Settling in in Bujumbura (31 July 2007)

It’s been a long time since our last “mailing.” We have now been in Burundi for almost two months. It took us 2 weeks to find a house and another week to move in, after which we did everything we could to make it a home. We have had it renovated (painted and fixed), had curtains and sofa covers made by a local tailor, bought a TV, stereo and a satellite dish, as well as equipped the kitchen. Speaking of kitchen, we have hired a cook. His name is Tarsus, he is in his late 20s, is married and has two little children. He comes 6 days a week, 8-16:30, and cooks and cleans.

With the house we also inherited a gardener, Charles, a man in his 40s, also married and with 6 children, the oldest one being 21 and the youngest one 3. Charles takes care of the garden and does the laundry (by hand!). As mandated by UN rules, we had to hire a security company and its three guards to keep us and the house safe. Two guards (Augustine and Bosco) work during the night, and one (Celestine) during the day. The night guards are quite young, while Celestine is 55. When they started we found out that they had not been paid in 3 months by their company. Outraged by this injustice, we changed security companies but kept the guards, making them quite visibly happy, especially after we told their former boss on the phone, in front of the guards, that we would pay for the 12 days we used their services only after they pay the guards for the 3 months they owe them.

Add to the mix two little cats, Siva (the girl) and Thor (the boy), and you should have an idea of what our household is like. The house is located on the biggest road in Bujumbura and is a walking distance from my office, which brings me to the next topic:
work.

I hate my internship. The work is quite boring and administrative in nature, with the exception of an article on peace agreements in Burundi I helped write for the organization’s magazine, which might be published in September. Now that the staff figured out I wasn’t the boss’s friend by any stretch of imagination, they commiserate with me and express their hope of finding another job. Unemployment is very high here putting them between the rock and the hard place. And on top of that, I’m beginning to think that ACCORD practices a very limited sort of conflict resolution. In fact, they call it management, and that’s all it is. I crave more bravery and innovation, as well as stimulation in my work. (beware of places like this, my ICAR friends!)

Elray’s work situation is somewhat better, though he is beginning to feel like a UN bureaucrat, unable to use his creativity or initiative. He attends endless meeting with chiefs of UN agencies in Burundi who, due to big egos and inertia, are incapable of cooperating with one another. He also has a very annoying and controlling coworker with whom he shares the office, making it that much harder to enjoy his job.

Bujumbura is not exactly the cultural capital of anything—there are no theatres, museums or art galleries that we know of. However, there are great restaurants. The great refers to the food, while service is notoriously slow. It takes an hour to get
food once you’ve ordered. But it’s delicious. The downtown is pretty run down, though vibrant. The main shopping street, Avenue de la Mission, has many little shops, textile, electronics, cosmetics, and in front of the shops sit tailors, male and female. We bought, for example, the material for curtains in one of those shops, and gave it to one of the tailors outside to
sow them.

I might have talked about this in one of the previous emails, but it’s worth mentioning again: there are NO traffic rules in Burundi! Crashes happen all the time as drivers weave in an out of non-marked lanes at 100 km/h in the city, at the same time competing for road space with pedestrians and bicycle riders.

Burundians are quite nice, though a bit suspicious of strangers, which in not surprising given the history of colonization and violence. We come in contact with cultural idiosyncrasies on a daily basis. The other day, for example, I found out that women do not share the news of their pregnancy with anyone until the baby is born. This might sound odd, but makes a lot of
sense in a place where it is not certain that the fetus will survive and be born at all due to the lack of proper nutrition and medical services.

We are leaving for Croatia on August 10 where we will meet many of you for a week of fun and celebration—our
second wedding! Though the island we’ll be staying on has had a couple of severe wildfires this summer, we hope that everything will be fine and no natural or man-made catastrophe will conspire to ruin our gathering ;)