and then dysentery struck

Mr Mpoga sees the python first. He beckons to me to follow.

I step over the long damp grass to the sodden pile of branches and dry leaves at the back of our house. "There. Can you see it?"

For a moment I can see nothing, just a grey and black log. Fattish, about the thickness of a man's arm. Then it moves, a lazy languid curling.

Mr Mpoga's assistants - he is a house painter - jump back, laughing.

I clutch my three-year-old daughter. She is goat-sized, I realise. Perfect python fodder.

It's not the first time I have seen snakes in our yard in Zimbabwe. Though we live in a built-up suburb, it is close to a lushly-forested mountain.

Mr M, the banker who lives further up the slope than us, had a cobra banging around in his attic not so long ago.
We ourselves had, one horribly memorable Christmas, a black mamba in the garden. It snaked itself into the frangipani tree where I believe it would have done no harm had stones not been thrown at it.

Our bouncing three-year old Rottweiler lunged at it as it lunged at her.

Twenty minutes. Ruby died in 20 minutes, despite my husband rushing her to the vet where she was put on a drip. She was bigger than my son at the time.
That's all I could think of, in my shock: how long would a child take to die? Black mamba bites are survivable, as long as you can get on life support.

But there is no life support machine in the clinics in Mutare, the provincial capital.

Sometimes I feel very far from England where I grew up. Where the most dangerous snake was a viper in nearby Bardney wood. Snakes are at their most active in Zimbabwe's hot muggy Christmas weather, where flies swirl and uncollected rubbish lies on the street corners.

Back to the python in the garden. Mr Mpoga thought it had eaten something. A sun squirrel perhaps: there are many in the flamboyant trees at this time. If it had, it would be sluggish, easy to catch.

When the snake twisted suddenly, I did a quick headcount of the cats - all present and accounted for -- and 'phoned the Snake Man.
Wiry and tough, Mr H arrived with his tousle-haired baby grandson and a large fork-like instrument.

The snake was trussed up in a sack in 10 minutes. I watched it for a few minutes, its body rippling through the canvas.

Maybe I can get a grip on this place after all, I thought hopefully. Surely after more than 10 years here, I should be able to.

And then dysentery struck.

Market

Sakubva, four o'clock.
The very best time of day. The worst of the heat is past. There's a slight breeze. You can finally breathe.
Down the street beyond the stalls and the sea of secondhand shoes that lie in front of them, the purple jacaranda trees sway.
I am looking for a bag for my 11-year-old son. A sports' bag, the sort he can fill with things for a weekend.
People brush past me. There are French fries for sale, wrapped in cellophane. Over there in a bucket, dried fish, startlingly yellow on one side.
I stop to consider some shorts in a soft khaki material. Nice quality. Probably too small for him though.
I come to the used clothes market here often enough for some vendors to know me by the name of my first child. They greet me now: Mai Given, Mai Brighton.
A woman swings her toddler off her back and stands next to me. The child stares at me, wide-eyed. I greet him in Shona. His mother smiles.
I hold up a green-patterned blouse against myself, wondering what other things in my wardrobe it will go with.
She does the same. We catch each other's eyes and laugh.
At the end of this line of market stalls, an elderly storeholder and his friend tuck into an afternoon snack: a cake and tea.

"Come, join us," he jokes. "Do you drink tea like this?"

"Of course."

There is something in his eyes that makes me think suddenly of my father, half a world away.
He urges me to look through his T-shirts, 2 US for the ones on coat-hangers, one if they're at ground-level, unfolded. I find a light brown T-shirt, hardly worn, for my son.
I pack it into my already-bulging bag and promise to come back soon.
I am a foreigner in Zimbabwe. I was not born here. I may never have the right to call this place home.

And yet...so often I am happy. Just to be here.

At the salon

"My husband was murdered," she says, reaching for a comb. And then I realise -.

Her surname. Of course. It was a big story three years ago. An appeal for a missing man. A few days with no news and then -- a body found in the boot of a car in Harare. Passersby noticed the car hadn't moved and alerted the police. He'd been hit over the head and then suffocated.
This kind of killing is extremely rare in Zimbabwe.
The murdered man was a businessman. State media said he was a gold dealer. His business associate was arrested for his murder.

"They thought he had money," the woman says. He did, in fact, according to first reports: 20,000 US was on the man when he was killed (it wasn't recovered).

Four daughters. One is still in school.

I had not thought a rare trip to the hairdressers' would bring all this back.

She can make a dress in 30 minutes

"Did you find a good tailor?" I ask. The choir needed new outfits making up in record time. Thirty of them. They'd chosen the fabric. But each choir member wanted a slightly different style.

That didn't faze the tailor.

"We took the material to her on Thursday. She had no electricity all day so she couldn't start the sewing machine until Thursday night."

Zimbabwe's power woes aren't over. Some of the enterprising -- including teachers in the rural areas, so I hear -- work at night to take advantage of a few hours of electricity.

"She'd finished them by Friday morning. She just needs half an hour on each dress."

Eavesdropping

"No I'm not coming to that meeting. The pastor might start casting out demons and then I'll fall on the floor and you'll all be watching."

Maid or no maid?

"She's not a maid," says one student.

"She is." Her classmate is equally emphatic. "Just look at her clothes."

"She's not."
I'm slightly surprised at the vehemence of this discussion on a sequence in the Zimbabwean short film The Secret Circle. In it, three women mix up the books they were reading after the domestic helper (is she a domestic helper? or a relative?) lets a saucepan of water boil over and everyone's forced to put their books down for a minute. I think - or I did before this discussion started -- that this is a story about secrets and infidelity and the things we don't tell each other.
Turns out it's also about social status, and how difficult it can be to work out who exactly is who.

Those who think the third woman (who is, everyone agrees, the lowest in the female hierarchy) is a maid base their argument on this: her clothes are shabby and the "big" sister says she brought her from the rural areas. Also - and this is key - she's left to mop up the spilt water by herself. If she was a valued close relative who'd hurt herself, would she be asked to do that?
But not everyone is convinced.
Don't the two sisters - the one with cancer, the one with the cheating husband - display more concern than they would for a domestic help, asks one student.

I'm fascinated and out of my depth.
I know what I think. But this is not my culture, nor my country. I did not grow up with domestic help.

So I listen and I learn.

Pants or no pants

These are today's purchases: one pink pair (Triumph), a khaki-coloured pair (white lace) and a pair of black shorts. Secondhand knickers, all of them. Bought from the market for 1 US a piece.

Former finance minister Tendai Biti once announced that as a man, if your wife was buying secondhand underwear "then you should know you had failed." He said this when announcing a (shortlived) ban on the sale of used underwear in the country.
I think about his words occasionally on one of my many forays to the market. I disagree. I've never expected my husband to buy my underwear for me, for one thing. And it's not as if the underwear on sale in Zimbabwe is affordable where it is of decent-ish quality. The only time I've bought new knickers here was when I was going into hospital and I knew I could throw them out after one wearing (which I did).

I wash my purchases out thoroughly before I wear them, of course. So, I imagine, does everyone else who buys them. I always find the bra stalls slightly off-putting, all those misshapen contraptions with straps tangled together like spaghetti. But I've dug deep in the piles and rifled along those bras stranded on hangers over the wooden rails and always found what I needed: Calvin Klein, Victoria's Secret.

I'm thinking about knickers again because of an unfortunate incident picked up Zimbabwe's state press yesterday. A 21-year-old model has appeared in court for modelling with no knickers. It happened in Harare in July. Apparently other photos were deleted (and possibly the other models also had no pants) but this model's pictures got circulated.

Secondhand knickers are better than no knickers, surely.

Afterwards

"She phoned me at lunchtime," she says. "Sekai's friend. She was Sekai's friend while she was alive. But now that Sekai is dead..."

"She says she wants 50 dollars. For cleaning up the blood when Sekai was killed. She said she cleaned up the blood and washed the blanket. Now she wants money."

"She says that if she does not get the money, she will go to the police. I told her 50 dollars was too much. But she says she does not want to talk. She says she wants me to send the money by Ecocash. To Mai Taungwa's account."

She shakes her head. "I have to call my father. In case that woman takes the police to his house."

Grief

"Khumbulani has phoned," she says. "The police know who the tsotsis are."

When I first saw her after Christmas, her face was hollow, her cheeks sunken. Grief has aged her: grief, and horror too. Her sister Sekai, an energetic mother-of-two was murdered.

Sekai was managing a general store well off the beaten track in Nyanga, eastern Zimbabwe. I have not seen the store but I imagine what it is like: the long wooden counter, and behind it, bottles of cooking oil, bars of soap, bags of kapenta. Not a lot of choice but the basics, enough to keep a family that grows its own maize and vegetables going.

Sekai slept at her workplace in a room off the back the store. The tsotsis came at 10 pm on the Saturday night after New Year. Sekai heard them truck arrive. She tried to lock herself in. The tsotsis blocked the door. "Do not close it," they told her (the male worker at the bottle store heard this conversation and recounted it to police). "We want the money." "There is no money," Sekai said. But the tsotsis, their heads tied in plastic shopping bags so that she couldn't identify them, had been watching. The owner of the store had not collected the money that night. "Give us the money." Sekai tried to pull out her cellphone. That's when they stabbed her in the chest. She staggered away, screaming. "You've killed me, you've killed me." One of them pulled out a pistol.

Her sons found her by the step just outside the store.

Now what Sekai's sister is telling me is this: that the tsotsis may have disguised their heads with OK bags but Sekai's male co-worker recognised the pair of trousers that one of them was wearing. In the village, clothes are not a commodity endlessly renewed as they might be in the towns which have a market. Here, clothes have to last several seasons, if not years. A pair of trousers is as recognisable in some cases as a person's face.

"The police beat that man. He said: Do you want to kill me? And the police officer said: Yes, I will kill you because you killed Mai Khumbulani. So then the tsotsi cried: OK. I will talk."

There is no relish on her face as she says this. Only pain.

The attacker is from the village. He says it was not him who stabbed Sekai. That was his friend from Rusape, a two hour-drive away. The one who owned the truck. The police have gone to find him.

Back to school

I have left school shopping to the very last minute, as usual. I dive into a stationery shop. Ten minutes, that's all I've got. Pens, rulers (those brittle plastic ones that will shatter in days), rubbers (There are no rubbers. Sold out. Help. Will have to raid his father's pen tin), gluesticks (ditto). Three other customers are picking up stacks of exercise books and rolls of plastic book covering. They're together, I realise. Teachers, I think. "Are you shopping for your school?" I ask one of them at the counter. The man who is overseeing the purchases, checking items against a list, replies: "Our children are going to be educated. Very educated." He smiles, but in a grim way. "But there are no jobs in Zimbabwe. We are teaching these children for what?"

Miss Lizzie

"But she's beautiful," Miss Lizzie says as the baby squirms away.

 

Esther is here too -- a grown-up Esther in a purple dress with sequins on. Not so long ago, Esther was eagerly taking my twice-read magazines (because I got them secondhand already) to cut up and use for her Fabrics O-level coursework. Then her mother put her into a private academy (which isn't the same as private school. It's a lot cheaper, for one. And less regulated. The only thing the authorities seem to do is to close lots of academies down for "not being licensed." But often the exam results are better, partly because the teachers don't strike).

 

Esther wants to be a teacher, or at least, her mother wants her to. Miss Lizzie has dreams of a better future for her only child. She has enrolled her at the local teaching college.

 

"Look at me," she says. "No exams, no house. Nothing."

 

Esther suddenly seems downcast. We exchange pleasantries. How my elder child is growing. How Christmas was. How it's good the rain came.

 

"She has a husband now," Miss Lizzie says. "She's having a baby, you know. In March. I was not angry. But now - "

in the bank

"They should do e-banking here," the woman behind me says loudly. "It's dangerous to be moving round with large sums of money this time of year."

 

I look down at my fistful of dollars: an advance payment on next term's school fees. Inside the crowded banking hall, I feel safe.

 

"It's getting like Jo'burg," she tells me. She is youngish, bespectacled, well-dressed. Spends six months of every year in the UK "where my parents are. Wandsworth. Do you know it?"

 

The night before last, she tells me, she found a taxi idling on Herbert Chitepo, the main street. It's a busy street, lined with flamboyant trees in full bloom this time of year, dotted with phone card vendors. It wasn't late. Glancing inside, she realised something wasn't right.

 

"The driver was dead. He had a bag on his head. His wallet was open on the seat. They'd taken everything."

 

She called the police, who confirmed the man had been murdered for his takings. It was a Saturday. Somebody -- some people -- must have reckoned that by the end of the day, he'd have made a pretty penny.

 

"The worse thing was, he was old. And from Malawi. His family are all there. There's no-one to bury him here."

security

The officer follows me beyond the battered wire fence of the station. "Do you know anyone who is interested in machines?"

Machines?

"I am only a policeman because of security," he says. His black boots are well-shined, unlike (I noticed earlier) his superior's. He is 24, he says. I imagine his mother ironed his grey shirt that morning. "There were white people coming to my place to look at my machines. They said I was an MDC supporter. It was better for me to join.

"But really, it is not what I want to do."

His eyes light up when he talks about his inventions. Machines for grinding nuts, machines for irrigation. What he wants to do is make something big. Like Daniel Shumba's helicopter in Harare (which hasn't taken off -- yet).

I feel old standing next to him and his eagerness -- old and aware people are watching. How many other kids, brimming with potential, joined the force "because of security"?

oxbridge

"Auntie, what do I have to do to go to Oxford?" A asks.

He appeared in the kitchen a little while earlier, a rucksack full of books in his hands. We sit at the table, green bananas in a bowl in front of us. He declines tea. I know there is something he wants to ask me.

I will have to wait to find out.

So I ask first after his mother, his sister, his grandmother. He asks after my baby, my son, my husband.

I ask how his lessons are going, at the private academy next door to his grandmother's that offers a better -- very slightly better -- education than the strike-plagued government boys high school.

He tells me about his old school in Matero, the township in Lusaka where he lived for five years with his parents. "I always wanted to come home, Auntie," he says. "They were so rough there."

(Later I will look up Matero on Google as I try to picture him there: "a section of populated place in Lusaka", travelingluck.com tells me. Barclays bank has a branch there. There's a football team called the Matero Tigers. Greataupair.com tells me to find "all Housekeepers available near Matero, Lusaka" and then it tells me to find "all Senior Caregivers available near Matero, Lusaka. Redemption Shalom Church is somewhere there: 'Peter' has a strong heart for evangelism and community development, apparently. A crime wave is haunting residents after the murder of a female student, says the Lusaka Times two days ago).

"I took up martial arts," A tells me. "I loved it so much." I wait.

"Auntie, if I get 25 points at A-level, do you think I can go to Oxford?"

I take a deep breath.

in this part of Africa...

you unfold a pushchair -- a nice pushchair, given to you by a Swiss diplomat -- and a snakeskin falls out.

and if the baby doesn't breastfeed...

A five-month old baby exposed his mother's affair, a local paper reported -- because he refused to breastfeed. When the baby refused to feed for three days, the parents went to ask why at a local church. "The wife was told to confess her transgressions," according to the Manica Post. When 17-year-old Laiza Makufa revealed she'd had an affair with a married neighbour since the baby was born and begged for her husband's forgiveness, the baby started to feed again. The three -- and the baby -- were photographed in the paper: the neighbour in his blue city council trousers, Makufa in a red top holding her baby. "I just felt like I loved him," she said.

the colic remedy

"She's a screamer, your daughter," says S.

"Have you tried putting her on your back?" asks S's mother.

I haven't, not yet. Not that I wouldn't, but I worry that I wouldn't tie the blankets right and she'd come crashing down. We talk -- in the flickering light of a candle, this late Sunday afternoon -- of babies, their babies, my new one, nappies and nappy rash cream and colic... Colic. My mother Fedexed two bottles of Infacol, the UK remedy, when the baby's colic was at its worst. The local remedy is:

"Half a cup of cooking oil. You boil it, then leave it to cool. Then you give her a spoonful. It's an old remedy, but it works," says S's mother.

visiting

"But where is the blanket?" Mai D asks me. Blanket? It's 30 degrees at least this afternoon. The baby doesn't need a blanket, surely? Mai D tut-tuts. "I have never held a baby without a blanket," she tells her husband, who is sitting dutifully in the living-room next to her, summoned no doubt, to welcome The Baby. He nods awkwardly.

I've always been fascinated by different approaches to child-rearing. And now I'm getting a Zimbabwean lesson first-hand. Mai D asks me about nappy rash, tells me she washed her babies (and she had four, and she raised a grand-daughter, who, aged 12, has finally left for mission school) in Sunlight washing-up liquid (same as green Fairy), used Vaseline on their bottoms (Blue Seal is the best, she told me firmly), and always, always used a blanket. She watches me breastfeed critically. "Are you sure you're not suffocating her?" I shift position as I'm told. "Did you come on your own?" she asks. "But who held her?" Mai D is envisaging my daughter bumping around in the backseat, unrestrained. "I have a seat," I tell her, and think of all the mothers I've seen clutching their babies in the backseats, wrapped up thickly like sausage rolls. No-one checks you have a baby seat when you leave a Zimbabwean maternity ward.

Every time the baby opens her mouth, Mai D tells me to feed. (The baby, unused to being offered milk every few seconds, licks hesitantly, to cries of horror from Mai D). She plies me with Coke. I already know -- because my doctor told me - that locals think this increases milk supply. Ditto for peanuts. Once, visiting a friend in a maternity ward, I watched her aunt ululate when she saw the baby -- and promptly hand over a bag full of peanuts.

Mai D rummages in her freezer. "You must have this chicken," she says, handing me a huge lump of frozen bird. "It'll help you make good milk."

gifts

"My father sent you some things," she says.
"He went into his fields, got you some pumpkin. The big white pumpkins. And cucumbers."
"He said to me: Take them to Mai S - because she has given me food."
I put my hand to my chest to say thankyou, I'm touched. Gently, the way I've been taught. In Zimbabwe, I've learnt to receive. I think hungrily of big white pumpkins, of the chopping they'll necessitate but of the roasts too, they'll make.
"But he put them in the hut," she says. "And then I got up at 3 o'clock and it was dark and I forgot them."

The Fear

"Don't go into town. That's the consensus. They'll be driving people to the stadium," she says.

This is the other side of The President's Birthday: The Fear. The fear that makes so many stay at home this Saturday, including the elderly residents of a cluster village near the centre of this eastern city. They'll be closing the shops anyway, goes the whisper. Trucks swerve past, laden with chanting supporters. Buses -- dozens of buses -- pull into the stadium. The fresh produce market, normally dotted with huge baskets, pyramids of fruit laid out on plastics and tarpaulins and ancient zambias, has been razed to make a VIP carpark. Across the road the new Spar store makes a good vantage point.

By night, the curry takeout on the golf-course in the lushly-green Murambi suburb has run out of everything but pork-chops. The VIPs did not stay in the stadium to feast on the huge pots of sadza, then.