Dependency, Dirty Carrots, and When I Met T.I. the Rapper (Don't Get Too Excited)

You wouldn’t want anyone to develop a mentality of dependency. You wouldn’t want someone to rely on handouts to make it through. You don’t like the sight of someone sitting on the ground in a dark corner, hands outstretched and lifted to you as you walk by. You don’t want to think that you might be their only hope. You want independence, not dependence. We’re talking nations, individuals, institutions, organizations, communities – we want all of these things to be self-reliant. Begging – that’s something that pushes our sympathy buttons. Would you give money or food to a beggar? To a starving child? Is it wrong to give? Is it wrong not to give?

There is one thing that is true of us all: we cannot give to everyone. If we have the means to give, we just can’t help everyone who asks us for our help. We are finite. We have limited resources, limited energy, limited time, limited capacity. This is not an excuse. This is the reality. So we need to turn to something else. We need to think outside the charity box. Giving money can most definitely be good, but giving money is not all there is.

We are living in an age of micro-finance, micro-credit, micro-enterprise, micro-franchise. Micro-mega. It’s everywhere. And to so many people now, the “micro-revolution” is the key to eliminating poverty. It’s the key to watching individuals, families, communities, and entire countries find and maintain the ability to sustain themselves. Of course, there are ups and downs to “micro-approaches” to things (I need to stop coining my own words, but I think you get the point), and I’m excited to watch these approaches develop as time goes on. It’s exciting. There is, though, something we cannot forget in the shuffle of the “micro-world” (ok, I’ll stop). We cannot forget about the importance of relief.

There is no doubt about it: Rwanda needed relief. It needed emergency aid. It needed attention. It needed the provision of basic human necessities to get back on its feet after everything was destroyed. So did Haiti. So did New Orleans. So do many nations that are crippled by civil strife as we speak. Any individual who just suffered tremendous loss should be cut some slack. Any community that was just torn to shreds by a hurricane deserves some immediate attention. Any nation that just experienced a genocide should hit the top of the priority list.

There is one question that I constantly ask myself nearly every day here: At what point does relief stop and development take over? At one point do we take our hand out of the bag and let things run their own course? Maybe that’s not even a good question. Maybe it’s a question not of all or nothing, but rather of how far we remove our hand from the bag. And a question of when we remove our hand. Obviously, the international community’s step up to the plate was a necessary thing. It’s been 16 years. Aid is still rolling in.

We have to watch out: financial dependency (and its implications) is a reality, but there is another reality, too: the mentality of dependency – thinking “I’m dependent on someone else, and I’m okay with that.” Any country that experienced what Rwanda experienced is ripe to develop a mentality of dependency. This means that the country gets comfortable with short-term needs being met and loses sight of the importance of thinking long-term. I see this in big and small ways as I explore and talk to people here. Begging is one example: I need money, and I need it now, so you should give me money. Urgency. Relief. If someone can earn enough to live just by begging, then by golly, they just might continue doing it.

In the last post, I talked about how restoration since the genocide needs to be both practical and psychological in scope. There are tons of organizations out here, PFR included, that are emphasizing the importance of vocational skills training for the guys and girls in their late teens/early twenties who missed out on education after the genocide for very understandable reasons. I also said that this country is overwhelmingly driven by agriculture and manual labor. So, vocational skills training seems the most logical and most effective route: You don’t give them fish; you teach them how to fish. Vocational skills training includes construction, carpentry, welding, hotel management (for a hopeful tourism industry), painting, raising livestock, farming, and many others. This kind of education makes sense for this country, but then again, Rwanda is having visions of big skyscrapers, heavy tourism, and an advanced infrastructure (I’ll talk more about Rwanda’s aims for 2020 in later posts). I wonder what will be the implications of these visions for education.

Another example: I was at the market the other day. The “market” – a huge, open-air hodgepodge of produce and grain stands – is where I go to get pretty much everything I eat, because a) I am on a budget as tight as leggings too often worn as pants in the South, and b) everything is straight from the soil, straight from the cow, straight from the tree, straight from the chicken. It’s fresh and delicious (see produce assortment fresh off the stands in the pic). The market is set up where each vendor has his or her own stand, squished next to the neighboring vendor to the point where you don’t know which of them is selling the tomatoes in front of you. Hundreds of vendors, hundreds of people, lots of noise. Lots of people grabbing your arm, putting dirty carrots in your face to make you want to buy them, lots of “Sister! Sister! Come here!”. The market doesn’t end at food. There are unlit aisles and twists and turns with everything that you could ever want – underwear (second-hand, baby), plastic chairs, fake flowers, detergent, pots, baskets, fabrics, with no particular scheme of order. Let’s just say that a trip to the market demands energy and focus.

So I was walking around, bargaining, brushing up against people, squeezing through impossibly small crevices, and I was being followed. This guy doing the following this time was familiar (I’ve been here for a little over 2 months, so I’m recognizing vendors’ faces and they’re recognizing mine). He had stepped away from his vegetable stand. This guy was probably about 17 or 18. “Customer, customer, I have tomatoes, mangos, oranges, broccoli.” If I so much as glanced at another vendor’s stuff, I would hear him behind me: “Customer! Stop. I have that. Come to see me.” Sigh. I remembered this guy had tried to rip me off (I’m a filthy rich chick, remember?) a few visits ago, but I thought I’d try again. I now know exactly how much I should be charged for different things, so I decided to bargain.

I was carrying a heavy bag full of freshly-purchased fruits and veggies, and I had just spent a good amount of time being overcharged, negotiating, refusing, accepting. The guy had some baby green peppers. He held up 6 to me. “Fourteen-hundred,” he said. “Good price.” That would be 1400 Rwandan francs. And let me tell you: I’m not stupid and I’ve bought enough green peppers now to know that each freakin’ green pepper should be about 50 francs. So 300 francs for those 6 green peppers. I don’t know what happened to me, but I lost it.

“Okay kid, what’s your name?”

“T.I.”

“T.I. like the rapper?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. But what’s your real name? The name your mamma gave you.”

“T.I. Because I like his rap.”

I gave up on that one.

“Look, T.I.,” I said, “I’m going to be in this country for a long time. I’ve already been coming to this market for 2 months. I’ve seen you a lot. Don’t you think I know that 1400 francs is way too much money for peppers?”

“Yes, Customer, yes.”

“Let me tell you something, T.I. If you want to make money from anyone, umuzungus [white people] or not, you are not going to make money by ripping people off. I know you want a lot of money right away, but it’s better for you to be fair and make money overtime from people who know you’re fair. If you overcharge, people will remember that and they will not come back to you. I don’t have a lot of money, so I am going to go buy things from people who are fair to me.”

He understood exactly what I had said.

“Yes, Customer, yes. I know. You are right. I am sorry, I’m so sorry. The peppers are 300, next time even 200 francs.”

“Thank you. And another thing. My name is not Customer. My name is Grace.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He offered to carry all of my bags. He offered to take me around and help me find things for the rest of my time at the market, saying “I’m sorry for being unfair” every 30 seconds. He offered to translate for me as I made purchases. He walked all of my stuff out to the car. He shut the door after I got in the car, and he wouldn’t accept a payment for his help.

“You will come back to me next time,” he said.

“Yes, I will come back to you next time.”

“Bye, Customer!” he shouted as we drove away.

“Grace.” Whatever, he got the point.

This is just a small example of short-term thinking. I want money, and I want as much as I can get from this person. The thought just didn’t enter his mind that I wouldn’t come back to him in the future if he ripped me off now.

Here’s another example: the HIV/AIDS Women’s Cooperative, a PFR initiative. Right now, the staff is training the women to be self-sufficient. All 35 of the women were infected with HIV/AIDS as victims of rape during the genocide, and all of them lost their husbands. They are some of the most incredible women I’ve ever met. PFR staff train them to sew (see the last 2 photos in this post) and create handicraft items, like baskets, purses, laptop cases, etc. which they sell both domestically and overseas. One of the things I’m working on is improving the marketability of the goods and expanding the number of markets for their goods. The 35 women are divided into 5 groups of 7 women each. Each group shares income, has regular meetings together, and has a savings account.

Savings accounts. Definitely a form of long-term planning. PFR does a great job of talking to the women about the importance of savings, but this is a concept that’s difficult to grasp for the women in a land of subsistence farming. I need to put food on the table for my family, so why am I saving the money I have? I need to buy food today. Yes, you need to spend, but you can save at the same time. Dependency tends to create a mentality of “I have it now, so I’m going to spend it all. They’ll give me more when I need it.” This is a dangerous thought process for any individual, group, or nation to have.

Same thing in the villages. If PFR gives 45 families in a Reconciliation Village a goat for sustenance, the last thing we want each family to do is kill the goat that very night and have a very nice protein-filled dinner. No, we want them to breed the goats to produce offspring, to give to other families in the cooperative and in the village. These offspring can in turn keep breeding. Pretty soon we have an unlimited population of goats and abundance of meat. Sometimes people just don’t think of breeding before eating. It’s the sustainability factor, the long-term thinking. The Reconciliation Village pictured in the second and third images has been particularly successful in thinking long-term (the first of these images depicts a mind-boggling expanse of cassava, a starchy root full of nutrients - I eat it practically every day; the second image shows the inside of one of the houses in the village).

One of the things that’s made Rwanda such a success story is the demonstrated ability of individuals and entire communities to put aside the natural inclination to revenge, and to embrace reconciliation in its place. This is a pure form of acknowledging long-term consequences. In doing so, these individuals and communities recognize the long-term gain of peaceful communities, and they’re willing to sacrifice the short-term individual gratification that comes from “just desserts.” To keep this mentality of prudence alive, we have to make a conscious effort to fight the mentality of dependency.

Remember Liu Xiaobo, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his writing on injustices in China? His words ring true in Rwanda:

“For hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.”