On labor

The rock gospel music coming from the church downstairs is pretty intense tonight. Wednesday is the night for the youth choir service. And when I say rock, I mean, ROCK. Drums and electric guitars are involved. So I'll try to write this in the lull between the end of service and the beginning of the nightly dance party at the Hotel Bouquet across the street.

The problem of labor and unemployment here in Burundi is huge and it's led to us having many weird gray area questions for ourselves. There's a large, disproportionately young population here (what does that mean? According to the CIA Fact book 46% of the populations is 14 years old and younger, about 50% is 15-64 and only 2% is older than 65. So pretend that 1/3 of the people in Florida were all the people in the whole US over 65). So there are not nearly enough jobs to go around. What that means on an observational level is that I see a lot of people everywhere, standing around, not having a job. What it means on a personal level is that 3 people cook our food for us and one of them also washes and irons our clothes. Hence the gray area.

When I thought about coming to Burundi, not as a tourist but to work and to help and to witness I didn't really think about cooking and clothes washing. There are some workcamps where people stay with host families and it makes sense that those people would just fold into the daily life of how that family accomplishes those tasks. For us, we live in rooms in and around the HROC office and I guess I just assumed I'd do what city people do, make my own food and wash my own clothes in whatever facilities were available. But the powers that be at AGLI being far more familiar with how things work here have arranged otherwise. In the first place, the need for jobs is, as I said, enormous, so part of the helpfulness of our being here is that our presence creates and pays for 3 people to have jobs which we're told also gives them good experience and references for getting the next job when we leave. In the second place, when I cook and clean for myself at home as I have done for my entire adult life, I do so with the benefit of a modern kitchen and a washer and dryer so it doesn't take all the live long day to make 3 meals and wash a weeks worth of clothes. So what at home are incidental activities, here are concerted endeavors.

It's peculiar when you think about it. Here we are in a city. There are SUVs instead of horse and carts, AK47 rifles instead of spears or arrows and cell phones instead of... nothing. But the cooking and the clothes washing are still done the way they were done at the dawn of the inventions of charcoal and the wash basin. I don't know of anyone here (maybe some rich people we haven't met) who have a kitchen like we think of a kitchen. Here we have, for example, a room with a refrigerator and a sink and a countertop. How does one cook, you ask? Over a charcoal fire in a metal brazier on the floor is the answer. It gets pretty smoky which is why I think more often in actual homes the cooking takes place outside. The charcoal is not the barbeque briquettes that we think of but wood which has been burnt down. I watched tonight as Mirielle lit the fire- she uses a twisted up plastic bag which she holds burning over the coals until they catch. Then there's a lot of fanning and waving and waiting for enough heat. The pots and pans sit directly on the coals. To adjust the heat she moves a few coals from one side to another. There's nothing like an oven so if you want bread or anything baked you get it at nearby bakery. I imagine there probaby are places too where you could bring things to be baked as well.

All the food is local and of course there's nothing packaged or pre-prepared so what with all the washing and peeling and chopping in addition to the actual cooking, dinner is, on average I'd say, a 2 hour endeavor. That doesn't include the shopping. After dinner Dina and Mirielle wash the dishes and put everything away. Our contribution is to get to clear the table and bring everything into the kitchen. I'd love to at least pitch in and wash the dishes but I guess the point is not to give people 1/2 a job or 3/4 of a job but a whole actually job and all the tasks that go with it because that's what they'll be hoping to do when we leave.

Clothes washing is another intensive labor because it too is all manual (and no John it is not done with rocks on a river bank). I haven't been able to watch the whole process but it involves wash basins and hanging things up to dry which takes about 2 days with no spin cycle to wring out the excess water and then of course, ironing. Now none of the clothes I brought with me have ever seen an iron and if it were up to me I'd say that step could be skipped. But Ciza (pronouced chee-za) is a pro and must do his job to the nth degree or it stops being a job he's doing and therefore something to be proud of and and becomes a charity he's being given and something to feel indebted about. At least that's how it has been explained to me, but I'm still not really comfortable with the feeling it gives me. There's an air of hierarchy about it.

(Man I am getting good at killing mosquitoes. It's too bad they don't live long enough to tell their friends and children that I am not to be trifled with.)

All of which is why it was such a joy and relief tonight when Jocelyn offered to come over and teach me how to make capatis. They are the Burundian version of that age old stand by- flat bread. We'd had some at the restaurant one day which we all really enjoyed and I asked her if she'd show me. So tonight I spent a happy hour in the kitchen, rolling out dough with a Fanta bottle and kneading in oil and then frying it over the charcoal fire. In spite of the smoke I found myself breathing easier, me and Jocelyn and Mireille in the kitchen together.

The workcamp is another labor quandry. Jobs being so scarce I'd feel pretty terrible if I thought my volunteer building was putting someone out of a much needed job. But looking around the worksite each day and judging from the (lately at least) small amount of work there is for us to do, it seems to me that they've hired enough people to do the work, without factoring us in, and then whatever we and the other voluteers do is just that much less which has to be done by the others. So then I get into this whole quandry of the necessity of us in this equation at all.

The times when we're actually working, whatever it is we're doing- like today pretty much all I did was hand bricks up to the masons on the staging- are the times when I feel most concretely helpful. I am helping to build this wall and it feels good. But the point of the endeavor is not to make me feel good but to build the wall and since there are enough paid assistants to keep the masons adequately supplied then am I just being humored in my fanciful mzungu desire to build something in Burundi? I mean in some ways it is exactly the problem you want to have. We have so many volunteers now including some women from the neighborhood who want to help and probably also don't mind the lunch for themselves and the children they bring along, that there are ever smaller and smaller amounts of work for each person. But instead of turning people away, we just each do a little bit less. This in some ways decreases my sense of personal accomplishment at the end of the day at which point I just remind myself, that the walls and the clinic and the community are the endgame so I can feel personally accomplished about that rather than the number of bricks I personally hefted. I'm not 100% satisfied with the answers I've found to the questions we ask ourselves and maybe I won't ever be. But I do know, speaking only from an utterly selfish, Sara-centered point of view, I am so glad to be here, doing any kind of work, with my Burundian friends.

PS. Jocelyn swears that 'urukuma' doesn't mean anything and that they were only laughing at me essentially saying a nonsense word. But really, how funny can saying "thamb" possibly be?