, but all of the tomatoes died. I organized the students to clear out all the weeds growing on the dirt playing surface. Then we put a hoop on the back board that was missing one. I let one of the students go crazy taking pictures with my camera and I think I already put some of them up here. After that we played some four on four. It was very fulfilling and I felt like I was doing some for real development work, although since then the weeds have all grown back and it is once again unplayable.

The next umuganda I returned to the school where I walked around and helped the students in their normal chores like piling wood and sorting beans. I spent most of my time talking to students who were trying to improve their English. I don’t mind this at all and I even enjoy it most of the time, but it is also my everyday so umuganda just felt like more teaching other than a little bit of bean tossing.

The next two months I skipped umuganda unintentionally but also without remorse. So far both of the umugandas that I had participated in had been for nothing. I didn’t see why I was going to these things if it was going to be the same as every day or be undone in in two months. This of course is not the right attitude to have. I know that every minute I spend with these students could have an impact on them. I also know that nothing lasts forever and no matter what I am doing for umuganda it will eventually return to its original state unless it is maintained. My entire service might result in no change in anything or anyone other than myself, but that wouldn’t make it worthless.

Last month I went to the first umuganda that I have been to that was for the community that I live in instead of at the school. The goal was to carry rocks that were being quarried out of the side of the mountain three miles up hill so they could be used to build a poor family a house. I showed up prepared to work at 8 AM. I brought my empty backpack so I would have something to put the rocks in which is very different than the normal way of carrying the rocks on your head. I made my way to the village center and started asking where umuganda was. The kept telling me I was in the right place and it would start soon. I passed the time by greeting everyone who was out there and offered water to a lot of people. Some of the men I offered water to would tell me no because they wanted ikigage (sorghum beer –the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted, I tell people that it makes me sick which it hasn’t done but I am confident that it would because I do not trust their home brewing). I can’t help but think that they must like to get the party started early if they already want something alcoholic. They invited me to go get drunk with them and after carefully considering their offer I decided that it wasn’t worth risking the reputation that I had built up by drinking at nine in the morning. One of them told me that ikigage is for the morning and water is for the evening.

After finishing my water at 9:30 I decided to return home and refill. I told the housekeeper when she asked me about umuganda that they weren’t doing anything, but that I was going back out anyways. On my way back out a girl whose name I didn’t really catch, but didn’t correct me when I started calling her Ashanti, asked me where I was going and when I told her umuganda. She let me know that I was going the wrong way. Unlike everyone I was hanging out with in the village center Ashanti was on her way to do her civic duty. I walked with her over to the quarry, stopping along the way to give someone who was digging a ditch a drink. He turned out to be my neighbor that is only home on the weekends and hadn’t met yet. When I started loading up my backpack with rocks everyone started laughing after the first rock, then after the second they were seemed impressed, then after the third rock they seemed shocked, when I reached for a fourth rock they shouted at me to stop. I decided they were right and I didn’t need to take that fourth one, but I did carry a small one in my hands. Each of the rocks that I took I wanna guess weighed between ten and twenty pounds and the one in my hands was about five. Ashanti took one that was probably about seven pounds. We walked up the mountain together greeting everyone we came upon. When we reached our destination the people who had already finished carrying rocks up were resting and some of them laughed at me because they thought I had only brought up the one small rock in my hand. I tossed that one on the pile and then removed my bag and unloaded it to gasps and cheers. Everyone was thanking me and my reply was the same to all of them, “Ntakibazo, nkunda gufasha.” – no problem I like to help.

I made my way back down the mountain with Magenzi the village boss and Stan the grounds keeper at the health center. They are the kind of people that I want to be. These guys are running the show trying to develop the community. They both thanked me for helping and I thanked them as well for their organizing.

That night there was another guy who started making fun of me for only carrying up a small rock to which I became defensive about and told him about the rocks I had in my bag. I also visited my neighbor later who saw me loading the rocks into my bag. She told me how impressed she was and that made me feel good. It feels good to be recognized for helping, but I don’t need recognition so for all of the other people who thought I only carried up one small rock I am not going to argue with you if you want to laugh at me, but come on man, I bet I carried up more than you did.

One of the conversations I had that morning was with a guy who asked if they did umuganda in America. The obvious answer is no because what we do is different. In America we are required to pay taxes and then we have people whose full time job is to do what they do for umuganda. He also asked me about the machines and told me that they don’t have any in Rwanda. I proved him wrong immediately by pointing to a motorcycle and a truck transporting the newest shipment of tea and asked him what those were, but he isn’t all wrong. America has machinery that unless you are trained to use it you really shouldn’t touch it so that wouldn’t be a good idea for umuganda. Americans do umuganda though. The L.I.V.I.N.G. Ministry does umuganda in a very similar fashion to Rwanda. They don’t have the best tools or materials, but they have people donating their day off to work to improve the community.

The Gorilla Naming Ceremony from in the crowd.