In the streets of Kigali

I thought I should share just a few random vignettes from my walks around the streets of Kigali over the past week…

A group of about eight men walk in a single-file line down the street, one after another, each with at least one piece of furniture. But the furniture is not in a cart or on a vehicle; it is carefully balanced on each man’s head. The first man has a full sofa. The second has a coffee table on his head and a smaller table in each arm. Another balances the frame of a bed while yet another has the mattress. They walk both carefully and carelessly – careful to balance their loads and yet careless to the idea that they might be doing anything out of the ordinary – down the street. Yet there are no houses on this road so there is no way to tell how long they have been walking or how long they will continue to walk with their household of furniture on their heads.

I glanced behind me and saw pink, pink with a capital ‘P’, not pale pink or hot pink. I saw a true Pepto-Bismol pink. I only glanced for a second, but I could see that behind me there were four men wearing pink shirts and pink pants. There is only one category of people who wear all pink in Rwanda. The four men behind me were prisoners. They walked in pairs, two in the front and two behind. Yet I hadn’t noticed a guard with them. And they weren’t restrained in any way. I was surprised, but I couldn’t turn and stare. After all, no one else in the street seemed concerned. Yet there they were, perhaps two or three meters behind me, four prisoners walking down a main street of Kigali. It wasn’t until I turned down the alley to my house that I was able to take a closer look. At this point I noticed the khaki-clad guard walking behind the four men. I know he was there to keep them in line on their journey, but all five of them seemed a bit lethargic. I wondered where they had come from and how long they had been walking. I could tell they were heading toward the prison, but I still don’t know where they had been.

As I walked up the alley toward the main road on my way to work, there was a young man with a broom. He was sweeping. He was sweeping the dirt alley between my house and the road. Let me repeat myself, he was sweeping the dirt alley. I’ll probably never know why, but it was a puzzling sight to see someone sweeping a dirt path.

There is a small field on the left as I walk to work where the children play soccer every morning and every afternoon. One morning, however, the children were not there and in their place, there were three men. They swung their arms back and forth in almost perfect rhythm, each holding a long handle with a sharp blade on the end. As each arm whooshed through the air, shreds of grass flew in every direction. I wondered how long it would take them to cut the entire “soccer field.” Back and forth their arms swung in the morning sun as the shreds of grass rained down on me in the street below.