This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective.
You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out.
A pleasant discovery while I was in Rwanda was that people in my village basically ate no meat. Here are some samples of conversations I had:
Me: How often do you eat meat in your household?
Them: Two
Me: Two times per week or per month?
Them: Two times per year.
—
Me: How often do you eat meat in your household?
Them: Laughing and gesturing at my interpreter.
My translator: They’re saying that you’re being ridiculous. Do you see how poor they are? How could they afford meat!
The only people I met who ate dairy products regularly were people who had their own cow or the one family I met who was wealthy enough to have a television and a couch. The only people who ate eggs had a handful of their own chickens (you can read more about how they were treated here).
When I was learning about their various holidays, they described something that I’d only seen in museums but is still running strong in Rwanda. In the past British people would participate in a joint savings group where everybody in the group would contribute a small amount each week to a collective pot so that they could afford a turkey on Christmas day. This is done the same way in Rwanda except that people start saving in January so that they can slaughter a cow for a feast on the New Year’s Eve of the following year.
Overall, I updated substantially away from the concern about the poor meat-eater problem.
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