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.