drought

"It's too hot," he says angrily. "It's never going to rain."

Every year it seems as if the dry heat will never break. The rainy season is supposed to start in October. Like last year and the year before, we're into December and there's been precious little rain.

Everyone's ill: stress colds, mumps, temperatures, tickbite. My son's friend fainted in the Christmas Play but the doctor (who's moneyed now he treats political violence victims) is in the US. Cholera is spreading its spiderweb across Harare: already it's reached the better-heeled Westgate suburb, where the cinemas are. The health minister has banned Zimbabwe's three-stage (thumb in front, behind, in front) handshake. Tempers fray. At night we toss and turn, too hot to sleep, scratching at bites from mosquitoes that have weeviled their way inside our net.

"The desert's going to creep up from Buhera," he says.

visit

11 o'clock, Sunday morning. There's loud hooting at the gate. I am expecting a woman to drop round with vouchers for a short trip we've planned. I run outside, squeeze through the gap and... it's a police car. Inside are three policemen in luminous vests.

They're aggressive. "Where's Mr B?" they say, naming a local store.

Not here. "Why don't you know? Aren't you a resident?" the officer in the back says.

I look him in the eye, something a good Shona woman (especially a young one) does not do.

"We've only had this house for two years," I say. Immediately I regret the words: the police are looking for anyone who's acquired wealth in the shape of houses and cars since the diamond rush started.

That was two and a half years ago.

"Let me go find a number," I say. I close the gate before they have a chance to stop me, rush inside, try to make a 'phone call, fail, grab the telephone directory and run outside to the car again.

"Is this guy Indian?" I ask.

"No, black," the officer in the driving seat says. I see he has a clipboard. The infamous list?

I page through the directory and find a number for the store, at least. Eventually the police drive off.

My hands are shaking when I go inside.

black boots

These days when I go into town, I look for the army girl. Aged about 22, he said she was. She was the one who lashed the females. "She loved it," he said. "She was relishing it." She beat one digger -- unlucky enough to be found with a tiny electronic diamond scale on her -- until she screamed. A policeman's wife from the nearby bivouacs sneaked into the cage later, to bring the victim water.

He says he's seen the army girl in town, near the Holiday Inn Hotel. It was on Friday, a day after he was released. "Must have been her day off," he says.

There are soldiers in camouflage dotted on the streets this Friday. In Spar I see an army woman. Under the black beret, her hair is freshly curled. Her trousers are tucked into black boots. She's browsing among the imported baby nappies and aqueous cream. She approaches me. "Excuse me, Madam," she says. I look at her face, my heart pounding. Early 20s, I'd guess. "You don't have change for 50 US, do you?" No, I don't.

Of course, it won't be her. I know that.

But what has to happen to a young girl to make her enjoy beating another woman?

face cream

In the end, it all comes down to face cream. I would like to live in a place where:

a) it is possible to walk into a pharmacy during your lunchhour and buy a decent pot of face cream (impossible in Zimbabwe now)
b) buying a pot of face cream would not be an unimaginable luxury requiring a trip across the border to South Africa
c) just thinking about buying a pot of face-cream wouldn't be a thing to be ashamed of given the overwhelming human misery all around.

racing

"Shall we leave?" I ask for the hundredth time (this week? this month?). Zimbabwe always looks worse in the dark minutes before sleep.

"Don't keep saying that," he says. "It's like running a race. Every time you say that it's like we're slowing down and stopping for a second."

"It only makes it worse."

decisions

When do you stop sending your child to school? When cholera has reached the next town (which it has)? When it's reached the high-density township of Chikanga near the school? If I pull him out now, he will miss the Nativity Play they've been rehearsing for all term. ("We three kings of GLORY AND TAR", he chants).

There is likely no treatment for cholera in the local private clinic. A classmate's father was supposed to be bringing in cholera treatment from Mozambique but not till this weekend. Cholera kills in a few hours. You need a simple rehydration solution to treat it. I should stock up on Coca-Cola. But where do I find it? I went to the forex shop two days ago, but there was little for sale. The truck with provisions on wasn't due from South Africa till the end of the week.

Cholera needs no transport, it has no passport, the head of the Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights Douglas Gwatidzo said today.

Better safe than sorry?

radio ga ga

Our four year old has been brought up to the sound of the ZBC news jingle ("news on the hour, every hour"). Now he's getting tired of it.

"Switch that radio off," he says when we sit down for whatever it is I've mustered up for lunch (toast but no spread yesterday). "All they say is Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe. It's so boring."

"I want to eat my lunch peacefully."

So do we, boy, so do we.

operation no return*

"There are lots of children away," the headmistress at the preschool says. "We don't know why." Chickenpox? That was last month. The owner of a Montessori preschool across town has more of an idea. "It's the diamond dealers," she told C. "They're in hiding. Lots of kids are absent now. And the kids that are left are being picked up by different people." Obviously they've been left with friends or relatives until the dust has died down and the dealers judge it safe to return.

* Operation Hakudzokwi (No Return) = brutal army/police clampdown on gwejas (dealers) and diggers in Chiadzwa diamond fields and nearby city of Mutare. "After this operation, no gweja will think of going to Chiadzwa again," official close to Hakudzokwi told local Manica Post newspaper

into the jaws

She's a student at Africa University. It's the end of the semester and she's desperate to go back to see her family in Harare for the Christmas holidays. There's just one problem: the family live in Budiriro township, the epicentre of Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic.

"Don't go," I say immediately as I hand her a cup of soup (Super Chicken Noodle sent by mum -- should it be this watery?)

It'll be fine, she says ("and this soup is great"). There have only been two cholera cases in her area (Two? Isn't that two too many?)

Her part of Budiriro is the part near Glen View, the old part. They haven't had running water for a matter of years now: her father brings containers of water from the office every day at lunchtime and in the evening. Paradoxically, the lack of piped water makes the cholera risk a tiny bit lower. "There's no sewage," she says delicately. Residents have long found their own "solutions" to human waste disposal -- pit latrines etc. The real problem comes in the parts of the township where there is occasionally running water. Then people flush the loos but the sewerage pipes are overloaded so they burst and flood. Mix that with no rubbish collection, no schools (kids playing outside in the flooded streets), poor immune systems and what do you get? Cholera.

"You know in our area now you're not even allowed to hold funerals now," she says. "You have to tell the police when someone's died, their officials come, they wrap the body in a blanket and then in plastic and the body is buried straight away.

"In our culture funerals should take three or four days. Everyone comes to your house. You eat and drink together. But the officials are saying that's how the cholera will spread."

Africa University is organising a bus on Friday to take Harare students back home, she says. "I can't wait."

tickbite

The reason I got tickbite fever and she has never got it, says A., is because she's "a sturdy Mashona" and I'm not.

The reason I got tickbite, my mother-in-law says (and she's never had it), is because I should have stuck a match on the tick's tiny bottom and burnt it off me. Or smothered it with vaseline so that it suffocated and fell off.

Not scratched it, like I in my foreigner's ignorance did.

earwigs

remedy for ear-ache:

Crush a cockroach ("it has to be a large one") until "the white stuff" comes out. Mix in a small amount of cooking oil. Pour down ear. "It really works," T says.

diamond snapshots 3

Philippa and Mel were minding house for two foreign diamond dealers in Mutare's Toronto (?) suburb. The girls were employed as cleaners, paid good money (because that's what the diamond dealers had). But the plainclothes CIO came. The girls lied that the men weren't there. The officers started to beat them ("with iron bars, Mel couldn't sit down for a few days, it was just last week") and went through the house, trying every door. One was locked. "Open it," the officers said. "We can't, there's a key in the other side," the girls said. They beat them again. "We will keep beating until whoever is in there comes out," said the officers. The dealer did come out -- eventually. But the answers he gave to the questions weren't the same as the answers the girls gave. "I used to envy those people with diamonds, the ones who had new clothes for school while we could barely make ends meet," T. says. "Now I don't."

no they don't

Tadiwa's mother remembers being out in the fields in Mutare a long time ago. She was a child at the time. There was a mother with a young child there, ploughing. It was a strip -- Tadiwa measures with her eyes -- from this table to the fence round the swimming pool. What mothers did then when they got to the fields was to dig a small hollow to put their babies in while they were working. This way a child learned to sit up on its own ("though I think it's awful, leaving your baby like that," Tadiwa says). When this mother got halfway along her strip, she dug another hole, sat the baby in and carried on. She looked round.... and saw a snake coiled round the child (a python?). She started to scream, wanted to yank the child away but she was stopped by an elderly man nearby. "Leave the snake," he told her. "If you grab your child the snake will squeeze." The mother did as she was told and eventually, the snake slithered away. Snakes do not bite babies, the man said.

so they do bite

L. has a story about boomslangs. Her brother-in-law was bitten one Christmas. He was walking under a tree with a chameleon balanced on his forearm. It's an easy thing to do: adults and kids alike are fascinated by a chameleon's slow movements. What the brother-in-law didn't realise was that on a low-lying branch a boomslang had spotted its prey. It reached down, missed and bit the man instead. "Fortunately it was a dry bite," L. says. "But it caused a bit of stress for a short while."

luna park

Luna Park is Zimbabwe's travelling fair. In the midst of Zimbabwe's worst-ever economic crisis, it's still operating. The rides are exactly the same as they were in the 1970s, my husband confirms: the Joy-Ride, Vroom-Vroom, Boats, the Sky-Ride, Shells.

The Octopus is still operating, even though it lost a leg mid-ride some years ago, my mother-in-law says darkly.

There's even a rollercoaster, wending its way in the semi-darkness at the edge of Meikles Park. When my husband was eight, he was so terrified he made them stop the ride. His two brothers loved it, of course.

Teenagers and young black families throng the fairground this time round. The local Manica Post newspaper says even nightclubs are feeling the pinch: patrons prefer the fair. Streetkids beg for money for a ride. We have no Zimbabwe dollars. You cannot ask a four-year old to just stand and watch the merrygoround, I realise.

"Auntie!" It's Mai Sean (Sean's mother) in a T-shirt and tight jeans. We exchange news. Her father, a prominent charity worker, is back from a trip to Uganda. Her beauty studies are going well, how it's impossible to get cash from the bank: the little nothings that make up a conversation, knots in the net of community. Sean stands on tiptoe, clasping his arms around my legs.

"It's my birthday," he says. "I'm 5."

Mai Sean's brother slips off quietly to change our 2 US somewhere behind the ticket shack. I watch two small boys sharing a pack of pink and white marshmallows as the jet planes whirl and the fairy lights flash onto their faces. "Time to go home", I say at last.

For now, this is the home we have.

boomslang in the bathroom

The cat sees it first: a snake, a metre long, vivid green, swaying on the blue tiles in the shower cubicle.

"Snake!" I shout, "Nyoka!" (one of the first words I learnt in Shona). I bundle cats, kittens and protesting child into the pantry.

It's a boomslang, a bright green tree snake. I saw one earlier this year just outside my study window, raiding a nest. Boomslangs are highly-poisonous snakes, but they're back-fanged which means they won't strike out at you like say, a cobra will. You're only in danger if you're actually handling the snake.

Still, I'm afraid I subscribe to the general Shona feeling: a snake within the house precincts has to be a dead snake.

Showers will never be quite the same again.

diamond snapshots 2

The police came to S's house in Greenside suburb one morning this week. Her husband had already left for the shop. "We want to see your husband," an officer said. There were two carloads of police waiting outside. "Who is your husband?

S. gives his name. The officer consults his list. "Sorry, wrong house," he says. The police drive on.

The helicopter leaves Mutare early in the morning, six-ish, they say. Known diamond dealers are rounded up during the night, pulled out of their flats. The police are checking big cars on the roads, asking where they've come from. The first thing the dealers did was to buy big SUVs, Prados. They cruise the streets, numberplate-less.

We've heard the hooting at the gates, loud and persistent, early in the morning. Too early for the school run, which is normally around 7. This is earlier, 5 or 6 am. It's not just black Zimbabweans they're arresting. They've taken in a white businessman (C.W?) too. An Asian guy (Mr E.) was taken out to the Chiadzwa diamond fields and made to fill up a crater dug by the illegal diggers "with his bare hands," a member of the Asian community says. What if someone's given the police the wrong names out of spite? I lurk by the kitchen window, worrying when vans go too slowly past the gate.

There are whispers of beatings and worse. Our gardener has heard of seven bodies with gunshot wounds brought to the central police station from Chiadzwa last Saturday. "Ask anyone at the Holiday Inn, they saw them," a rights worker says. (Holiday Inn is opposite Mutare Central). A policeman from R. came to collect the body of his brother from a private funeral parlour, a senior MDC official says. The brother was a digger killed in Chiadzwa. The policeman doesn't want to talk.

"They shoot you," says Mai Agnes, whose friend Mai Alfred has just come back from Chiadzwa. "If you take two steps forward the soldiers shoot you."

diamond snapshots 1

The last time I saw Shamie, she was living in a maid's cottage with her husband, two boys and newborn baby Ishe (God). I squeezed into the building one grey morning, edging past sofas turned on their sides, overflowing boxes and dining room chairs stacked several high.

They'd been turfed out of the house they were renting in Palmerston suburb. The owner's relative was coming back from the diaspora and needed a place to stay. Before going on maternity leave, Shamie had been working as a lecturer at a local polytechnic. She was giving the job up, she told me, to buy and sell.

They moved out to Fern Valley, to a house with a plot where Shamie would grow vegetables. I texted, 'tried 'phoning a couple of times. Shamie called me once, I remember, when she was in town with her wares. We didn't meet up.

Then, out of the blue months later, she sends an sms. She'd love to see me. "We've been blessed with a car -- two cars actually." She's learning to drive. I'm intrigued. Her husband was studying for his exams (accountancy, I think) when last I saw them: has he passed and got a great job? I do a little bit of sleuthing.

Mrs D. has the answer. Her granddaughter goes to the same school as Shamie's boys -- or did, when the teachers were still teaching (Now they have "study groups", where teachers give lessons to a select few whose parents are willing to pay in forex, say 200 rand a month. Mrs D can't afford to). One of the teachers asked her class one day who'd seen a diamond. Shamie's boy -- the younger one -- put his hand up. "Bring it to school so we can all see," the teacher urged. Shamie's boy did. He's a nice kid, brought up to obey without question as Shona children traditionally were. Mrs D says the teacher (daily pay = 1 million Zimbabwe dollars: daily bus fare to and from school = 2 million dollars) took the stone -- and disappeared for a month.

So that's where the windfall came from. Shamie's husband has done a few diamonds, like so many others here. Who can blame them?

I invite Shamie and the boys round for tea and a swim. I presume she doesn't know that I know. On the 'phone though, as we're firming up arrangements (3 o'clock on Saturday, I'll make a cake, she'll bring some cool drinks) I make a terrible gaffe. She asks after Mai Alfred, a cleaner I once employed and she was keen to take on after me.

"She's not around these days," I laugh. "She's in Chiadzwa, doing diamonds."

Shamie doesn't respond. A few minutes later, she calls back. Sadly she can't make it on Saturday. "Another time, perhaps?"

yoghurt

Hannah can barely contain her excitement. "Look," she says, handing me a tiny covered plastic pot. "Golddust!"

I'm wary. Golddust? The pot weighs virtually nothing. Has my neighbour branched into the illegal mineral trade that's wreaking havoc in eastern Zimbabwe?

This afternoon a man approached me at the supermarket in the border city of Mutare. "I have an item to sell," he whispered. Did he mean corn-meal, cooking oil, bread, jam, a tray of eggs -- all of which are in short supply in Zimbabwe?

"A diamond," he said impatiently. I told him that wasn't the kind of item I was interested in buying.

Now Hannah is offering me golddust.

"Not real golddust," she says affectionately. "Yoghurt culture, of course."

She and I have been plotting for weeks to get some yoghurt culture so we can make our own yoghurt.

Like many other foodstuffs, yoghurt isn't readily available in Zimbabwe. In the early days of the economic crisis, the state Dairibord milk company still managed to pump out sachets of pink, green and yellow drinking yoghurt. Those sachets are hard to find now, much to my four-year old's disappointment.

I’ve never been too keen on drinking yoghurt.

To me yoghurt is the voluptuously-smooth veloute I used to eat late after work in a tiny Paris kitchen in my 20s. Sometimes it was topped with a velvety prune compote. Better still, yoghurt is the thick and creamy stuff my mother made when I was growing up in eastern England.

Dad bought Mum a yoghurt maker for Christmas one year. It was a small brown glass tank. Six glass pots fitted snugly inside. Every few days Mum filled the pots with her yoghurt mixture, snapped the lid on the tank, wrapped it in a blanket and slid it among her freshly-ironed pillow cases in the airing cupboard, under the hot water tank.

For a few hours the yoghurt matured in the gentle heat of Mum's sheets. Then Mum unwrapped the tank, pulled out the pots and stacked them in the ‘fridge, ready for breakfast the next day.

My father liked to stir in spoonfuls of dark brown Muscovy sugar. The granules never dissolved properly so the yoghurt had a speckled look, like birds' eggs.

Hannah has managed to get her hands on some Greek yoghurt from South Africa, which we'll use as a culture. We have the other vital ingredient: a litre of milk. But now a new problem presents itself. Neither Hannah nor I have an airing cupboard. And Zimbabwe's shaky power-supply means hot water tanks rarely stay hot for long. How are we going to make our yoghurt?

We ask around. An elderly friend suggests putting the yoghurt in a polystyrene box to mature. We'll need to wrap the box in towels and leave it somewhere warm for the yoghurt to be a success, she says.

Mum has a brainwave.

"Use a thermos flask," she says in an email. "Make only a small quantity at a time so you don't have to worry if your 'fridge isn't working."

YOGHURT

Rinse out a thermos flask with boiling water.

Bring 500 ml full-cream milk to just below boiling point. Take the saucepan off the heat when the first bubbles appear, otherwise you'll get a "burnt milk" taste.

Stir in two teaspoons of yoghurt culture. Pour into flask. Leave for six hours. Pour into four (pre-sterilised) cups, reserving two teaspoons of yoghurt to make your next batch.
Refrigerate overnight. Serve nature or with honey.

lizard

My son has caught a blue-headed lizard. Actually the cat caught it first and he and the Rottweilers confiscated it. The cat has to fight to keep his prey these days: recently our cleaner's granddaughter told me with relish -- not registering my guilty horror -- that Gogo had taken a bird from the cat to cook for supper.

They're not cute things, blue-headed lizards. Jack Russell-size, prehistoric to look at. I can see their attraction though, for a four-year-old dinosaur lover.

"Look, Mum," he says, poking the lizard with a stick. (Why do small boys love sticks?). "It's bleeding everywhere, even from its eyes."

"Let's keep it as a pet."

fireworks

Cars line the dark verges, bumper to bumper. St John's private school is holding its fireworks display and le tout Harare is here.

This is an annual event apparently, though we've never been before. Commemorating Guy Fawkes has never seemed the right thing to do, not in a Zimbabwe still so furious with its colonial past.

There's little sense of unease tonight though. There are teenagers with blaring stereos and halter-neck tops that can only come from South Africa and cellphones that glow in the dark. (They are not all white, these kids, by the way). Brisk mothers in tight jeans with long blonde hair trail pre-teens. An expensive sound system is in place. Little Luke has lost his parents: can someone come to the front to collect him?

The rich and the want-to-be-seen go through the gate. Tickets are 20 US a head and they've sold out, B. tells us. Twenty US would buy a bag and a half of mealie-meal.

We sit among the rocks in the ditch beyond the fence, our friends and I. Our boys, both four, press their noses to the wire. They will see just as well from the outside.

B has the offer of a job in Botswana, which is -- as we say over and over again -- only a car ride away. "Not the other side of the world." But it is a long car ride. B and his wife are good friends: we met shortly after our boys were born. I had banked on us growing middle-aged in the same place, two couples comfortably swapping stories of our kids, the books we're reading, our leaky roofs.

"We have no option," B says sadly. They can afford to live in Zimbabwe no longer. He has a good job with a local bank. By the time he's paid -- every week, at least his company has the courtesy to do that for him -- his salary amounts to no more than cents. "And Botswana is the only door that has opened." They will leave in January.

From my spot in the ditch, I watch the showers of pink and blue and green stars reflected in the windscreen of a parked car. Beside me, B's wife nurses her three-month old.

This is the picture I will take from Bonfire Night 2008: two little boys, hands locked together firmly, eyes heavenward, shouting joyfully at each fresh bang. I still believe Guy Fawkes has no place in Zimbabwe, still shudder to think of what that money should have been used for in this desperately-hungry land.

And yet, and yet..

in a time of cholera

The man on the verge is mouthing something as I close the gate.

"Some sugar," he croaks. "Please."

We're staying in a cheap boarding house in Harare's Avondale suburb: the flat we normally rent has no running water. There are piles of rotting rubbish outside the shed where my son plays with his friends Tino and Tino. Terrified of cholera -- I regularly receive cholera alerts on my cellphone -- we've temporarily relocated. This is not a licensed guesthouse: in a sign of the times, an impoverished bachelor is renting out a wing of his home and a converted garage to bring in some extra income for himself and his ageing parents.

I run inside. This is not my house: what do I put the sugar in? I find the top of a Nescafe jar, pour in some spoonfuls of South African Selati I was given a week ago. I hear the gate rattle with impatience.

By the time I get outside again, the man's collapsed on the verge. Already a small crowd has gathered. Three men have taken charge.

"Can you dilute the sugar?" one asks and I run inside again. I fumble around to try to find something to put a drink in, measure out precious pre-boiled water from the plastic water containers that go everywhere with me. I must look as if I'm taking my time, uncaring, an irritable white madam.

Out on the grass -- the owner keeps his verge lush green, using precious water from his well -- the man is now conscious. He wants milk. There is almost no milk in Harare. The state-owned Dairibord is barely selling a drop now. Any milk you get is from private sources: a few brave dairy farmers taking a risk by "side-marketing" their supplies. I have milk in the guest house fridge. But there's less than a cup-full left. My son will also need milk when he's dropped off by a friend any minute now. I don't know when I will be able to get more. Feeling guilty, I split the milk: half for the man, half for my child.

The crowd thins. The man gets up. He will survive, this time. He is in bad shape, diabetic probably, poorly-fed like most Harare residents. Except for the very rich, we have all lost weight.