requests

The man hobbles up as I pay for the paper. He's probably from the rural areas, judging by the hat. He can barely speak English. "Please, one dollar," he says. "For sadza." And I, who am usually wary of all street requests, give in.

In town, the street kids follow.

My desperation mounts.

The girl who mans the town's only well-stocked (that's relative, of course) bookshop sees me park the car. Charity, her name is. She knows me well, always asks after my son. She runs after me in the street. She looks away as she tells me she needs 40 dollars ( "20 or 40") and why. Her father is in hospital. I know this to be true. He has diabetes and has recently had a leg amputated. Charity's mother goes to see him every day: she has to or else how will he be fed? But the transport -- from Sakubva high-density suburb to the Provincial Hospital -- costs a minimum of 30 US a month.

Charity is looking after her sister's child and needs school fees in 15 days. That's another 20 at least to find (and that's not counting incentives). She needs to pay the city council 30 dollars a month rates. Her father used to do this but he is not working at the moment, of course. The electricity bill is 20 dollars. I've lost count but the running total I see is already 100 US. She is paid precisely 100 US a month. A perfectly normal horrible salary in Zimbabwe.

"How often do you shop?" she asks me, seeing my basket.

"A little most days," I say. "I buy bread and vegetables."

She sighs.

"I shop once a month," she says. "For everything."

I feel -- as I feel so often here - powerless, frustrated. Where do you start? Where do you stop?

A sms message printed in the newspaper: "Morgan Tsvangirai has not delivered on his promises to workers."

how not to do your job

"He says he's got me an interview with the Mozambique opposition leader." He looks at me panic-stricken. "Alfonso Dhlakama, do you think?" I say. "Don't know." Help. It's 7 o'clock at night, we were due at a secret MDC gathering five minutes ago (we only found out about it in the last half hour), we don't really need an interview with a Mozambican politician but we do need to stay on the right side of our contacts. Who might be offended if we brush away our chance to interview a Big Man..."Google it," I say, shovelling scrambled egg down the infant's throat. He'll have to come with us: we have no babysitter tonight. So we google, in between locking the house, turfing a tidal wave of cats out, tying the laces on a pair of holey trainers ("Why can't I wear my flip-flops?") etc, etc. It turns out there is not one Mozambican opposition leader but two, the second is the mayor of Beira, and -- wouldn't you believe it -- he's just survived an assassination attempt. Oh, and there are elections next month. ("I could have told you that," says a friend the next day. "They're painting all the government buildings in Chimoio.") We formulate questions in the car, bumping over potholes: If it's Dhlakama, ask this and if it's Simango, well, at least you can ask about the assassination. We tumble into the dark and cold of a winter's garden. My son heads for the Cokes, thoughtfully provided at ground level. Simango is in the red baseball cap. And yes, he does want an interview...

embassy

Sky TV blares from a large screen in the waiting area of the new British Embassy in Harare's Mount Pleasant Area. It's prime minister's question time in the British parliament. Gordon Brown sports a permanently-tilted head (downwards, as if he's about to butt), as he insists his chancellor "has done a great job." I watch idly, clutching my son's red passport. There is no shade in the new car park. The girl behind the glass screen has a brown fleece and a bad cold.

"That'll be 128 dollars." I have no change. Neither does the Embassy girl. I'll have to go back through the security checks and drive off to Arundel Park Spar to try to make some. "And make sure the shop doesn't give you rand," she says. "We don't accept that."

The man at the door commiserates. "At least there are no queues here," I say. Stiff upper lip and all that.

"But there were," the man says. "Last week. All the old people. They are flying them out, you know. The first lot went on Saturday."

"The next ones will go soon." The embassy's Repatriation Programme can cater for up to 5,000 penniless nationals (though only 500 have signed up so far). The move has provoked outrage from Zimbabwe's pro-ZANU-PF Herald. The paper insists Zimbabwe's economic mess was caused by British sanctions. White pensioners were "cushioned" from the ravages of inflation by charities, it insists.

The doorman looks envious. Things are expensive here. He knows people who've gone to "UK" and earnt enough to buy a house. He has an afterthought. "I run a peanut-butter making project," he says. "You don't know anyone..?"

inspection

At first sight the inspector looks imposing. He's wearing a dark blue uniform and a clipboard. He's from the city council, he says and he has come to check that we are cutting our grass properly.

There are all sorts of things I should say. Like: what about the verges that the city council doesn't cut, the ones just down the road from here? What about those letters of complaint about the unslashed grass on the sides of the road in the state-controlled press last month? Residents say snakes are lurking in those long weeds, that burglars use the grasses to hide their loot in.

Instead I gulp and let him in.

"I'll just roam around," he says. I think of the tottering compost heap, the gooseberry shrubs I'm letting straggle because we need the free vitamins (these are wild Cape gooseberries, spherical, sweet and orange, nothing like the tart green rugby balls Dad used to grow). The inspector must be kept strictly on the straight and narrow: the bit of lawn in front of the vegetable plot.

"I'll come too," I say cheerily.

When he starts making a beeline for the rape -- unweeded, a metre high, stalks broken by the rains -- and the bits of rotting banana branch that will earn us a black mark and follow-up visits, I try a bit of distraction.

"We have a problem. There's been no rubbish collection. The city council bills us for it but there's been no collection for more than two months."

"You are right," he says. "It is a problem. The council says there is no money. We have no vehicle now."

He looks at the old tyre swinging from the custard apple tree, my spinach bed (struggling --spinach doesn't grow with excess rain) and I feel the familiar stab of guilt. My mum sends food packets: custard, marmite, contact lens solution, dental floss, Bachelor's Bean Feast, dried fruit, milk powder, all the things I can't get here. But in this man's eyes, I'm a wealthy foreigner.

"You're alright here," he says. "You should see in the high-density areas, where we live. There is rubbish in piles and lots of flies."

I know.

I see now how his uniform is old, how it has been washed and rewashed so many times that the double stitching on his shoulders is nearly white. He has two children, little girls. One in creche, one in Grade 2.

"It's the food that's the problem. Trying to feed them. There is no money. But we are hoping things will change in the next month or two," he says.

I see how tired he looks. Once, change -- chinja -- was a slogan bandied around with such optimism. These days, the energy's gone.