God bless sms

Posted by Janine

I started the job at the school book company and it’s fascinating. I have 5 colleagues, who I am supposed to ‘manage’. Almost all of them are in the end of their twenties and single. In fact, one of the guys instantly fell in love with my sister when I showed him her picture on internet (yes Lon, I didn’t tell you this yet!)  Partly this is because he likes to marry a ‘white woman’ as this will bring him beautiful babies… But when I told him she is not religious I saw that this brought some doubts to his face.

He and some of the other colleagues are pretty serious about Jesus. They talk a lot about him (in fact, it’s one of their favorite topics), read the bible during working hours and listen to gospel songs and very melodramatic slow religious songs (until I ask them to please stop it!)  Yesterday when my stomach was protesting a little bit, I sent an sms message to my colleague that I would work from home and she wrote back to me: 

“Hi, don’t be afraid jesus is there 4 u and i know u’ll be healed by The Almight soon. See u”

This brings me to the topic of interesting smses. One person in particular wins the price when it comes to sending hilarious messages; it’s the guy who used to be my spontaneous personal sports trainer the first weeks I was here and with whom I tried to meet up a few times to go running. He was the guy who ‘saved’ me on my first running trip in the area Nyamirambo, when I got hopelessly lost. However, I found out that his English and French are so bad that it was impossible to make any appointment with him (we went running together once and he took me on a semi-marathon for two hours up- and downhill and in the rain!!). After this episode where I ended up taking a mototaxi home –Mikkel got all worried- and after several times waiting for him in vain, I decided to drop him as my teacher.

And now he has become a phone stalker. Phone stalking is quite a common thing here; Mikkel's stalker sometimes calls him in the middle of the night. My stalker doesn’t own a mobile phone himself, but borrows different phones from friends to call me every day, or even better, text me. For example:

"Hello, sister how are feeling?me, i am not so good,because I miss you every day you can take the day,i met you i love you so much and i will love you for ever i do know English, sorry to me.you come from me, for to do sport with me, ok, you have a good time."

 And:

"morning sister what are you doing in Gishushu? [this is where we live] Sometimes i am listening your voice in the two Radios, the first one is radio ten the last one is city radio. Ok, tell me. Remember that day when i taught you the Boxing Game. You know here is in city we have more stealers.when some stealer, touch you . must kick him no ashamed ok thank you.God bless you,and have you a Peace and Love in your heart from a God."

I have no clue which radio show he is talking about but it’s probably some other white woman’s voice that he’s hearing! It’s nice though that he’s concerned about my self-defense skills ;-) 

Other ‘Mzungu’-girls here who speak from experience have told me that ignoring the phone-calls and messages is the only way to stop it. I haven’t received any for a while now so it seems to work. Now I hope God will still bless me and my stalker…