disability umuganda

Yesterday was the fourth Saturday of the month, which means it’s umuganda (collective work) time again. By 8am stores are closed, buses and cars parked, and people disappeared from the streets. Trees are being planted across the country this umuganda, and in our neighbourhood people gather at the old cemetery, but we are not with them as we have decided to join a special umuganda and we will plant our trees at a village for disabled ex-combatants. It’s an opportunity to show support for disability rights and needs in Rwanda, a country where disability carries strong stigma and although the government is moving slowly forward on understanding and the development of policies, the life of a disabled person here is painfully difficult. So we join a gathering at a local gas station and together with Rwandans representing a range of disability organizations, and organizations supporting their efforts, we climb on a bus that transports us to a rural village, only fifteen minutes away.

Hundreds of people have gathered here, to join the locals in supporting the veterans and promoting the theme on the banner: to work together and to include disabled people in development. The ex-combatants are mostly young; many were teenagers when they joined the army that liberated Rwanda from genocide and were shattered by bullets and grenades. The ‘National Commission for Demobilization and Reintegration’ has spearheaded the building of the houses in this community. The houses are simple but attractive, well-built and nicely landscaped, facing a fertile valley that is half agriculture and half marsh land.

some of the disabled veterans

We are all given several tiny trees of various species and we set off to palnt them. As usual in umuganda, there’s a great deal of standing around and socializing as there are not enough tools and work to keep everyone busy. But we are all carrying our trees carefully, and eventually a hole is hoed for each tree. Very small children carry their trees carefully. A blind woman is helped to set her tree on a banked roadside. Several men conversing in sign language have commandeered a hoe and are enthusiastically hacking holes. A limping woman with a turned out foot and a man with a crutch join the river of people streaming down a dirt road. An enterprising man is selling sugar cane along the roadside and turning a fine business. A small boy struggles to whack a piece off with a small knife.

Eventually all the trees are planted and we retrace our steps, convening together for entertainment (a troupe of young acrobats of various ages and gender) and speeches commending collective work and supporting the integration of the disabled into society. We are warmed, not only by the hot sun, but by this coming together of the abled and the disabled. The road ahead is very long and difficult – for example I listened to the English interpretation of a deaf man using sign language, the man describing the impossibility of finding work after finishing secondary school – but in this moment, it seems possible.

On the bus home my mind went back a couple of weeks to when, in another context, I listened to the testimony of a young man who had been crippled by polio. He is twisted into a small tight shape and uses his hands, with flip-flops for protection, and one foot to make his way into the centre of a room. The interpreter, a man over six feet tall, immediately dropped to the floor to put himself at the same level as R., who began to speak of his early isolation and loneliness. He spoke of how he was not allowed to go to weddings or other community events because he ‘was small and could get hurt’, and how he never knew for a long long time that there were other people like him, until he went to a school where he met other people with disabilities. He came to see that he was a ‘somebody’, not a ‘nobody’, and that his gift was music and dance. He sang then, with a strong rich voice and then enchanted us with his own very talented version of break dancing. R. is a very strong somebody and meeting him challenged me to open my heart more fully the disabled people on the streets.

For the record: President Kagame joined a tree planting umuganda yesterday, and gave a talk on self-reliance and aid dependency. Here is a link to what he said. http://allafrica.com/stories/201111270042.html