This week saw lots of good food, progress in the community on both sides of the project, and one frustrating knitting machine.

Daily Breakdown

On Tuesday, we spent most of the day sitting in the office doing cooperative research and writing the last blog post (whoa, blog-ception). If you’ve read it you’ll understand why this was such a large task. Besides that, Sarah and Rachel realized that one tiny latch on one of the 100 tiny hooks was missing, rendering the entire enormous knitting machine pretty much useless.

After work, we wandered around Kigali and found a cafe called Neo; we then returned to chez Theó for a delicious dinner of chapati, vegetables, and traditional spinach-groundnut sauce.

As usual, we started out Wednesday with a training. Sarah and Rachel began to teach ribbing (which is used at the bottom of hats/sweaters, cuffs of sleeves, collars) which many of the women picked up crazy fast. There continues to be a divide, however, between those who are progressing quickly and those who are stuck on only knitting; for some reason, those left behind tend to be the women with orange yarn — possibly due to Sarah and Rachel’s aversion to the color orange? This training was unique in that we mainly waited for the women to call on us for knitting help, rather than constantly helping, as they got in dat knitting groove, hayyy. Connor and Hannah spent time speaking with Providence, the cooperative president and treasurer and backbone, basically. With Nadeg’s help, they discussed Providence’s gain from cooperative trainings that she had attended, including how to effectively communicate to the cooperative and possible changes to the division of roles; Hannah and Connor also asked if she felt that the cooperative could benefit from their help in communicating the fruits of their business training, and she responded positively.

After the training, Connor and Hannah worked on a write-up of what they learned about the current cooperative structure. Hannah and Sarah headed to a coffee shop to work while Connor and Rachel went on a walking adventure that took them through a socio-economically diverse assortment of neighborhoods, starting at the golf course behind the Manor Hotel, which is located in the wealthiest neighborhood that we have seen in Rwanda. As we walked around the golf course, Connor was attacked by an adorable child in school clothes who, in his excitement to see Umunzungus, forgot to stop running as he crashed into/hugged Connor’s leg; that elicited some giggles. Then we continued uphill and noticed the drastic transition from the perfectly green golf course into weeded and overgrown land that, according to Google Maps, was previously part of the well-trimmed course. We progressed through a “more authentic” neighborhood with significantly smaller houses than the previous neighborhood. Here, we greeted basically everyone we saw until we came across an art gallery called Ivuka that overlooks the barren golf course. One of the artists encouraged us to come into the gallery of paintings and showed us the studio, where we talked to some of the other artists. Connor concluded that the Kigali art scene is poppin’ and, despite asking a few times, we never found out what had happened to the golf course. Connor and Rachel ended the walk at Mezze Fresh, the “Chipotle of Kigali” to be joined by Julie, Hannah, and Sarah.

To prepare for the Thursday debrief… here’s some much needed inspiration:

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that will not work.” – Thomas Edison

Our biggest accomplishment Thursday is that we can confidently say we figured out several ways not to get a knitting machine fixed.

Sarah came down ill Thursday and wasn’t with us for the events that follow. Fortunately, she made a speedy recovery; as Sarah is very goal driven, we like to hope she took at least a little comfort in knowing she was sick the day we accomplished nothing.

Last week, our knitting interns discovered a small problem with the knitting machine we purchased. The machine is missing a small latch that causes a gap in any knitting project. It’s a bit like buying a piano and finding out it is missing the key for middle C. Not a huge deal, unless you are trying to play music.

The previous morning, our co-worker Claude had called up the place where we purchased the knitting machine. They directed him to a place we could get it fixed in a more distant area of Kigali known as Nyamirambo, so on Thursday morning we geared up for the trek to Nyamirambo… hoping to leave by 9 AM. Our departure ended up getting pushed back a bit, but we are pretty sure we were on the road no later than 1:45 PM. We took turns carrying the slab of granite heavy knitting machine to the bus stop and boarded the crowded public bus. Two buses, and about an hour later, we reached Nyamirambo.

According to our housemate Yannick, the red dirt roads and many shops of Nyamirambo contain a unique treasure of Kigali affectionally called “The Big Fish.” This deleight for your belly is a full tilipia served cut in half, as long as an NBA player’s arm, and big enough for two people. Unfortunately, we were only in Nyamirambo for business, and had to leave our salivating mouths wanting as we lugged the oak tree heavy knitting machine through the streets.

After asking for directions multiple times and our arms telling us in no uncertain terms why it might be a good idea to frequent the gym more often, we made it to the shop we were looking for.

It was closed. And had been for at least a week. From what Claude could gather, the shop owner had a death in her family and had closed up shop for a while.

One of the nearby shop owners told Claude there was a place in Town (the Rwandan way of denoting downtown / uptown / centeroftown / placewithbigbuildings) where we might be able to get our 1990s rear projection television heavy knitting machine fixed.

We trekked back to a main street, hailed a bus, and settled down for the thirty minute ride to town. This was followed by some more walking, more colorful protests from our arm muscles, and more asking for directions.  Finally, we made it to the next shop, optimistic the fix we were looking for was in sight.

This shop was also closed. Oh.

Claude did his magic and found the number for the shop owner from someone nearby. He called, and the owner agreed to come by. Twenty minutes later a French woman showed up. Turns out the shop is actually a sewing school. Unfortunately, sewing is not the same as knitting. She couldn’t fix our knitting machine. She said someone else who works there has a slight chance of knowing how to fix it. This person wasn’t there that day. She gave us a number to call in the future.

Discouraged, and approaching the late hours of the afternoon, we lugged our Rwandan mountain gorilla heavy knitting machine back to the bus stop for one last ride back to the office.

This much can be said in favor of Rwandan public transport: it’s friends with our wallet! For 200 RFW ($0.28 USD) you can hop on a bus and hop off at any point you wish along the route. However, it’s not all sunshine and butterflies; the affordable price in dollars comes with an occasionally more frustrating price in a currency we Americans tend to value so greatly: time.

To take a taxi from this bus stop to HDI would take no more than fifteen minutes. Our bus took an hour and a half. Ninety full minutes of minimal personal space, body heat, and frequent stops. Perhaps it was just an optical illusion, but several members of our team swear they glanced out of the window and literally saw us moving backward. Some of our coworkers commute by bus everyday, traveling in over an hour what a car could do in a quarter of the time. As hard as it was for us not to be frustrated after that bus ride, who are we to be frustrated after making the journey merely a single time?

And besides, as Claude previously mentioned about public transport, how can we say we’ve tried to immerse ourselves in the local culture if we don’t experience traveling the way locals do? And so while the day didn’t turn out as we had hoped, and our knitting machine is still broken, it was still a day we are strangely glad to have experienced.

We got back to the office and took ourselves and Claude out for some ice cream to reward ourselves for our patience.

On Friday, we had our fifth training. Hannah and Connor pulled three of the cooperative members–Claudine, Adelfin, and Angelique–as well as our wonderful translator Nadeg, to talk about a selling training they had been to the day before. The cooperative is currently transitioning to a new structure with the leadership and duties more divided than before, and these three women are some of the ones taking on larger roles moving forward. The goal of this discussion was to find out what they learned at the training and to develop a plan for presenting this information to the whole cooperative together.

On the knitting side, Sarah and Rachel were able to start a few of the women on double pointed needles, used for making round products like hats and socks. Claude stayed with the knitters, and the mood was casual and friendly, probably because of Claude’s close relationship with the community. One younger woman, Josefa, asked Sarah and Rachel (through Claude’s translation) about family planning and marginalized peoples in the US; it was unclear if Josefa had described her own community as “marginalized” or if this was Claude’s word choice. We told Claude about Native Americans in the US and related their experience to that of the Community of Potters.

This Week’s Business Shenanigans 

In talking with a few of the leaders of the cooperative (i.e. Providence, Claudine, Adelphine, and Angelique) we’ve gotten a better idea of the nature of cooperative practices and the ways in which they are changing. The city of Kigali is sponsoring two series of trainings for cooperative members that the women have been attending for their respective areas of interest/speciality. As they are returning from these trainings, we’re doing our best to help them transfer the knowledge they received to the rest of the cooperative members. This will ideally help promote and preserve a sense of collective ownership amongst the members, something they seem to be lacking.

Look, basically, we’re entering into this community at a pretty dynamic time for the cooperative. They’re diversifying their skillset, dedicating 9-12 hours a week to knitting trainings (not to mention outside skill practice), attending trainings that continue to change the way they view themselves as individuals and as a cooperative, and beginning to implement subsequent changes in their leadership structure and financial setup. It’s a lot. What we (we here meaning Hannah and Connor, as Sarah and Rachel have a more defined niche in this project) are trying to decipher is where we can be of most utility to the cooperative and their income-generating model. A lot of this has involved reckoning with ego and coming to terms with the fact that we may play more of a facilitating/organizing role within the cooperative’s transition process, or that we may be the eyes and ears of HDI on the ground to record cooperative proceedings and more effectively relay COPHAD-relevant knowledge.

It’s been a difficult process for us — we rely on translators for communication, and so much of what can make or break the transition process is identified in the nuances of how cooperative members interact, which we don’t have access to outside of body language. That being said, we are all very invested in this project and don’t shy away from the challenge of doing all we can to contribute to its success. As is apparent based on the soon-to-be-hats slowly emerging from the women’s knitting needles, progress is being made.

More Cultural Differences

We continue to notice differences in culture as we spend more time here in Rwanda. Claude invited us to his sister-in-law’s wedding next weekend, which we are super excited about, but we really have no idea what type of gift is expected/appropriate because nobody will tell us. HELP! When asking our coworkers about this dilemma, as well as just about anything else, we have received quite indirect answers. It is somewhat frustrating trying to decode this, as we aren’t getting the kind of feedback that we expected. In many American internships, it is easy to figure out where one stands because both positive and negative actions and behaviors are pointed out continuously. In our case, most of the HDI employees are less able to comment on the content of our workshops because they don’t know much about knitting, but we would love more feedback regarding cultural appropriateness and any other observations made. It may be that they are presenting all of this information in the Rwandan way and we just aren’t recognizing it, but either way we are struggling to broach the cultural gap.

Up Next

Another post is coming about our weekend in Gisenyi, a town on (the potentially explosive) Lake Kivu. We’re continuing trainings throughout the upcoming week, and we will be accompanied in the field by a representative from a Swedish NGO, Sergio, who plans to form a partnership with HDI. Hopefully the knitting machine story will take a turn for the better. Lastly, we are pumped for the wedding this weekend!

— HDI Team