bathtime

I give my son an orange bath. It's the water that's orange, not the tub. The mains water started to dry up last night. The taps spit angrily when I try to fill the kettle. What little water I get is the colour of weak Nescafe. Late at night my husband takes a torch, mutters something about lurking puff adders (front-fanged, can bite through leather, 50-60 babies per litter) and goes outside to switch on our (probably poo-tainted) borehole. Zimbabwe had more rainfall in December than any other year since records began around 120 years ago, and we're running dry. The state-run water company ZINWA (aka Zimbabwe No Water Available company) has admitted it doesn't have the chemicals to treat the water.

When I first got to Harare, I took the colour of the tap water as an ominous sign. The company paid to have me put up in a serviced villa complex, just off Greenwood Park. The quilts were lumpy, the cupboards empty and a grizzled colleague a few doors down the corridor who I think expected me to cook for him sneered when I brought back some pasta shells from the OK store in First Street. There were reports of buses being torched in the townships. The moss-scented bath water was definitely the straw that breaks the camel's back (and yes, once someone did try to introduce camels to Zimbabwe. He was called Colonel Flint and he thought camels would be a brilliant way of overcoming the transport difficulties faced by the BSAP. Flint had two baggage camels and 10 riding ones shipped out here in 1903. A year later -- and after at least one public camel race -- only one was still alive).

These days I know brown water is vastly better than no water. "But mummy," my boy says, languishing in the tub with sandy grit below his tummy, "I won't get clean and shiny in this water."

"A bit of dirt never hurt anyone," I say (Mary Poppins, anyone?). "Your father says he used to bath in brown water when he was a boy with yellow hair just like you and he came out absolutely fine". Actually, his hair mysteriously turned brown a few years later.