And just when you thought it was safe to enter the office...

Its 11:05, I’ve been in work for just over three hours. This is my day so far:

Visit to the Director of Finance (DF) to get him to sign an invoice for Microsoft. He already signed this yesterday and I sent it off but MS said I needed to address it them. So I come in early to find the DF. I get there and he asks for yesterdays copy, so I return to my office and bring it for him. He signs and destroys the first copy.

Now I need his secretary Milly to put the official stamp on the invoice so I can scan it and send it to MS to get the money to finish the survey that we are in the middle of…

Meanwhile, I need to see the Vice Rector Admin and Finance on some urgent matters relating to getting payment for my surveyors by next Monday. But he is ill so I return back to the DF for advice. He tells me I need to see Celestin the chief accountant about accounting for the Imprest (petty cash) they gave me last week so I make the request for the surveyors salary and more petty cash at the same time.

Celestin tells me I need to have a copy of the original payment slip to fill in the Imprest retirement form and that this should be with Milly. While I’m up in the accounts department I decide to check on my request for my flight home (a benefit of my contract) with the Procurement officer. I sent the request for my terminal benefits to the Director of Administration last week and she says she’s sent it on to all concerned. But Raymond, the procurement officer is not around, so I ask JB the purchasing officer for advice. Unfortunately he is more interested in getting me to go out for a drink with him and although he does help me speak to Raymond, I have to endure a bunch of shit from him about taking him for a drink. Some people just don’t recognise a big glaring NO when they see it.

So anyway Raymond hasn’t seen my flight request as yet and he suggests I follow it up with DA. When I go to see her, she isn’t in. So I go back down to Milly’s office, and luckily she is in this time. I get my letter stamped but she tells me that the payment slip is still with the cashier, Jean Baptist up in accounts! I trudge back up to accounts again to find out that Jean Baptist is at a workshop till tomorrow.

Final act of my ‘Asterix in house of insanity’ drama: Celestin tells me that there should be a copy of my payment slip, with the required cheque number, down in Milly’s office. We find it there and Celestin shows me how to fill out the Imprest retirement form, we return to his office and just when I think we are almost done, he tells me that the paperwork for my photocopying expenses is not correct. The recipts say “Bordereux d’expedition” and not “Facture”. So I run down to Secam, the photocopy joint, where they give me an identical piece of paper to the one I had, except it says “Facture” on the top. As an extra bonus I find both Raymond and the DAs secretary. My flight request is up for approval in the Director of Finance office, BUT I can already book my flight with on of the approved travel agencies.

As I settle down to a well deserved cup of tea, I try not to think about how none of the running around I’ve done this morning is actually part of my job. It’s the same all over the Rwandan public institutions, every single person has to do their own administration and so much time is wasted doing “non-work”. I thankful for tranquilizers…or I’d have been pretty angry by now.

Desperate Housegirls

Like a strange African version of Desperate Housewives, you might find it hard to believe what goes on with domestic staff around here. It might be a little weird to some of my readers who have never lived in a country where manual labour is dirt cheap, but you get quickly very accustomed to have domestic staff - to cook, to drive, to clean up after you, wash your clothes and do your gardening.

Most people have at least one live-in staff member, either the guard or the “housegirl”, or maybe both. My male friends have been telling me stories about the odd behaviours of some of their staff.

Take the case of Mr. A, happily married with two kids and wife all living in Kigali with him. He starts getting protestations of love from an unknown person over email. At first he thinks it’s a practical joke by one of his friends. Then the emails start to get a bit psycho (“I can’t live without you and I see you around with female friends. I don’t like it”) and very, very sexually explicit. Mr A was freaking out a bit by the end. He eventually found out that the emails were from a young woman he had engaged to give him language lesions!

Next is the case of Mr B and Ms C, who are expecting a baby. So they move from Ms C’s one room apartment, where they have been living, and move into a 3 bedroom house taking Ms C’s married cleaner, who has worked with Ms C for several years, with them to the new place. Ms C flies home a few months earlier to wait for the birth and Mr B stays to continue working. During this time he temporarily rents his spare room to Mr. D (single and on assignment in Kigali for a short time). Still with me?

Well, no sooner is Ms C out of the way than the cleaner starts leaving notes for Mr B declaring that she is madly in love with him. Mr B is a little perturbed and doesn’t know what he should do…he wonders how the heavily pregnant Ms C will take all this nonsense. So he goes out with Mr D to have a few beers and discuss the problem, only to find the cleaner has been making the same declarations of love to Mr D!

Sounds like the plot of a badly dubbed Spanish daytime soap? Nope…just another day on the weird side of life…

Kigali is short on entertainment so I’m engaging in some Prison Breaks

One of my particularities is that I can live without TV quite happily but when I do get some opportunity to watch, I tend to overdose. While in Kenya I brought the complete 2 seasons of Prison Break on a pirate DVD with Chinese subtitles. Most people know of the series about the brother of an innocent man on death row getting himself incarcerated in order to break them both out of jail.

On the surface, it sounds like a modern day remake of The Fugitive, except that the whole of the first series cleverly takes place in the closed world of the prison. The second series manhunt is more reminiscent of the Fugitive but in fact the whole franchise owes much to other, more modern sources...

It has LOST’s focus on a ensemble of characters and their multiple storylines, it has 24’s “one highly skilled man against the system, with insiders double crossing each other” and its breakneck pace. It has both 24 and LOST’s page turner endings and also has elements Big Brother in the “who is going to be eliminated next?” angle. There’s even a satellite tracking shot in the second series that could have been lifted directly from Google Earth and some close up eye shots straight out of Blairwitch. Despite its blatant derivative elements its pretty engrossing. At least when you live in central Africa.

Today’s Frivolities

Then I’m lunch just now, this guy comes and sits beside me. This is fairly standard in any restaurant when its busy – someone will just plonk themselves beside you without so much as an “is this seat free” or even a casual head nod or eye contact. But its almost 2:30pm, well off peak time and the canteen is pratically empty. So why has he sat beside me. He looks vaguely familiar, in the way most staff here do, but I don’t really know him…not even his name or in which department he works. He also greets me, which is again non standard. Perhaps he’s a foreigner (ie non Rwandan) or has grown up somewhere more friendly.

But after a brief pause he gets straight to his point.

“How can I get books from America?”

I mention Amazon and he says he has tried but can’t and maybe he needs to have an account or something. I tell him all he needs is access to a credit card. And of course he asks me if I can help him, if he gives me the money. I protest mildly, doesn’t he know anyone else with a credit card he can ask? (besides an almost complete stranger!). So he drops it. I’m quite wary these days of buying anything for people, unless its cash upfront and a little extra added for exchange rate losses. I have yet to hear of anyone getting refunded if they actually bring an item without being paid in full in advance.

Only three days back from almost 3 weeks out of Rwanda and I’m already getting cultural claustrophobia…everything seems much lighter and wider when I’m not in Rwanda.

So this morning, I’m doing my usual pathetic attempt at exercise by walking 5 minutes to the moto-taxis, instead of sending my guard/gardener out to bring one to the door. I walk past the “school of little assholes” near my house, whereupon 3 youths (early teens perhaps) jump out in front of me. Despite the fact they start in front of me they manage to get themselves positioned behind me and start making foolish noises, in what might be an attempt at English.

I’m totally fucked off with this kind of treatment in Rwanda, I think I maybe developing a phobia to teenagers. So on turning the corner on the top of my hill, I speak to the traffic cop who is usually in residence there and tell him to explain to the 3 boys that their behaviour is rude. I feel like a bit of an old granny, but it gives me some satisfaction and at least they scarper quickly rather than follow me all the way to the taxi stand.

Scams in Nairobi Airport

I had a hell of a layover in Jomo Kenyatta airport the other day, 6 hours waiting for a 1 hour flight, and after a night flight too. All because Rwanda, regional capital of all things ICT, has a national airline that cannot cope with the codeshare partners etickets. Hmph!

Instead of trying to find a comfortable piece of concrete on which to get some kip, I paid the 20$ and crashed out in one of the First Class lounges for a while. Admittedly part of this decision was in order to get away from an extremely grabby Indian colleague at KIST who also happened to be transiting through NBO that day. I’ve known him for most of my two years at KIST but at some point in the recent past, he has decided that its totally acceptable to handle me like some woman who hangs out at hotel bars looking for customers. Its really infuriating.

So after a while, I emerge from the refuge of the lounge to take a poke at the duty free shops. I run into grabby Indian talking with some other passenger in one of the main waiting areas. The other is a tall attractive guy with some kind of strangulated American accent who claims to be from Botswana. Neither his look or his accent fit with this, but who I am to judge?

He claimed to be held up on route to some UN job in Juba, South Sudan. He later said he’d missed a connection the day before and had slept in the airport. I thought at the time he looked remarkably fresh given that fact. I mentioned that Kenya Airways should have given him accommodation and he claims he knows that now but didn’t think to ask. So he toddles off and I check into the final waiting area – the one just before you board the flight.

Some time later, a lady working in the airport says I have a friend who wants to talk to me outside. I can see someone waving outside the glass but can’t see clearly who it is till I get back out past the hand luggage screening area. Its none other than our lost UN guy, claiming he has no money and can I lend him 2$ to check his email. Hmm…this was definitely being to feel like a scam.

On the other hand, many young Africans going to jobs or study abroad don’t have the means to travel with much cash, so they have no margin for error…if there’s a flight delay you go hungry, its not as if they have credit cards, bank cards, travellers cheques or a reverse charge call to home to use as back up! So I decide to err on the side of niceness and hand him 200 bob (200KES about $3.50). Then he asks for my email address, so I think maybe he is genuine…until I see where he asks me to write it. He presents the front page of the book he is reading, where there are scrawled at least half a dozen other email address in a haphazard fashion. Come to think of it the book looked pretty new too!

On the plane, I ask grabby Indian what the deal with the guy his. He says the guy told him that he actually got to Sudan but the paperwork wasn’t in order so he got thrown back.

“Work for UN and paper not in order?”, says the grabby Indian, “Impossible!”

So, two different stories, definitely a scam. Perhaps his final destination was Nairobi and hanging out at the airport for a while proved a lucrative venture. Wonder what he is going to do with my email address?

The "Liittle Princes" of Southern Africa

Some Caucasians from southern Africa are just plain assholes. So I’m getting into a pretty crowded Kenya Airways flight in Yaoundé to Nairobi. I have a bit of an oversized bag as I didn’t bring any check in luggage so I walk a bit down from my seat to find space in the overhead bins. I’m a bit tired and don’t really have a plan when I see some space behind a smaller bag that’s taking up a lot of needless space. Absentmindedly, I take down the bag and as I’m looking for some where to put it, I hear someone behind me hissing at me.

“Oi, put that back!”, I turned to see a rotund white guy with a southern African accent, South Africa probably but maybe Namibia or Zimbabwe, who knows.

A little later I thought perhaps a better way for this man to have approached this situation would have been to say “Excuse me, I’d like you to keep my bag where it is”. I wish I’d said something to that effect to him, instead I just said something about needing to find space, to which he replies “Well you don’t touch my bag, put it back”. God, so bloody rude and aggressive for no reason…and he is not the first white from that region with attitude. I wonder what kind of future can be for countries which such a high level of testiness.

One day at the bank....

So I'm queueing up to take some cash out of my dollar account for my impending voyages to Kenya and Cameroon and there's 3 Rwandan's at the counter.

One is speaking intermitantly in English, as is quite common here for those who grew up in Anglophone East Africa. Rwandans who grew up in Burundi and Congo liberally mix in French, Lingala and Swahili to their conversations. This guy then proceeds to say something about Europeans being happy with small families "I'll be like a European, two is enough for them".

I was pissed off. "Europeans", like "Africans", one singular job lot, all the same! Did he mean my sister with 4 kids, or my various cousins most of whom have at least 3? Did he mean Europeans in the sense of Germans, Central Russia, Immigrant families in France or what? Couldn't he wait to make his gross generalisations untill i was out of earshot? I get so sick of people here speaking as if I wasn't in the room.