Studying the trials and tribulations of underdevelopment is all well and good, but I never understood the importance of practice as much as when I had to use the moodle (the internal website for my graduate program) on a low-speed internet connection.
The impatience I felt last fall for the global classroom (connecting the entire network of MDP programs around the world) from a Columbia user point-of-view is nothing compared to what it feels like to try to open a single page on the moodle from anywhere that doesn't have high-speed internet--even using the "low bandwidth" setting is not enough to keep my blood pressure from soaring and the vein on my forehead from popping out a little more. My sympathies go out to all those who were connecting with us during the global classroom.
Nonetheless, in terms of getting through the day, the Internet and its connection speed are the least of our worries, as rationing water and power come before we even begin to think about how painfully long it takes and how many tedious steps are involved in accessing the moodle.
The four of us working for Millennium Villages in Rwanda this summer opted to live in Nyamata, the "biggest" town near the actual MV village, Mayange, and where the MV Rwanda office is located. In the seven weeks since we arrived, the dry season has progressed and we are feeling it at home.
We are supposed to have piped water at the house every Tuesday and Wednesday morning and every Friday evening—though I found out today that this has been cut to twice per week. For the last four weeks, we've had problems of not being able to fill the house's water tank because the water pressure was too low, or the water that was supposed to arrive on Tuesday morning at 7am didn't start until 5pm or 10pm or even 4am the next morning, which means Daniel, our house guardian, has to stay awake until the water is on so he can fill the assortment of jerry cans, 5-liter water bottles, plastic buckets, and cooking pots we’ve assembled to store extra water. We've had to buy extra jerry cans of water (at 150 RWF a pop) to carry us through to the next time the piped water came on.
I taught Le, one of my housemates, the phrase "if it's yellow, let it mellow," and we've all become very strategic about trying to use the toilet somewhere besides home as much as possible in order to avoid running out of water for things like washing dishes, flushing the toilets, and performing our own limited ablutions.
(Having grown up in Southern California during a looooong drought, I'm no stranger to water conservation behavior change campaigns and I'm pulling out all the stops in our house this summer. So, yeah, like thanks, California Board of Education, I, like, totally learned something, I guess.)
The sink in my bathroom is like the canary in the mine—each time I turn the knob is like a check on the gauge, I can tell by the water pressure how much is left in the tank and the smaller the trickle, the closer we are to running out; I’m always anxious that this turn will be the one that releases only a gurgle of air and perhaps a melodramatic final drop or two.
This week we ran out of our last jerry can on Monday morning and the tank was completely empty by the next morning. The water came at 3am and today we woke to a full tank, a platoon of water containers at the ready, and Daniel fast asleep despite the late hour because he’d been up all night first waiting for the water to come on and then filling the containers.
Also, I don't know how or if this is related to the water problem, but for the last few weeks, nearly every night we have had a power outage that lasted anywhere from 2 to 4 hours. This is only inconvenient in that it usually happens right in the middle of our dinner preparations, so we've become connoisseurs of half-cooked pasta topped with olive oil and soy sauce (75% of us are East Asians, after all). When it happens in the afternoon and the back-up generator is out of gas, the office empties, and work grinds to a halt.
Bitch, moan, rinse, repeat.
As annoying as the water and electricity problems we're having are, they are not really much more than that—simple (temporary--for us) annoyances. I remind myself that even complaining about these problems is a sign of the relative luxury we are living in compared to most of the people in the community we serve and the neighborhood we live in.
Every day, we see kids and adults pushing bicycles heavy-laden with full jerry cans up and down the inclines that give Rwanda its "Land of A Thousand Hills" namesake. Electric wires and poles crisscross the Rwandan countryside, but at night, houses are as likely to be lit by kerosene lamps as electricity as “cash-power” is too expensive for most despite their technically being “on the grid.”
All this has made me wonder, at the end of this summer, are these three months much more than just adult camping? Are we the ultimate summer poverty tourists,“slumming it” for the novelty of seeing development in action? I'd like to think not and I'd like to think that, just like with what CA’s Board of Ed taught me about water conservation, I'm, like, totally learning something along the way.
While the three months of summer initially seemed like they would stretch lazily across twelve long weeks, I can’t believe we’re already more than half-way through. It seems like we’re only now getting settled and it’s already time to start preparing for our goodbyes.
Professionally, admittedly, I’m not making a lot of progress. I've come to realize that given the language barriers and the heavy involvement that the CHW program has with the Rwandan Ministry of Health (read: bureaucracy moves slooooowwww) and the hesitation (read: we are explicitly forbidden) I have to "go rogue" at the Mayange site (read: strike out on my own with an interpreter in tow), I'm probably not going to get very much accomplished with my project this summer.
To make up for that, I’m trying to learn as much as I can about Rwanda's culture and society (with some very interesting observations! More to come on that in a later post.) and how these influence the country’s development challenges. I do this by tagging along for site visits even for sectors that aren't explicitly under the health sector purview, talking to people I meet on the bus to and from Kigali, and asking people why they think things are the way are or work the way the work or what they would keep or what they would change about Rwanda’s development progress.
I still have hope that, ultimately, I’ll be able to produce and deliver something that the MV health office here will find useful, but, so far that seems as likely as a full tank of water on a Tuesday.
