4 Differences between Rwanda and N. America

1)      Time –  At 2pm on Monday and Thursdays, we offer English classes to the local adults. At 2:05pm, there are literally no more than 4 adults in the classroom. By 2:30, there are around 25 willing pupils. This happens EVERY Monday and Thursday. I asked Cathy about this phenomenon and she knowingly nodded and said “Look at their wrists”. No watches. No clocks in the house either. Many of them tell time using the sun (Cosmo Kramer style), by watching their neighbours, by when their kids come home from school or by looking for our vehicle to come to school. Some have a mobile phone and use that as their main clock, but in general, time is event-trigger based here.

2)      Speed of Internet – I’ll never complain about Rogers Internet ever again.  The internet here reminds me of the dial-up days of 1996. Connecting to the ISP server was never guaranteed, and you could take a nice shower in between trying to connect to different websites. In our case, we spend a lot of time at Ste Anne’s Hotel patio which is a bar that’s about a 10 minute walk away from the house and offers free WiFi for patrons. So we consume a lot of Fanta and Primus beer while waiting for Facebook or Hotmail to load up.

3)      PDA’s between male and female – I’m not huge with public displays of affection (PDAs) as Dal will attest to. I'm probably average for a North American male. In Rwanda, I’m like the emotional lovechild of Michael Buble and Casanova. There is very little hand-holding or arm-around-the-shoulder happening here between male and female. We haven’t seen any public kissing yet. However, it’s common for a pair of men to be holding hands while walking on the street and it’s not indicative of their sexual orientation, but rather a sign of friendship. Basically I’ve had a magnet put to my gay-dar, as evidenced by Dal’s last post about our night out on the town.

4)      Operational Efficiency – In North America, decisions in the workplace are often aimed at increasing operational efficiency. More output in less time with fewer resources. Consultants are paid gross sums of money to design and implement process maps while innovation and technology spur newer, better and faster ways of doing things.  In Rwanda, efficiency doesn’t appear to the goal. As we walk to school, we’ll pass countless women carry sacks of potatoes or rocks on their head. We see men sitting at the side of the road crushing rocks with other rocks with the goal to eventually create bricks. When we get to the market to pick up produce, one of the local boys will approach us as we park and ask for a ‘job’. We’ll pay him 100 francs ($0.20) to carry our bags as we navigate the market. At the guesthouse, there are two employees that cook our meals, do our laundry and keep the place clean. At the school, a man is employed as bathroom monitor to ensure that the kids are washing their hands and that they’ve cleaned up after themselves. For the first couple of weeks, my head was spinning with ideas of how to make things more efficient. But as more and more people approach me for a job, there’s the unwavering reality that Rwanda is still an impoverished country with many untrained adults that need to provide for their families. Rwanda is in that early stage of the transition from an unskilled workforce to a skilled one. The government prioritizes education which gives promise for this transition, but it will take time and patience and for now we’ll have to accept the realities.

- DP