Here's to many more years of dstv....

So I promised a couple of people I would write a blog again. Now this surprised me since I had no idea people were actually reading the thing. It is more a record of my insane thoughts, an electronic diary...something for the psychiatrist to refer to someday when they’re trying to prove me of unsound mind. 

Because you do know that poor folks like me will always be crazy, never eccentric...we’re not rich enough.

I don’t socialise as much as I used to - I watch a lot of dstv. A lot of it has to do with the fact that what I like to do hasn’t quite taken off in Rwanda yet...theatre, bookstores (Exclusives, exclusives wherefore art thou exclusives?), movie theatres (they’re building one at the moment but I think it is going to be a while before there will be a cinema nouveau) shopping (I can’t even find a shoe that fits..)  art galleries..

Now before you blanche and think I have exiled myself to some backwater...try to remember that Rwanda literally started from a zero base 17 years ago. What they have done has been more intellectual and economic. For art to grow you need leisure time, and they haven’t had a lot of that. They still don’t. Everything they have done and continue to do centres around stabilizing their economy, their politics, their safety..health...all of it basic human needs. A lot of foreigners who work here find it boring and scamper off to Uganda for a weekend for some fun. (I confess, even I have done it, on occasion.)

A friend and I travelled to Gisenyi recently for a timeout. It is right on Lake Kivu – beautiful, peaceful and smack on the DRC border. A place to kick back and chill.

But to get there from Kigali you have to travel through countless winding hills. I joked  that I was feeling horribly claustrophobic walled in by green hillsides for three hours and was likely to throw myself out of the car and roll down one, just for a change. I begged him to find a straight road longer than 100 meters before we hit another winding road around the next bend.

For its size, Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. You wouldn’t necessarily notice it, until you needed a pee while on the road and were desperately looking for a secluded bush to relieve yourself. Then you realise just how busy a rural road can be. People pop up behind every rock and crevasse. And they're all so bloody friendly. Makes getting on with your business a little difficult. I've never been comfortable having a conversation while peeing...even in a bathroom, let alone in the open air with my pants around my ankles. Yeesh...

Villages run into one another and every piece of available land, whether in a valley or perched against the steep side of hill, is cultivated – by hand. You see folks working a plantation where a mountain goat would think twice about going. No piece of machinery is going to make it up there, so they work the land themselves. Literally from dawn till dusk.

They haul their produce to the market by hand up the steepest inclines I have ever seen in makeshift wheelbarrows, or on the back of a bicycle – or more amazingly...on their heads. They work, work, work. They haul water, firewood, produce...At one point I broke down and wept at the sight of a little girl with strap around her forehead helping to hold up a full jerrycan of water on her back.

In Kigali, it is no different. They labour. I see women doing construction on roads, sweeping the roads (for gods sake) by hand with reed brooms. So where in this daily toil will there ever be time for art, theatre, and books for at least the next 5 to 10 years? Until they have foreign investment solid enough to mechanise functions, to improve their water and irrigation systems, transport systems so that they won’t have to get up at 4 in the morning to haul water and can stop work at 5 and get home before it is dark?

Many people thought I had lost my mind coming to Rwanda from a profitable career in JHB. Abandoning glossy Sandton for central Africa. And I will be honest...I wonder about that myself sometimes. But one thing is sure. I am learning something else here right now. Something for myself – that poverty doesn’t mean a loss of dignity. That because you don’t have modern conveniences that you have to lapse into filth and decay. That because your toilet doesn’t flush you don’t have to break it and demand a new one. You find a way to fix it ...yourself until someone else can.

But I am afraid for Rwanda. That this will change. Will that be a good thing? I don’t know. My heart says yes, that is a good thing for people NOT to labour like this. But my head also says NO.

Rwanda does not fulfil the west’s idea of democracy. So there are signs that it changing. Due to pressure from the west there has a relaxing of what was deemed more of a military state. Too much visible policing they say. Too much police for such a small country.

But the downside.....there are now muggings, house breakings, and you hear of what was unheard of in 17 years...random murder...street urchins harass you on street corners...money changers drive you crazy in the town centre until you would think yourself in Nairobi.

And the beggars on the street corners brazenly stepping up to you and saying...’’heh umzungu...gimme money...’’ and try to snatch your bag.

Is it as bad as JHB? No and not likely to be so for a long time. But it will be..in 10, 15 or 20 years from now.

So I assume soon there’ll be art. And the city will grow. There will be better education and construction and jobs and prosperity, more political parties and government bodies and manifestos and unions, and cinemas and theatres and more people and crime and poverty and misery and strikes.

And I will weep for another reason – for the little girl selling herself on a street corner, high on drugs and stumbling from alcohol.

And the safest city in the world won’t be that anymore.

Do I have an answer, no. A solution no.  I pray that the Government does. I pray that they intend to fulfil every promise they've made - that they'll reach every goal for safety and prosperity. Am i naive...probably.

But Rwanda’ll have joined the 21st century...and I will have a social life again.

I hope to be too old and senile by then to appreciate it.

xoxo

Sam