desperate housewives

Come to church...and get your ironing done?

Ironing's a problem when the power cuts are long. You can't just not iron things: in Zimbabwe there are putze flies. They land on wet clothes on the line in the rainy season, lay egg and the eggs then burrow themselves into soft warm flesh. A few days later, you see a pimple. If you squeeze it, out comes a yellow maggot.

So, ironing oblige. Which is why some desperate housewives follow the power. Literally: they cart their ironing (and their housekeepers) to an office, a friend's house, anywhere with power to get those clothes and sheets putzed- out. One local church had a huge advantage attracting members, it seems: it allowed them to take advantage of nearly-uninterrupted power to get their ironing done.

chicken

"I am going to do something very big for you," she says, disappearing behind the sofa. There is no power at Mai D's house. There was none at ours yesterday. Her arthritis is worse.

"There." She comes back clutching something loosely-covered in a plastic bag. It is fat and disturbingly fleshy. A frozen baby?

"A chicken," she says triumphantly. "I told you." I am embarrassed. My gift of bread and jam cannot match a chicken, not in these harsh times. But she insists.

"How?" I say. She begged Mai C for 2 US this morning to buy Brufen -- the local equivalent of Ibuprofen -- for the pain. "It's from that boy. He 'phoned a lady in Damgamvura (township), told her to bring his mother six chickens."

"But you mustn't tell the others. That time I bring bananas for your boy, Mai Simba saw. She said: "Are you selling those bananas?" She shakes her head. "They will all want some."

I nod dutifully. "Sometimes those boys are good," she says proudly. "They will care for their mother. But if those muroora (daughter-in-laws) get involved, I have to zip my mouth."

power cut

Sixth hour of the power cut. The tractor battery linked to our inverter starts to screech. The charge is running low. Soon we will be in total darkness. Well, we do have three candles...The 'phone rings. It's Mrs H, my friend Siba's mother. Siba left for Zambia two years ago. Mrs H is not amused. "I haven't even seen Tapiwa." How old is the baby? "Eight months. Doesn't it bother Siba that her mother hasn't even seen her baby? If she's got a problem, she can tell us and we can send her 20 US." I fear 20 US won't be enough to get Siba here, partly because of the carload of groceries she'll be expected to arrive with. "T. talks to her from Bots. But I can't get through." Me neither but Mrs H is on a roll. "And it's cold and dark and the lodgers keep moving out without giving me notice and messing up my budget and I've got nothing for Tamara (the 6-year-old granddaughter who lives with her). What -- haven't you got power either?" No. We are on the same line. "I'm so bored," says Mrs H. "Haven't you got books you don't want, maybe magazines you've finished with?" I glance over to where my son is reading Zoric The Spaceman. OK, books I can do. Magazines too: I buy ancient copies from pavement vendors and store them in my husband's old school trunk. But the rest? "Paint," says Mrs H. "It all looks so dirty. Haven't you got some paint lying around? I want to paint the gate, and the garden wall.." "We haven't painted a thing for a good two years now and even then it was so expensive we only bought exactly what we needed. I'm sorry. "The bills," says Mrs H. "My rates are 800 US. I mean, who's got that kind of money...?"

body viewing

"She was so tiny in there," says Mrs D. She's still wearing her faded black T-shirt from the funeral. It's baggy and shapeless from many, many funerals.

"So tiny," she repeats. "Shame, she had a brain cancer. And that M, you know? She was crying and crying. She is very sick, that woman."

Body-viewing is an obligatory part of Shona funerals. Everyone files past the open coffin slowly and then the women discuss the state of the deceased afterwards. I guess it's part of the closure thing but I find it hard. I was relieved at Susan Tsvangirai's funeral when a smartly-dressed Shona woman slipped out of the church side-door when I did. "I don't like the body viewing," she said, silver bracelets jangling as we waited by the jam of government Pajeros and Mercs outside. "And my husband is Morgan's uncle."

In this case, it was the wife of a town physician who'd died of a brain tumour. The funeral was at the Anglican cathedral. I'd seen the Mother's Union members in their blue and white uniforms hurrying there on my way home from the school run that morning. "The church was full," Mrs D says with satisfaction. In fact, the funeral seems to have cheered her up, made her forget her arthritic legs for a while.

"Here," she says. "I've cooked some sweet potatoes. You haven't got power, have you?" And she hands me a warm plastic bag.

homecoming

We get back home to darkness. "The power is bad now," Mai Agnes says. "They cut it yesterday, and Monday." Our 'phone line has been cut (as has half the town's, we learn later. C's outstanding bill is for 3,000 US, three times ours). We can receive calls but we can't make them. Those in the know inform us that you get a grace period and then the line goes totally dead. I see the money I brought back for schoolfees will have to be diverted. My cellphone has been cut: I've gone too long without "rejuicing", apparently. I find to my horror that supermarket prices have gone up (S, a local retailer, explains that it's because of the strengthening rand: most goods are imported from SA but once here, they're priced in US). "Give us more time," the headline on the local Manica Post newspaper reads. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is trying to stave off strikes by civil servants. More hopeful still (NOT), former High Court judge George Smith is warning of 'anarchy' within a year. My son and I struggle to wash ourselves by candlelight in a baby-bath half-full of warm water. "South Africa is a delicious country, isn't it Mum?" he says.

the governor has gone

And with him our power.

For the last two years, we've had more electricity than most. "You've got a VIP living up the road," Mai C told me. In the evenings, she could see our lighted street from her backyard up on the hill as she cooked her family's supper on an open fire. "It was in the paper." At first, I was sceptical. Weren't we on a better line because we were near the Infectious Diseases Hospital? Or the radio mast? Mai C said not. The provincial governor lived just up our road, she said, and he had insisted he have full-time ZESA. OK, so it wasn't full-time but we didn't have the 19 hour cuts every day that other people were having.

We joked about it. When we had long cuts, it was because the governor was away. When the power flicked off and then on again three minutes later, it was because some unknowing ZESA official switched off the governor and then got an angry 'phone call. When the power came back on just before 5 o'clock, we reckoned the governor must be getting ready for his sadza.

Just before Christmas, I took my son to a six-year-old's birthday party on the other side of town. The child's family were celebrating in more ways than one. "The governor's moving into our suburb," announced mum Daphne as she dispensed soggy chocolate lollipops from Mozambique. (She'd made a special shopping trip) No, she didn't know when.

It must have been 10 days ago. Because since then our power has been...well let's say very shaky. Much like the New Zimbabwe.

blood on the floor

These days, you're most likely to see Zimbabwe's state-controlled Herald newspaper soaked in blood.

Like most electrical appliances in Zimbabwe, my 'fridge is an old one. The white's peeling off the inside, the handle is half-eaten away and there are streaks of blue paint left from when I unwisely let my toddler use the door as a lovely long platform for his creativity. Worse still, the seal has gone, which means the freezer compartment freezes into a solid ice drift with remarkable rapidity. Every other day I take a hammer and bash away at the ice to make a space to store my milk packets (milk comes in sealed plastic bags, like giant tea-bags in Zimbabwe, if it comes at all). Banging is bad for my freezer (and yes Dad, it's bad for my sanctification) but there's not much else I can do. At least I still have power to make ice for good chunks of time.

Blackouts are lethal if you have meat in your deep freeze. The meat goes off, just like the power. So we line the bottom of our 'fridges with newspaper to soak up the water and the chicken blood. There are no private dailies here anymore -- the Media and Information Commission still hasn't decided whether to re-licence the wildly-popular Daily News, nearly four years after it was closed down by armed police -- so what do we use? The Herald of Total Honesty, of course. Problem is: there's a Herald shortage. Price controls mean the printers can only buy 14 tonnes of paper a week when they need 100 tonnes, reports said today. Hey presto: a thriving black market for the pro-government press. In Harare you can waste precious fuel driving from robot to robot (Zimbabweans copy South Africans and call traffic lights robots), looking for a copy. If you're lucky a black-market dealer/doormat-made-out-of-strips-of-old-tyre vendor might offer you one, at, say, 2 million Zimbabwe dollars a copy instead of 900,000. Snap it up.

We need the Herald badly. We need it to know what They are saying, we need it for loo roll (1 roll very thin greyish, disintegrating 1-ply = 3 million Zimbabwe dollars this week, ie three and a third Heralds. The other local loo-roll alternatives are gnawed mealie-cobs and -- this one's for deep in the bush -- large stones).

And we need it to mop up the blood in our 'fridges.