chickens

This past weekend Corrie and I went to a church in North-Eastern Rwanda. Our muzungu friend Travis was preaching at our Rwandan friend John's church.

Here's Travis preaching:

And here's Corrie telling her story, with Pastor John translating:


















After the full-day service we ate a meal with the pastors and John said, "we have some chicken for you to take home." It wasn't until we got to the car that someone thought to ask, "are they alive or dead?" "Alive, of course." Of course.

We had some great grilled chicken a couple nights later at Travis' place.

non-conventional development indicators

A friend here has been keeping a list of non-conventional development indicators. Looking past GDP per capita -- how can we see if the country is really improving? Here are some of my own:

Hats. I love seeing men in the countryside wearing hats. A hat is a non-necessity, a vanity item. In the wealthier areas of Rwanda you see lots of them; fewer in the areas with less-fertile land. I like it when a man thinks his head is worth putting a hat on.

Sidewalks. Sidewalks say, "I care about pedestrians. I want them to live." For the most part, human life isn't considered very valuable here, but Kigali is putting in sidewalks on a few of the busiest roads. They make me smile.

Crossing Guards. You wouldn't believe it, but there's a school near a busy road where a cop actually stops traffic when school lets out. (Okay, maybe you would believe it, if you haven't lived here.) It's my favorite thing in Rwanda.

Scout Uniforms. I saw kids in a village wearing scout uniforms the other day. And I knew right away that they had something to do after school.

Smile-to-Stare Ratio. Rwandans love to stare at me. If they smile instead, I figure they're probably better off. I have not yet performed a formal study to quantify the relationship between the S2S ratio and GDP.

have you bought your rwandan coffee?

There may not be a Starbucks coffee in Rwanda, but now there's Rwandan coffee in Starbucks.

Trouble is they're only selling it at a few stores, and only for two months. Apparently the beans are flying off the shelves, but Rwanda can't produce enough high-quality coffee to meet demand from a behemoth like Starbucks (with revenues 4 times the GDP of Rwanda, by the way).

So get it while it lasts. Only $26/pound. Or $5/pound if you come visit us.

i am a commodity

I've heard that the job market has really improved for MBAs. When I finished business school in 2004 it was pretty tough to find a job. It was worse in 2003 but much better in 2005; I hear that folks finishing this spring are stacking up the offers.

And I realized that we MBAs are like corn.

Corn is a commodity -- you can buy it by the pound and you don't much care whether you get one ear or the other, so long as they're of the same quality. It's just corn.

Same seems to be true of MBAs. My salary depends more on the supply and demand relationship for MBAs than on my own special ability to create wealth for my employer. But aren't I an individual? Aren't I unique and irreplaceable?

Apparently not. $100K of school loans and I'm just another ear of corn. You might pull back my husk for a second to make sure I'm not rotten, but then you chuck me in your cart with the others.

But the good news is it's a good year for corn.

river's end

Apparently the Nile begins in Rwanda. This group of explorers was willing to battle rebel groups to find it.

Add it to the tourist attractions here.

death

Three immediate family members of our friends here have died in the past five days. This is common here but it's still hard to stomach, hard to understand how much death is part of life.

I spent a month in Iraq a couple of years ago, and spending each day at high risk of getting shot changed my perspective on death. I learned to fear death less, to accept its eventuality.

But it's different here. Death is so much less dramatic, and somehow correspondingly more tragic. There's no war, no cause to die for, no way of imagining there's a purpose to it. Instead, it's always some stupid illness that could have been cured easily. It's that somebody didn't go to the hospital soon enough or that they got misdiagnosed by a too-busy, inexperienced doctor. And then it was too late.

The life expectancy here is 38 years. About half what it is in the States. Here, death is part of life.

And this week flags are at half mast in memory of the genocide.

a week to pray for rwanda

Today begins the Week of Mourning -- a rememberance of the genocide that occurred here 12 years ago. In just 100 days of war, 10% of Rwanda's population was killed.

Everyone lost someone, and this week is a time to reflect, remember, and look to the future.

We are praying for Rwanda today.

poor people's diseases

Here's a great NYT article which discusses some of the challenges we face trying to treat "poor people's diseases."

It discusses the difficulties of funding research for cures of diseases that don't kill people in rich countries, like malaria and TB.

(It does not discuss the ways that our five collective bouts with malaria this year may have impacted the market for artemisinin-based combination therapy in Rwanda.)