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.