Local oranges are always green on the outside, and orange-colored imports can only be found in Kigali for six to ten times the price. So this little gem really stood out in the Rubona market. Can't someone plant the seed of this bright outsider and make more of them? I suppose that is not how it works. I met a Kigali man in a shop who was visiting his friends who were on a business trip from Kigali. "What are they doing here?" I asked. They live in Kigali but apparently come to Rubona and the surrounding towns, collect locally grown food, and re-sell it on market day in different rural markets, including here in Rubona. The day of the markets change, so it's possible to work a few days a week. They work professorially in resale.
I asked him, "Why are foods so much cheaper in the early morning?" My catering friend Joseph said what I already thought - because who wants to get up at 5am? Demand must be lower around that time of day. But this Kigali salesman - he personally sells second-hand clothes in Kigali - said that farmers are the ones who generally sell at such early hours, while the rest of the day is filled with salesmen like his friends, who live off the income they make from selling and so are less flexible. Subsistence farmers sell to get a bit of pocket change, was more or less what this man said, and so don't care to much if they are charging a bit below market value. I don't know how much logic there is in this explanation, but it's interesting to know that's what he thinks. Another explanation I have heard before is that those coming from outside Rubona show up later in the day, and also pay for fuel costs, so the extra expense raises the price.
Oddly, in Kigali, the large super markets only sell the pricey orange orange imports. I guess wealthy elites who frequent these establishments value orange outsides six times as much as the green siblings in the countryside.
Green oranges are not a different variety than orange oranges. They are just picked before they turn orange. In the US, they only sell oranges that have already turned orange, and most people assume that green oranges are not ripe and would not taste good. I certainly thought that when I lived in the US. But in Israel they often sell green oranges, and I discovered the first time I ate one (at the company cafeteria at GE Medical Systems) that they are perfectly ripe, and orange-colored, inside, and taste fine. I assume that, if the customers know that, it is better to pick them green, since they will have a longer shelf life. Maybe the people in Kigali, who buy orange oranges at the supermarket, are doing it as a way of showing off that they can afford to pay so much for them, as a kind of status symbol.
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