surviving

The house is dark by the time we arrive.

"No power, can you believe it?" says J, hobbling up to greet us. She is in her eighties, still going strong. "We thought they'd fixed it, but it cut out just before you came."

"Here, take a glow-worm."

A glow-worm turns out to be a small round battery-less light, a bit bigger than a Bovril top. It lets out an eerie blue glow, enough for you to see to wash your hands by (as long as you place it next to the soap-dish). The glow-worms come from J's adopted son in the UK.

In the dining room, you'd think nothing had changed. J's white-robed domestic (a Malawian, been there for ever) has set the table with a crisp white cloth and creamy napkins edged with tatting. There are tall silver candlesticks and place-mats with Paris scenes on. (I get the Moulin Rouge.) The food is concealed in delicate casserole dishes, silver serving spoons waiting beside them. It's only when J takes the lids off that I see they're smudged with soot. The cooking's been done outside, on an open fire.

The boerewors sausage comes from neighbours who emptied their freezer in her direction when they took their Christmas holidays, says J triumphantly. The carrots and beans are from the garden. The butter for the potatoes also comes from the neighbours' freezer. The precious grenadilla jelly has been carefully saved from Christmas two weeks ago, as has the ice-cream (which bears the taste of having defrosted and refrosted several times).

A long time ago (or maybe only ten years) J and her (now late) husband and stay-at-home son lived a relatively easy life. This is one of Harare's best suburbs. J's plot is a big one with worn-smooth tennis courts (so far she hasn't been able to bring herself to subdivide). The subtle signs of struggle though are hard to hide. The pool is brown, with bream in (for two much-loved cats). The gate is broken. J's plimsolls have holes in. So do her son's clothes.

She can't ever go on holiday (she says) because she fears her domestic would eat the one tiny tin of pilchards she divides into five and mixes with breadcrumbs to do her cats' weeknight suppers.

Even before J's husband died, his Zimbabwe pension was worthless because of hyperinflation. J's son eeks out a living making brightly-coloured children's puzzles -- but these days the toy market has shrunk. Besides, he can't get the wood to make them. The pair survive on parcels, parcels from the church, parcels from J's adopted son, parcels from an ex-lodger's sister with the enviable London address of Cavendish Square. The parcels come from startups with names like mukuru.com, shopzim.com, zimseller.com: all people who're exploiting a big gaping hole in Zimbabwe's foodchain to make their own small fortunes.

J opens the wardrobe in the guest room where we're staying (no bulbs in the bedside lamps but a beautiful pink rose on the dressing table) and shows us rows of cooking oil and bags of flour. "We've got enough Sunlight soap to run a shop," she says grimly. "And candles," chimes her son.

What J needs really is forex. Sometimes she takes some of her parcel goodies ("tinned fruit, body lotion, things we don't really need", and tries to sell them cut-price to the staff at the local Spar). She and her son had just managed to amass the princely sum of 120 US to fix the car, but then she got a bladder infection.

The scan and the antibiotics gobbled up the car repairs.

"I don't know how it's going to end," she says. I've always loved J for her energy, her resilience. I see suddenly that she is getting old.