A friend recently spent a month in California. While there, he took a trip to Venice Beach, and from the sounds of it, everything there surprised him. Like the crazy people who mutter to themselves and to anyone else who will listen. The most fantastical things roll effortlessly from of their mouths. Meanwhile, “I have to think so hard to speak English,” he told me.
The other thing that impressed him about the Beach were all the homeless people. “In Rwanda, there are no adults without a place to stay,” he observed. “Maybe you do not have much money to pay for a house, but even me, I can just go to the forest, cut down some trees, build a structure, get some mud, make a home. Not fancy, but a place to go to at night.”
I had never thought about it before, but he’s right (of course; this is his country, after all, and I’m only slowly learning how to see and understand it). The only homeless people here are street kids. I’m not sure what happens to them as they get older–at least, I’m not sure what happens to the kids who don’t find a kind of benefactor in NGOs local and international–but I haven’t really seen homeless people.
Actually, relative to my last time in Kigali, I havent’ seen that may poor people in general. There are fewer kids following me down the road and saying, “J’ai faim,” fewer adults pointing out the deformities with which the fates have cursed them and asking for a hand. My hunch is part of this is because the American embassy has moved to another part of town; two years ago, the street leading up to the embassy was where folks collected to try their luck on mzungus going past. Today, the embassy is Kaciyru, near the new government offices and the swanky villas going up on hillside that was full of mud huts, a part of town where begging for money is as socially improbable, and somehow impolite, as it is outside of, say, Saks Fifth Avenue.
He suggests that homelessness is the other side of American opportunity. “Everything is possible in America,” he says–and he doesn’t mean that you can do anything or become anyone or have anything you dream, if only you work hard enough. He has noticed that in America, “everything” goes both ways. “You can go to casinos, or you can go on Deal or No Deal, and you can win so much money, in just one moment. But one thing goes wrong, and you can lose everything. You lose your job, then you lose your medical insurance. You can lose your house. If you don’t have an address, you can’t get a job again…”
His observation seems to me to be the kind of thing our confident talk of bootstraps and our access to Mastercard offers make invisible to us. Maybe in Rwanda they don’t have as much as we do, but there is a limit to what they can lose–a limit set not just by the fact that there is less to have, but by wholly different way of thinking about community, society, and what really makes people “rich.”
