Tuesday, March 29, 2011

there for each other

"Are you shopping?" I say. I saw her standing on the side of the road next to OK. She wears a flowered skirt I've seen many times before and a smart blazer. "Only for medicines," she says. "I was thinking," she adds. She fumbles in her pocket, thrusts a note into my hands. "Take this to buy a drink." I look down. It's 10 dollars. "It's too much," I say. (Her husband earns 200 US a month, maximum). "No," she says. "You are my daughter. I know you have always helped me. So, so much. We must be there for each other." She has stood beside me, this 60-something Shona woman, during a miscarriage, my father-in-law's cataract-op-gone-wrong, my son starting school. I take the note, afraid to offend. And then find that the international VISA system is down - it still is, six days later and I still can't withdraw any money -- and actually my purse has only another 12 US or so in it. That 10 dollars makes a dinner's difference.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

sadness of a seven-dollar toothbrush

The outrage ripples down the line of shoppers. Seven dollars for a single toothbrush? I had been idly watching the man, standing three ahead of me at the till, for some time. He is well-dressed, in a suit. He chatted politely to the man behind him, whose small daughter clutched a bottle of orange juice. She said something to her father -- the way children do about people they think they recognise -- and he waited a second before turning to glance at me. We look furtively in each other's shopping baskets. Do people do this in other countries, I wonder? Or is it a reflex born of the days when there was so little to buy that you didn't even need a basket, when you could walk to the till clutching your "leaves" (bundle of rape) and your soya mince? My basket -- for the record -- has nothing special in it: pilchards, cucumber, some biltong. No more, no less than most of the people standing in this lower-end supermarket, enjoying the buzz of payday. This city has its rhythms and the the 23/24/25 of each month are the 'high' days, when crowds sit in the banking halls to wait for the government to pay its civil servants. Then they flock to the supermarket. Earlier, I watched a boy a bit older than mine check a shopping receipt excitedly for his mother, who was wearing the turquoise blue uniform of a senior nurse. She watched him fondly for a second, in the private way that mothers do. What supper was she cooking for him tonight, I wondered? The suited man is only buying a toothbrush. I hear him talking to the cashier -- quietly first. She calls a supervisor. The supervisor confirms. Yes, the toothbrush costs seven dollars. It is a plain toothbrush, the sort that gets sent to me in parcels. Worth about 90 pence, I reckon. "No," he says and he looks at the rest of us for confirmation. "I just paid my rent." "You can keep your toothbrush!" he says and he stalks off. At the opposite end of the spectrum: a friend of the family who's charging monied expats -- and locals -- in Harare 30 dollars per flower-arranging lesson. That's without the flowers: she goes to the 'student's' house to give a guided tour of the garden to show which flowers said student can pick. So many people want to sign up that she has a waiting list.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Mr Old Mutare

"So is Mr Old Mutare real?" Mr Old Mutare is 30-something's Mr Darcy-equivalent: they got together more than a year ago, then they split up. Now, after various non-serious dalliances on both sides, the two of them are finally engaged. There's just a small problem with paying bride-price, which is making the 30-something Lady have second (or is it third) thoughts...

"He could be but he doesn't really exist," she says enigmatically.

"Look," she explains, hugging the book I've just given her ("Can I keep it? I like to highlight things with a marker, you see, and I can't if I have to give it back"). "I have about five people who do exist and who I write about. Not too closely, of course."

"And I'm always listening out for ideas, for things people are talking about," to get inspiration, she adds. (Don't I do the same?). Some of what she writes is to alert people to things going on - the Small House issue, the way you can exploit phone recharge cards on New Year's Eve, before the computer system's been updated. "I want to say: Hey this is true and things shouldn't be like that."

"I write too," I tell her.

"You do? I have seven novels I've written at home, and I don't know what to do with them."

tracking down the 30-something lady

"It's you, isn't it?" I can't hide the triumph in my voice. "You are the 30-something Lady!"

I've been looking for this writer for months. She writes a column in the local paper called Diary of a 30-something Lady. I know I'm not the only one who looks eagerly for the tell-tale red heart on the leisure pages: other readers text in advice and comments to Zimbabwe's Bridget Jones. ("Diary of a 30-something needs more sugar in it:" someone suggested last month).

Through the last years of Zimbabwe's crisis, she's written faithfully about what it means to survive as a professional 30-something singleton when your salary doesn't arrive in the bank at the end of the month and when the power keeps getting cut (but the bills keep going up). She writes about dress dilemmas, her love of shopping, the problems of styling her hair, weekends away in the Vumba mountains, about watching her married friends with kids ("I would just like to have lunch one day with my friend without the kids or the maid or relatives tagging along. Now every conversation is interrupted by small voices,") She writes about her men dilemmas -- Mr Gorgeous, Mr IT, Mr Old Mutare, Stan: which should she marry -- and dealing with prospective mothers-in-law who are intensely suspicious of her (why isn't she married and yet she's past 30?). She observes friends who've got into relationship messes: her Small House friend (who's dating a married man), her friend who's HIV-positive -- and talks about the refuge of church on Sundays. Her column's a refreshing lively look at life in Zimbabwe's vibrant, never-cowed middle-classes, struggling to better themselves instead of crumbling in despair.

And it's that struggle that helped me to find her. She writes anonymously --"90 percent of it is true," she tells me now, standing on the steps of the church-building. "Ten percent isn't. I don't want to get sued."

I've had my suspicions for a while. I'd noticed that a column on dress sense that appears in the paper was similarly well-written (though prescriptive rather than descriptive). I'd wondered if it was the same woman, Ann R. But how to prove it? Then the author of the dress column was interviewed by an English lit. teacher who publishes study guide-pieces on Animal Farm in the paper. In that piece, Ann R revealed she was "setting up a coffee shop." I cut out the interview, and asked around for new coffee shops in town. No-one seemed to know anything. There were still three cafes"up-town" -- and goodness knows the ladies-who-lunch would have surely have heard of a new one. Meantime, the 30-something Lady had spoken of her new coffee shop, and her plans to take time off from work to get the business off the ground. Curiouser and curiouser...or maybe closer and closer. I put a book I thought she'd like into my car: The Dress Doctor, by Bessie Head (an autobiography of a dresser-to-the-(film)-stars) and drove around with its plastic cover glinting at me on the passenger seat for a few days. Then I took my child to his sports club, organised by enthusiastic 20-somethings at a local church on Wednesday afternoons. Normally I drop him at the door but today, I had to pay. I walked inside... and found a new coffee shop, the inside draped in vibrant blue. And there, inside, was a girl (30-something, definitely) wearing bouncy orange tear-drop ear-rings and the kind of wedge shoes that befit a fashion critic. I felt like I was meeting a friend.

"You're not supposed to know it's me," she laughs. "But people are guessing."

leaving sale

"I think this year's going to be bad," she says as her children play on the rug. End of the afternoon. The sun dapples on the freshly-cut grass. Kids swing on the home climbing frame to the chink of wine glasses. Idyllic, non? "You know, that man you told to clear out of the playground M?" She turns to a friend. He was selling pirated DVDs inside the walls of a local playgroup. M, a mother of two, had asked him to move. "He said, you're racist. He said he's a war veteran - " "Rubbish --" says M, who's hosting a leaving sale (crockery, tired baby towels, crocheted blankets, braziers: how many of these sales have I attended willingly or unwillingly in the last 10 years?) -- "He's not old enough." "But that's what he said," she insists. "And he said: just wait for the elections. We're going to sort you whites out." It's there so often on both sides, that hatred, so near the surface, waiting for the trigger.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

still happening

They've been given 2 days to get off the farm, Mrs G says. "Drunken mobs" are at the gate. Someone caught and killed a buck and pinned it to the farmhouse fence. The warning: If they speak to the media, things will be worse for them. How can this still be happening, 10 years later? The embassy official says he can't help: in theory the family is protected by a BIPPA - an investment protection agreement -- but "there is no law and order." So...you're on your own. I sit here and type less than an hour away from where all this is taking place and a family is pulling out its suitcases and scrabbling for the photo albums and think: the story has not changed. Only now, no-one is interested, outraged, bothered. Not even those supposed to protect you. And I too feel weary with it all.