If you looked at the wall above my desk anytime over the last 3 years, you would have seen a small sticky note taped up with one simple phrase: “leave room for margins.” A coach and mentor of mine said this phrase to me during a particularly busy week, and I hastily scribbled it down. For years, it has stuck with me as a much-needed but seldom-followed reminder to slow down. However, I don’t think I truly understood it until coming to Rwanda.
As a lover of to-do lists and busy schedules, my go-to performance metric for life is productivity. However, this past month has taught me that the day should not be measured by how many checklist items you complete or the fullness of your schedule. Time is much more valuable than that, and the moments you leave open - the margins throughout the day - are often the most rewarding.
The month of March was a busy one for the Shooting Touch Rwanda team. Kicking off with a community basketball-for-equality day in Rilima, the month quickly shifted to preparation for the largest event of the year - International Women’s Day (IWD).
Planning for this event was a true team effort. Between Zoom calls, shared Google Docs, and lots of WhatsApp voice memos, everything came together. Madi and I edited and re-edited the schedule more times than I can count. Alex and I spent a few days researching the disproportionate impact of sexually transmitted infections and noncommunicable diseases on women in Rwanda, a topic I found both fascinating and astounding. I spent the better part of an afternoon buying paints and sheets for each court’s tournament banner, and in the final days of preparation, we planned a coaching clinic on basketball drills and expectations for the IWD event.
Once the day arrived, everything went relatively smoothly, and the event was deemed a success! It would be impossible to talk about the day without giving a well-deserved shout-out to Denise, our Community Engagement Coordinator for Kayonza District. Not only did she do most of the heavy lifting in preparation, but she also acted as MC for the entire day.
We started early with a 5 kilometer march to the court at Nyamirama, where the basketball competition began in earnest. The games were competitive, the crowds were cheering loudly, the guest speakers were engaging, and over 200 community members were screened for NCDs and STIs. One personal highlight of the day that stuck out to me was hosting high school students from the Noble and Greenough School in Boston, as it was a similar trip that originally brought me to Rwanda two years ago. The time I spent at a Shooting Touch court during my first visit to Rwanda left a lasting impression, and I hope this group of students had a similar experience throughout the weekend.
Even with a long to-do list this month, I still found moments of slowness that, while sometimes frustrating, offered me a chance to reflect on my approach to work and life. Hoping for the rain to stop so that I could find a moto to take me to practice, or watching the clock tick by while waiting for the last seat on the bus to be filled so it would finally depart from the station - these things can admittedly be infuriating. However, I am learning that here, you must be willing to take the day a little slower. No one around you cares about your productivity or self-imposed schedule, and quite frankly, it doesn’t really matter. You’ll get there when you get there.
Instead, it’s the people and the small moments that matter. It’s finding ways to converse with neighbors in a mix of broken English and Kinyarwanda, taking a few extra seconds to wait for the kids in the village to run to catch up to you, or laughing it off when a toddler sticks a finger up your nose on the bus. It’s spending a few extra minutes on the court after practice with our beneficiaries and spending time getting to know our incredible group of coaches. The small margins throughout the day leave time for these unplanned moments and interactions that I know I will look back on fondly.
Now that International Women’s Day is behind us, I am looking forward to a few weeks of calm and some travel mixed in before the pace picks up again. If you need me in the meantime, I can likely be found running in the valley, working from a cafe in Rwinkwavu, or reading my tenth book of the year! Sawa!
