inspection

At first sight the inspector looks imposing. He's wearing a dark blue uniform and a clipboard. He's from the city council, he says and he has come to check that we are cutting our grass properly.

There are all sorts of things I should say. Like: what about the verges that the city council doesn't cut, the ones just down the road from here? What about those letters of complaint about the unslashed grass on the sides of the road in the state-controlled press last month? Residents say snakes are lurking in those long weeds, that burglars use the grasses to hide their loot in.

Instead I gulp and let him in.

"I'll just roam around," he says. I think of the tottering compost heap, the gooseberry shrubs I'm letting straggle because we need the free vitamins (these are wild Cape gooseberries, spherical, sweet and orange, nothing like the tart green rugby balls Dad used to grow). The inspector must be kept strictly on the straight and narrow: the bit of lawn in front of the vegetable plot.

"I'll come too," I say cheerily.

When he starts making a beeline for the rape -- unweeded, a metre high, stalks broken by the rains -- and the bits of rotting banana branch that will earn us a black mark and follow-up visits, I try a bit of distraction.

"We have a problem. There's been no rubbish collection. The city council bills us for it but there's been no collection for more than two months."

"You are right," he says. "It is a problem. The council says there is no money. We have no vehicle now."

He looks at the old tyre swinging from the custard apple tree, my spinach bed (struggling --spinach doesn't grow with excess rain) and I feel the familiar stab of guilt. My mum sends food packets: custard, marmite, contact lens solution, dental floss, Bachelor's Bean Feast, dried fruit, milk powder, all the things I can't get here. But in this man's eyes, I'm a wealthy foreigner.

"You're alright here," he says. "You should see in the high-density areas, where we live. There is rubbish in piles and lots of flies."

I know.

I see now how his uniform is old, how it has been washed and rewashed so many times that the double stitching on his shoulders is nearly white. He has two children, little girls. One in creche, one in Grade 2.

"It's the food that's the problem. Trying to feed them. There is no money. But we are hoping things will change in the next month or two," he says.

I see how tired he looks. Once, change -- chinja -- was a slogan bandied around with such optimism. These days, the energy's gone.