Diaspoman:Why Aggrey and I sought for extra sources of income

As 2012 kicks in, I have to devise strategies of ensuring that my pockets bulge in real pride. I am thinking of taking up part time duties in the evenings – such as teaching classes of young and old Rwandans. I am convincing myself that the knowledge I gained from my 4 year stint at SFB could come in handy. This kind of strategy would not be a strange one to me in particular. This is because during the mid 90s, Aggrey and I once tried out a similar project which promised us lots of crispy dollars. Yes, we had decided to open up a training centre in the heart of Kigali! This training centre was supposed to answer our difficult questions during those mid 90s. It was an era in which both Aggrey and I guzzled huge volumes of booze. That meant that one crafty lady called Béa benefited from our very thirsty throats. She owned a small pub in the poor section of Kiyovu. We happened to be residents nearby and that is why we always ended up visiting her crowded and noisy pub. Béa really loved the sight of cash. Whenever the month was coming to a close, Béa would unleash her weapons of mass destruction upon us. These weapons were in form of nice looking ladies who would join us at the counter for serious sipping. That kind of guzzling usually ended up into two kinds of bruises. The first type of injury was to our wallets. As we tanked bottle after bottle, our wallets would start to shrink until whole salary was wiped out. The second type of bruising that I am referring to concerned our faces. You see, after downing several bottles of Amstels, Aggrey and I would stand up to challenge anybody in sight. Somehow, we would convince our drunken heads that we were Superman, Batman and Spiderman combined together. That is why we would climb on top of the counter and declare war on whoever touched our babes. Since the other patrons in the bar would also be highly intoxicated, they too would stand up to the challenge. The guys were usually bulky dudes. Our minds would however convince us that we were heavier than them. The next thing would be catastrophic for us. The heavy dudes would indeed proceed to disturb us by picking our chicks and proceed to dance with them in the most provocative Zoukish manner. This would drive us crazy. We would then release some nice looking flying kicks which would even make Jackie Chan ashamed of himself. The problem is that our kicks were always similar to kicks of a dying mosquito. So, whenever we attempted to fight off our competitors, we always ended up in real trouble. The dudes would give us some nice hot jabs that would leave us with bruises all over our face. The only advantage of such jabs is that we would sober up almost immediately. Once we were sober again, we would kneel down and beg for forgiveness. Our chicks would then laugh at us as they left with their new heroes. As for us, we just walked back home to nurse our funny looking faces. We would then turn all our frustrations on our poor houseboy for not having prepared our usual meal of rice and beans. “But boss, you have not bought any food for the last 3 weeks” Eventually the houseboy would pack up his belongings and flee our home. If we were lucky, the houseboy would flee with a few pairs of shoes. This meant that we were perpetually broke. We could not sustain such habits without getting some extra income. That is why we initiated a project to start a small institution of learning. Our target group comprised of students who were registered in higher institutions of learning – especially the technical schools where Computer science was high on the agenda. We were also going to help the students in matters to do with physics, algebra and statistics. The truth of the matter is that neither Aggrey nor I had a clue about all these subjects. So anyway we started our marketing campaign by distributing leaflets everywhere. We introduced ourselves as professionals whose sole goal was to impart knowledge to the Rwandan youth! In a short time, we had a list of applicants who were interested in our services. The group had a good gender mix. The ratio is what we were looking for. It was 1 male versus 8 females. We convinced ourselves that by the time our lessons ended, we would have hooked ourselves some future brides. We then confirmed to our new students the commencement date. We told them how much they were to pay in terms of subsistence allowances. All that was left for us was to look for 2 computers so that we could start off on a high note. There could be only one place to snatch the computers from. So, we started to plan on how to smuggle the computers from our Gikondo offices where our expatriate boss was always found asleep in his chair. The journey to total freedom and riches had begun… diaspoman@yahoo.com