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Published: June 29th 2010
The title of this entry is probably the most useful thing I can say in French here. It means "I speak a little French." It saves me from the embarassment of stammering in English that I don't know any French, but saves me from saying one sentence and having people think I am fluent. Not really related, but I thought it was funny.
Today I participated in Umuganda. Umuganda happens on the last Saturday of every month. The communtiy gets together with their local neighbors to work on different improvement projects. Often times it is filling in potholes on the dirt roads or picking up litter along the roads in the communtiy. On my project day we doubled the width of a bridge which crosses over a stream in a small ravine. The bridge was made out of 5 tree logs so we added five more. We began by digging up dirt around surrounding banana trees. We then loaded this into bags and moved them over to where people were working on packing it in between the logs. Within about an hour and a half we doubled the bridge. No construction equipment, no government funds, no whining about things the community needs. We wanted a better bridge, so we built one. It was empowering to see this radical change happen through the combined efforts of the people.
Umuganda is a helpful component to decentralization. For people whose only experience with anthropology in Africa is my blog, decentrilization is the concept of spreading out power and agency from the central government. It encourages more action by local government. You could write entire books about it, but I guess that definition will due for now.
After about 10 minutes of working with 15 people there were at least 60 helping. When everyone shows up, we all work for about 10 minutes at a time then are able to take a short break. Brothers in the fraternity, think of it as a house work day. When everyone shows up there is very little work for the individual to do, but a lot gets done through our combined efforts. I wish Umuganda would happen in America. Instead, people complain to their local council or mayor for 6 months until something happens when they could get it done quicker if people joined together and worked on the problem for one morning.
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B.Bear
non-member comment
Americans could probably benefit greatly from a routine Umuganda in their lives, but I think you hit the nail on the head that people would rather just complain to some authority figure and leave it at that. It's kinda sad because you get a sense of a stronger bond within a community when it can work together on a project. I'm glad our fraternity strives for that, but we still have the whining and moaning as well. By the way, your last post was chilling. I wanted to leave a comment, but I was just speechless. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to see it rather than read about it.