Me? I saw 12 in the half hour it takes us to walk to the bus and then ride it to Kamenge. All AK47 rifles held by policemen, usually in a casual way. Slung across the back, laid crosswise in a sitting lap, upside down by the handle, stock on the ground, barrel against the leg. They may be used to it but I'm still not. The other day we were in a craft market and I almost bumped into a rifle carrying soldier and still had a moment of thinking "Hey that guy's got a huge gun" as if I hadn't been seeing men with guns ever since we arrived in Africa.
There are police everywhere, usually in pairs, recognizable by, well, the guns and their cobalt blue uniforms which are essentially the same as the army uniform without the camoflauge pattern. You see them on most street corners, walking down the street, at the entrances of government buildings and riding around in those converted pickup trucks with the two outward facing benches. You know the kind I mean, for when you need to deploy 8 men with guns at once. I have also seen them riding buses, bicycles and motorcylces. I will say too that not all of them have the rifles. Some have nightstick/batons. And I wonder as I look at all these policemen, what do they do? Most often I see them either sitting or standing, just watching, waiting for something to happen I guess. Sometimes they say hello to us if we say hello to them. Most look young and some have a kind of inaccessible expression on their faces. Maybe its the naif in me which makes me think these are the men who have killed someone. Foolish I suppose to think I'd be able to tell. It reminds me of a line from a play. The character says something like, "I thought everything would change if I killed a man but the only thing that changed, was thinking anything would change." I want to believe that's not true. And I suppose it's not really the policemen themselves or the fact that there are so many of them that makes me think of it. It's those AK47 assault rifles.
On the trip up country we had to pass through 2 police roadblocks. There'd be razor wire coiled across the road and we'd stop. Fidel would hand over his papers and then he'd have to go through a test of the car. Right blinker, left blinker, hazards, windshield wipers, horn, lights. First with the officer standing in front of the car, then behind it. We were always able to go through and had no problems at all but there's something about being asked to follow instructions given by a man carrying a rifle that just can't possibly feel routine.
I say men with guns by the way because the very few female police officers I've seen in Bujumbura were of the nightstick carrying persuasion. During the Independence Day parade the police processed in troops just before the army. I saw 4 women among the hundreds of officers. Eli tells us they come from the bush where they were soldiers. There are also some women in the army, same story but I didn't see any of them in the parade. Eli says they're probably still out in the bush.
The work camp update is that the bricks arrived yesterday! And what a production it was. A huge truck backed up to the clinic gate and 1/2 a dozen men from the brick factory started unloading stacks of bricks. By the time they were done maybe an hour later they were all covered with a fine white dust from the bricks. While they were unloading Samuel would keep an eye on the stacks and count to make certain there were 30 bricks in each. Sometimes I'd see him add 2 or 4 bricks to the top if he found it short. Then a minute later I'd see one of the men unloading the bricks pulling 2 bricks off the top of a pile to start the next stack. A constant battle of perserverance. Nor was it over once everything had been unloaded. Then the counting of the stacks began. The Florida recount of 2000 was not conducted with more negotiation and accusation of wrong doing than counting these15,000 (or16,500 depending on who you ask) bricks. I wasn't watching the whole thing, I only saw 2 counts including the last one in which each stack was marked with streak of charcoal to prove it had been counted. John says there were 2 other counts prior to the ones I'd seen. I'm not even sure what the final result was but I did get a lot out of hearing someone count that many times in Kirundi. Now I can count to 10!
I also had my first successful communication of a non greeting/leave taking with Martin who only speaks Kirundi. To him it probably sounded like this: "Stones street, stones (gesture to indicate 'here')?" I'm like the Tarzan of Kirundi.
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