5 Things The U.S. Could Learn From Rwanda

Sorry it's been awhile since my last post, but I have been super busy finishing the school year and helping students prepare for exams. This post doesn't have a lot of pictures, but I have started thinking about the that I will probably o do differently after I return home and how much my mindset about different things has changed. When I hear about different things happening in the news, I start to think, maybe Rwanda has some things right, even if it isn't a perfect country.

1) Waste Not, Want Not

I have quickly learned in Rwanda that everything can be patched, repaired, or repurposed instead of thrown away. You bucket broke, we’ll melt plastic to fix the crack. Your shirt ripped, we’ll patch it until it’s too ripped to wear. You shirt is too ripped to wear now, we’ll use it as a rag to clean shoes. There is no reason for things to just be thrown away. I think back to living in the US when I would throw away most things just because it couldn’t be used for it’s original purpose anymore. I think back to the large amounts of waste that are created, due to this mindset, and I’m ashamed. I look at the amount of waste that I create here in Rwanda and I am amazed that most weeks I don’t even fill a small paper bag with my trash, and every care package I have mounds of garbage to deal with (even after my mom removes most packaging for me).

As people around the world discuss ways to make less waste, I can’t help but think that maybe the developing countries have it right and they don’t even know it. I think about buying groceries when I was trying to be waste free in the US and how hard to was to buy things without packaging (don’t even get my started on Trader Joes’ packaged vegetables) and I look at the drastic difference when I go to the market here. Encase you didn’t know, all plastic shopping bags are banned in Rwanda, and all other plastic bags are deeply frowned upon and hard to find. So in my market, you go to buy beans, they’ll ask you for a container to put them in and if you don’t have one you will need to pay 100 RWF (about 10 cents) for a paper bag (I then use these paper bags to keep my trash in before throwing it into my latrine). I definitely ask myself; why does anyone need to put their vegetables in plastic bags to then put in another plastic bag to get home to then to wash them and throw all the bags in the trash? But I will get off my high core of living a plastic free life. My point is, we can always repurpose things or repair them instead of just throwing them into a landfill.

The other day, my neighbors were at my house and the kids started counting how many buckets I have (I had to buy many during the bedbug incident). I was telling them I couldn’t use a couple of them because they are cracked. Not knowing what to do with these, they have been sitting in my douche collecting dust. The next day, my landlord comes over saying he has a man with him to fix my buckets. I then proceeded to watch this man heat iron robs in a charcoal stove and melt plastic from long-gone buckets into my cracked bucket to seal it. I truly wish I wasn’t so stunned by this ingenuity to think to take pictures (sorry).

2) Use What You Have

I guess this also goes with number 1, but I think it also deserve its own discussion. The ingenuity I have seen in this country has continued to amaze me. Because it is not as easy to buy a new one, you must work with what you have. For somethings I have to travel 6-7 hours to Kigali just to buy it. I remember my ball pump needle breaking and the children asking me for an old pen. I proceeded to watch them fix this old pen into a needle and pump up the ball. Was it perfect? No. Did it work? Yes. I think we get so caught up in having everything work perfectly or having it be new and shiny that we ignore the ability to to use something after it isn’t new.

Just this morning I saw a man scooping up all the cow manure in the road from when the farmers walked their cows the night before. I asked the other teachers why he was doing it; who would want that job? They told me farmers do this to keep our roads clean (cleanliness is extremely important in Rwandan culture) and now they have free fertilizer to plant their crops. I know this might sound gross to many of you in the states, but farming is the main source of income for people in my community, and they need to stretch their dollar as much as they can, so they find great solutions to help them get the most of their crops in this changing climate.

3) Lend a Helping Hand

I couldn’t tell you the amount of times people in Rwanda have helped me for absolutely nothing in return. Whether its me getting lost in Kigali, not understanding something in Kinyarwanda, or just my usual stupidity. I’ve never been somewhere in Rwanda where people wouldn’t help me. Now part of this is also due to my being a white foreigner, but I see this behavior with everyone else around me. A teacher needs 2,000 RWF to buy electricity, someone will offer it. You don’t have electricity, your neighbor will charge your phone for you (literally me yesterday). It doesn’t matter what it is, someone will always find a way to help you. My landlord, Seti, does this almost everyday for me. He takes rats out of my house, checks my bed for rats, watches my house when I’m gone, it doesn’t matter as long as you ask, someone will help.

4) Always Ask For Help

This truly needs its own entire post (coming soon). One of the biggest things I’ve had to learn in this country is to ask for help. It’s my biggest advice for any incoming volunteer. As someone who tries to be fiercely independent, I struggle to ask for help, especially with littler things that I should probably be able to do myself, but I’ve had to learn that asking for help isn’t a bad thing and it usually results in my life being easier. My landlord was talking to me yesterday and I mentioned that I had not had electricity for 4 days so my phone was dead. He immediately offered to charge my phone for me and asked my why I didn’t come over sooner to charge it. Its just a friendly reminder that sharing your problems and asking for help isn’t bad, and in Rwanda it’s expected. Gire is someone I always know I can ask for help.

5) Trust Your Children

I grew up learning to be an independent child and my parents always trusted me, but as a teacher I quickly learned my family is a rarity in the US. With the amount of laws and rules put on teachers about not leaving children alone, not having anything with rubbing alcohol in the classroom, and many other things meant to protect our children from getting into trouble, I have seen that children are told they cannot be trusted to care for themselves or handle issues alone; which I believe is leading to more and more adults not being able to care for themselves. In Rwanda, these things simply don’t exist. Students are left alone all the time, they are allowed to walk to school alone, or stay at home alone, and I see children acting like adults and sometimes even hurt each other, but this is children learning, and quickly they learn to make better choices. While my students aren’t perfect and they definitely do get into trouble at times, they usually figure problems out by themselves. Now, I know this is a different type of community where stranger danger doesn’t really exist and severe allergies is a phenomenon of developed nations, but the same principle could be applied to houses in the US. If you give children the ability to make mistakes themselves and figure out problems themselves, they will be able to do it when they are an adult. My neighborhood children are by far more mature, because they are given the opportunity to be instead of being babied and having every problem solved for them.

When my students don’t understand something, when they need help or when they have an issue they have to solve, they do it on their own and figure out when it’s time to ask an adult for help. I rarely have kids tattling on each other in my class and when they do its because of serious issue they simply couldn’t solve on their own. I also rarely see a child with a broken leg or arm and my students climb trees, play with machetes and do back flips all day long.

Now I am not saying Rwanda is perfect, but I am saying that maybe a simpler life has advantages that would could learn from and adapted to our own lives.