Orange Men

I once saw an orange man praying in the shade of a satellite dish. Andy reckons that it was an orange man who stole his two bags of cement. It must have been at least two orange men, as they were big bags. Sometimes orange men set up base in the gardens of disused flats. Sometimes not disused ones. They travel on tractors with trailers attached to the back. One driving, the others in the trailer. There is one orange man outside Peter's house who uses the outside part of his air-conditioner as a clothes rack. When you see the orange men in the shop they are always buying tins of tuna and about twenty bread rolls. I sometimes see orange men out late at night, sitting on a bank of grass under the sodium street lights, which hum like giant mosquitoes. They can look slightly sinister, sitting there with scarves wrapped around their faces like bedouins. I don't think there is anything dangerous about the orange men though, as they slink around the compound in a somnolent slumber. Paula said that someone once found an orange man asleep on their bed when they got home from work. But I don't believe anything Paula says. I think the only difference between me and the orange men is opportunity.
The orange men aren't orange. They are, without exception, black Africans, from Somalia, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan and other sub-Saharan countries. I call them orange men because of their uniform flourescent orange waistcoats. The orange men, and there must be around fifty of them, although it sometimes feels like there are a thousand, are there for the general purposes of security and maintenance. Maintenance includes things like pruning the trees, sweeping the road, setting the lawn sprinklers to water at least part of the grass, but mostly the road and security involves sitting around, staring into space. On my part of the compound, there is more than a fair share of orange men. They sit on pieces of cardboard on the lawn of a vacant flat, eating couscous out of bowls like satellite dishes. This is how everyone eats in Libya; huddled around an enormous bowl, with each diner carving out their hollow in the mass of food. The shape of a starfish emerges, and then the shape contracts into itself, just like a dying star. But most of the time they just sit there watching the world go by, like the audience at an interminably boring play, or perhaps the cast themselves, in Becket's 'Waiting for Godot.'
Hamid was my orange man. Of course, he wasn't in my employment but he seemed to have taken a liking to the area beneath my stairs. I didn't really mind him being there although when I walked out onto my balcony, which is on the first floor, he always seemed to be there and turned his head up, grinned in my direction and gave a wave. Sometimes I didn't really feel like waving back. I started to feel that I was being spied on when Maria told me that she had called round at my flat and Hamid told her that I was out. She asked him when I had gone out and he said something like. "Well, he left by car at 9.00. Then he came back at 10.00. I think he had been shopping. Then he went out again at 11.00. This time he was walking." The funny thing was that I didn't recall seeing Hamid. He had seen me though. I don't know what became of him. One day, he just wasn't around any more. He was a good guy though. He once climbed onto the roof with me to change the position of my satellite dish.
But sometimes I just wish the orange men would take a few weeks off. Just not be around for a while. I know an Irish woman who just got fed up with the orange men lounging on the lawn opposite her flat and snapped and screamed and bawled and chased the orange men away. They only came back later on though. It's not their fault though. There is just not much for them to do.
The shame about the black Africans in Libya is that many of them, at least the ones from Ghana, Nigeria. Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe possess a skill which remains unexploited. A skill which so many upwardly mobile Libyans so dearly covet - they speak English. There is an irony that Libya has an underclass which is able to speak English, while its middle classes spend so much time, effort and money trying to learn it. Maybe not all of Libya's sub-Saharan immigrants are cut out to be English teachers, but it might help Libyans learn English if they just spent a bit more time speaking to them. Instead, they are viewed with deep suspicion and there have been public demonstrations demanding their removal. I caught a taxi outside the African market a while ago and the driver told me that I should stay away from the market, that it was full of thieves. But I have been there twenty times and not been robbed or even seen the slightest hint of trouble. I have been to Rome, the centre of western civilization and the seat of the Catholic Church, once and been robbed once.
Some can be cling-ons though. The barber I go to at the African market is always asking me to help him to get a visa to enter Europe. I try to explain that if I walk into the embassy and say "Hey, I have met this barber down at the African market. Can you give him a visa please?" I will be summarily laughed out the door. There used to be another guy who would sit with my barber in his shop. I asked where he had gone. The barber dramatically pointed towards the sea with his scissors. The route to Europe which requires no visa. I would get him a visa if I could, but he doesn't understand that there is really nothing I can do.
There is much muttering on the compound that you are more likely to have your house robbed by an orange man than a resident. If you want to improve security, get rid of the security, they seem to be saying. I don't know if it's true though I did once see one making off with ِPaul's ladder. I think he was only borrowing it though. But then there is the issue of Andy's cement. There is no proof that it was orange men, but Andy was using it to build a fence on his garden because he was fed up with orange men leaving their pieces of cardboard on his lawn. (Want to improve the rubbish situation? Get rid of the rubbish men.) That they should steal the very materials which were being used to take away what they regard as their territory (virtually all of the area of the compound which is outdoors) would seem to make sense. They had the motive. But while it is highly possible that it was an orange man, it could just as easily have been a white one.