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!