another sunday by the pool

Sunday by the pool in Kigali offers the chance to cool down from the relentless heat of rainless days: swimming slow lengths, sitting in white wicker chairs under green shade umbrellas, watching the eucalyptus and palm swaying in the soft morning breeze and listening to children cheerfully shouting in the water. I’m appreciating the refuge from the heat and the dusty streets filled with children giggling and laughing at the ‘muzungu’, wanting to touch, demanding money and chocolate. All week long, a gauntlet of uniformed children of all sizes, all staring, pinching, and generally behaving with a rudeness they wouldn’t show their parents. All week long, crowded commuter buses and dangerous motos, rush hour exhaust clogging the lungs. Here, it’s easy to turn away from all that.

Here, nothing but a parking lot filled with SUVs, a pool filled with black and white children chattering in French and English and Kinyarwanda, sodas and beef brochettes and french fries with mayonnaise in the Belgium style. The SUV’s have come from gated homes where the housegirl (who in fact has left girlhood behind many tiring years ago) sweeps the tiled verandahs at five thirty in the morning, and then makes breakfast and dresses the children in their new weekend sportswear, tucks their swimsuits into a cloth bag that madame tosses into the car. The houseboy opens the gate, the car roars out, the houseboy closes the gate and gets on with clipping the hedges.

The SUV slowly moves down potholed roads through air so thick with dust that it is tinged red. The hills across the valley are barely visible. On the roadside, women with trays of avocadoes on their heads, men moving quickly to keep their loads of lumber balanced, children with jerry cans of water from the communal tank. Past groups of people chatting in shop doorways, moto-taxi drivers lounging and laughing as they wait for customers, past the shoe repair man and the seamstresses with their sewing machines, and the women selling second hand clothes. Past people doing their morning clothes washing just outside their door which is on the edge of the road, and a man standing in the street wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, brushing his teeth and chatting to a neighbour. The SUV drives through the whole damn neighbourhood, the children playing football with a ball made of compressed plastic bags, children with whom the children in the SUV never play. Those are poor children, dirty and ignorant and simple.

When you climb out of poverty here you don’t look back. You distance yourself from the poor. You never want to walk again, you have left behind the long treks to the river for water and meals of nothing but plantain and cassava and tomatoes. You have left behind hunger. If the water in your newly tiled bathroom fails, you can send your boy to the communal tank but you yourself are finished with all that. Your eyes are fixed steadily on Rwanda’s bright future, on developing the country and your role in it, on looking smart in your weekend casuals or your black suits and fancy dresses. At the pool you can think about your career, you can play with your kids and your I-phone. Here there are no dirty shorts, no torn-t-shirts stained with the sweat, no broken flip-flops.

An English friend once asked a group of professional Rwandan women if they ever thought about the lives of the women who were looking after their homes and children, if they ever wondered who was looking after those women’s children. Why would we think about them, they answered her, puzzled. A Rwandan friend said, you wouldn’t believe how Rwandans treat their servants, ordering them around, never a kind word.

Why think about those who are building this new Rwanda, the armies of workers digging fibre optic cables, carrying loads of cement on heads and shoulders to building sites, sweeping the red dirt from curbsides and raking leaves off grassy boulevards on which no-one is allowed to walk? Why wonder about the life of the man who pushes his bicycle uphill, loaded with a five-foot high sack of carrots, or the black dusted men unloading the charcoal trucks, or the women selling tomatoes and onions and stinky fish on the sidewalk until the authorities tell them they can no longer sell on the street? Why think about the life of the woman dressed in a hotel uniform who serves the guest breakfast, lunch and dinner, working from dawn until late into the night, day after day? Why care about the people, who used to tend their banana trees and tether their goats where yet another treeless development of monster houses is rising on the hillsides around Kigali?

It is not so simple of course. Middle class Rwandans might say to me, we are giving jobs. In your country, gates are opened electronically, automatic machines wash and dry your clothes, electric gadgets make cooking easy. And I know people whose house help is like family, who grieve when a houseboy loses a family member, who help people go to school, to get a job, to move forward in life. We, ourselves, have had to learn to live with a house guard who also washes our laundry and our floors. We didn’t want this young man to complicate our lives by living in a shed in our back yard, but he was grateful for the job and a place to live while completing secondary school. Everyone tells him he is lucky because his ‘bossi’ is musungu, and musungu might help you. Which we do, paying for English lessons and driving lessons so that he, an orphan child, might have a way to support himself. Unknowingly, by choosing to ‘be social’ with him, we have tangled ourselves up in some complex social obligations that we barely understand.

We don’t have a car or hot water. We cook for ourselves on a two burner electric hotplate. We walk, we take buses and motos and the occasional taxi late at night. We endure the close observation we receive on the street; we see the city directly, unlike a large percentage of the ex-pat community that lives in homes like the ones they had back in England or Australia and look only through the windows of moving vehicles. We are living on salaries based on local rates. All this can make us feel virtuous, but that’s a false pride. We have passports, we have had the opportunity to come here; we have choices that are impossible for most Rwandans. We own a home in Canada. It’s not a problem for us to pay 6,000 Rwandan francs (ten dollars) to sit by the pool on a Sunday morning, enjoying the friendly family atmosphere, just like everyone else who is here with us this morning.

Sunday by the pool, if you are lucky enough to be here, is a time to contemplate what really matters, the choices that have been made, the choices that can be made, the direction one wants to lean towards.