To Guard or Not To Guard

So now you know about the walls.  And I briefly mentioned the guards.  But since we are about to move into our own place, now it's time to delve into this mysterious and confusing subject.

Everyone has a guard.  Almost everyone, at least.  Like the walls, you find them at almost every private house, business, NGO, school, or restaurant.

But the guard thing is so f.ing WEIRD, and no one seems to talk about it.  Maybe no one else thinks it's weird???  But here is the deal...

We are house-sitting right now.  We are house-sitting in the land of plenty.  Our house has 24 hour guards, a full time housekeeper, a full time cook, and 2 (maybe 3?) full time nannies when the family is home.  That is an extremely strange situation for us, for so many reasons, but let me focus on the guards.

Imagine yourself preparing dinner.  You finish cooking the pasta and veg on your outdoor stove, and are inside assembling your plate, your glass of wine, your water.  Outside, (in the dark until you see him and turn on the light) your elderly guard is fumbling around, heating up the left over rice and beans the housekeeper made earlier in the day.  You see each other through the window.  I wave.  I ponder inviting him in for dinner.  This is not what you are supposed to do, and that would also be super weird.  So I don't.  When his food is finished heating, he takes it.  I don't know where.  Somewhere in the dark; into the chilly night.  To eat on his own.  Later, you hear him washing up. In the dark.

I don't know if the guards are supposed to stay awake all night or not.  But they usually sleep, with a hoodie pulled tight around their heads, occasionally with a light sheet or blanket over them, sitting in a chair by the gate.  Though this morning ours was laying across the garden furniture.  We have a little "guard post" at our house - where they can sit, read, stay out of the rain, by the gate.  The neighbors seem to have no such spot, and their guards seem to just lay on the grass outside their gate.  So when we drive home at night, they invariably sit up in the light, hoodies tied around their faces, worried it might be their employer.  Sometimes our guard seems to be canoodling, spooning with them.  What do these guards do in the rainy season?

So there is the issue of feeling bad for the guard - because you are in your nice warm house cooking lovely food and eating in the light.  And they are alone, cold, outside in the dark, eating their rice and beans.  For some reason that seems heartbreakingly sad to me.  OH and don't forget the issue of the separate bathroom, outside, for the staff.  Which seems to invariably be kinda gross.

But maybe this is me pushing my Western ideals here.  A job is a job?  I'm quite sure the guard doesn't want to hang out with me.  But should I be able to get used to ignoring him?  I am the outsider.  He is the norm.  So should I follow his lead?  Or try to push my idea of a more normal, acceptable employer/employee house staff relationship?  What would that even look like here?  Is it wrong to accept the norm here, and embrace and further this practice?  Or is it wrong to stand up against it, and push my own ideals which come from a completely different, foreign, inapplicable society?  When I feel sad about where a worker eats his dinner, am I patronizing him?  Perhaps.

The other issue is privacy.  There is none.  The guard is always there - shuffling around watering plants, doing something at the kitchen, cleaning up the pool.  Want to lay out topless?  No such luck.  Want to water the garden in your skimpy nightgown?  Bad idea.  Want to just have your own space and not share it with someone else 24 hours a day?  Well, you can go inside.  But they can still see you.  And hear you.  And you can still see them.  And hear them.  Want to sit at the outdoor table and do some work?  Better be prepared to exchange kind words with the staff.  (Oh, and the two staff that work inside the house all day, M-F?  No escaping them!).

There is also the question of why you need a guard, since everyone in town claims Kigali is the safest place in all of Africa, and the large majority of people say it is actually safer than pretty much anywhere else they've lived.  Also, the guards aren't armed, so I'm very confused about what he's actually supposed to do if three guys with machetes come to gate looking to rob the place.  How would he stop them?  Maybe he could yell to the other guards?  Who are also unarmed?  I just don't get it.  Some people say it's actually just an employment scheme - that as a muzungu, you're just expected to hire help.  Our friends say that people stop by their house every week asking for a job, doing anything, for extremely low pay.  So you're supposed to hire staff and, rather than feeling like a bourgeois colonialist, you're supposed to feel good that you're providing a stable job for someone.  But I still feel like a bourgey colonialist, and I'm certainly not sure that depending on expats and wealthy locals to employ house staff is the best plan for the economic development of a nation.

No one else here seems to find this as bizarre or awkward as I do.  But we have been greatly struggling with whether or not we should get a guard for our new house.  It's a tiny one bedroom, with good, locking metal shutters, but very easy to climb the walls and get onto the property.  We are really really tired of being around staff.  And I really, really want to be able to enjoy our huge garden without chatting with the guard, or being stared at by him, or feeling bad that it is cold and he is outside by himself.

When we ask about safety, we, as usual, hear conflicting views.  Some say a guard is absolutely necessary.  If you don't have one, everyone will know, and it's just inviting a robbery to happen.  Others say more often than not, a guard is the one involved when a robbery occurs.  A very select few say the whole thing is hogwash and just an employment scheme, but then most of these same people also say you'll probably get robbed if you don't have one. :/  And, it sounds like most of the robberies that happen involve "casing", or someone following you so they'll know exactly when you can be expected to be home or away.  We don't really have anything to steal except our laptops, which are often with us.  But then again, an employee at the farm I volunteer at, who makes $1.50/day and basically owns nothing, was broken into and the few things and pieces of clothing he had put aside for their expected baby got stolen.  Along with everything else.

So, this is where we stand.  Suggestions?  We are leaning toward 24 guards.  We need help cutting the grass.  And I really don't want to get robbed.  My laptop may be all I have, but IT IS ALL I HAVE!  I do NOT want to lose it.  And being broken into would probably make me feel extra uncomfortable in a place I am still getting used to.  So I guess I will have to tell our guard to have fun with the other guards while we are home - snuggle, spoon, listen to the radio together, but please don't watch me read or garden.  And please don't wash my car (another of the typical guard duties.  Daily car washing, despite a severe water shortage!!!?!?).

I wish I didn't have to consider these questions and contradictions.  But they are part of life here.  Driving an SUV, having a guard, living in a walled compound, eating in a restaurant in Central Africa that is only filled with other white guests.  You can see from my posts, these are things I'm constantly thinking about.  Struggling with.  Making me uncomfortable.  But this is life in Africa.  It is not easy, and feeling anything but out of place here is no easy task.

But I guess it's also what makes interesting.  And challenging.  I can't ignore these questions that arise every day.  But I also can't seem to make sense of them.  And in a way, that's what's best about being here...

But it's also what's worst.

Please share your thoughts.