fat cat

Power -- or the lack of it -- gets everyone talking. This week I've read several good pieces on the cuts. (Which is saying something: load-shedding's been happening since 2001, so finding something new to say about it is no mean achievement). One letter-writer to the Manica Post blamed the cuts for the resurgence of diarrhoea and kwashiorkor in the townships: he said the lack of power meant housewives could neither cook healthy meals nor heat water for bathing and washing. A blogger said his TV had become "like a carpet", something to sweep and dust rather than something to watch. I particularly liked Nevanji Madanhire's defence of Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) chief Ben Rafemoyo. Writing in the Zimbabwe Independent, Madanhire blamed the cuts for his pet's sudden weight gain: his cat, he said (and many Shona people are still wary of cats) "is getting fat on sour milk."

turning the tables

By the way," I ask. "Was it you who wrote that article in The Zimbabwean on Sunday?"

I've 'phoned a well-known political analyst for his comments on this week's party congress. A lecturer at the main University of Zimbabwe, he's the commentator EVERYONE calls since Professor Masipula Sithole died. I've spoken to him often, but am almost certain he doesn't have a clue who I am.

He gives me the soundbites -- he's good at them, he knows what's required -- and then we chat for a few moments.

"Yes it was," he says, surprised.

"I enjoyed it," I say. It was a small piece, on disciplining kids. "I have my own child and it made me think."

"Precisely," he says. (I guess he means that's what it was meant to do). He chuckles with pleasure. "That's great. Thankyou for saying that. Thankyou. Darling."

rain

"It's raining," I say. Actually, it's pouring. The rain was leaking through the roof of my car.

"So?" The cashier looks at my suedge wedges. "Are you going to the fields?"

Only if you're going to weed with your badza like a good Shona mother do you have a license to complain, apparently. Otherwise...

thief

Monday morning, 10 am. Three men are running down the road. One's shouting: "Mbava, mbava!" Thief, thief. Inside, Mai Agnes shakes her head. "It's because it's near Christmas." Robberies and break-ins surge towards Christmas. Five minutes pass. Then there's the sound of screaming. Through the bushes, we can see flashes of colour. People have gathered. I can see an arm being raised. Up, down. Instant justice isn't something you see being meted out too often in Zimbabwe's low-density suburbs. In the townships though, it's common. When you have a police force deployed to deal mainly with 'political' crimes -- read clampdown on the (now former) opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) -- few bother to report petty crime. In fact, when a neighbour rang to call the police to report a burglary, the police said they'd have to come to fetch them from the police station. While the neighbour was out picking up an officer, the house was broken into again. Police report done, the neighbour had to once again leave the house to ferry the policeman back to the station. You've guessed it: the burglars struck for the third time. The sound's coming nearer the house. "I want to know how you broke into my house," shouts a guy in a white T-shirt and a cap. Another man has a stick. The burglar is being dragged past our house, slapped round the head and round the chest. He's tottering, hardly able to walk. His shirt's been ripped off. Housewives, maids and gardeners have gathered under the fig-tree. "It's like sharia," mutters my husband. I see an armed security guard from the VIP who lives on the corner. "They're beating a thief. Shall I call the police?" I gabble. He laughs at me.

crybaby

There are local ways of doing things that still bring tears to my eyes.

Mai Danai texts me on Saturday afternoon. "At clinic. Bn blessd wt a baby boy."

She's pale when I get there with my bars of Dove soap and a blue babygro. "It was awful," she whispers. Her satin nightie is askew. "Much, much worse than Danai. They wouldn't give me painkillers." (Did they even have them?). "At least with Danai I was on a drip at Baines (a private hospital in Harare). And the nurses here are so rude."

"My husband was outside the door, crying." We whisper in the gathering darkness, two mothers swapping birth stories, baby Tafara wrapped slug-like in a cot between us.

Mai D arrives, hobbling on her bad leg. In her 60s now, she has seen many babies born. She ululates when she opens the door to the two-bed ward.

"Tinotenda Jesu," she sings to the tune of Happy Birthday -- "Tinotenda (thankyou) Jesu, tinotenda Amen." Mai Danai joins in, mouthing the words softly. I have seen this happen before, when an elderly relative arrived at the bedside of Mai IsheAnesu. (Song finished, the relative presented peanuts "to make the milk come in").

Half-angrily, I find my eyes are swimming with tears.

women's lib

"My husband doesn't like me to walk in the suburb," she says.

I've taken Mai Ruvimbo some No 7 Hand Saviour. (My sister sent it). "Imported hand cream?" she asks, pleased. Imported is the key word. In shortage-hit (until very recently) Zimbabwe, very few bother about buying local. Why, the further something's travelled to you, the better it is. Makes you look richer.

Mai Ruvimbo's husband works for ZESA, the state power utility. That doesn't stop her having power cuts (though ZESA pays her electricity bill, which is some small consolation). "What do you do when you've got no power?" she says. These days the cuts last up to 14 hours, three or four times a week.

"There's nothing to do but sleep," she says. "It's so boring."

"Come walk a bit with me," I say. Our dog is straining at the leash. Mai Ruvimbo looks worried.

"My husband doesn't like it." This is her MBA-ed husband. "He says,' You've got a big yard. What do you want to go out for?'"

poison II

"It was to get the money," says Mai C, when I ask her who on earth would want to do a thing like that.

"They poisoned him to get the money. If he had enough to buy maize seed and drink beer, then they thought there was probably more. No-one has money for seed these days."

I check the price of a bag of Pannar maize seed: 23 US in the local TM supermarket. In the rural areas, where few are formally employed, just one Obama (slang for US dollar) is hard to come by. Twenty-three must represent a fortune.

poison

I count out malaria tablets quickly. She wants to take a kombi to Nyanga straight away.

When the 'phone call came, Mai Agnes dissolved into tears. I got the story little by little.

It's the youngest brother, Didymus. Twenty-nine years old, separated from his wife. He has three children. The eldest, Alice stays with him and the grandfather in the mountainous Nyanga district. One of the children had just sent them money to buy maize seed. The rains have started: there was no time to lose. Didymus went to the dealers in Ruchera. He bought the maize. There was a small amount of change. He decided he'd buy a scud of beer. A scud is the local measure, a carton-ful. He bought the beer, drank a bit, placed it on the bar. He went to the toilet.

When he came back, he took up his scud. The beer had a strange taste.

"Barman" -- this is Mai Agnes speaking and she's echoing what her sister Letizia told her who's echoing what her father's friend who was drinking at the same bar told her -- "barman, did somebody put something in this scud while I went outside?"

"I saw nothing," said the barman.

Didymus took another drink, started to complain of stomach pains. A few seconds later he collapsed on the floor. His father's friend took him to Ruchera clinic, and from there to Nyanga hospital.

A doctor there told them he'd been poisoned with temic. You die if you drop a few grains of temic -- sold here with a purple label as rat poison -- into your boot: it enters your body through your pores. Didymus had swallowed it. "There's nothing I can do," the doctor said.

assignment

"What do we do if we don't get the story?" he asks.

We're on a shaded verandah just over the border in Mozambique. Red hibiscus flowers bloom in boxes. Next to us, four men idle the afternoon away over bottles of the local Manica beer. They're not playing cards and they have expensive Blackberries. I have my suspicions.

"Wait."

So we order: sandes de ovo (egg sandwiches), tonic water. Coffee, the continental kind served in tiny white expresso cups. Another tonic water. And another. It is hot, so hot I think I could sleep. Inside, three waitresses chat. A group of stiletto-ed women arrive for lunch, then disappear.

The men do not seem to want to move. On the steep incline beyond the cafe, I count the cars, large ones: Toyota Hilux. Toyota-something else. A money changer flaps a wad of notes.

I notice the sign on the wall: Jardin. Beer garden. Could deals be happening there? Are we in the wrong place -- too obvious, too foreign? He goes to look.

On my own now, I watch one of the men out of the corner of my eye. His face is vaguely familiar. As he stretches out his hand, I ssee the stone behind it. "You want?" his friend whispers.

chicken

"I am going to do something very big for you," she says, disappearing behind the sofa. There is no power at Mai D's house. There was none at ours yesterday. Her arthritis is worse.

"There." She comes back clutching something loosely-covered in a plastic bag. It is fat and disturbingly fleshy. A frozen baby?

"A chicken," she says triumphantly. "I told you." I am embarrassed. My gift of bread and jam cannot match a chicken, not in these harsh times. But she insists.

"How?" I say. She begged Mai C for 2 US this morning to buy Brufen -- the local equivalent of Ibuprofen -- for the pain. "It's from that boy. He 'phoned a lady in Damgamvura (township), told her to bring his mother six chickens."

"But you mustn't tell the others. That time I bring bananas for your boy, Mai Simba saw. She said: "Are you selling those bananas?" She shakes her head. "They will all want some."

I nod dutifully. "Sometimes those boys are good," she says proudly. "They will care for their mother. But if those muroora (daughter-in-laws) get involved, I have to zip my mouth."

snatched by baboons

Saturday's state funeral had tongues wagging in Zimbabwe. In the middle of a power-sharing crisis, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai chose not to attend. It was hardly surprising: President Robert Mugabe used his graveside oration to blast Tsvangirai as he used to at almost all state funerals before the unity government was formed. State reporters were sent Tsvangirai-sniffing and found him playing golf at Ruwa Country Club. "PM plays golf as nation mourns," read the headline on the official Sunday Mail.

The man being buried was a little-known senator, Misheck Chando. He was a member of ZANU-PF, of course: one of the MDC's gripes is that the national burial ground is now nothing more than a graveyard for ZANY-PF. He was killed -- wouldn't you know it -- in a car crash. It turns out Chando very nearly didn't make it to national hero status and not for the normal reasons (wrong party): in 1944, at the age of three, he was abducted by baboons. His parents were working in their fields in Murehwa. The toddler was set on the ground. A troop of baboons dashed out from the bush and snatched the child. The parents were too far away to save him, although they tried. Villagers mounted search parties in the nearby mountains. They searched for four days. At one point, they found a child's footsteps next to the tracks of adult baboons. Eventually, they conceded defeat and arranged a funeral at the family homestead. It wasn't until the fifth day since the boy had gone missing that a villagers out looking for firewood came upon the child, calmly seated in the middle of a circle of baboons. The man managed to scare the animals away and rescue the child. Village elders had to "erase" the funeral by throwing sorghum into a fire and celebrations were held instead.

To this day, no-one really knows what the boy Chando ate for five days or how he survived.

how to keep your love alive

...Zimbabwe-style. Musician Dino Mudondo's been spilling the beans on his 'spiritual wedding' with local woman Cecilia Dapeta earlier this year. The pair went to a n'anga or prophet in Marirangwe. He got them to hold live pigeons ("just like the pigeons that never leave each other, we would never leave each other's side") and to catch and swallow -- while still alive, of course -- a fish apiece. The n'anga told the pair that swallowing the fish would ensure that their riches would multiply ("just like the countless eggs that fish lay").

After countless fights, Mudondo's just been slapped with a 14-month jail sentence for the physical abuse of Dapeta. She too got a suspended jail sentence.

home

From my seat at the cafe, I hear the steady chink-chink of a coin against an enamel plate. A blind beggar sits by the pharmacy, shaking a battered Kango dish rhythmically. The number plate on the plush burgundy Toyota in the parking lot a few metres reads "CHIXIE." There were zebras in Plantation Drive this morning, making me late on the school run. Two of them, ambling along as if they owned the place.

new neighbour

The house across the road has been empty for a couple of weeks. We thought we saw the owners moving mattresses and a stove out on a flat-bed truck. They did not come to say goodbye.

"I heard shouting late last night," our housekeeper says, wiping down the kitchen cupboards. "It was midnight. Screaming and screaming, like somebody had caught a tsotsi." Tsotsi means thief or criminal in the local Shona language.

I saw a small white sign on the gate opposite as I drove out this morning. ZRP, it says: Zimbabwe Republic Police.

properly-dressed

It's not your normal way of selling a dress.

"I was looking out for you," Mai Musa says reproachfully. "Why didn't you come?"

I made the mistake a few weeks back of saying we didn't have a gardener. Mai Musa's sister's husband wants a job. She made me promise to go to ask my husband.

"I'm sorry, we just can't afford one at the moment," I admit. "My husband's doing the work in the yard now." Which is true: he wears an orange boiler suit brought out by my mother.

Disappointed, Mai Musa persuades me in to look at the new clothes in her shop. She is eyecatchingly dressed herself in a bright purple knee-length dress with a square neck and lots of buttons.

"I know you like dresses," she says. "What about these ones?" These ones are the maxi-dresses that have finally reached Zimbabwe. Mai Musa hurries past a sleeveless modele. "Not that one," she says. "I can't wear that one."

"Why?" (I thought it was me who was supposed to be looking).

"It's my father," she explains. "He's an apostolic. He won't let me wear anything that shows my shoulders. He doesn't like hair pieces either". She touches her ponytail of braids guiltily, shuffles through the rack until she picks out something suitably demure. Her father lives in Old Mutare, it turns out, so at least she gets some warning of his visits.

"I can do piecework at your place," she says eventually. "Even on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. These days, the money's not enough."

small change

The deal is for 300 million US dollars -- and they're negotiating it right next to us as a waitress hands out Fanta.

"That was Vice President Msika's* son," says the 30-something Shona man proudly. Earlier he told the adolescent busy fixing his wife's laptop that he'd lived in 'Ukay' for 20 years where he'd been a professional boxer. He returned to Zimbabwe three years ago. "Now I sell fuel," he tells the spikey-haired teen.

His wife returns with the associates. They sit on puffy leather chairs. There are flies on the tables.

"That was Vice President Msika's son," the Shona man repeats. "Douglas. Not the other one Joel. He's a bit stupid. He's just given us an order for three million."

The ageing white man -- Portuguese? Spanish? -- appears unimpressed. He's irritated by the heat, the flies. He flicks open his cellphone, shouts in broken English.

"Look, yesterday you tell me 46 cents a litre. Now you tell me 56. I want your boss. This not how you do business." He turns to his neighbour. "10 cents extra a litre - that's two million."

"They don't play games," insists the Shona guy to no-one in particular. His wife, freshly-coiffed, says she has a friend at Noczim, the state fuel procurer. She's on a cellphone too, asking about fuel prices in Bulawayo. "The Msikas are a good family, a strong family..."

"I call you tomorrow," the patriarch says.

* VP Msika died earlier this year. Businessman Billy Rautenbauch was specially thanked by the Msika family in the official Herald newspaper last week for help offered during their 'time of loss.'

the smartie run

South African toyshop chain Aladdin's Cave has opened a branch in a plush shopping mall in Harare.

"Don't tell my husband," says a white resident. "I don't want to miss out on the smartie run."

The smartie run is a girls-only shopping trip to Jo'burg, a hurtle through the border in a 4 x 4 supposedly to stock up on the necessities of life that haven't been on sale in Zimbabwe for a good few years. But things are changing. You can buy Estee Lauder in Sam Levy's Shopping Village now -- at a price, of course.

"My husband says you can get all you need in Harare now," says another.

happy

Clothes shop Alcatraz is jammed with new imports from Dubai, Singapore and Malaysia: Britney T-shirts, black tops with a seqinned British queen on (surely not PC), spikey-heeled fake suede boots (what -- for Summer?). Not so long ago, in the depths of Zimbabwe's economic crisis, places like these were empty, echoing hangars. I browse through the rails, prick up my ears when I hear a familiar song.

"If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands," the assistant sings.

Another joins her. They loll underneath the clothes, singing loudly above the roar of the generator. "If you really want to show it, if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands." And the next verse, the Shona ex-Sunday school version: "If you're happy and you know it, say Amen..."

How long since I heard that song sung here in Zimbabwe?

topical

"Life is not good to me," she says.

Mai Agnes' grand-daughter was staying at the weekend. She sleeps in the same bed as her grandmother. But sometimes the eight-year-old has an 'accident.'

"She did wee-wee in the bed. So I take the foam rubber outside my house to dry." The house is on a former white-owned farm, which now 'belongs' to a pro-ZANU-PF bishop. There was talk of demolishing the workers' houses a couple of years back. So far, it hasn't happened.

"Then we take some buckets to fetch water. I leave my mattress there, some few minutes only. But when we got back, it was gone."

She asked her neighbour, Mai Ngoni if she'd seen anything. Nothing. They conclude that someone had been watching her from the bush, rolled up the foam rubber mattress and disappeared. She vents her exasperation on the child.

"I told her: you did wee-wee on the bed and now the mattress is gone."
..........

Local remedies for bed-wetting are bananas or a spoonful of honey before bed. Mai Adam used to ban Mishi from drinks after 5. Mai Tadiwa used to get her up every two hours in the night (but she carried on bed-wetting till she was 12, she says. To make it worse, she shared a bed with her two sisters.)

..........

Police in the eastern city of Mutare have arrested a 37-year-old highschool teacher who beat his three sons with an electric cable for wetting the bed.

Teachers at one of the boys' schools in Sakubva township noticed the child had trouble sitting down.

The boys, ages 4, 9 and 11, were taken to Mutare Central Police Station. They had been beaten across the back. Some of the wounds had gone septic.

"The father was arrested and he admitted beating the children, saying they were bedwetting," said Police Superintendent Alfred Kasingarirwi.

"It is shocking that a father could ill-treat his children like that."

The children's mother died in 2005. They were cared for by their grandmother until 2008, when the father took custody of them.

............

"That man should look at himself," says E. "He was doing the same thing when he was a child."

conversations

"My mother was a princess in her tribe," E. says. E is a greying lecturer, his car long consigned to the garage. A teacher's paltry pay won't get it going.

When he and his brothers were born, they were 'princes', set apart, treated as royalty.

"Even now, if I go back to my rural home, the people will clear the way for me. 'Here, this one is a prince,' they say. 'He must sit next to the chief'."

..........

Mai D's son has finally paid his lobola (bride price). Six of the bride's relatives came to her house last week. ("I told my son, I don't know what I am going to feed them. There isn't even a dollar in the house..."). Mai D's grown daughter was there too, to receive them. "That's important in our culture," she tells me. "The sister of the man must be there." All that's left to pay now is a 'fridge and some blankets. The son's been granted time to find those things.

You must be happy, I say. Mai D had worried the prospective in-laws would set lobola too high: the girl was educated at a South African university (that could have put the price up).

"I am," she says. "My son has done the right thing. He has not run away with someone's child."

"Soon we will have a wedding."

on the verandah

"Can you believe what we lived through?" he asks. "It doesn't seem possible, not now there's everything in the shops..."

R is a local bank manager. At the height of inflation last year, his monthly salary came to trillions of Zimbabwe dollars. Converted into US, it came to somewhere between 5 and 7.

"We had a bottlestore," he says. "At the bank, I could arrange transfers (most people weren't allowed to make them anymore). I'd buy from Delta, sell for cash -- and change every cent into Zimbabwe dollars."

We're sitting on the verandah in the dusk, a plate of shortbread on the table. The smell of the yesterday-today-and-tomorrow bush floats from the side.

"Remember the money burning?" he says. Enterprising youths would arrange transfers as the Zimbabwe dollar lost value by the hour. "You'd see your money dissolve before your eyes."

We talk about the diamond craze. (Which isn't over: a dealer died this month when he jumped off a moving truck to avoid a police roadblock. Nurses found 1,100 US in his clothes, photocopied the notes with the connivance of a police officer and tried to pass them off as real). He tells a story I haven't heard. "You know that bus-stop near the ZESA offices, the ones by Jairos Jiri?" It's where everyone waits for inter-city transport. "A bus came up, empty apart from a soldier. He was sitting at the front. His gun was under his seat. Everyone was pleased to get transport, they crowded in. But when the doors were shut, the soldier got up."

"Now we're all going to Chiadzwa to fill up the holes you dug," he announced, gun at the ready.

"Most of those people, they'd never been near Chiadzwa. They were businesspeople, people going back to their families in Harare. But they drove to Chiadzwa and they had to work there for two days, filling up pits."

One of the kids empties a whole tin of marbles on the stone floor. From inside, I can hear the soft murmur of National Geographic. We have power tonight, supper waiting. Good things, normal things.

"You know what, though?" he says slowly. "It made us resilient. It made me realise what I could do. It made me more of a man."

ENDS

one year on

"Miss - " The girl comes running towards me in the deepening dusk. For a moment I think it is H., the girl across the road who's studying in England but back for the holidays. Trucks come to her family's house and unload things at night, never in the daytime.

When the girl gets closer, I see it's not H. This one is younger, 19 or 20 maybe, with straightened hair (which costs money).

"We are selling clothes," she says. "Shorts, tops. Come and see."

How do I explain that though I'm white, we're struggling like so many others here in the middle-class, wondering where to get school fees from, whether the 'phone will be cut off over unpaid bills, hitching a lift to Mozambique with family, eating spinach-from-the-garden-stuffed pancakes from mix sent from the UK, making tea from 'leaves' in the garden?

As we near the house -- it's the big tiled house on the corner, a double-storey building that looks as if it's been transplanted from Coventry rather than built for the tropics -- another girl emerges. She's wearing hipsters, a strapless top. I can make out the plastic -- they're supposed to be invisible -- straps holding up her Chinese underwear. Zhing-zhong bras, we all wear them.

The clothes are in a sports bag. The girls pull them out: shorts (favoured by masalads but certainly not traditional Zimbabwean wear: Girls La Musica dance group causes a furore each time they don skimpy shorts), tops ("8 dollars each," the girl says. "But we can negotiate"). Some still have the Top Shop price tags. Others are clearly second-hand. Has someone left a bag behind and the girls are disposing of the contents? Or has one of them just come out from England and she's selling off her stuff to raise some cash?

"I don't have cash at the moment," I say (which is true). "I'll have to ask my husband."

In Zimbabwe, that's a perfectly good get-out clause.

....

"My mother's sister has gone," she says. "Last week. They tried to 'phone but there was no-one there." She looks at me reproachfully. There was no-one in the house last week. I imagine the 'phone ringing unanswered.

"Was she old?"

"Not so old," she says. "She had problems - there." She points to her chest.

"Heart problems?" "No, BP. Her younger daughter was working in Harare so they took her to that hospital there. Sakubva Hospital. No, Mabvuku." She names a township to the north of the city.

"If I had money, I would go to Nyanga." The aunt must be buried by now, but I know the ritual: the sitting with the bereaved family through the night, the food gifts that will be expected. "All my money is gone."

"Gone?"

"I send money to Nyanga for my father," she says (her English is a thousand times better than my Shona). "40 dollars. Then my brother's wife wants money for thatching grass, 1 dollar for a bundle. I buy them 25. Then there is no money for my sister's child to buy school books. So I buy books for Khumbulani, 1 dollar 70 a book."

"They are all taking money from you," I observe.

"They say I am their mother, now that our mother has died," she says with a sniff. I am not sure if she is cross with me -- a not-wealthy employer she has the misfortune of working for, a Madam who does not even have enough money to get her hair done each week (or month, or six months) or buy a DVD player or a plasma TV or drive a car that doesn't belong to her in-laws -- or with her desperately-poor family who have fastened onto her as the only one with an above-average income in US dollars. Both, I guess.

.......

"How is school?" I ask A, a teacher.

There was a teachers' strike before we left, 10 days ago. Something has shifted though, because yesterday pupils were streaming out of St Dominics, a government secondary school.

"Some of them are back," she says. "At the junior school, they held a meeting. The parents must pay 50 dollars a term. With the 'incentives' -- localspeak for parent topups -- the teachers will get 330 USA." She uses the local slang: you-sah.

Happy told me about the junior school arrangement. She has a daughter there. "Honestly, we're so fed up," she says. "We want to put M in private school next year. Some of the parents were complaining, they say they can't afford 50 US." Happy can afford it. But many of the parents are civil servants, earning less than 150 a month. They can't.

"At the teachers' college, they are having a sit-in," A says.

It's one year exactly since the unity deal was signed. Some things haven't changed.

elections

Horns blaring, the motorcade sweeps past us near Manica, twenty miles from Mozambique's border with Zimbabwe. An outrider on a motorcycle forces our vehicle off the road in this desolate countryside, flanked by the Amatonga hills. Youths hang out of open lorries: some wear election posters for Mozambique's ruling FRELIMO party on their backs and their chests, like paper ponchos. Black SUVs carry smartly-dressed women in elaborate turbans. Official campaigning for Mozambique's October 28 general elections kicked off this weekend. After eight years watching elections in crisis-riddled Zimbabwe, the torn election posters lying in a marshy township in the seaside port of Beira look fairly familiar. Political analysts say President Armando Guebuza is almost certain to be returned to power. His FRELIMO party has been in power here since independence in 1975: Zimbabwe's ZANU-PF has been in power since 1980. Despite the grey landscape -- the rumour is that if you paint your outside, you have to pay more tax -- there is an optimistic vibe. Villages are dotted with the bright yellow and blue shacks of rival mobile 'phone companies. "Tudobom", one advertisement reads: "Everything's fine." Part of the centre of the market town of Chimoio have been cordoned off. Policemen in white shirts stand at the side of the square, I'm immediately cautious. In Zimbabwe, policemen at ruling party rallies do not like white Western journalists. Neither do party officials: just before one poll, I ran into a glaring (now former) agriculture minister Joseph Made at a thatched tea-room near Headlands, near where he'd been addressing a rally. "Hey, camarado," one officer shouts, waving. "Good morning."

first pizza

"Do you think they're really coming?" he says.

It was a spur-of-the-moment invitation: come and have tea if you've nothing else to do. "That'd be nice," Mr M says. "Bring the boys," I add.

I set out tea-cups, boil the kettle. Take out the tray. Bang icing sugar through a sieve on a sponge cake (and scrape off the burnt bits from the bottom). Put more chairs on the verandah.

There's a hoot at the gate. Finally. Mr M appears, bearing a hexagonal box of pizza. "We always have pizza on Sundays," he says.

My son is excited. "I've never had pizza before," he says. That's not strictly true: Mai C baked pizza on Friday. Pizza and polony sandwiches and sponge cake, at four o'clock on the afternoon. She kept the cheese off the slices reserved for her husband: he has a stomach ulcer and BP. Like so many in Zimbabwe. Mai C sent slices of pizza back with me in an empty ice-cream tub. But fast-food pizza from Nandos, no, my child hasn't tasted that before. "They know us so well in Nandos," Mr M says. The pizza is in halves: clockwise from 12 to 6 it has lots of meat, from 6 to 12, it's pineapple and green-pepper dotted, vegetarian. We eat pizza and drink tea outside and talk of Mr M's plans to become a life-coach. The kids play football on the drive. A memory stirs -- was it really 15, 16 years ago? -- of an Italian verandah, sunflower fields beyond, eating pizza from the oven cut into the hillside.

My son eats the pizza like kids do everywhere in the world: nibbles off the topping, leaves the crust.

gigi

There are two sides to every central bank chief.

One side: Gideon Gono, the man behind the relentless printing of Zimbabwe dollar notes for more than five years. Zimbabwe's hyperinflation is now the second worst in history, according to Washington's Cato Institute. Dr Gono also stands accused of dishing out freebie tractors, ploughs, combines and fuel in a bid to up ZANU-PF's chances of winning last year's poll; paying youth militias; diverting donor cash to government projects etc, etc. The former opposition MDC would like to see Gono gone.

Another side: the son of a friend (white) was involved in a car accident at the weekend, in Harare's plush Borrowdale Brooke suburb. Dr Gono stopped at the scene and asked if he was alright. When he heard an ambulance had been called, he pulled out his wallet -- and a 50 US note. "Those ambulances are expensive," he said. "That's all I've got on me. Put it towards the ambulance.."

dish

The man's shirt is threadbare but he's worried about more important things."Where's my dish?" he asks. "I'm sorry, Mr M.," the girl behind the desk says. Mr M is obviously a frequent visitor. "It's still not arrived." "How am I supposed to eat then?" Mr M chortles. The dish Mr M wants isn't actually a flat enamel one. He wants Dish, the TV guide for DSTV, the satellite TV service for much of Africa. I've been thinking that Dish is an apt name. Because in times of scarcity, crisis and economic hardship, people here still want stories almost as much as they want food. New stories aren't easy to come by: the shelves of the government-owned Kingston's bookstore are as empty as the shelves in TM supermarket were last year. The local library is "seasonal": it closes for much of the 8-month-long rainy season because the tin roof leaks, so the books (what's left of them) have to be packed away. Friends beg me for used magazines. An official from the Education Ministry sends in a letter to the local paper: "I am appealing to anyone out there to give me a book or books for distribution...We welcome any book or magazine" (When I trek up several flights of stairs to the dingy government offices with my meagre pile of ancient Woman and Homes, the official's wife looks up from her typewriter. "We don't even have paper," she says.) While I've learnt to substitute where food's concerned -- to make my own tea from the rosemary bush outside the door, to fry the stalks of the spinach leaves, to use donated pancake mix to make spongecakes (they turn out doughnutty) -- I still battle with story-hunger. Which is why my mother-in-law tries to deliver a couple of loaves of bread and a fresh DSTV video twice a week.

karate

My son's karate teacher sizes me up. We have all done this in the past 8 years: which side is he on? Will I be taking a risk if I say..? I think she's pro-MDC but she looks remarkably like Vice President Joyce Mujuru -- could they be related?

After three lessons, he tells me about taking karate to Kenyan townships. He has a friend who has done this, empowering women to fight back. I ask him if there's anything similar in Zimbabwe.

He looks at me for a second. "I've just been approached by the Revolutionary Youth Movement," he says. "You know, it's linked to the MDC." There, he's put his cards on the table. I nod. "They want me to take this programme to the high-density suburbs," he says. "For self-defence."

After President Robert Mugabe lost the first round of presidential elections last year, countless MDC supporters were raped, assaulted and killed (when Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara tried to point this out at a ministerial retreat this weekend, Mr Mugabe's ministers walked out in protest). Would it have made a difference if they had had basic self-defence training, I wonder? If former opposition supporters are gearing themselves up to fight back, that obviously means they fear there'll be a next time. Which doesn't say much about their confidence in ZANU-PF's commitment to the power-sharing agreement.

change

"Where's Morgan?" "Morgan? There is no Morgan," the official replies crossly. We're in a dusty carpark, waiting for the man.

"But...Morgan is More, remember?" the first guy protests. That was the slogan the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader very nearly swept to power on in 2008. Mr Tsvangirai's face beamed out from a thousand red and white posters.

"No," the official insists. "There is no Morgan." Now we must say the Prime Minister, the Honourable Prime Minister, Mr Prime Minister, or something along those lines. Mr Prime Minister arrives, relaxed in a traditional style white collarless shirt. His aides cluster round in dark suits. When we eventually get to speak to him, the former trade union leader is affable, interested. Tired too, perhaps. A metre or so away, the official waits. He has been reluctant to let this go-ahead. After five minutes, he claps his hands. We are dismissed.

how not to do your job

"He says he's got me an interview with the Mozambique opposition leader." He looks at me panic-stricken. "Alfonso Dhlakama, do you think?" I say. "Don't know." Help. It's 7 o'clock at night, we were due at a secret MDC gathering five minutes ago (we only found out about it in the last half hour), we don't really need an interview with a Mozambican politician but we do need to stay on the right side of our contacts. Who might be offended if we brush away our chance to interview a Big Man..."Google it," I say, shovelling scrambled egg down the infant's throat. He'll have to come with us: we have no babysitter tonight. So we google, in between locking the house, turfing a tidal wave of cats out, tying the laces on a pair of holey trainers ("Why can't I wear my flip-flops?") etc, etc. It turns out there is not one Mozambican opposition leader but two, the second is the mayor of Beira, and -- wouldn't you believe it -- he's just survived an assassination attempt. Oh, and there are elections next month. ("I could have told you that," says a friend the next day. "They're painting all the government buildings in Chimoio.") We formulate questions in the car, bumping over potholes: If it's Dhlakama, ask this and if it's Simango, well, at least you can ask about the assassination. We tumble into the dark and cold of a winter's garden. My son heads for the Cokes, thoughtfully provided at ground level. Simango is in the red baseball cap. And yes, he does want an interview...

tension

I last heard from Tension when we moved house three years ago. He arrived early one morning, complete with truck. We had to get rid of some of our bigger pieces of furniture. Tension offered to auction them for us. He and I moved round the rondavel (thatched round hut), setting a reserve price for the railway teak teak sideboard, the writing bureau I kept my books in and The Desk.

The Desk had a bloody history. Leopold Smith was one of Rhodesia's most infamous murderers. On June 17 1963 he shot 11 people, killing four of them. The attacks took place at the Premier Citrus Estate, near what was then Umtali. Smith was employed as accountant and paymaster at the farm. He and his wife Joan had a turbulent marriage -- he beat her with a sjambok - and on June 14, she got a court order for the removal of her children from Premier Estate. She arrived at the farm on June 17, accompanied by a policeman and a welfare officer. When Joan started to take her clothes from the house, Smith opened fire, first killing the welfare officer. He made for the Premier Estate office where he killed a Mr Hein, also an employee. Joan and Mrs Hein barricaded themselves into the office, so Smith shot through the window, killing Mrs Hein. A gardener was also killed. Smith gave himself up after two days spent hiding in the bush. At his trial the defense argued (unsuccessfully) that Smith had his first ever epileptic attack and was unable to control his actions. Smith was hanged in 1964.

Smith wrote to his wife after the attack: "Recalling the event, I hope you did not get hurt as it was a small room and lots of objects to make the bullets glance off." He was right there -- The Desk had a bullet hole.

Tension took it to be auctioned. It was a huge heavy thing, and we didn't have the means to move it ourselves. He took full advantage of Zimbabwe's accelerating inflation, only paying us back for the furniture he sold a couple of months later, by which time the amount was worthless.

A few days ago, I got a text message: HIE. STILL IN BUSINESS OF SELLING ALL HOUSEHOLD GOODS AND ALL TYPES OF MOTOR VEHICLES TENSION GOD BLESS. I thought of The Desk, and wondered where it is now.

road safety

Baba waDanai pulls out his Blackberry. On the screen, the red 4 x 4 is crumpled.

"It rolled three times," he says. "I have to keep pinching myself to see if I'm alive."

He was with four colleagues on a business trip, he says. They were on the road to Chimanimani. It was 8 at night, a bad time to travel. These days there are cattle on the roads, cars without lights, broken-down tractors. At the 24-kilometre peg Baba waDanai had only time to scream: "Watch out." The driver saw the dark shape of the stationary lorry, swerved, clipped the side....

"If he hadn't, we'd have gone under it," he says.

Zimbabwe's roads are deadly. This week alone there have been three kombi crashes, leaving more than 60 dead. At the agency, we used to report on road tolls when the number of victims was more than 10: in Zimbabwe, less than 20 and it's no longer news. President Robert Mugabe's health advisor Timothy Stamps told the Herald last month that you're 50 times more likely to die in a road accident in this part of Africa than in the West. Potholes, alcohol, clapped-out vehicles and the simple fact that you can buy your licence (and your way through police roadblocks if you haven't bothered to take even that simple step) might have something to do with it. Poor pay kills too: a kombi driver gets just 180 US per month. The quicker he gets back to base, the sooner he can load more passengers and the bigger his commission.

The video on Baba waDanai's Blackberry rolls on. He shows us a tiny scratch on his wrist. "I got out and thought I must have internal injuries. I thought I was going to die." His wife stands hugely pregnant next to him. "Did he call you?" I ask.

"At 1 in the morning," she says. "From the clinic. You can imagine how I felt."

coming home to roost

No money = no wife.

A. has three sons, all in their mid- to late-20s, all with university or poly degrees. One has a job with Customs and Immigration, another's been working at the Blair Research Station near Marondera as he completes his Masters, the third is waiting for his poly results (a paper he wrote has mysteriously disappeared, meaning he might have to sit -- and pay for -- it again). There are no fiancees or wives, not even a girlfriend. How can there be, when prospective in-laws expect lobola (bride price), lots of it and payable in foreign currency?

The sons are home again this weekend. Unaccompanied, of course.

"Other people complain about an empty nest," she says. "In my case, they're coming home to roost."

diary of a 30-something

Zimbabwe has its own Bridget Jones. She writes in the Manica Post newpaper every Friday. Unlike Helen Fielding, she doesn't sign her column. But this chocolate-loving 30-something's dilemmas are just as pressing.

Ms 30-something, a top-level executive who comes complete with secretary, is torn between two men: Mr IT, who works in the IT section of her company and Mr Old Mutare, who comes from Old Mutare*, is from an apparently politically-powerful family (government, possibly though it's never spelled out) and has money (and a farm). Lots of money. When he and Ms 30-something quarrel, he sends her a "roomful" of flowers. The memory of that has her a weeny-bit scornful when Mr IT -- to whom she finally succumbed a couple of weeks ago -- sends her a bouquet of flowers by dint of an apology. An apology what for, you may ask, only a fortnight into a relationship? Mr IT has made the mistake of refusing to eat chez Ms 30-something (he prefers restaurants every night, which she concedes could be a problem if she married him: how would they save?). He says it's because she might put mupfahwira (love potions) in his supper so he'll never leave.

Ms 30-something has her fair share of drama. She was in a car crash earlier this year, was horrified when taken to a rural hospital (where she was left groaning on a stretcher) and relieved when her church in Harare (Ms 30-something goes to one of the trendy new monied churches the well-connected love to be seen at) sends money for her to be transferred to the capital. She has a lesbian friend who's recently given up on women and is engaged to a man old enough to be her father, and she has a Small House friend. Small House is the mistress of a man with several wives already, but he pays her rent and hairdressing bill and gives her money for groceries. Small House -- who recently lost one of the twins she was carrying -- tells Ms 30-something the secret to keeping someone else's husband: "She tries her level best not to behave like a wife. She plays her cards right, depending on the situation. If he needs a listener, she listens: if he needs an encourager, she encourages, if he needs a nurse, a massage, a bath...whatever it is, she gives it freely, without complaining..."

*the eastern city of Mutare was "moved" over Christmas Pass at the turn of the last century. According to old accounts, houses were dismantled and transported by wagon across the mountain range. Hence Old Mutare (where there's a mission, a school and a university) and Mutare proper, today's diamond-riddled city.

guessing

After eight years living here, I still find it impossible to gauge Zimbabweans' ages. The sister who takes blood from me tosses her ringlets as she writes my name on the test-tube. They're reddish-purple corkscrew ringlets, the sort you could thread your little finger through. It's an elegant wig, I realise (there's a tell-tale gape at the neckline)"Do you have children?" she says. "A boy." I've warned her I might faint. "I have two, a boy and a girl. But they were close together and the girl did whatever the boy did so it was like having two boys." We discuss night wakings, how if you've only had girls you'd never understand how exhausting it is having a boy. "How old are your children?" I ask as she corks up the tube. Her face is smooth, unlined, firm - she's not much older than me, surely. "Old," she laughs. "What, 8 and 9?" "No, 21 and 20," she says. I gasp. "But that means you are.." She laughs.

It works both ways. A few minutes later, hurrying from the vegetable shop with a sachet of cayenne pepper I hear a steady "Sss." And again. "Sss." Yes? "Please, come over here." I take a few steps towards a trio of well, what are they, youths? Not so long ago, this would have been an offer of sugar, US dollar change or diamonds. One of the youths steps towards me. He's wearing a cap and a white-striped polo shirt. Breathtakingly white. He probably is a diamond dealer, come to think of it. Definitely a dealer of some kind, anyway. "I just want to say," he says, staring into my face. ""that I think you're very beautiful." "Thankyou." I laugh. I've slipped to the wrong side of 35 now, if I'd started having babies at 16 I could probably be your mother. That's if you're as old as I think you are, which you probably aren't. I hold bag, laptop and pepper tight and turn to cross the road. His voice floats after me. "Please, are you married?" .

power cut

Sixth hour of the power cut. The tractor battery linked to our inverter starts to screech. The charge is running low. Soon we will be in total darkness. Well, we do have three candles...The 'phone rings. It's Mrs H, my friend Siba's mother. Siba left for Zambia two years ago. Mrs H is not amused. "I haven't even seen Tapiwa." How old is the baby? "Eight months. Doesn't it bother Siba that her mother hasn't even seen her baby? If she's got a problem, she can tell us and we can send her 20 US." I fear 20 US won't be enough to get Siba here, partly because of the carload of groceries she'll be expected to arrive with. "T. talks to her from Bots. But I can't get through." Me neither but Mrs H is on a roll. "And it's cold and dark and the lodgers keep moving out without giving me notice and messing up my budget and I've got nothing for Tamara (the 6-year-old granddaughter who lives with her). What -- haven't you got power either?" No. We are on the same line. "I'm so bored," says Mrs H. "Haven't you got books you don't want, maybe magazines you've finished with?" I glance over to where my son is reading Zoric The Spaceman. OK, books I can do. Magazines too: I buy ancient copies from pavement vendors and store them in my husband's old school trunk. But the rest? "Paint," says Mrs H. "It all looks so dirty. Haven't you got some paint lying around? I want to paint the gate, and the garden wall.." "We haven't painted a thing for a good two years now and even then it was so expensive we only bought exactly what we needed. I'm sorry. "The bills," says Mrs H. "My rates are 800 US. I mean, who's got that kind of money...?"

chivhu

The public swimming bath is on the edge of Chivhu, encircled by a crumbling white wall. It looks like a cemetery, especially with the pavement gravestone sellers who've set up shop outside the ornate gate. But if you crane your neck, you can just catch the flash of the blue walls inside. My mother-in-law remembers this place as Enkeldoorn, once an Afrikaaner farming stronghold. If you look in the 'phone book now -- the 2002 phone book, that is, no-one seems to have a newer one -- there are still lots of Afrikaans names in Chivhu. Few, if any, will be left. Max, a black mechanic, stops to chat through the passenger window. "Where are you from?" he wants to know. "What do you do?" "I used to be a farmer," my 70-something father-in-law says. "But then the government took my farm." "Look," says Max. He has, no doubt, looked at my mother-in-law's Pajero, the boxes of sandwiches and the bulging bags in the back. "Count your blessings. I was in UK with some of those white farmers. They were working in factories, working in Tescos." My father-in-law is silent. His own future looks uncertain: the rented house they were staying in has been sold from under their feet but he cannot leave his office job for another town or country: who else would employ a pensioner? "You will get all those things back," says Max. "If not your farm, then a business, something even more profitable." "You're right," says my father-in-law firmly. As we drive off and the border-bound trucks swish past us, there's a fresh breath of hope in the car. "Well, he was positive, wasn't he?" says my mother-in-law.

sour taste

"But you said you were foreigners," the woman at the toll gate protests.

A breeze whips across the tufts of grey grass like hair. It is not a difficult climb up to the grave: an elderly Mrs Prescott laboured up here the day Rhodes was buried, he reminds me.

The moss has turned yellow and papery on the slabs of stone. High up now in the afternoon light, the balancing rocks look other-worldly. It's not hard to imagine throngs of people toiling their way up to bury the man. Not far from him lies Jameson, then, on an outcrop, Coghlan. "It's a kind of Heroes Acre* for colonials," he says grimly.

The children chase a giant blue-headed lizard. "What's that box?" asks Bella. At the edge of the ledge is a memorial to the Allan Wilson Patrol of 1893. There's a carved frieze of the men round the edges. "To Brave Men," it reads. "That's where they've put the two brave men," says tow-haired Hunty, whose ancestor Huntsman W was an early settler.

"Don't run," we call after them.

I break off a piece of Resurrection Plant. If you sink one of these dark dried twigs in water, it turns green. My father-in-law turns to his cousin on the way down. "How much did they make you pay for this?"

"55 US," she says. "10 each for adults." We confront the woman at the gate. You pay one fee to get into the Matopos National Park, extra to visit Rhodes Grave. Foreigners pay 5 times the price of locals. We produce our Zimbabwean identity cards. "But you said you were foreigners," the woman protests. Why on earth would we do that, we ask. A riot policeman in a faded uniform appears. "Look in the receipt book," he says. We do -- and see we've been carefully entered in blue biro as Zimbabweans. So where's our change? "You can't have the money," the pair say in unison.

"It'll look like there's been fraud."

* Heroes Acre: burial ground in Harare where black fighters from the war for independence are buried (almost all ZANU-PF)

fuel

Fuel shortages irritate me, but not in the same way they irritate my husband's family. I will let the gauge sink down to empty and then happily drive for what I estimate to be another 50 kilometres with the red light flashing before reluctantly consigning the car to the yard. This horrifies my mother-in-law, who makes a habit of stopping "to top up" at every garage she passes. Those blackboard signs in Zimbabwean garage forecourts that say Petrol: No. Diesel: No are the stuff of her nightmares. I thought it was just one of those: we-do-it-like-this-and-you-do-it-like-that things until a weekend with the extended family in Bulawayo. "We always keep the tank full," says my father-in-law's cousin thoughtfully. "Always have done. It's from the war days.

"You had to be ready to leave at a moment's notice."

dusk

Dusk. I drive carefully. I need to get home before dark. A girl walks along the side of the road in an orange velours tracksuit. The street leading up to the house looks as if it's been shelled. There are craters like fishponds, only deeper. The lights are on in Mr Gigi's garage-turned-hair-salon. He's 90-something. Still cutting. Inside the house, it's dark. Only the television glows bright red. Probably Zimbabwe's popular soap Studio 263 is showing. Or is that later in the evening? I rattle the padlock against the locked gate. "I didn't even have enough money to buy Kim a drink for school," she says. "Those boys, they don't send us anything."

abandoned

"Don't ask," says Mai C, shaking her head. I thought maybe their mother was back because Yolanda, (8, 9?) has a dress on. When I look closely though, I see that it's an ancient dress.The lilac is faded, the frills torn. Yolanda used to be a bookworm, grabbing my old Woman and Home magazines and tucking herself away in a corner to read them. Now she drops her head when you speak to her, refuses to answer.

Yolanda's mum left six weeks ago. She left the children -- Yolanda, Igno and two-year-old Polite -- in the care of an 11-year old brother. For food, she left half a bucket of maize. The brother slipped across the border to Mozambique to try to buy cheap dried kapenta fish. I don't know if he's still doing that. Now the children rely on charity -- donations of beans, cooking oil, rice, salt. There's been no word of the children's mother since, though Mai C says she's heard (through a complicated network of contacts) that the woman has been seen. "In Marange," she says. "Digging for diamonds."

cold

"I don't even have a thermos," Sister Basope says.

There's no heating in the pediatric ward. The iron cots are squashed up at one end. The president, in his black suit, glowers down at us from the far wall.

Sister Basope tries. When I ask how she is, she replies: "I'm blessed." I watch as she takes the mother of Ruwarashe, an 11-year old Downs Syndrome child into a side room after the consultation. She reads to her from Rhapsody of Realities, a popular Bible-study course often quoted in the state-run Herald newspaper.

But as we leave to go, she calls after us: "Can I have a job sweeping your office?"

rootless

"The thing is," she says, "we just don't belong."

Eastern Zimbabwe in the winter. It's drizzled all day. The mountains at the top of the road are covered in mist. We could be in England. "But I don't have the right to live in England. We're fourth generation pioneers."

To prove it, there's a framed pioneers certificate on the wall, along with the china plates and the black-and-white photo of her grandmother with bouffant hair and a ruffled full-length white dress. "She came up in the 1890s. She and her father stayed at Khama's kraal. He missed the slaughter at Fort Vic by a whisker: his wagon wheel broke loose or something. She didn't see another white man until she was 6."

What do you do when you've lived all your life in a country -- and your parents and their parents before you -- but you're told you don't belong? When your race is regularly vilified in the state media? "We're made to feel not welcome here, aren't we?" What are roots and does it matter if yours have been cut from underneath you?

She looks round the tiny two-roomed cottage, stuffed with heavy old mahoghany and teak furniture from the farmhouse and, after that, the Spanish-style villa with pool in a good suburb. "This is where I'll end my days, I suppose."

intercepted

...on a torn-out piece of exercise book:

To the highly-motivated --

Firstly and far most I would like to thank the Lord for giving me the opportunity to drop you one mail, saying how is school?

Back to me everything is moving in the right direction. except the fact that it's very cold these days. I wish I had enough money to by more blankets, tracksuits. More news in the next mail

Yours in love T. Nahvo.

(on the other side) My friend, please don't play around with useful papers.

zilla

She was a bit worse for wear, he says.

My father-in-law talks very little about the war. When Ian Smith declared independence, there were UDI parties and chants of 'good old Smithy'. He and a friend refused to celebrate. But they couldn't refuse to fight. Six weeks on, six off for more than eight years. A few gapped it. My mother-in-law's friend's ex-husband drove to the airport the day he was supposed to report for duty, hopped onto a flight and 'phoned her from England. But he was running more from debts (and excess children) than from the call-up.

Zilla was memorable in more ways than one. She was a stripper, brought in to entertain the forces. She made a trip to Chiredzi once. "Hey Zilla, you've got a hole in your pulling-socks," a rowdy member of the audience shouted. Zilla drew herself up to her full height. "So? Don't you know there's a war on?"

embarrassed

"I'm embarrassed to ask," Mrs D says. "But I've asked A. so many times. Do you think I could borrow 5 dollars? That's all I need.

"I'll get Mai J to replace it when she comes," she says. I'm embarrassed too. Because this time I can truthfully say I don't have a cent. We haven't been able to lay our hands on a cent (a rand, a penny) for eight days now. We haven't bought bread, 'phone cards or even desperately-needed newspapers. Trying to finish a diamond piece on Friday, I spy a new diamond headline in a state weekly and have to lurk by the newspaper pile on the pavement to skim the piece.

A friend takes pity on us on Monday, arriving with a parcel of dry groceries and two Buddie cards. We start weighing up petrol use. If I go to the court hearing this morning, will there be fuel for the school run tomorrow? How long will the car run on empty? At 11 pm I realise I have nothing for a school lunchbox. I comb through cookery books looking for a biscuit recipe that doesn't require eggs. Lunch is now baked rice, roast pumpkin and avocado -- if there's power to cook. Yesterday's blackout lasted 15 hours. I grate green soap to use to wash...everything. Then we get a promise. This afternoon, our supplier says. He should have "supplies" by then. Our hopes rise. "Sorry," reads the text message. "I haven't received any payments yet. I'll let you know when I'm ready."

I'm still not sure Mrs D believed me.

plump

Gibson is 5. "I'm five too," my son says, pricking up his ears. I've brought him along to the clinic where I'm observing a feeding scheme with Plumpynut, a supplement made of peanut butter, milk powder, oil and vitamins. (There's no power at home. No food either, but that's another story).

I look from Gibson to my own child. The difference is painful. Gibson is half the size of my child. He sits quietly on his mother's knee, while mine sits chunkily on the stone floor, drawing spaceships on a torn-out page of reporters' notebook.

"What's that?" he asks a little bit too eagerly, as a nurse counts out 28 silver sachets of Plumpynut. Gibsons's mother -- we've exchanged sympathetic smiles over the kids' heads --packs it carefully away in an empty maize-meal bag. Four a day for seven days. She'll be back next Monday to get more.

Gibson drank poison while he was young. It's a common enough tale in some townships, where people live close together and there's little storage space. Fertiliser or rat poison, those are the usual ones.

"He's got strictures in his oesophagus," the nurse says quietly. "Before, he could only have milk but this Plumpynut, he can digest it too."

Gibson starts to cry as his mother gets up. She hands him a sachet and he tears at the corner greedily.

Later, I send my child outside while I watch in silence a small boy with flesh hanging off his buttocks being weighed. The nurses insist on stripping the children naked to weigh them.

Guiltily, I lug my huge child home.

lean times

We've had another taste of managing on not-a-cent. When you can't get money out of the hole-in-the-wall (or the bank) in Zimbabwe, you have to rely on a complicated network of suppliers and transfers once or twice monthly. This week our regular supplier told us he had had to provide a lot of cash for his lawyers and was flat broke. "Try again next week," he advised cheerfully. In desperation, we contacted a second supplier, only to be told he too couldn't help: he's away until next week. Because of Zimbabwe's horrendous prices (on average two to five times what they are in neighbouring South Africa), few people can afford to have a well-stocked larder to fall back on. So here's how we manage on next-to-nothing:

-- two spoonfuls of peanut butter for breakfast (and nothing else).
-- pancakes five days in a row (thanks Mum and UK supermarket Sainsbury's: she sends us packets)
..stuffed with Soyameat Spaghetti Bolognaise (ditto)
-- baby spinach leaves (not because they're trendy but because they're the only vegetables growing in the garden in winter and I can't wait for the leaves to get any bigger)
-- grapefruits from the orchard next door for fruit/Vitamin C (try getting that down a five-year old's throat..)
-- stale, oversized dog biscuits for the cats (the dog died two weeks ago)
-- Surf washing powder to wash the dishes/floor/toilet/bath (when the shampoo ran out)
-- diced newspaper for the loo (which presents a disposal problem: there's been no rubbish collection for two months despite our 95 US rates bill)
-- ancient body lotion in place of washing soap (that too is finished).
-- black tea/no tea/tea made from the mint leaves that grow round the garden tap

Last time this happened, A, a Shona friend and mother of three grown boys, handed me a tin of tomato paste and some dry spaghetti. "Take it," she said. "We're used to having little. You lot aren't."

teapot

In Shona culture, you don't arrive with a gift in your hand. You leave with one.

This is all very well in times of plenty: when you have laden fruit trees for example. It's harder in winter -- when all I have is lemons and unripe avocados -- and when there's been no parcel delivery that week.

The 'phone rings well past shopping time. "Mum, it's Shamiso," he says. "No,it's not," she says when I pick up.

"It's Tadiwa. I'm in town with my mother. Can we come see you tomorrow morning?" They're in town for a funeral. Tadiwa's 20-something cousin Melody has died, leaving a baby in Damgamvura township. They arrive bang on time, both in black. The traditional colour for mourning is red here (if you see a red ribbon tied to a gatepost, you know someone's just died and the relatives are gathering). but most urban dwellers have adopted black for mourning. We sit in the dark. There is no power. I offer four slices of dry sponge cake, left over from yesterday. "No-one expected it. He was fine at the weekend. Then he got sick on Monday and died on Tuesday." There's a muddled murmur of pneumonia. No-one voices the unmentionable. Tadiwa is close to tears but she steers the conversation valiantly to her teaching job at a township highschool. "I earn more than she does," she says, gesturing to her mother, a typist in the police force.

As they get up to go -- they must leave town tomorrow and the bus-ride to Rusape is tricky -- I reach for my cobbled-together present pack: a novel (Tadiwa teaches English) and a teapot that's still miraculously bubble-wrapped, two years after I bought it. For her room at the University of Zimbabwe residences, when lectures finally resume.

body viewing

"She was so tiny in there," says Mrs D. She's still wearing her faded black T-shirt from the funeral. It's baggy and shapeless from many, many funerals.

"So tiny," she repeats. "Shame, she had a brain cancer. And that M, you know? She was crying and crying. She is very sick, that woman."

Body-viewing is an obligatory part of Shona funerals. Everyone files past the open coffin slowly and then the women discuss the state of the deceased afterwards. I guess it's part of the closure thing but I find it hard. I was relieved at Susan Tsvangirai's funeral when a smartly-dressed Shona woman slipped out of the church side-door when I did. "I don't like the body viewing," she said, silver bracelets jangling as we waited by the jam of government Pajeros and Mercs outside. "And my husband is Morgan's uncle."

In this case, it was the wife of a town physician who'd died of a brain tumour. The funeral was at the Anglican cathedral. I'd seen the Mother's Union members in their blue and white uniforms hurrying there on my way home from the school run that morning. "The church was full," Mrs D says with satisfaction. In fact, the funeral seems to have cheered her up, made her forget her arthritic legs for a while.

"Here," she says. "I've cooked some sweet potatoes. You haven't got power, have you?" And she hands me a warm plastic bag.

heard at the vegetable shop

"I hear the magoda (diamond dealers) are back," she says, leaning on the counter.

"Yes. But so are the soldiers," says the cashier. "If they catch you, they will hit you. Like a snake you find in your house."

poundnote farm

The policemen flag us down not far from Penhalonga. There are three of them

"Tell them to go in the back," I hiss. Because while I'm not averse to giving lifts -- and policemen can be a very good source of quotes -- this is a quiet Sunday afternoon, the men are very obviously armed and my child is in the back seat.

He ushers them into the back of the truck. Two women jump in too. Both elderly, doeks on, struggling with suitcases. They want to go to Muchena communal lands. Fine.

On our right is what was Pound Note farm. It was where the tallest tree in Rhodesia stood, a eucalyptus. The tree was depicted on a pound note, hence the name of the farm. I think about farms as we drive along and about the gently-spoken woman with the quavery voice I spoke to this week. She and her husband have already given away 92 percent of their farm. The last 8 percent is threatened by a US citizen somehow linked to the prime minister. The "niece's" sister came to the farm in April, a handbag over one arm, a badza (hoe) in the other. She started digging daintily through the already-planted tomatoes. "Did your husband really call that woman a cold, stupid kaffir?" I have to ask the farmer's wife. Later she sends me a text message. "Thank you. These days justice seems so elusive."

There's a voice from the back seat. Someone's reading my thoughts. "Mum, how do you get a farm?" "Why?""I want one."

"You have to work very hard and then you can buy one," I say. "But best not to buy one in Zimbabwe."

"Why?" Careful now. "Because you can't always keep it."

My five-year old never saw his grandfather's farm. We were married on it, but the farm was taken over eight months later. My father-in-law went back there once. There was human excrement in some of the rooms. Someone had scooped out my sister-in-law's face cream from the bathroom cabinet, which made her very indignant.

"Why can't you keep it?" "Because sometimes the government wants it," I say. "But how has Z's papa still got his farm?" Some questions don't have answers.

We're in Muchena communal lands. The women want to get out. The policemen don't. We turn off the main road. There's not another car in sight, nor a pedestrian. I start to get edgy. There are too many stories of fake - or corrupted -- policemen in the Herald and on our daily email. Two policemen are currently on trial for bank robbery. In court last week, they complained they were being victimised for being in possession of 120,000 US. They were merely "enterprising," the cops maintained. Their monthly salary is 100 US. It wasn't clear from the Herald report if the magistrate had actually got round to asking them how they got the 120,000 if they didn't get it from Kingdom Bank. (He may not have done. Last month the Herald carried an obit for a 35-year-old Harare magistrate who was still studying for his law degree at the University of Zimbabwe)

"Just turn the car round," I say. "Let's get back onto the main road."

There's a tap on the back window. They want us to stop. "I'll get into the driving seat, shall I?" I say, boots at the ready. In the event, the police get out, grasping their guns. They back away. I slide, relieved, over to the passenger seat. Later, on our way back from the dam we see them, lolling in the long grass near the Rhodesian ginger.

"Mum, does the government take houses as well?"

the rats ate it

C. thought she was being clever.

Zimbabwe's sudden switch to US dollars early this year led to a sudden surge in armed robberies. Supermarkets are being raided, there are now regular bank heists and security companies are finding they've got a new niche. Businesswoman Jane Mutasa lost 20,000 to carjackers. The reason? When the inflation-weakened Zimbabwe dollar was in circulation, it simply wasn't worth any would-be robber going to the trouble of staging a hold-up. It was far more lucrative to "money-burn" - conduct parallel market deals online -- in a downtown Internet cafe.

All that's changed now. So when C. heard an armed gang was operating in her area, she put her savings up in the roof. Intruders always check the safe and under the mattress. "Every time I got a bit of change, I added to it," she said. "20 rand here, 50 rand there." She'd managed to amass 7,000 rand (around 700 US). She lifted her stash down this week, or what was left of it. The rats had got there first.

embassy

Sky TV blares from a large screen in the waiting area of the new British Embassy in Harare's Mount Pleasant Area. It's prime minister's question time in the British parliament. Gordon Brown sports a permanently-tilted head (downwards, as if he's about to butt), as he insists his chancellor "has done a great job." I watch idly, clutching my son's red passport. There is no shade in the new car park. The girl behind the glass screen has a brown fleece and a bad cold.

"That'll be 128 dollars." I have no change. Neither does the Embassy girl. I'll have to go back through the security checks and drive off to Arundel Park Spar to try to make some. "And make sure the shop doesn't give you rand," she says. "We don't accept that."

The man at the door commiserates. "At least there are no queues here," I say. Stiff upper lip and all that.

"But there were," the man says. "Last week. All the old people. They are flying them out, you know. The first lot went on Saturday."

"The next ones will go soon." The embassy's Repatriation Programme can cater for up to 5,000 penniless nationals (though only 500 have signed up so far). The move has provoked outrage from Zimbabwe's pro-ZANU-PF Herald. The paper insists Zimbabwe's economic mess was caused by British sanctions. White pensioners were "cushioned" from the ravages of inflation by charities, it insists.

The doorman looks envious. Things are expensive here. He knows people who've gone to "UK" and earnt enough to buy a house. He has an afterthought. "I run a peanut-butter making project," he says. "You don't know anyone..?"

supper

"They say they won't kill us. They just want their properties back," the note read.

Matabeleland, 1982. S's 23-year-old son had taken his girlfriend to the family farm for a party. S was in Bulawayo, not on the farm, but that morning she'd been violently sick. So had the girlfriend.

"Premonitions," says S, matter-of-factly.

S's son went out with his grandfather to a small mine on the farm. The pair never returned.

The note, handwritten by S's son, was delivered to the house that day. The body of S's father was discovered hours later by the mine. There was no sign of her son.

Who was behind the attack? The general consensus was that it was ZAPU , the Ndebele-based opposition to Robert Mugabe's ZANU. The Matabele "troubles" were just starting: in the mid-1980s around 20,000 died. Many were killed by Mugabe's Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, who were officially clamping down on "dissidents".

The then security minister Emmerson Mnangagwa wrote S and her husband a letter, promising that those responsible would be punished. "And some people hung for it," she says. "I don't know who." There was, of course, always the suspicion -- never voiced, never investigated -- that the Fifth Brigade themselves were behind the attack.

They found S's son's body nine months later, two weeks before her first grandchild was born.

"That's what I was praying for, that they'd find him first," she says.

She wipes her mouth delicately on her serviette. She's in her 80s now, a widow. "It will take me the rest of my life to get over it," she says.

"And now it's 27 years later and what do I read in the paper? ZAPU wants its properties back. Such a flimsy thing to kill someone for. If it was them."

homecoming

We get back home to darkness. "The power is bad now," Mai Agnes says. "They cut it yesterday, and Monday." Our 'phone line has been cut (as has half the town's, we learn later. C's outstanding bill is for 3,000 US, three times ours). We can receive calls but we can't make them. Those in the know inform us that you get a grace period and then the line goes totally dead. I see the money I brought back for schoolfees will have to be diverted. My cellphone has been cut: I've gone too long without "rejuicing", apparently. I find to my horror that supermarket prices have gone up (S, a local retailer, explains that it's because of the strengthening rand: most goods are imported from SA but once here, they're priced in US). "Give us more time," the headline on the local Manica Post newspaper reads. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is trying to stave off strikes by civil servants. More hopeful still (NOT), former High Court judge George Smith is warning of 'anarchy' within a year. My son and I struggle to wash ourselves by candlelight in a baby-bath half-full of warm water. "South Africa is a delicious country, isn't it Mum?" he says.

president showerhead

"President Mugabe is a pooh," says my six-year old Afrikaans niece. My son chuckles. At five, toilet humour is his idea of fun too. "President Mugabe is a pooh, a pooh," he chants.

This could be a problem. Chloe lives in South Africa, where you're allowed to freely criticise your leaders. Ask her who the president of South Africa is and she'll giggle: "President Showerhead", the widely-used nickname for Jacob Zuma, who testified in a rape case that he'd showered to minimise the risk of HIV infection. Chloe has heard her Zimbabwean father (and no doubt many others) slam Mugabe at the dinner table. My son hasn't. In Zimbabwe, criticising Mugabe is a jailable offense. State media often carries stories of individuals picked up because a CIO officer sitting behind them in a commuter omnibus heard them badmouthing the Father of the Nation. At home, we use the code RGM when we talk about Mugabe so our child doesn't repeat what he's heard. Our neighbours are ZANU-PF as are half the kids at his preschool (which is why the school can't organise farm visits anymore in case the small visitors tell their parents where they can find a nice farm...) We've even had to hide what we do from our child ("When the teacher asks you what your mummy and daddy do for a living, you know we write BOOKS, don't you?").

Time to take him aside again. "You can't say bad things about President Mugabe," I tell him.
"Why?" "Because if people hear you, you could get into trouble." "But why can Chloe say it?"
"Because she lives in South Africa." Which will have to do, for now. But after reading South Africa's papers, I'm inclined to believe that Chloe's turn to watch every word may well come.

border

"I got here at 10 last night," the bus driver says.

It's four on a Thursday afternoon at Beitbridge border post, aka Hell. Three days ago South Africa abolished visas for Zimbabweans, offering them a three-month worker's permit on production of nothing more than a passport. Guess what? A few metres past the infamous bridge, hundreds of Zimbabweans -- 700?, 1000? -- are queuing.

We'd wondered what it would be like. Naively, we'd believed the Herald. "Subdued," the paper had said the traffic was. And it was... on the Zimbabwe side.

There are women sitting on the ground, huge carrier bags next to them. Others are texting madly. A young Chinese couple succumb to a "fixer". He sneaks them through to the courtyard of the immigration building, but no further. A white threesome in front of us are trying every 'phone contact they have.

"It's got to be someone reliable," the woman insists. She pulls out a novel. There are no toilets, no drinking water, nowhere to buy food: a recipe for cholera. "There's going to be riots soon," an elderly woman

My mother-in-law does not take to queues kindly (though she is from Zimbabwe, where I Q is a national obligation). She marches to a policeman, pleads seniority (she's 67) and smuggles all five of our passports to the desk. In three hours -- miracle of miracles -- we're through.

Less than a kilometre from the border post, we stop at a garage while our cellphones still have coverage. We buy ice-cream, magazines, fruit lollies, mineral water. And we turf in-laws and infant out of the car so we can scribble a script on the back of a medical letter and file, one last dispatch before two weeks of freedom: "There's chaos at Beitbridge border post as the buses keep rolling in..."

contrasts

The Club House is a colonial-era building with a wooden balcony and a turret. It stands on Mutare's main Herbert Chitepo Street where -- for a very short time in the early 1900s - a tram ran. The road is still wide enough for a wagon with horses to turn round in.

A friend has invited me for a "Ladies' lunch." In theory, only members can dine here. There are thick dove-grey carpets inside, tables set with starched white cloths, roses in vases. Gilt letters on a board record the names of past Club chairmen. On the menu are grilled pork chops and baked apples with custard.

"My father was a chief in the police force," says one dining companion. She means Rhodesian police force. "Female recruits had to have a cat and the cat had to sleep on each woman's bed."

"If an intruder broke in, you were supposed to throw the cat at it. They put out their claws instinctively."

"My father said it was the best form of security there was. "
....

"Mwana wako," the vendor shouts. For your child.

The stalls are built of rough wooden poles. It's best not to go shopping when it rains: the water collects in the tarpaulin and runs down shoppers necks as you stumble through the mud.

"Dollar, dollar, dollar."

Sakubva flea market in downtown Mutare was smashed up during the infamous slum clearances in 2005. But the stalls are back now. You have to pick your way through a pile of discarded rubbish to get to them.

"Dollar for two, dollar for two."

Vendors sit on the floor, piles of clothes heaped on to sheets of plastic. A few choice pieces hang on ancient wire hangers, ironed and washed. You pay more for those. The clothes are charity donations, smuggled in by the bale from neighbouring Mozambique.

Mimi, a stylish enterprising middle-aged black woman, has made a profitable business picking through Sakubva flea market. She selects pieces she knows will appeal to Borrowdale madams, washes them, irons them, affixes her own Mimi name tag, sets up a designer-style stall behind Sam Levy's village -- and sells them to clients who'd never dream of venturing to the flea market. Average cost of a blouse at Sakubva: 50 cents. Average cost of a blouse chez Mimi: 10 US.

That's called making a plan, Zimbabwe-style.

gakas for breakfast

They look like those stress-relieving balls, the rubbery ones that come with spikes that you're supposed to squeeze. These ones though are green and edible. I've never seen them before.

"Here," Mai Agnes takes a potato peeler. She cuts off the studs.

"Do you want to try some, Mum?" I take a bite. It tastes like cucumber, only sweeter. Much better than the Oxford cucumbers you get in the supermarket sometimes. Those ones are invariably sour at the ends.

"They're gakas," he says happily. "Mai Agnes grows them in her garden." He finishes both, puts down his plate.

"Maita shumba," he says, clapping his hands. Not tatenda or masvita or tinotenda or any of the other variations on thankyou in Shona that I've diligently learnt.

At five, my son is more of a local than I'll ever be.

musical chairs

The only room in the house with good cellphone reception is the bathroom. This means it has to double up as a 'phone interview room. There are several consequences:

- the loo itself has a wooden flap, making it ideal for a desk. This means that if you want to use the loo for other purposes, you'll have to move a file or two off the top. Desk chair is the side of the bath. A bit precarious, but that's Zimbabwe for you.

- you won't just find loo-roll next to the loo, you'll find a cardboard list of 'phone contacts.

- loo interviews are all very well when it's one of you doing the 'phoning. Sometimes though, people 'phone you. This means that you may be happily minding your own business when somebody else bursts in, waving a cell-phone. And, of course, commercial activity has to take priority...

invasion

"Excuse me," I scream. "What do you think you are doing?"

It sounds so exotic: monkeys in my mango trees. Actually it drives me insane. They get braver by the day, now the semi-Rottweiler is dead. Breakfast-time, they scamper metres away from us to pinch the bananas ripening in the lean-to.

We wave our arms and shout. They bounce on their hind-legs, taunting us. "They've got blue bottoms," my five-year old giggles. Not quite bottoms, but I'll leave it at that.

Two nights ago, I lay awake seething. Rival troops were conducting a turf war by the light of the full moon between the mango and the avocado trees. In desperation, we resorted to a Valium tablet, carefully conserved since my in-laws' last trip camping in the bush near western Chitaki (they down a pill each per night so they're not woken by the lions).

I'll blame it on the lack of sleep. But when I saw them in the loquats the next morning I caught myself shouting like a prim English farmer's wife powerless before the war vets come to take over her homestead.

Dove soap

The leather chair has such a large hole in the middle that I'm momentarily foxed, wondering if it's one of those ominously-named delivery chairs that I've heard of but never actually seen.

But no: it's just an old broken chair the nurse is perched on, in the middle of the childrens' ward. The ward is shabby, but light and clean. There are hand-painted guinea fowl mobiles floating over each bed near to felt-tipped green apples (or are they hearts?) with the message: Get Well Soon.

"I've brought you something," I tell a nurse. I'm waiting to interview a senior consultant. I've learnt it's often best not to arrive empty-handed in these cases.

I hold out my package: seven or eight individually-wrapped Dove soaps, some Dove deodorant (Black Dress Friendly, apparently it's a new line) and some toothpaste. A family friend has been sending these packages for seven years. His Dove soap has gone to childrens' homes, MDC officials' wives ("She'll use it at the church camp this weekend. None of her friends will have nice soap like this," the official in question told us happily as we skulked round a deserted building in the east of the country), victims of the Murambatsvina slum clearances, a would-be hairdresser in Mabvuku, Mrs Dube-who-gives-me-mealies and, and...

An older nurse appears. "I am the sister," she announces. "These are nice. Are they for me or for these girls?" Until January, nurses were being paid the equivalent of 50 US cents a month. "You must decide," I say, embarrassed by my heels and a tan leather Longchamp bag that's at least 10 years old but still looks expensive.

A chair appears, as if by magic. "Sit, sit while you wait," the nurses say, smiling. I do -- and the seat is solid.

fresh produce

"Let me see your ring." The man behind the onions seizes my hand. I'm choosing large potatoes in TM supermarket. (800 US 'phone bill for the month = jacket potatoes and baked beans several nights running, plus cheese if you're very lucky).

"How many carats is it?" he asks. I've no idea. It was my mother-in-law's ring.

"I'm asking because I can get you a diamond like that," the teller says.

Oh. I thought the days of the Chiadzwa diamond rush were over. Mai D. told me Sunday the makorokoza (digger) who was renting her cottage had gone for good (without paying the rent, of course).

"This diamond is not from Marange," I say defensively. "It's an old ring."

"It's one carat," he says. "I know all about diamonds. Yours is from Sierra Leone."

storytime

Polite starts first. She stretches out a tentative hand to his head and strokes the long bits of hair near his ears.

Igno is fascinated. Her hand reaches out too. She pulls, just a little bit. He swats her hand away as if it's a fly. He's trying to listen to a complicated story about a hippo and an elephant caught in a trap.

Stroke, stroke...

From the other side of the room, I watch, waiting for the inevitable explosion. Clustered round the teacher are eight small black heads and one white one. Sounds simple, but it's not. I've been here long enough to know that the eight black kids won't all be Shona. For starters, Fadzie has some Mozambican blood in her, Kimberley's grandmother is Ndebele and Baizel has some sort of connection with the US. My own child has a British passport but a Zimbabwean birth certificate. One of the names on it is Shona.

Polite can't stop herself. She runs her fingers along his hairline. Hippos are old hat to her: yellow hair is much more interesting.

I wonder if he will remember these things?

bits from the braai

Sheena was arrested for overcharging on...roses.

"The supplier had put them up. I wasn't going to make a loss, was I? But the inspectors came round and said I shouldn't have put my prices up."

"They put me in cells. It was filthy. You couldn't even put your head back: the walls were covered in black slime."

She spent half a day there before her husband came to bail her out.

"The police said to him: Take her, take her. She's a cheeky madam, that one."

....

Elias' birth certificate gives his D.O.B as 1948. In fact, this Classics professor was born in 1942. He went to school six years late, aged 12.

He spent most of his childhood herding cows and goats near the Runde River.

"We were coming back late, one day. I was with Edwin, my small cousin-brother. This snake appeared, a python, big as an anaconda. It took the goat before Edwin."

The villagers turned out en masse -- including Edwin's mother -- and beat it to a pulp.

Elias' parents had never registered his birth, and he needed a birth certificate to get into school. So he took himself to the District Office -- and knocked six years off his age.

...

C. T, in his early 20s, is due for a finger amputation today or tomorrow. Dr Cut-Cut (that's how most people refer to the local surgeon) warned last week he'd lose his whole arm.

He put his finger into the grill of the swimming pool at home and got bitten by a Biberon burrowing adder.

"It was probably looking for frogs," says my MIL with a shudder. The Snakes of Rhodesia book says burrowing adders -- which look deceptively like harmless brown house snakes -- are most often seen in the rainy season when chasing their prey. "Inquisitive children" are frequent victims.

"His flesh has gone all rotten," she says. "And his poor mother is off caring in England."

waiting

"They can't get their money," the security guard whispers. "It's a big problem."

Crouched on the kerb, lying on the verges, sitting on the steps of the Tel-One building next to the People's Own Savings Bank in the midday sun, people wait. It's civil servants' payday. There are hundreds of them, here and at Agribank one block down. The police are out in force but this time they appear to be waiting for their own payouts, not manning queues. In the few banks that actually have cash, there are whispers of withdrawal limits: 40 US, customers say.

Zimbabweans had hoped the new coalition government would mean the end of cash shortages and bank queues. Apparently not.

said the colonel to the farmer

S, a farmer's wife, delivers 20 litres of milk to our house on Friday mornings: 10 for us and 5 each for two friends (which is why power cuts are fine on Thursday nights when our milk has nearly run out. Cuts are most definitely not fine on Fridays, when a whole week's supply of milk will go sour). Strictly speaking, "side-marketing" is illegal: all milk has to be sold to the state Dairibord milk company. But Dairibord is collecting tankfuls of milk every other day and not paying for it.

Last Friday, S looked worried. An army colonel turned up at the farm earlier in the week. "I know you're busy," he said. "And I don't want to disturb you.

"We just need to fix a meeting to discuss me taking over the farm."

He had an offer letter (they all do). He showed it to S's husband. The date the letter was signed -- the letter giving the beneficiary authorisation to take over the white farm -- is Feb 12. That was the day before Zimbabwe's new unity government was sworn in.

The colonel's residential address was at the top of the letter. He lives on our road, three doors down.

the governor has gone

And with him our power.

For the last two years, we've had more electricity than most. "You've got a VIP living up the road," Mai C told me. In the evenings, she could see our lighted street from her backyard up on the hill as she cooked her family's supper on an open fire. "It was in the paper." At first, I was sceptical. Weren't we on a better line because we were near the Infectious Diseases Hospital? Or the radio mast? Mai C said not. The provincial governor lived just up our road, she said, and he had insisted he have full-time ZESA. OK, so it wasn't full-time but we didn't have the 19 hour cuts every day that other people were having.

We joked about it. When we had long cuts, it was because the governor was away. When the power flicked off and then on again three minutes later, it was because some unknowing ZESA official switched off the governor and then got an angry 'phone call. When the power came back on just before 5 o'clock, we reckoned the governor must be getting ready for his sadza.

Just before Christmas, I took my son to a six-year-old's birthday party on the other side of town. The child's family were celebrating in more ways than one. "The governor's moving into our suburb," announced mum Daphne as she dispensed soggy chocolate lollipops from Mozambique. (She'd made a special shopping trip) No, she didn't know when.

It must have been 10 days ago. Because since then our power has been...well let's say very shaky. Much like the New Zimbabwe.

change, please

"How would you like your change, Madam? In bubblegum or salt?" asks the cashier.

Zimbabwe's recent switchover from its worthless local dollar to the US has been far from smooth. Not only is everything hideously expensive (£3 for a tin of tuna, anyone?), there's never any change. Shoppers are forced to choose between cubes of bubblegum, small packs of biscuits or 40 cent bags of salt as change.

Central bank governor Gideon Gono has spent years printing Zimbabwe dollars, fuelling inflation estimated last month at 89.7 sextillion percent. These days, he can't print US, though he does try. Teachers and civil servants are being paid partly in locally-printed foreign currency "vouchers", supposedly to a total of 100 US. Shops and banks are meant to accept them as legal tender. Not surprisingly, many of them won't. Exasperated locals are calling the coupons "goupons" after their inventor.

At a hotel in the mountainous Vumba district, we want to pay for a couple of coffees and a coke. The bill is 3 US. Because every other outlet that day has insisted on the exact change, we realize that we have nothing smaller than a 20 US note. "It's a problem, Madam," sighs the waiter when we hand over the money. He goes to consult the manager. In the end we're forced to buy a hotel cap -- price 15 US -- to make up the bill.

quotes

Getting quotes isn't always easy. Not because people don't want to talk, but because they don't want to talk about what you want them to talk about. I stride into the stadium, suede heels slipping on the rocks. I haven't had time to change from the funeral. Trevor stops me at the gate while I'm bodysearched. "Are you married?" "Yes." I flash my left hand. Best not to be too standoffish in these cases, you want people to be loquacious. "I've seen you before," he says. I've got my eye on the heaving mass of people, a good 200 metres away. I need to get there before Biti starts talking. "Have you got a sister then?" asks Trevor hopefully. "Yes but she's in Sweden." I throw over my shoulder (At least it's not Britain: then I really would be identified as a colonial relic). I make it to the stadium. There are old men in ties and braces, women with MDC fabric wrapped round them as zambias (skirts), youths with red rags tied round their heads as a sign of mourning. Calvin flops down beside me, plus friends. "Hi Madam," he says. "Are you married?" "Yes," I say. "Isn't this a sad occasion?" "Do you have a friend?" he persists. "A husband," I say. "What's that guy on the podium saying?" No quotes coming from that source, I can see that. I edge away from Calvin. Lawrence, in a shabby yellow T-shirt, pats my arm. "The thing is Madam, we're doing a film. About marriage. About the difference between Western ideas and our local ideas. Would you like to be in the film?" "I'll ask my husband," I say. "Don't you think it's so terrible what's happened?" "Prudence Katomeni is on the board of directors," Lawrence says. "Wouldn't you like to help correct the script? Trapped, I put on my sunglasses, a gift from the sister in Sweden. As I run out of the stadium after Biti's speech, Trevor catches up with me. "When will we see you again?"

no questions asked

"I'll need a knife," T. says. "For protection."

Living in Zimbabwe, we've got used to watching our backs. Nothing valuable or sensitive is ever stored on the hard-drive of our main computer. Everything is on the flash-stick. Two flash-sticks in fact. His n' hers, only his has a lot of hers stuff on it. Four days ago, his flash-stick was stolen. Along with some digital equipment, a phone book containing several years worth of contacts and some household bills that nicely display our address. All in a brown leather bag, which might have looked as if it was stuffed with US dollar bills.

After the initial gut-twisting panic, we tried to make a plan. My father-in-law printed posters, offering a reward for the return of the flash-stick. His office help trawled computer dealers in town, begging them not to sell on any secondhand flashsticks that came into their possession. We alerted everyone we could think of. T. too, volunteers to help. "They'll sell it on. Obviously," he says.

T has a neighbour who managed to recover money stolen from his wife last week. T's neighbour wants to team up with T. on the understanding they'll split the reward money. We have to provide transport for T and Co. to get to the place where the stuff was stolen. Co. reckons he should be able to identify which tsotsis operate from there. The pair of them plan to raid the tsotsis' hideout.

"But T," I say (I mean, I do desperately want this flashstick back) - "Won't you get into trouble with the police if they find you with a knife?"

"Only if I'm using it," he says.

In the end we give him a catapult. For protection.

budiriro

The Revellers NiteClub is on the left and we are not anywhere near Tadiwa's place.

"Where are you?" Tadiwa's father says on the 'phone. His English is heavily-accented, as mine must sound to him. "Is that in Budiriro 1 or 3?" Budiriro township has several sections and we are not, it seems, in the right one. Meet you by the cholera clinic, that's what she'd said. We have a map. A very ancient map. On the map, Budiriro has one red cross so that's what we're aiming for. Thing is, roads have appeared and disappeared since the map was made. There are potholes and piles of rubbish and vendors and buses and chickens and no street signs. The sight of our car -- with us in it -- causes a major stir.

"I'll give you directions," calls one man. Too sensitive, not wanting to rub the cholera bit in (nor make them think we're aid workers or nosy journalists) we settle for asking for directions to the community centre, which the map says should be just round the corner. Two sullen security guards direct us to a community centre, but it's definitely not the one we want.

On our right, there's the Apostolic Faith Mission. Now there's another landmark we were looking for. We follow the road round. The cholera clinic should be here surely...

A few kilometres on, as we meander through a maze of tiny streets, we have to concede that there must be several Apostolic Faith Missions in Budiriro.

"We'll have to turn round," he says desperately. It's getting dark. We want to be out of the township before night falls.

Past a new borehole, a UNICEF bowser. There are vegetable vendors in the mud, near the rubbish. Suddenly, the clinic looms, mostly hidden from sight behind sheets of plastic. We can see someone moving around inside. It is quiet tonight. Cholera has moved from the city mostly now, into the hard-to-reach rural areas.

Tadiwa appears in the long grass at the side of the car, a plump, shy sister in tow. "Did you get lost?"