Monday, March 10, 2014

Umuganda

On the last Saturday morning of each month, the whole country shuts down. Cars are not allowed to drive after 8 am and the community is expected to gather together to clean the public places in the neighborhood in an event called Umuganda. Afterwards, there is a community meeting. Tim and I woke up early on Saturday and wandered out into the deserted street. A block away from our residence we found a crowd of people "working". By working I mean there was about 5 people with machete's cutting grass and about 50 people standing around in the street watching. Every minute or 2, the machete would be passed off to someone else, so everyone could participate. We slowly worked our way down the street "making improvements". We live in a very well kept neighborhood to begin with because the national stadium is a block away, so it is generally kept up by the city, so there was not really a lot if actual work to be done. One of the nuns for the center where we live was there too, and it was funny to see her with a pair of hedge clippers snipping here and there at a already perfectly manicured hedge that someone, moments before, had already trimmed. It was nice to see more people from our specific neighborhood, the event is more about socializing than anything else since the entire city/country is shut down and there is nothig else to do, but also because there is not that much real work to be done, so everyone just chats. It looks a lot like American construction work. Afterwards, we wound up in a school playground for the meeting. Everyone was just lounging around on the grass for a while, goofing off because we were actually locked into the compound. Everyone had to go into the playground and then the umuganda guards/security officers in charge of our area locked the gates because democracy was to be had damn it! The meeting was interesting, we were with a priest who translated for us and it was a lot of community announcements like they needed volunteers for a parents committee and things like that, more importantly, the neighborhood was going to elect, by vote,  people for a few positions associated with this event. However, some people there were not strictly part of, aka they did not live, within the bounds of the neighborhood, so at 11:30 when umuganda officially ended they were released and free to go while he rest of us stayed to vote. A rable-rouser shortly before 11:30 had made a big stink about people not in the neighborhood voting and had insisted everyone who lived there move to a different area of the school ground so as not to include these other people. The voting was interesting. Tim and I didn't understand the campaign speeches people were giving, but we were voting on 4 or 5 different positions, only 1 position however was there any opposition with more than 1 candidate. After the speeches, the candidate(s) stood with their back to the crowd and people lined up behind the person they were voting for to form, in essence, a living bar graph. I have never voted in that manner before. I found it interesting that, while those who did not live specifically within the peramiters were discouraged from voting, Tim and I were welcomed to vote. To be fair, we technically live in the neighborhood, but neither of us felt as if our voice/vote should count because we really aren't part of the neighborhood, we aren't even citizens of the country, but even though we looked different and were the most obviously not actually connected to umuganda (we are actually exempt from participating) we were welcomed to the vote. Someone joked about this being our chanced to participate in democracy, and I joked back that it's not like our country hasn't been doing that for hundreds of years now.