Toy Story, Burundi-Style (1)

On bike rides in the hills outside of Bujumbura, I get a fun look at what kids in a developing country come up with for toys.

Ain't no Toys R Us here, no hobby shops.  There's no Radio Shacks selling remote controlled this and Nintendo that.  'Bout the only toy-type stuff available is Chinese-made, plastic, and cheap.  But most kids can't afford even that.

Which is where imagination, and a little ingenuity, comes in handy.

In Burundi, all a kid needs to have fun is a discarded wheel or some rubbish.  The wheel gets simply rolled down the road, the kid pushing it along adeptly with a stick; think those line drawings of girls in frilly dresses rolling hoops around in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century American novels.  The rubbish - some wire, perhaps, along with a few bottle caps and a bit of old styrofoam - gets turned into a small toy car or truck.

Recently, though, a saw a couple kids who went even simpler than that.  They made their fun out of nature.

I was riding a dirt road I hadn't set tires on before.  About an hour up from Bujumbura's university-on-the-hill, I took a left heading down toward a large school complex atop a valley knoll.  After dropping in past the school, I reached a river and decided to turn around.  

(The road continues, I think, to the mountain town of Bugarama, a back-country hill route that avoids the busy paved highway.  Can't wait to ride it...)

By that time there were, as often happens, a few kids running along behind me.  I was in a hurry to make my U-turn and get back home, so I didn't pay them much attention.  That is, until I saw something that made my camera appear lickety-split.

Attracting the attention of my lens was a rather unusual toy: a live beetle on a stick!

Who needs radio controlled cars and personal video consoles?  In Burundi, if you got a beetle, you happy.  Flapping wings included, no batteries necessary.

(Stay tuned for more Toy Story installments.)