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In the small village of Lyantonde, it’s the hum of trucks passing that first wakes you in the morning. Not the birds. Or the kitchen. Even the large woman sweeping briskly in the courtyard. No. It’s the trucks that wake you.
The entire main street is hemmed with them. At all hours they come whistling past, brakes trembling, horns babbling, cargo thrashing. Scattering children, goats, they slip into empty slots and join the assembly line of matoke, petrol, cattle, grain. More petrol. Roadside buildings cower under these looming behemoths, their windows wincing in the plumes of red dust that spew from weary tires, their walls perpetually cast in a rusty pallor.

One, perhaps two drivers step out. A man emerges from the cargo hold, sneezing.

“Oh you know them,” says Sylvia, in a voice barely audible but for its biting acrimony. Shifting in her seat, she readjusts the lapels of her blue jacket and pauses for a few seconds, eyebrows raised, extending the gravity of her statement.

“They are tired,” she sighs, herself chasing a yawn with one hand. “Coming from Rwanda, Burundi…let me say wide, wide.”

“They are tired,” she sighs again, her eyes sinking deep into mine, “and they just think to sleep with a woman, eh? They do what? They come bursting with their money,” she says, grave demeanor suddenly giving way to nervous laughter. “Bursting with money…In order to attract you, eh?”

“Women are so taken up with money,” she mutters as she sinks deeper into her chair, adding sadly, despairingly, “money can cost their life in…within seconds.”

“Yaa,” she begins, real slow. “They have bad perception about we people who work in bars and hotels. If someone comes, eh, they look at you like you’re a sex worker, you say ehhhhh?”

“So they will just go straight to those people when they reach there, they just give 2000 to the girl. Off for the night—off for the what,” Sylvia begins to nod mockingly, “provided you’ve given their 2000. For the hotel. 2000 compensation.”

“I feel so bad, so disgusted. Because if one does that they will generalize that all women are like that. They won’t say that Sylvia did this-this-this-this, they’ll just say that women, they are nothing.”

Sylvia pauses, catching her breath, allowing an eerie silence to seep through the door frame, managing her thoughts. “I think that this comes in because of the nature of, not the nature…no yes the nature, eh, of our culture. You find that in our culture, women are taken to be so low, so that means that women have no say, women are so backward, women do what? Nothing.”

“The man, he waits for his tea, he waits for food. Most women, eh, most of them who live in villages, they have a hard life. They wake up in the morning, they go and dig. She has to fetch water, catch firewood, she has to cook.”

“Rules are there to be broken and to be taken.” “For a night they give you fifty. They take your life like that…she spits, slapping the arm of her chair. “because of fifty…fifty shilling.”