Life in Lockdown - Again (the Stress Edition)

 

 

Aw. Maia's partner, Ian, sent her some beautiful flowers whilst she was here, but they arrived the day before she was leaving, so I got to take them home instead. 

 

 

 

 

Said a fond farewell to Maia and Taia, and shared a last glass of wine before dashing home to make the 8 p.m. curfew.

 

 

 

These two lovely people have started a community library at Maia's restaurant. It's called Kamaliza Rreads, part of Sistah Circle, and they stock books by African and African-American female writers. You can rent a book for 2,500 (1,500 for students) per fortnight, then 500 per week after that. Really great initiative. Find it at CasaKeza in Kacyiru - once we're out of lockdown.

[UPDATE: they are no longer based at CasaKeza. Not sure where they've moved to.]

Two weeks ago I went out to Bugesera lodge with a couple of friends for a nice meal. We were planning to walk the floating bridge, but it got too late in the day, so too hot, and there had been a lot of rain, so we just relaxed with food instead.

 

Socially Distanced Traffic

Little did we know, that was the last supper. 

Soon after, Rwanda went back into full lockdown after a spike in COVID cases. We're on a 6 p.m. curfew, with no one leaving their house without special movement permission from the government. I did have permission to travel to campus this week, but that's now revoked, so I've been busy putting all the lectures online.

Home food delivery - I can cope with. Zoom meetings for work - no problem. But this country is so not set up for remote banking and online payments. Even simple stuff is really hard. For example, every year there's two business taxes you're supposed to pay: patente (trading license) and Kigali cleaning fees. These are paid to your district, whereas all other taxes (VAT, CIT, withholding, etc) are paid to the central revenue authority. 

You would think that the basic, minimum requirement for any business account in Rwanda, is that you can pay your taxes online.

You'd think, right?

Wrong.

Although there are a whole load of banks in Rwanda, only about two - Bank of Kigali and Bank Popular - allow you to pay district taxes online. If you bank with anyone else, you have to either:

1. Physically print out the invoice, go to BK or BP, stand in line for half a day and pay.
2. Pay using mobile money.

The second one sounds easy, right?

Of course not. Momo is notorious for having to figure out a string of  press-button commands as long as your arm (that was just to pay for a drink), then there's the added issue of banks, like mine, refusing to link corporate accounts to momo as a security precaution. Because, of course, people stealing your online identity to pay your taxes for you is a constant concern.

I mean, honestly, could you imagine that in the UK? You can bank with anyone, but you can only make online payments to HMRC through NatWest or Santander? Anyone else, you have to print out your documents and go to one of their branches to pay in cash or with card. No online ability to pay with card or to make a direct transfer. You physically have to go there - in the middle of a pandemic.

It's utterly ridiculous. 

I'm sorry, but I have been so unbelievably stressed by this the past week. Plus, when you e-mail, you hardly ever get a reply. If you do get a reply, it's almost never helpful. I had one customer service rep from Access Bank (which provides Access to absolutely nothing) call me up to say she was sorry for my failure to pay taxes through their system! My failure to make their completely failed system work. 

An unfortunate choice of phrasing.

She wasn't calling to offer any solution or help, simply to explain to me why it was completely impossible to pay my business taxes through my business account with them. 

The whole thing is mad. I don't understand why there isn't a national online payment system for these things. Should be so straightforward: 1) go to site, 2) enter invoice number, 3) pay with card or transfer.

But pretty much everything online is a real trek. 

It just makes a stressful, plague-filled situation a hundred times more stressful. And this system has been the same for years. No one in the banking world seems to care about the experience from the customer's perspective. No one goes, 'oh yeah, that doesn't work - I see the problem, let's fix it.' I've been with Access for about five years and every year it's the same. This year it's just worse because I don't have a car, motos aren't taking passengers, and, to be honest, I don't want to risk getting COVID just to pay my cleaning fees. 

To physically go to the bank I'd have to find a taxi willing to take me, then ask for permission to move from the government. Plus, BK usually take an age of queuing, because everyone's there to do the same thing at the same time of year, so I'd probably pay a fortune asking the taxi to wait.

It's not like Rwanda doesn't have the internet. So, I just don't understand why businesses don't use it to full effect. The whole point of the internet is that people stay at home and transact business and payments without leaving the house, yet it just hasn't really happened in this case. 

Talking of the internet, I've finally got broadband! Well, an approximation of it. Better than the old 3G I was using, although this router doesn't have a battery so, when the electricity goes out, so does the internet. Thankfully, power outs are quite rare, but it did go out for over two hours the other day. Even my laptop battery died, which makes working from home sort of a challenge. We've also been having chronic water shortages, though now I'm in lockdown and don't physically have to see anyone, that's not such a problem.

The other issue is that my laptop was so happy with the internet upgrade that it downloaded about six years' of Windows updates. I pulled out my backup laptop to use in the meantime, and this happened...

Joy to the world.

Apparently, the vaccine is on its way, but even during a full lockdown, we have scenes like this, which someone posted last night after Rwanda qualified for the African Nations Championship quarter finals. And we wonder why men aged 20-40 are leading the way in COVID infections here. Guess we'll be in lockdown a little longer.

 

Though, I'm not one to lecture on health. I'm so stressed out by the online tax payment issues that I started on the wine at 4:30 this afternoon.

I've mentioned before about the high cost of food. That's tricky to deal with. I have vegetables delivered and have eggs, milk, flour, rice, ugali and pasta in the house, but it's a dull diet. I buy from my friend's online store, so pay a bit extra to help support her business, but anything slightly out of the ordinary is eye-wateringly expensive.

Bacon £16, sausages £7.50, kidney beans £6, pitted black olives £11, tinned peaches £8, milk chocolate £4.50, pistachios £11, butter £7.50.

In many shops you can find these products for less, but still not cheap. Though, thankfully, there's a host of restaurants across town who are now providing delivery. You can often eat better for less if you order out than buying the ingredients to cook at home. Though, most places stop taking orders at 4:45 at the moment. So, order in the morning and heat up for dinner. 

Just before lockdown, I continued my purchase of novel flavours. My local shop started diversifying and I bought hoi sin sauce in a jar, yellow lantern chili sauce (which is extremely spicy), rose jam and ink-black spaghetti. They stand as a testament to better times, and all very reasonably priced.

 

 

 

I also tried looking for new things to do with kombucha scobies, as they just grow and grow and grow. Someone said you could stir fry them, so I gave it a go... would not recommend that. They're like wood ear mushrooms or shitaki, but way too thick and chewy to be appetising. I really did try, but no amount of soy sauce, honey and sesame can sort that out.

 

Scoby - the brown stuff on the left.

So, that's life in lockdown at the moment. Getting stressed and fed up with banks and online payment systems that only seem to exist to frustrate and infuriate. I know there's the same issues with call centres and crap websites elsewhere in the world, too. I recently had a hell of a problem with PayPal that resulted in me having to ask my dad to purchase a UK SIM card for me, activate and post out. But I really wish someone would make a concerted effort to fix the tax-payment fiasco here. Every year it's more stress than it ever rightly needs to be.

Anyway.

Back to drinking wine.

Christmas & New Year

  

Happy 2021!

It's been a nice start to the year so far.

Got some lovely prezzies for Christmas. Dad managed to DHL a couple of parcels out with clothes and chocolates, my friend Harris sent me some Gog games, and my neighbours bought me a lovely hanging basket for the kitchen with some personalised mugs.  I placed them under the Christmas Piano, as we don't really do decorations.

 

 

 

Reciprocated with a hand-painted pot from a lovely nursery in town. From the picture, I thought it was just a little thing, but I could hardly lift it when it arrived! Pretty, though.

Presents for kids and friends

 
Christmas day was lovely. There are tight restrictions on gatherings at the moment and an 8 p.m. curfew, but everyone there had either got off a plane or was getting on one so had a negative COVID test, except me, and I hadn't left the house in almost two weeks. 

There was a lovely spread with food from China, Spain, England and Germany.

 

 

(panoramic, click to enlarge)

 

Christmas dinner in Rwanda: roast potatoes, sweet potato filo pastry, pilau rice, tofu,
olives and feta cheese, Chinese dumpling bread with pork, mulled wine and mince pies.

 

 

 

 

 

Then we decamped two doors down to Jo's garden to sit on the lawn and continue drinking.

 

Marginally disturbed by this new craze the kids are into, called Slime. Someone described it to me as 'what happens if you mix glue and contact lens solution.' Hmm... lovely.

 

 

 

 

My lovely friend Maia bought me booze and a feather boa... ah, she knows me well. 

Cheers!

(Drinking responsibly - COVID free!)

Christmas day view near the sunny equator.

A couple of days later, I caught up with my friend Cathy, who lived here for eight years but is moving back to the States. Bought a stack of books off her and a couple of nice tops. We decided to check out a Korean restaurant I'd been meaning to try. I wanted to taste how my kimchi compared... and I think I prefer mine!

 

 

Mostly, for the days either side of Christmas, I've been  replacing all the springs on a Korean piano. A lady whose piano I tuned a few years back had moved house. I went to tune it, but it had been damaged in the move and needed a hammer replacing. On further inspection, I saw that the springs were really worn out, so decided to do that, too. Now on the loooong wait for the hammer replacement to arrive. Post here is glacial, but pianos are pretty.

 

 Old spring in front, new spring behind.

New Year's Eve was a quiet one. I'd been invited to a friend's house for a drink but declined because the curfew meant that I wouldn't get home in time and would need to spend the night. As we were going away the following mourning, I opted to spend it at home. Had a lively Zoom with dad, Marilyn and Aunty Jean, then was on the phone to mum when it turned midnight here. I'm two hours ahead of the UK, so it's like time travelling, being in 2021 before them. Just wish you could get Jools Holland here as that's a lovely New Year's tradition, though it would have been 2 a.m. before the countdown and I was asleep by then. 

 

The next afternoon, Maia, Cindy, me and the girls set off for a serene retreat by Lake Muhazi, in a little AirBnB. It was the first time I'd been out of Kigali in absolutely ages and the amount of green sent me into shock.

 

 

 

We eventually arrived at the cottage, which was right by the lake, with its own little boat. 

 

 

Bee Hives 

 

My Little Bed

 

 

There was no electricity in the house, though we did have solar lights, and the water was drawn up from the lake, so we used hurricane lanterns and tiki torches for light in the evenings. On the first night, we went down to the dock to watch the sunset, then came back up to eat pasta and drink wine around the fire pit. It was rather magical.

 

 

 

  

 

 

Floating Fish Farm   

 

  

 

   

Sky or water? You decide. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The night was so alive with noise. There was a tree full of weaver birds, and so many frogs that sang all night. Most delightful of all were the fireflies. I remember, years ago, walking at night from Jambo Beach, which is further up the lake, to my friend's house, and the road being thick with mist and fireflies. It was the first time I'd ever seen them with my own eyes and they were everywhere. Really beautiful. Here, they were flying about the shore, and quite a few small bats were swooping down to collect the evening bugs. There were also beautiful acacia trees up by the house, and their branches glowed in the firelight.

 

  

 

 

 

Morning was a little less magical, with this arsehole rooster setting off before the sun broke. There were hardly any mosquitos, but I didn't have netting, so got dive-bombed by a couple of moths instead. The house is in the process of being done up for visitors, so we got the rough version.

  

 

This was Maia's second birthday. She was born in Australia to British parents, so she was a day ahead when they phoned back to the UK to tell their families she had been born. As such, she gets two celebrations because she was technically born on both days. We had a leisurely breakfast of coffee and croissants and sat on the pier a bit before guests arrived from Kigali for a socially-distanced BBQ.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

Unfortunately, you can't swim in Lake Muhazi because it's teaming with these little water snails, which host parasitic worms that cause bilharzia (schistosomiasis). It's a real shame as the lake looks so inviting, but Maia and I filled up our wine glasses and went for a little boat ride. It's a barrel boat, so basically planks of wood resting on large plastic barrels, with an outboard motor. Safety on the lake is well regulated with every boat being licensed and registered, and police periodically checking that vessels aren't overloaded and that everyone is wearing life jackets. The president has a large house at one end of the lake so safety is taken seriously.

 

 

 

(panoramic, click to enlarge)

That evening, we sat around the campfire again and cooked noodles with fish we had bought from the fish farm. 

 

 

 

Afterwards, we started an innocent game of Ibble Dibble with the leftover charcoal from the BBQ.

Then the makeup artist arrived and things got a little out of hand. She decided to give everyone a unibrow like Frida Coal-o (gerrit? Because of the coal?).

 

 

The last words you ever want to hear from a nine-year-old aspiring artist is, 'can I do your makeup?' By the end of the evening, we all ended up with blackface! The photographs of which will never make the internet - careers have been ended over less. It was a particularly socially awkward moment when someone appeared out of the night to connect the house to the local electric grid! I hid in the bathroom, desperately trying to wash it off with cold water. Honestly, some things you just couldn't explain if you tried.

 

 

 

The next morning, we decided to take a walk up the road to find the bar we had seen on the boat trip the day before. It was only a five minute walk from our place and turned out to be a really amazing camping site in the making, using old cars as bedrooms!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

As we were sitting there having a mid-morning beer, the owner appeared and we got talking. Rwanda is such a village! Turns out he was one of Maia's Spanish students about nine years ago! We ended up with drinks on the house and a free breakfast. He even showed us his secret beer stash, which is how he cooled the beers before they got electricity. Surprisingly effective.

 

 

 

 

We took a wander back along the road.

 

 

(panoramic, click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

Cheese-plant-tastic!

Then it was back in the car and home to Kigali. Happy Birthday Maia! It's always an adventure when she's about. Definitely a lovely way to break in the New Year.