mothers

The woman is well-drawn, for a 10-year old. A floaty purple dress, high heels, black hair. Yollanda lingers over the hair. She makes it curl up at the ends.

"Is that your mummy?"

The children have been asked to draw things that are special to them. Most of them have drawn family members and friends. There are cats and dogs (Foxy, Spicy and Spider, Ruvimbo’s dogs are called). Baisel has drawn a cellphone, another child a flat-screen TV.

I know very little about Yollanda’s mother, except that she’s not there very often. In the days of the diamond rush, she disappeared to the Marange fields. She reappears every so often with a bucket of maize, the neighbours say. And sells the cast-off clothes Yollanda’s been given.

"Best not to give the clothes and the bath-soap to her," says Mai Caroline. "Give it to N, who lives across the road."

The women wonder what to do about Yollanda. How can you report her to Social Welfare when the department is barely functioning, they say, when state orphanages (and even private ones) are struggling to feed the children in their care?

"If she runs away from a home, she’ll be a street child and that’s worse," says Mai D.

But Yollanda is fast turning into a problem child. She steals, the neighbours say. Teenage boys – friends of her half-brother Courage – hang round the house.

"Have you drawn your mummy, Yollanda?" I ask again.

She looks at me shyly. "No. It’s you."