Rwanda: Her Dream

Her dream is to have solar panels, lights and switches in her tidy brick house. The nights would no longer be lit by a gasoline lamp.

The house is big by some standards, with 4 bedrooms (one used for food storage, of a large basket of beans). The beds don’t have mattresses. The children need to carry them back from school, rolled into tight bundles, during holidays.

There is a traditional bathroom, which is nothing more than a concrete floor with a rectangular hole, and a traditional shower, a place to splash water from a bucket. These are next to the cow. When the cow moos, it sounds like she is in the house. And there is a calf in the kitchen, and some sheep, and 6 chickens.

By our standards, the solar wouldn’t cost much–about $400 for the whole kit and caboodle. But for her, she will need to save for at least several years. It is so far off, she still thinks of it as a dream.