neighbours

In a capital city of less than 2 million inhabitants, you're bound to bump into people. The then finance minister Herbert Murerwa used to shop at our local Bon Marche supermarket (gratifyingly, he didn't push trolleys-full of goods: judging from his basket, his tastes were moderate). Our son once played with the son of a top-ranking, very anti-white government official (at four or thereabouts, the child already had a black leather jacket). Before last year's elections, we came face-to-face with discredited Lands Minister Joseph Made plus entourage in Halfway House store, near the dried fruit.

The latest neighbour we've discovered is vitriolic pro-Mugabe geography teacher-turned-writer, C Zvayi. He left the state-run Herald newspaper last year to slip into neighbouring Botswana as a communications lecturer but was thrown out by the authorities. Zvayi was filmed back at his Avondale flat, angrily discussing his predicament (presumably the Zimbabwe government doesn't pay for propaganda in pulas). Which is how we realised we were neighbours.

Zvayi's block is a dank, creme-painted place under the shadow of thick trees, right next to the German Embassy (wonder if they know?). Last night there was washing hanging on the balcony. Looking at it, I was reminded of my grandmother's dreary council flat half a world away in Coalville, England.

Neighbours, but not friends.

it never rains

"I'll take him for a walk," he says. It sounds like a great idea: it's been raining all afternoon, we've been glued to the computer and my son is muttering dire things about the news and "the deafest mummy in the world."

My husband attaches sandals (no Wellingtons: they don't sell those things in Zimbabwe), zips up a raincoat (sent from the UK) and they're off.

They're back in record time.

"You know how boys love marching through puddles," he says. "Well, he spotted a huge one round by B's, went running for it but I stopped him just in time."

"Raw sewage was running straight into it. You could smell it metres away."

some day

...it will not be normal:

- to pack wet towels when you're going anywhere near a demonstration (to put over your mouth if the police fire tear gas).

- to push your memory stick down your underwear when you're going through a police roadblock (obvious place I know, but maybe less so than in a shoe)

- to discuss who's just been arrested or shot over Sunday lunch (today it was Mike R, shot three times at his plot on Christmas Pass when he disturbed burglars/invaders on Saturday morning. He's "stable" in the local provincial hospital, friends say. His wife's already in Australia: he'd come back to Zimbabwe to wrap up their affairs.)

- to carefully shred each page of a notebook as soon as you no longer need the quotes (worryingly, our child has started tearing up pages as soon as he's carefully filled them with letters. "It's so that no-one can see what I've written," he says.)

- to let your child play with million, billion and trillion dollar notes. They're totally worthless.

mercy

"No, I'm not at school," Mercy says with a bitter laugh. She teaches Shona at a local college. "At Chancellor (a primary school) the parents agreed to pay (in forex, she means). The teachers are getting their 300 US each now. At least they've got that."

"But our students wouldn't pay so we're not going."

"Anyway," Mercy says. "The prime minister (she says this delicately) is meeting the education minister today."

Zimbabwe's teachers want 2,300 US each per month, which is just about equivalent to Mugabe's salary (27,000 US per year). They've been getting the equivalent of around 3 US per month up till now. There is some offer of aid (from UNICEF and USAID, so the rumour goes). But can it stretch to 2,300 US for every government teacher in the country for the next few what will it be -- months? years? And what about the other civil servants: nurses, doctors, soldiers who are also clamouring for hard cash and lots of it?

Mercy - who bears more than a passing resemblance to deputy president Joyce Mujuru -- has great faith in 'Coltart', (lawyer David Coltart, the new education minister, also referred to by my mother-in-law as the 'racing driver one'). "The NGOs offered the Other Government money to pay the salaries and they said no," she says with disgust.

"But this Coltart, he says "We have so many friends who are willing to help us." I think he will sort something out."

Update: Coltart on Wednesday admitted government was "broke" and offered teachers 100 US cash each per month. Most refused to accept.

things to do

...when you're crouching on a kerbstone waiting for a court ruling:

- scan passing traffic for creative/unusual names: Go-Whack Transport was a good one.
- try to avoid photographer D, who totally blew your cover yesterday by greeting you expansively in front of lots of people
- surreptitiously adjust the back of your jeans to make sure no offending skin (or worse) is showing
- remember that you probably shouldn't have worn jeans without a zambia (wraparound skirt) if you didn't want to offend past-middle-aged Shona
- sneak round the corner to peak in the secondhand furniture shop (OK, so this is a dodgy one but you might be getting quotes)
- think that the courthouse, with its sandy-yellow facade, clock (stopped) and fluttering palm trees would make a great postcard if it wasn't for the motorbike helmeted riot police pacing up and down in front of it.
- text the mayor. Maybe he knows what's going on

rock

"Why do we have to go to the police station?" he says sleepily.

We strap him in the back seat. There are crowds gathering outside a police station. There is no-one to leave him with at this late hour. "Just to count something," I say vaguely.

Main Street is dark. But as we near the station, we can just make out shadows of people.

There's the sudden sound of shots. Teargas? Gunshots? We turn off Main Street quickly, past the police station, round the back of the TelOne office.

Ahead, I can see the shapes of people running. A yellow shirt, someone with red trousers. They've obviously left Main Street, escaping whatever's been fired.

As we near -- our headlights full on, stupidly -- there are shouts. They're clearly angry. Yellow shirt (I think it's yellow shirt) throws something at the car. We accelerate. Against the blackness, I can make out clouds of what looks like smoke.

When we examine the car in safety we find that a rock two-thirds the size of a football has gone through a window in the bakkie part of the truck. The rock is still in the back. It's pointed. It looks like a broken piece of kerbstone.

The window is the one just behind where my son was sitting. A second or two later and it would have been his window.

propaganda works

Under the doctor's desk, an old radio blares the headlines from the BBC World Service.

He switches it off as I come in. The surgery is shabby. Peeling magazines lie in a pile by the secretary's desk. From a back room, there's the unmistakeable smell of sadza cooking. But this doctor is patient and thorough. He has his own worries: a son who's at private school who should be taking his A-levels but there are no teachers, another younger child who needs to find a secondary school place. Once he worked in private practice for Kenneth Kaunda. He came back to Zimbabwe when the Zambian kwacha was the currency everyone laughed at.

"We used to get all the medical papers here in Zimbabwe. I could keep up with the latest research," he laments.

"Now, because of sanctions you know -- " he looks up at me keenly, a lone white representing the West -- "they're not getting here."

sto esperando*

"The thing is, it's not that easy to start again," my Pakistani friend says. In theory, she could go back to Pakistan with her husband and her two boys. Her father's a chief in the police force: there'd be some help.

In practice, leaving Zimbabwe would be a huge wrench.

They own a shoe shop here. Under Gideon Gono's new regulations announced in his latest Monetary Policy Statement, they'll have to licence the shop (20,000 US), open an FCA, surrender 5 percent of their earnings (on top of tax), pay their staff in foreign currency, pay 'phone, electricity and rates bills (for non-existent rubbish collection, non-functioning street lights, potholed roads that look like they've been shelled and infrequent water supplies) in forex.

And no-one's buying shoes at the moment.

"Each time we're hoping and hoping and it never gets better," she says.

*sto esperando (still hoping): song by Dino Mudondo, won Outstanding Rendition Category in local arts competition, state radio reports today

Jamaica Inn

Not far from Marondera, there's a collection of shabby thatched buildings to your left. A sign reads: "Jamaica Inn. National Training Centre For Total Skills Training."

My in-laws spent their wedding night here in the early 1960s, when the place really was an inn. It was a disappointment. "It didn't have the palm trees you'd expect," my father-in-law says.

Up till then the day had been picture-perfect. My mother-in-law descended the stairs in a tiara made of daisies (there are pictures to prove it). The best man treated them to a supper at his father's house. His father was then the governor of the Reserve Bank. The governor's official residence was opposite State House. My in-laws left -- this bit I'm imagining -- in the dark in a flurry of good wishes.

After a half-hour drive they were met at Jamaica Inn by "a lecherous old so-and-so" with an smirk. My father-in-law soon found out why. When they opened their room door (after a suitable interval in the bar, pretending to be a long-married couple), they found a whole boiled chicken and a flask of milk sitting on the bedside table. A friend had ordered a "sustaining" snack.

These days it's Mr Mugabe's Green Bombers and Co. who hang around the sign, hoping for some food.

footie

Mr M. appears round the side of the verandah, bearing gifts.

"I came to see how you were," he says. He hands me Mozambican groceries: a carton of fruit juice and some apples. He's the head of an AIDS charity here. Just before he travelled to Botswana, he developed back pains and had to be wheeled through the airport in a wheelchair. He's better now but thinking of taking a new direction: life-coaching.

"Tickbite takes four months to get over," he says. "I remember, when I was in the Lowveld, there was a guy who got it..."

Mr M. moved from the Lowveld (southeastern Zim, cane-sugar growing area, hot, malarial) a few years back. He started to play soccer one evening a week: nothing formal, just a few blokes getting together. One of the men had a brother in the shadowy Central Intelligence Organisation and managed to get a glimpse of Mr M.'s file.

"This man is dangerous and needs to be watched," it began.

soapy flour

The food parcel flour is soapy. So are the Jungle oats and -- unbelievably -- the rice (The rice is in a sealed plastic bag. How did it get tainted?)

As pensioners and dispossessed white farmers, my in-laws get food parcels. Once a month, my mother-in-law gets a call to go to the local old peoples' home, where she picks up her fertiliser sack full of South African groceries: porridge oats, tinned tuna, cheese spread, peanut butter, tea, candles, Johnson's Baby Shampoo, pasta, the sort of things that are total luxuries here (prices are now estimated to be 15 times what they are in South Africa).

The parcels are what's kept them going, she says.

My father-in-law remembers his adopted mother Edith Mabel packing up food parcels in then then Rhodesia to send to relatives in England in the 40s, after the war. (He remembers D-day, when he and his brother and Edith Mabel were holidaying on Lake Malawi. Edith Mabel made them stand to attention when the band played God Save the Queen.)

These parcels are donated by a South African businessman who wishes to remain anonymous. But there is one big disappointment. The packers pack the bars of green soap unsealed in the bag with everything else. Which means the flour and any other foodstuff wrapped in porous packaging gets ruined. This distresses my mother-in-law a great deal.

The opposition finally agreed to the unity deal on Friday. My mother-in-law wants to believe there's hope. She needs to: when she went to the bank Friday morning to withdraw cash pay her 4.6 trillion dollar phone bill, there was no cash to withdraw. "I ordered it from the central bank," the bank manager assured her. "But they haven't sent any." (What: are they not printing any more?) He pulled out a 10 trillion note from his own back pocket. "Here," he said, "Pay your 'phone bill, pay mine and keep the change."

"Gono (central bank chief Gideon, author and maker of "Zimbabwe's Casino Economy", price 40 US in local bookshops) is out, isn't he?I heard there's two going to the Hague straightaway," my mother-in-law says as she stirs her tea. "Shiri and what's that other guy -- Chi-something? You know, for the Matabeleland thing. "

"Who'd you hear that from?"

My mother-in-law believes in looking on the positive side. She does not like the traditional proverb that's been bandied about by sceptics this weekend in Zimbabwe (You don't lie down with lions. Which seems to me to be pretty apt).

"Anyway," she says, tossing her head and looking at the mountains. They're green and lush at this time of year because of the rains. "There's one thing they can't take away from us and that's the weather."

"Just give the rice to the dog."