Transitions and Democracy

August 9^th, 2012

Aroni.  Aroni. Chris. Mama Shalom. Providance. Chris. Aroni.  Aroni. Chris. Aroni…..

And so it continued at our final design team meeting. We read names out loud from ballots one by one to tabulate results for our governance committee elections. Over the weekend, the original six members of the design team had invited four new community members to join the cooperative, three of whom were men, and now the ten team members (plus Gilbert and me) were holding elections to determine the leadership of the cooperative after my departure.

Recognizing our team for their tremendous efforts this summer.
From L to R, Mama Marie, me, Mama Shalom, Donata, Juliette, and Angelique (Denyse, not pictured)

I knew who I wanted to win. Denyse should be the president. She attended every meeting with a smile on her face and participated actively throughout the Innovation Institute. Or it could be Mama Shalom, unarguably the “chief of the house” who we all know would be able to get things done. Angelique would be VP or Treasurer; she knows everyone in the village from her health care work. Mama Marie would be elected secretary, as she already helps with land registration and can read and write well. It never occurred to me that the elections would turn out any other way. Yet as we counted the votes the new members and the men were clearly winning. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

As it became clear that either Chris or Aroni had the most votes for President, I pulled Gilbert (my translator) aside, away from the group. “Gilbert, this is not good. Is it too late to make a new rule? Shouldn’t the president have to be a member of our original team?” Gilbert, also rather surprised at the results of the election, stood there for a minute thinking. Looking at the rest of the team sitting in the grass and staring at inquisitively, he finally said, “We can’t change the rules now, it’s too late. They know what they are doing. It will be ok.” I hesitated before going back to the group to proceed.

The election continued in this fashion. President: Aroni. Vice President: Chris. Treasurer: Providence, also new. At the end three of the five members of the governance committee were not from our original design team, and both the president and vice president were men. I was gutted.

Our team with new members at our final meeting/election

It will not be ok, I whispered to Gilbert! How could this happen? The election wasn’t supposed to go this way! I had very intentionally picked a group of strong women for my design team, and now in an instant my team was turning over the reins to men who had just joined the project. While feeling defeated inside, I tried to hide my disappointment as we shared mundazi (donut like pastries)and Fantas, a special treat, to celebrate our accomplishments this summer.

I came home after the meeting to a swarm of my favorite neighborhood children, and we had one more backyard concert as dark settled in. Neighbors stopped by and laughed one more time at our song and dance before the long line of hard, teary-eyed goodbyes began. As Mama Shalom was putting the finishing touches on dinner, Aroni, the newly-elected cooperative president and schoolteacher who is also Papa Shalom’s cousin, came through the gate to the backyard.

Evening song and dance in the back yard 

In that moment, I felt my anxiety start to slowly melt away. I remembered my first night in Nyarubuye when Aroni walked me home with Papa Shalom from the football field. I remembered the next night when he taught me to count to 10 in Kinyarwanda. And I remembered the evenings that we sat in the backyard practicing conjugating verbs by the light of my headlamp. Aroni was a life-long educator with a decent command of English and a strong commitment to Nyarubuye and my family. I hated to admit it, but maybe my team was right in electing him president after all?

Falling asleep under my mosquito net that night, I flashed back to our first few days in Kigali in June. When we arrived in Rwanda, our goal was to leave having cultivated unique projects that our teams could own and continue themselves. The elections didn’t go as I had planned, but in the voting process, my team expressed their own knowledge of village politics and cultural dynamics that I was perhaps unable to see. They overwhelmingly believed that Aroni was the one who could help the project to succeed, and who was I to question that? The election was democracy in all its glory. As I handed over our materials, budget, and ledger to our new leaders, I felt like many pieces of our work were incomplete, like the real work was only just beginning. I didn’t want to let go not knowing what would happen next, but the influx of new members and their enthusiasm for our project showed that the team was indeed committed to forging ahead.  With that, our time in Nyarubuye came to a close in the blink of an eye.  The story of my summer in Rwanda ends here, but I’m hoping that the election shows that that of the Abashyizehamwe Muburezi cooperative is only just beginning. 

Living Locavore in Rwanda

August 2, 2012


Before living on the farm in Virginia, I did not spend much time thinking about where my food comes from. Yet in the years ate fresh blackberries from right outside my back door, watched the squash grow slowly by slowly and, yes, fed our cows every day all summer, I became increasingly curious about the myriad of foods we grow, transport, and consume both locally and around the world.


I began reading widely, including books from Michael Polan, Mark Bittman, and the like. I was particularly fascinated with Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which her husband and kids move to the old, rural family farm to live exclusively off their land for one year in an effort to embody the true locavore experience. When I left for Rwanda, I did not know that it was here that I would have a taste of just what that means.


The day before I left Minnesota, my Dad came home with a variety of freeze dried foods, the kind used for camping and astronauts. I too was worried that I might be hungry here, but I was scared of offending my host family and left the packages at home. Little did I know then that having enough good food would never be a problem here. In fact we scholars spend much more time devising strategies for how to communicate to our families that we need to eat less, not more.


Food is of central importance in Rwandan culture. When you see the amount of time that people spend cultivating their fields and preparing their meals, it is not hard to see why. We are eating a true locavore diet, with the corn, cabbage, potatoes, cassava, plantains, bananas, beans, and ground nuts we eat coming directly from our family's plot of land. I read an article that reported that Rwandans eat 550 pounds of bananas per person each year, and I believe it! Some fruit like mangoes, pineapple, and oranges might come from the weekly local market or neighbors, but the only things purchased at the corner store are chai tea, salt, sugar, vegetable oil, and the occasional can of tomatoe sauce or bottle of Fanta soda. When was the last time you knew the source of everything on your plate?


We are all starting to crave things like cheese, broccoli, and ice cream, but for the most part, it is refreshing to eat so simply and so well. There are basically no preservatives, and our diet is essentially vegan except for the milk from our cow. Surprisingly I do not really miss the meat. Combined with the daily running and walking and all of the Vitamin D from the sun, we feel amazingly healthy. I can't say that I will continue to eat 5 or 8 bananas per day, but one of the most wonderful parts of living in a different place is finding new habits andy lifestyles to bring home. My family here has given me a new arsenal of culinary tools to continue to experiment with at home.


Here are some of the specialities from Mama Shalom's kitchen:


1. Cassava, plantains, vegetable sauce and beans.

2. Daily staple of plantains, beans, and sauce.

3. My personal favorite, ubugali (cassava bread, or really a warm, doughy substance) and peanut sauce with tomatoes.

4. Akahunga (made from corn flour, water and milk, the consistency of mashed potatoes) and cabbage and bean sauce.

Progress Report

August 4, 2012


One week from today, I will be leaving to return to the States, so our team is in a sprint to the finish line this week. We have made good progress in devising a solution to the challenge of prohibitively high secondary school fees. The team has decided to found a cooperative appropriately named "United for Education" or "Abashyizehamwe Muburezi" to save and invest funds to pay tuition. It will be governed by a six year, renewable contract that the team has written over the last week.


Funds will be raised with two investment projects. One will be buying and selling crops, namely sorghum, in different seasons simply for the purpose of providing cash. The second investment will be opening the first library in Nyarubuye. In addition to generating revenue from book rentals and subscription memberships, the library is important because it will provide the community with adult education workshops and a lighted space to work at night, which will be especially helpful for students who need to study. Moreover, the project gives the team the flexibility to grow and evolve over the years. The process of arriving at this combination of projects was filled with many highs and lows, some of which I will share here:


Highlights:


Commitment of the team. I was nervous last week to ask the team to take four afternoons to work on our project, so I was thrilled when they insisted that we really needed to meet everyday. One of the women on my team exhorted that women are the "chiefs of the house," and if development happens, it will come from them. Our team of women all seem to believe this, and I love when I find them meeting or talking around town in addition to out meetings. These ladies make me smile every day.


Writing the contract. This should have been the most tedious and boring part of the project, but our team flew through negotiations of the structure of their group. I was particularly impressed with the governance committee they outlined to organize the cooperative and manage its investments. In Haiti, it was hard to know if and how any legal agreement would be enforced, and I was surprised by how much my team respected the idea of a contract. My favorite part? A clause that includes a steep pentaly fee for any member that tries to use their portion of the savings for anything other than the payment of school fees.

Willingness to borrow and save. I cannot overstate how important this is. During the Immersion phase of the Innovation Institute, many of the community members we met expressed anxiety about using banks and hesitation about their own abilities to take and pay back loans. The fact that my team so quickly decided that both saving and borrowing must be a part of their solution is exciting (note: this was their idea, not mine), and it further demonstrates the degree to which they believe in one another and the team.


Challenges:


Defining profit. My team has had many creative ideas for businesses they can open to generate profits to save for school, but I worry that many of them will not actually make any money. I have built a simple budget and a very basic financial model outlining expected revenues and costs for the next six years, and this concept seems novel to the team. For example, my team is considering renting an expensive house for the library space rather than sharing with another group, and I have tried to show how the rental expense will affect out savings account balance each year. There are limits to how many times I can say that revenues must be greater than costs, but I am hoping that some of these conversations will encourage the team to ask different questions of one anothr in the future.


Financing. It is not as simple as it sounds to open and use a bank account. The local SACCO (lending institution run by the government) promises an easy process to apply for loans with a low interest rate of 2% annually, but the college educated scholars is finding it confusing to figure out exactly which papers and business plans to prepare with our teams. What exactly qualifies as a sufficient project also remains unclear. Our goal is to have all of the paperwork sorted so that our teams are ready to apply for loans before we leave.


Outlining next steps. The objective of our work here is to have projects that our design teams can and will continue themselves after we leave. There are a hundred details I want to sort out this week, and it is hard to know where to focus my attention. I am trying to prepare a basic list of next steps, especially in terms of formally registering the cooperative and opening all necessary bank accounts, in addition to outlining some targets for the longer-term, but I want the team to be setting the pace and direction and running our meetings. Its is hard to know when to push and when to step back and let the group make its own decisions.


We are learning from these highs and lows as well as from the feedback of others in the community. For the next few days, we will continue to refine and tweak our ideas, and then we will present our project at the Innovation Exhibition this coming Wednesday. We are expecting tapproximately 1,000 attendees, including people from surrounding communities, local government leaders, and representatives of local banks and financial institutions. I look forward to watching team present all of their work!

A Story of Unity

July 31, 2012

In February, two Darden teams traveled to the University of Colorado in Boulder for the finals of a Net Impact case competition on hydraulic fracking. Delirious from a near all-nighter of presentation prep, my team, Bennett Graham, Jonathan Harris, Michael Barnett and I, invented a team handshake in the final moments before delivering out presentations to the judges. We coined it the "collaborative handshake," and we have been waiting for Power Point Clip Art to contact us for the copyright contract ever since.

Microsoft still hasn't called, but the collaborative handshake has already crossed an ocean to a new continent. During Think Impact University in June in Kigali, our scholar team from Nyarubuye adopted the handshake as part of our team mantra. When we made it to the villages, our translators renamed it "Unity," but the story does not end here.

A few weeks later, I met up with a scholar from the next community overof Nkomomangwa. James said, "You have to see this cool Rwandan thing our translator taught us called Unity." I had to tell him that that was in fact a symbol of American origin, but I was secretly so excited that the collaborative handshake was spreading.

My design team has also adopted the handshake, and we start and end every meeting with Unity. The team was a little leery in our first meeting, but now they remind me if I forget it. It seems silly and inconsequential, but there is something wonderful about the laughter and team spirit that come along with sharing something together. I'm pretty sure that Microsoftwill agree as soon as they find it!

Learning Meeting Management in Africa

July 30, 2012

Given that I spent the last two years a slave to my Outlook calendar, moving from class to meeting to meeting when my phone chimed to remind me of the appropriate time, it is ironic that it is in Africa that I am finding the opportunity to practice better meeting management. Many of those meetings I simply attended, and now leading a team of women through a rigorous, challenging process, I am gaining greater appreciation for the fine art of managing meeting time. Here are my most important takeaways:

"Respect the time." This is one of the most obvious cultural differences here. We Americans are obsessed with timeliness, and some of my team members do not have watches or phones. Having a meeting at 2:00 does not mean plus or minus an hour as the sun dictates, and it has been difficult knowing how strictly to enforce this. Our meetings are hugely more productive when we start and end together. Setting this standard is working, and yesterday a teammate even showed up a few minutes early and announced, "I learned, I respect the time."

Arrange the room carefully. We often meet in the local community government office, which doubles as a tailoring school. Furniture is limited, and it is sometimes a challenge to find enough chairs for the whole team. In early meetings, I often just sat on the edge of the table or stood in front of the group, thinking that reserving chairs for the team was the polite thing to do. After a few days however, I realized that the group was treating me like the teacher at the front of the room, waiting for my guidance or approval in their ever move. Since then I have made a more concerted effort to arrange the chairs in a circle with Gilbert and I mixed in the group whenever possible, and I feel like we are on more equal footing.

Have an agenda. Never in my life have I spent so much time preparing for meetings. Each day I make an agenda and a list of goals before meeting Gilbert, my translator, and we then review both together and adjust accordingly. We convene again about an hour before the team arrives to practice. This probably means at least two hours of preparing for every hour that the team is actually together. I don't know how exactly to adapt this practice to real time constraints at home, but I do know that meetings are infinitely more efficient and effective when I have an agenda and know all of the tools I want to use to cover pertinent information long before the real meeting time.

Share the pen. Gilbert and I prepare posters and headings before meetings to speed things up, and I often add things to our lists as we go. In talking to other scholars about their groups, I realized that I had developed an unintentional monopoly of the Sharpie. Since then I have been experimenting with passing the pen to different teammates at various points in the conversation to draw out their individual voices, and I like the results. Sharing the responsibility of writing seems to shift leadership roles throughout the meeting by putting different people in the driver's seat. It is my hope that cumulatively this will help my teammates to have greater ownership of the team and our project.

Vote. We have made a series of important decisions as a group in the last fee weeks, and I have used a voting process to do so many times. Sometimes I simply poll the group for quick results, but when I suspect that my members, many of whom are good friends, might be swayed by the opinions of their neighbors, I have used a secret ballot process instead. This accomplishes a few things. First, it gives members a few minutes to collect their thoughts before having to respond, and second, it allows everyone, even the quieter members, to have their opinions counted with equal weight.

Turn off the phone (and computer, iPad, or anything else electronic that you might be tempte to look at during a meeting). This weekend we had a scholar retreat (somewhere with, yes, electricity and running water), and in a group brainstorming session, I found myself reaching for my laptop to take some notes on my own project. In that moment, I happened to notice how carefully the entire group was listening. I set the computer back down and pledged to stay engaged in the conversation. I know you will say you can multi-task (and so do I), but I promise we can't. Just don't do it (I give you permission to remind me that I wrote this in a few weeks).

I have been lucky here to have the luxury of time to use each of these techniques, but I will be continuing to practice what I learned about meeting management in Africa when I return home and start a new job in a few short weeks.

Think Big

July 28, 2012

Every night 12 year old Olivier comes to visit. He walks around the house to where we are all congregated in the dark in the back and he says, "Teacher, I am ready." By headlamp we spend some time practicing English. We have studied African geography, Rwandan history, and the American states together. A few nights ago, he pointed up at the stars: "Teacher, how big is the solar system?" How am I supposed to answer a question like that?

As I counted the planets in my head (I forgot Saturn), deliberated the morality of telling him that Pluto is still a planet (I decided it was ok), and contemplated how to represent the scale of the solar system with pen and paper, I also thought of my design team. The theme of the week has been "Think Big," and I have been challenged to find creative ways to encourage my team to think of possibilities as expansive as the universe. We are continuing to build out a financial model to save sufficiently for secondary school fees. We debate the assumptions of the model, but the hardest part has been that I have become increasingly anxious that many of our solutionss seem simply to be different combinations of existing ideas. How can I dare my team to reach for the stars?

A credit office from SACCO, a government-run basic financial institution for savings and loans in the community, spoke with us this week, and I think this is exactly what he wants us to do. He mentioned the difference between entrepreneurship and innovation in passing, and he challenged Think Impact scholars to strive for the latter. We use these words all of the time, but I have been reflecting on the definitions of both terms ever since. What exactly is the difference? While my design team is eager to start a business, they are less certain of how to do so in a truly innovative way. In a culture that values order and an education system based on memorization, the notion that you can create something that does not exist rather than replicating what you see around you is hard to understand. Yet this is precisely where I believe we can find real opportunity.

I was thinking of these things in a prototyping workshop with my team yesterday when suddenly something clicked. The workshop was intended to push people to think of how to make new things out of materials we already have. When I first asked the team how we could keep food overnight using a tomato can, a Pringles container, a tissue, a rubber band, and markers, they looked at me (again) like I was crazy, and I asserted that they must build something without me. Fifteen minutes later though, they had rearranged the materials to hold a serving of cassava bread.

Even more impressively, when we returned to the discussion of our project, they came up with a handful of new viable options to generate revenue to to save for school fees. Beyond the ideas of raising goats and trading sorghum that we have already debated exensively, we began sharing ideas like growing flowers, selling gutters, raising chickens, and more. When we started to story board these ideas, they all claimed they could not draw, and yet 20 minutes later, our poster board was filled with visuals. Putting the materials and the crayons in their hands had unleashed a new wave of creativity.

I still do not know which option my team will choose for our model, but I left the meeting feeling re-energized by the group. It is easy to tell people to Think Big, and it is much harder to figure out how to make them (and myself) believe it is really possible. I still don't know that I have actually figured it put, but I am trying. It is hard to know or measure when that mind shift happens, but I know that my team is moving in a good direction. Also Olivier went home with a map of the solar system. Slowly the view of the world is changing for all of us.

Team brainstorming during a meeting this week

Preparing for a meeting with Gilbert (translator)

Moments of the Week

July 23, 2004

We are never short of things to do or meetings to plan here, but here are three highlights from our “free time” this week:

• Beautification. The weekend before last, I had resolved to get all of the clay out of my nails and paint them. Mama and Donata, who lives with us, were quick to notice. The next night, the kitchen was transformed into a salon as we painted nails in the back yard by the light of head lamps while dinner was on the charcoal stove. Look carefully to see our cow hanging out in the background. It is hard not to laugh at this picture of manicures Rwandan style. 

• Furry Friends. Last night at dinner, our neighbor Jean Paul said in Kinyarwanda, “Meriana, Audrey’s mom has baby goats… And their names are, um… Meriana and Audrey.” Audrey is my Think Impact adviser here. I replied, “I know, of course, I love baby goats!” I do not know if Jean Paul was more surprised at my affinity for goats or at the fact that they were named after us, but of course I love these soft, friendly little guys. The village is fascinated with our fondness of animals in general, but people are particularly perplexed with our obsession with picking up goats.

• Bucket List. On Sunday I crossed another item off of my life bucket list: seeing a herd of zebras in the wild. Scholars took a day off from our design teams to travel to nearby Akagera National Park for a little safari, and we were surrounded by antelope, baboons, hippos, giraffes, water buffalo, and, yes, zebras. Dotted across the horizon, the zebras were every bit as majestic and regal in person as I always dreamed they would be! Now I will have to move on to trying to tame one…

• Breakfast: Our cross-cultural exchange of the week was sharing breakfast. I had packed oatmeal and raisins as emergency rations for this trip, and we have certainly not been short of delicious food. I couldn't find the words in Kinyarwanda for raisins (they do not grow grapes here), and I think they thought oatmeal was very sweet. Still this was a huge success. 

Get Ready, Get Set, Go!

July 22, 2012

The clock is ticking, and our real challenge has officially begun.
After a lengthy discussion about three issues in the community – light
for studying and working at night, refrigeration for milk and
vegetables, and crippling secondary school fees - our design team has
selected the following challenge:

How might we increase secondary school enrollment rates by building
upon existing financial institutions (both formal and informal) and
social networks in the community to plan for and minimize the
financial burden of school fees for families.

Get ready, get set, go, we have two weeks to make this happen!

Milk vs. Cassava

July 20, 2012

Some people simply have a way with words. Our wonderful translator
Gilbert, a 20 year-old Nyarubuye native who taught himself English
after finishing secondary school here, is definitely one of them.

Perched on the only chair in the room slightly above the rest of us on
the benches below and wearing a light blue t-shirt with a cowboy boot
from some random 5K in Texas, Gilbert straightened his posture while
preparing to make an important proclamation. Deep into a meeting of
translators and scholars yesterday morning, he asserted, "You see,
babies drink milk first. They cannot eat cassava. The problem here is
that the people, they want to eat cassava, but they are not ready."
Well obviously, why hadn't we already thought of that?

The scholars had convened a special meeting with the translators to go
beyond the tactical preparations for each day. As our work becomes
increasingly complicated and as each scholar's design team develops
its own agenda and personality, we wanted to bring everyone together
to make sure we are on track as a larger Think Impact team. We do not
know what people are saying when we hear our names around town, and we
asked the translators to help us gauge whether people are confused,
excited, nervous, inspired, or frustrated with our work thus far. What
surfaced in this discussion was very interesting and hugely important
for all of us.

Gilbert explained that babies cannot digest cassava; they must drink
milk. In our work this summer, we are guiding and leading our teams
through an immensely complex process, nurturing them with "milk" in
the form of frameworks and tools that will enable them continue to
pursue new business opportunities long after we return to the States.
Yet much like a baby and despite our best intentions, our teams do not
always understand what the steps we are taking or why. Some people are
getting anxious about our progress while others eager to begin
discussing solutions in earnest (aka "I am ready for solid foods.").
Patience for steps in between (aka drinking the "milk" upon which
everything else will grow) is slowly decreasing. Dare I say they might
not "trust the process?"

All week we have been taking important steps to prepare our teams for
cassava. Two days ago we each led a 90 minute workshop on design
thinking with our individual design teams. I remember feeling confused
about how exactly the process would elicit any truly innovative ideas
when I read my first design book, so you can imagine the furrowed
brows of the women gathered at our meeting as we tried to discuss
prototyping, feedback, and iteration using the example of laundry in
their homes. Their eyes told me, "You want us to do what?" Since then
we have focused on the identification of the challenge we want to
solve, with ideas ranging from how to refrigerate milk to sell at the
market in nearby Rwamagana to how to use less water for cooking to how
to be able to save enough money to pay feels for secondary school. In
our meeting later today, we will decide upon the specific issue in the
community that we want to address. Each of these activities is an
important piece of the puzzle.

Perhaps more importantly, however, we scholars are slowly learning
that aside from completing specific deliverables and outputs, managing
the process, explaining the context, and measuring our design team's
morale and expectations are equally essential in preparing to eat
cassava. In addition to including specific tasks in our meeting
agendas, we are also experimenting with different ways to engage our
teams in discussion of the process itself. We've played games like
"The Wheel of Challenges" and drawn story boards of the steps that
lead to our ultimate goals. Their eyes and their smiles are a good
gauge of if these things are working. We are still drinking the milk,
but buhoro, buhoro hamwe (slowly, slowly together), we are making
progress.

Today already marks the end of the Inspiration phase of the Innovation
Institute, and next week we move into the Innovation phase. Equipped
with the challenge that we will have so carefully selected with our
teams over the last two week, we will begin to brainstorm creative
solutions using the assets already in the community. It is a little
frightening that we have only have 2.5 weeks to make it happen! We are
still not quite ready to eat the cassava, but we are getting closer.
Thankfully Gilbert will be with us for the rest of the journey to
guide us all with his wise and patient words!

Picking Teams

July 13, 2012

I have always hated the feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, and expectation surrounding choosing teams, but this week was different. It brought the most exciting moment of the Innovation Institute thus far: picking our design teams! These are the groups of 4-6 community members with whom we will work for the remainder of our time here. The entire week was devoted to the selection process and to preparation for our first meetings together. The process went like this:

1. Reviewing Assets. In the two weeks of Immersion, we interviewed 40+ members of the community to better understand the assets in the village. This includes physical resources, knowledge, abilities, VABES (values, beliefs, assumptions, and expectations), etc. Before we picked our teams, the scholars met and catalogued not only the assets of the people whom we had met but also those within our Think Impact team.

2. Defining Criteria. Next we individually reflected on the most important attributes of an ideal team member, reflecting on the ways in which our own strengths and weaknesses as leaders and managers will also affect our teams. Each of us used different techniques to do so. Emanuel had a ranking system based on scores in a number of different categories, while I used a table to organize the most important information from interviews. Beyond tactical considerations (i.e. who has a bicycle or knows how to sew), there was consensus that the most important qualities were understanding of and alignment with the Think Impact mission, an entrepreneurial spirit and forward-thinking mindset, and genuine curiosity and enthusiasm for the project.

Notes on assets of various community members

3. Scholar Discussion. We then came together with individually-prepared list of our top fifteencandidates. I had decided to select a team of entirely women, while Tom was interested in having a team of all men. We discussed team dynamics, village relationships, and team goals before creating a paper version of an Excel optimization model that would have made my Darden Learning Team proud. Given that we had all identified slightly different goals and criteria for our teams, there was surprisingly little overlap in our target lists. We each narrowed down the lists to a top 5 with the aim of having a final team of 4-6 community members.

Our team working in the village government office space

4. Design Team Invitations. Armed with our target lists, we were joined by our translators to devise an “invitation pitch” to the community members. Preparing ahead of time with our translators makes meetings infinitely more effective, and Gilbert and I outlined and rehearsed talking points before setting out across the three villagesin which our invitees live. I was shocked at how eagerly people accepted their invitations and how clearly they already understand our objective of our work from our earlierconversations (thanks to Gilbert and friends for such excellent work!).

Prep with our translators

5. Prep for the First Meeting. We spent the remainder of the week preparing for our first design team meeting on Friday. Talking with other scholars, it was interesting to see the many ways in which people found to connect with their teams. One scholar planned the human knot as an ice breaker, while another brought in specific items to spur conversation around assets and issues in the community and another facilitated a game of charades across the language barrier. I chose to storyboard my meeting with drawings of the most important things I wanted to convey (i.e. goals and expectations). Together with this, I tried to learn a few key words in Kinyarwanda, with the hope of connecting with my team directly instead of just through the translator.




Power Point slides by hand :-)



This was a very involved, methodical process, and we worked with each other every step of the way. Picking teams when you have clear goals and a strategy to get there is not as much stressful as inspiring. By the end of this week, we will have had several team meetings, and we will have identified the challenge we want to tackle as a group. I’m feeling confident that I have assembled a wonderful group of women, and I’m looking forward to our discussions this week!

 





My notes from Immersion and profiles of community members





These are a Few of My Favorite Things

July 11, 2012

It would not be a successful trip abroad if the soundtrack did not include at least a few songs from one of the greatest movies ever: The Sound of Music. When shuffling through my iPod a few days ago, I came across a mix from study abroad in Germany in 2004 with “Do-Re-Mi.” Later that afternoon, I caught myself walking around the village humming, “Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens.” In that spirit, here are a few of my favorite things about Rwanda.

1. Cooking with Mama Shalom. The time after our Think Impact work ends for the day and before we sit down to family dinner is my very favorite time of the day here. Preparing dinner is a very involved process over roughly three hours, and I have learned to plant myself near the portable charcoal stove in the back yard outside the kitchen to help Mama Shalom shell ground nuts, peel potatoes and bananas, and stir the pot. Mama sometimes sneaks me an ear of corn or a piece of pineapple while we wait, and we mostly sit in silence except for the repetition of food names in English and Kinyarwanda as we add each successive ingredient to the pot. Neighbors stop by to say hello, and I imagine that they are laughing that I do not know how to cook ubugali (cassava bread). Even so, it is in these moments that I feel most fully present here.
2. Singing and dancing with the neighborhood kids. One day I came home determined to teach the kids a new game from America: hopscotch. Much to my chagrin, they already knew it, and of course they had added more rules, twists, turns, and jumps than I remember from my elementary school days. As soon as I step out of the house, I immediately find a throng of around 20 children at my side every single day. They are eager to teach me a new song, to follow me to a meeting, or to show off a new word they just learned in English class. I have never been particularly good with small children, but early on, I decided to simply jump right in with them. We belt out “Come to Jesus” and “Old McDonald” in the back yard, and I think they are determined to help me master the traditional Rwandan cow dance before August. Sometimes the mothers gather to observe and laugh at this spectacle, but I am laughing and enjoying every minute of it.
3. My name is Meriana. One our first day in the village, a round-faced, barefooted, boisterous two year old chased us down the street yelling, “Muzungo, MUUU-ZUUUU-GO, MU-ZUUUUUUU—NGO,” meaning “foreigner” or “outsider.” These antics became a daily routine, as our new friend, affectionately nicknamed “Muzungo Baby” appeared every time we passed his house. This not isolated to our friend, however, and we often hear echoes of Muzungo following us around town. Slowly, however, this is changing. When we returned from a scholar day trip away last weekend, a pack of kids came running to greet the car yelling my Rwandan name, “Meriana,” and they of course proceeded to follow me home. Instead of hearing Muzungo from the banana fields on our morning runs, I am hearing “Meriana” from the faces we pass. Slowly we are becoming people and not just Muzungos to our new neighbors, and this makes me smile. The best part of this story? Muzungo Baby has learned to say “Good Morning,” AND we learned that his real name is RICHARD!
4. The African Stars and Moon. Since my days camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and my nights on the farm checking on the horses before bed, I have always had a special appreciation for the peace and tranquility of a sky filled brightly with stars without the distraction of city lights. Here we are a 90 minute drive from the capital city of Kigali, and the nearest town with electricity, Rwamagana, is approximately 10 miles away. When the sun sets at 6:30pm, the horizon changes from rich hues of gold and red to an expansive dark ceiling dotted with thousands of stars. Last week was a full moon, and it was so bright that we did not need headlamps to prepare dinner outside. It was spectacular. I am often alone when I go outside to brush my teeth at night. At home we usually do not take the time to look up at the sky, but here I pause. There is something majestic and intoxicating about the blanket of stars that surrounds me, and I head inside for bed feeling thankful, grounded, and ready to tackle another day. 

Where is the Market?

July 9, 2012

One of the books on my summer reading list here is John McMillan’s Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets. I’m about a third of the way through this as we finish the first phase of the Innovation Institute, Immersion. I know that we are in a developing country, but thinking about this book in conjunction with a scholar workshop we had on the innumerable hidden and financial transactions around us, it is amazing to see how the markets in the village are designed, organized, regulated, and function, both formally and informally. 

McMillan discusses markets that bring together buyers and sellers to create gain for both parties. He quotes a dictionary definition of markets as, “a meeting together of people for the purpose of trade by private purchase and sale.” There are many examples in Nyarbuye that fit this definition in the most traditional sense. Shops in our village sell salt and sugar, cell phone minutes, and tomatoes. We have a salon, a carpenter, a bicycle repair shop, and even a water delivery service. All of these are registered with the government and pay taxes, and some have a few employees. We also have many co-operatives, including a women’s handicraft group called “Rights of Women” and an agriculture group called “I’m sick of poverty.” Even health care has a market through the government’s Mutual Health Care program. A bank from the nearby town Rwamagana comes to Nyarbuye to extend loans specifically to women, and neighboring communities gather near the football field on Tuesday afternoons to exchange their goods. Financial transactions and markets are everywhere.

Perhaps more interestingly, the village also relies heavily upon the more informal trading mechanisms upon which the community is built. You can see this in the family that trades for milk while its cow is pregnant, in loans between friends to buy medicine for sick children, and in the financial roles and responsibilities divided between husbands and wives. Even in Nyarbuye, a futures markets of sorts exists, and financially astute individuals are buying sorghum and firewood to store for other seasons in which they predict higher prices will prevail. It is in this latter type of transactions that we are learning much about the fabric that actually holds this community together.

What have we learned from this new knowledge and understanding about opportunities for innovations? We scholars have been reviewing our notes from interviews and experiences during the Immersion Phase, and several major themes regarding opportunities for new or redefined markets have become obvious. These include the following:

• The need for electricity for work, studying, and the completion of daily tasks;
• The high transaction costs of getting water from Lake Muhazi, in terms of time and in the costs of illness from dirty water;
• Difficulty in saving for high fees for secondary school;
• Not just a lack of financing options but a cultural hesitation to take out loans;
• The problem of “small land,” or insufficient acreage to produce a surplus to sell at market;
• High costs of health care and distance to doctors;
• Availability and cost of agricultural inputs;
• Affordable transportation (i.e. bicycles).

What’s next? As we move into the second phase of the Innovation Institute, Inspiration, we will continue to read, observe, and learn about the myriad of diverse markets in the community. We will be forming design teams this week comprised of 1-2 scholars and 4-6 community members. These teams will them think about how to use the village’s assets to create an innovation that will improve and add value in new and creative ways. Stay tuned!

Team Meeting

A parting shot of our team after a sunset meeting by Lake Muhazi! 

Shared Austerity

July 5, 2012

Walking in the bright afternoon sun with my roommate Gabriela (a rising second year in Cornell's MPA program) and feeling the dust accumulate layer after layer on the sunscreen on my skin, we planned our big event for the evening: the much-anticipated washing of our hair. It had been four or five days since our last shampoo, we couldn't really remember any more, and as we watched dinner simmering on the stove, we asked Mama Shalom for some water for a shower. Staring longingly into the basin containing roughly 2L of water, Gabriela came over and said, "How am I supposed to wash my hair with so little water?" Before dinner we compared water saving techniques and enjoyed the fresh scent of our shampoo in our equally curly, clean locks.

Then it was time for another normal dinner in our house: a cassava-flour-based mashed potato-like dish with sauce of cabbage, beans, and tomatoes topped with fresh avocado. We had all finished eating, and at the time in the evening when our nightly cup of chai tea with fresh milk from the cow usually magically appears, Mama said in Kinyarwanda, "Amazi, oya. Muhazi," trying to communicate the following: no water tonight, we will go to Lake Muhazi for more in the morning. Confusion during dinner conversation is simply a part of our nightly rituals, so Gabriela and I looked at each other in disbelief. No water? What? We offered water from our Nalgene bottles, which she promptly refused many times. At our insistence, the kids finally finished off what we had with us, and Gabriela and I stared at each other in embarrassment and shock.

The Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) model championed by Terry Bergdall at Northwestern  on which Think Impact draws heavily describes the idea of "shared austerity." It is defined as, "being genuinely present in the local situation," with the aim of "building a foundation of trust through empathetic respect." This has been precisely the goal for the two weeks of Immersion of the Innovation Institute. Yet despite our best efforts to attend community events and church, to dress in locally-appropriate attire, and to understand the daily highs and lows of village life, I have never been hungry, my clothes are clean, my sleeping bag is dry, and I know that I have a 20L jug of safe water at whenever I am thirsty. People here have told us more times than we can count that water is a problem, but when you see gorgeous Lake Muhazi in the background all day, it is hard to understand exactly what that means. I think this dinner was the first moment that I realized that our neighbors might be going to bed thirsty. Somehow something had just changed for me, and, all of a sudden, I felt like I knew the village in a different way.

Shalom, Jolie, and Agape (the kids) all had water from our "secret" stash before bed, and I the family supply was replenished at sunrise before breakfast. We are very lucky. My team is already talking about the lessons we will bring back to the States with us, and I hope I never forget this dinner. Water is our most precious resource. We can never take it for granted. I know both Gabriela and I will both think a little differently before we complain about our greasy hair next time. Isn't that what shared austerity is all about?

Mi Casa

July 4, 2012

One of the many interesting things about visiting and interviewing so many community members is that we get to see the variation in construction and design of different houses around the village. Here’s a small glimpse of our world.

Rwandans are very private people, and houses are generally surrounded by a hedge row, allowing you to only see the front door from the street. Houses are constructed in one of three ways: mud bricks, mud over a wooden lattice-like frame, or concrete covering a mud structure.

Upon entering the front door, most houses open to a living room with a small table and a few chairs or stools for visitors. This is the setting of most of our meetings. Floors are either dirt or paved, and depending on the family, some walls are painted. Windows are made of glass or wood, and some families have wooden doors separating the rooms.

Most daily activity actually takes place outside of the houses. Kitchens are out back with either wood or charcoal stoves. The cows are inevitably in this same courtyard area, as they are almost considered part of the family. It is here that crops are dried, meals are prepared, the children play, and visitors gather in the afternoons and evenings.

Below is the blueprint and some pictures of our very lovely home, which is definitely one of the nicest in our village. 

Bedroom that Gabriela and I share

View of the "back yard," cow stall, and kitchen area from my window

Blue print of our house

The team plays cards in the living room for my birthday!
Note neighborhood kids watching through the window.

A Day in the Life of a Think Impact Scholar

July 2, 2012

It has now been two weeks since I left the States, and while it is hard to say that any day here is “normal,” here is the basic routine of Scholar life in Rwanda:

·         5:30 am: Wake-up

o   Often my family is already out in the fields cultivating by the time I wake up.

·         6:00 am: Run to Lake Muhazi/Exercise

o   Lake Muhazi is a giant u-shaped lake that surrounds our community. All roads here lead to Muhazi. It is about an 11 minute run past the church and school and through the farming fields to get there. We watch the sun rise on the horizon over the lake as we run. It is simply beautiful.

·         7:00 am: Team Check-in for the Day

·         7:30 am: Breakfast

·         8:00 am: Translators arrive

o   We have 4 translators in our village, and they are invaluable resources both in sharing their own knowledge and in translating during our community interviews

·         8:30 am: Observation, Exploration, Shared Experiences

o   Essentially everyone in the village cultivates their crops in the morning. While it is still cool outside, we wander from place to place, helping to harvest ground nuts and cassava one day and learning to do household tasks or visiting different cooperatives on others.

Cultivating maize and groundnuts with Mama Shalom

·         12:00 pm: Lunch at Home and Interview Prep for the Afternoon

·         1:00 pm: Interview Community Members

o   In the first few days, we focused largely on the local formal businesses, including the carpenter, shop keepers, the tailor, and so forth. In reality though much of our richest learning is also coming from observing the informal sector and hidden transactions amongst community members. We are interviewing family members in different settings to get a glimpse of how people live their daily lives.

Gilbert (translator), Gabriela, Tom, Emanuel, me, Audrey (adviser), and Emanuel (translator)

4: 30 pm: Team Debrief and Curriculum Workshops on Methodology, Tools, and Frameworks

·         6:00 pm: Downtime, Bathing, and Dinner Preparation

o   The sun sets around 6:30, and almost everyone is home by then. The evenings are filled with visits from neighbors and with the kids who want English/Kinyarwanda lessons and singing and dancing time.

·         8:30 pm: Dinnertime with the Family

o   Sitting in the dark, we laugh, learn new words, and try to share stories in combinations of French, English, and Kinyarwanda until we are all practically falling asleep.

My fantastic host family
From L to R: Gabriela (scholar), Shalom, me, Mama Shalom, Jolie, Papa Amiel

·         9:30 pm: Reading, Journaling, and Prep for the Next Day

·         10:00/10:30 pm: Sleep!