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…