Ruthless Clarity in Bujumbura, --A.'s Story

The perfect bishop.  They return every year to our neighborhood and forage in our trees.  Caught this fabulous shot with my new camera.

After this past Tuesday everything seems to be a bit of a blur.  Not that anything else bad has happened,  but that day was so unforgettable that I seem to have amnesia about the rest of the week. 

I do remember that Rebecca went out with her women friends on Wednesday, and that we had dinner with our friends Courtney and JJ (from World Relief) over the weekend.  The rest of the week was fairly normal in terms of routine-- school, work, and weekend rituals.

Rebecca left town for Arusha (Tanzania) on Monday and will be gone until Thursday.  I am here with the kids so they will not miss school.  She is having meetings with some of our partners on an annual regional seminar called the Great Lakes Initiative.  Hopefully she will have things to say about that next week.

One thing I did during my last visit to Kigali sans-famille was to re-watch the movie Apocalypse Now on my computer.  I have not seen it for many years but it has been one of my favorites in terms of critical acclaim in the past.  I remain impressed by it and probably have a deepened appreciation of it now that I live very near Joseph Conrad’s Congo which he describes in Heart of Darkness—the book on which the movie and the Colonel Kurtz character are based. 

The only problem is that I now have an inner monologue voice that seems to narrate my life here that sounds a lot like the dead-pan monotone of Martin Sheen as Colonel Willard.  I certainly don’t feel that pessimistic or cynical, but at times it is fitting, especially when it comes to judging the actions of others cross-culturally.

“In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action - what is often called ruthless - what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it.”  -- quote from Col. Kurtz

Probably the most interesting high-light worth sharing this week is a story.  I usually recount our own stories here, but today I want to share one from an associate of mine.  I will call him A.   I would want to say A. is a survivor, or use other adjectives to paint him sympathetically.  But I don’t want to do that here.  I want to put down plainly what I know about him and how he ‘se debrouille”.  The word ‘se debrouiller’ is one I have written about before.  It might be translated in English as ‘to manage’ but that does not quite catch it.  It is more like ‘disentangles’ or gets out of difficult situations.  But managing and getting out of difficult situations here are pretty much the same thing, as you will see.

I should give a bit of background on my own association with A.  In fact, he is probably one of my few truly “African” friends.  I do not say this because I have few Burundian friends, but because I do not know how I would classify him in the definition of ‘friendship’ that I learned in my life in North America.  I think outside of a patrimonial culture it is hard to define these kind of relationships.  I would say, perhaps, that it might be called a patron/client relationship maybe like a lord would have with a local merchant or tenant farmer.   It is cordial, but there is clearly a hierarchy, I am ‘above’ him in our relationship, though he is not an employee of mine, and that is what he is looking for.

new patio furniture.

I am learning how to have this kind of relationship, although I have not known its equivalent in my life in the US, but it seems to be based on a kind of regular ‘calling-on’ me (every few weeks) where he tells me what he is doing.  Usually his calls include a request for a bit of money, or a loan. 

The difference between a gift or a loan is hard for me to understand outside the system of ‘social security’ here.  A loan is not a formal arrangement of borrowing with a repayment plan so much as a kind of ‘I owe you one’.  If I was fully a part of Burundian society, I could probably hit him up later when one of my children was getting married, to contribute.  But for the most part it is one way with me as benefactor.

Until this past year I have been uncomfortable with the lack of mutuality, but recently I have found him to be useful in doing favors, particularly finding gas for my car when there are shortages.  He also has numerous connections at the market and can find me things, and is very happy to wait in long lines for me for things like paying my annual automobile tariff.

Over time I have come to accept the role assigned to me as a kind of ‘benefactor’.  He would like to use the word ‘parent’ but I rebuff him when he tries.

His story is not atypical.  He is from a mixed ethnic family and during the civil war his family was forced to divide with his father fleeing to his hutu relatives and his mother fleeing to hers on opposite sides of town.  He was raised by his mother’s family and his father died during the war. 

He was second in his family and shared the responsibility with his elder brother of caring for his younger siblings and mother. 

When I met him, at an English speaking church service (where he was looking for connections to benefactors) he was starting a business in the market.  He and his brother were able to open a clothing stall because he had had a taxi cab which was hit by another car.  When the insurance was paid (more than a year later) they were able to use the money to open the stall.  That was 2008. 

It seems his brother got the lion’s share of the business and got married as well.  Once married, he began contributing less to the family leaving A. to take care of their mother and younger sister.  I watched him struggle, with the market stall selling T-shirts and shorts, and occasionally doing some free lance driving.

I admit that I would complain during those years about the small loans he asked me for to care for his family.   The market struggled and he never seemed to be able to save a bit.  A year and a half ago, he told me he needed to raise a lot of money to pay for his sister’s wedding.  I watched him make the rounds for contributions and leverage himself out everywhere to give her a proper wedding.  (There is a certain way that weddings are done here and  there is little room for variation whether one is rich or poor.  They are always large, fairly expensive community events.)

His sense of pride in being able to do this for his sister was palpable.  For me it was hard to understand how he would have so little put aside, even to reinvest in his business, and his constant requests, and then put out so much for such a seemingly frivolous expense.  I resented, on his behalf, this social network that seemed keep him impoverished.  “How are you ever going to have money saved for your own marriage and family if you have to take care of your brothers and sisters?” I asked him more than once in the past few years.

In the past 8 months he seemed, despite everything, to be getting ahead.  He had leveraged several of his ‘patrons’ (me included) to be able to buy a very old car and had began his taxi business again.  With two income streams, the market and the car service, he was able to do  a little better, although did not seem to ever have much of a surplus.  He did however, hire a couple of employees to help run his market stall, and I was impressed that he was making a small contribution to the market economy in the city.

Two months after buying the cab, his market business ended catastrophically (January this year) in the fire that destroyed the central market.  His entire inventory and stall burned to the ground in the fire.  He had lost everything.

I saw him the next day and expected him to be devastated but he was surprisingly resilient.  “I thank God for looking out for me.”  He said.  “I had just bought the car before the market burned.  Now I will work as a cabbee.  It will be OK for me.”

Minotaur horns

I still saw him fairly regularly and last month he told me how he was going to open a restaurant in the very crowded “gare de nord” a big bus and taxi stop on the edge of town.  He had again leveraged himself out to several of his benefactors (me again as well—he never does anything from a place of surplus).   He had found a stall for rent and did some work to get it running.  He opened it this past week.   I visited it on the third day of opening.  He had hired about 3 employees and his brother and some other family were hanging out.  It did look like a good location and he had all the essentials for a small restaurant.  (A place to cook out back, a small fridge, and electricity.) 

Out in front of his restaurant I saw an unbelievable site.  His taxi was sitting by the road completely smashed to bits on the front end.  I asked what happened and he told me that on the day he opened the restaurant he had his cab parked out front.  That evening a drunk driver came careening down the road and smashed into his car destroying completely.

I asked about insurance and A. told me that if he ever saw any insurance money it would be more than a year from now, but he did not even seem very hopeful about that.

What really struck me though was the way he smiled as he told me all of this.  Again he shook his head and said,  “God really takes care of me.  Look, I have this restaurant right when I lost my cab.  We will be fine.”

Why am I writing this… Is A. the poster child of misfortune in Burundi?  A case for sponsorship by World Vision?  No.  A.’s story is not exceptional but typical of what life is like here for a small time Burundian entrepreneur.   I think it gives a picture of what the unregulated, uninsured world of free enterprise looks like here as well.  A. is more than a survivor.  He is a success story.  He has mastered the art of how to ‘se debrouilller’ here in Bujumbura.  He has his work, his patrons, and yes, even his own clients that make up the social network of economic life here.  Having been drawn into his social network by him I have a bit more of an intimate view than I would have had as an outsider. 

The more I understand A., the more I  feel powerless to ‘help’ him.  I have tried giving him advice, encouraged him to save, but the more I enter into the logic of his life, the more I understand how completely rational his actions are and how difficult it is for him to suddenly abandon the social relations he has in favor of some system which might allow him to ‘escape’ from the cycle of this kind of entrepreneurial subsistence.  Even things I would suggest do assume some level of functioning of social institutions like insurance and government regulation.  Maybe someday these will be reliable, but for now, the only true ‘social security’ are the social networks one creates and maintains.  I watch A. massage his patrons, and cultivate clients.  I do not envy him the amount of work he does to maintain his social network, but I see, now, how it works for him.

“- what is often called ruthless - may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it"