How often do people in rural Rwanda eat meat?

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. 
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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. 
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Overall, I updated substantially away from the concern about the poor meat-eater problem. 

If you liked this post you might also like:

• The full series on my research in Rwanda
• What’s it like living in a benevolent dictatorship? My experience in Rwanda
• “Do you eat cats in Canada?” and other interesting conversations I had in Rwanda
• Why you shouldn’t trust developing world surveys, including the one I did