Umuganda in Gikongoro

This afternoon, at approximately two o'clock, a government representative came to the project and told our administration department that we needed to send employees to Gikongoro for umuganda (a day of community service that takes place on the last Saturday of every month). This might be reasonable and almost logical if Gikongoro were a neighborhood nearby and if umuganda were in a week, except that neither of those facts are true. Gikongoro is three hours away in the southwest of Rwanda, and umuganda is tomorrow morning at eight o'clock! So we have had to arrange transport and find volunteers from each department to leave this afternoon to spend the night and most of the day tomorrow in Gikongoro. And yet no one except the expats seems particularly surprised or confused by this. I don't think I'll ever understand how an entire country can function on a system where everything is organized and executed at the very last minute.