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"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."
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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.)

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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.

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