things I still can't understand

It is a smallish bird, bigger than a canary, smaller than a thrush. A bulbul, I think. And somehow it's on the floor of the doctor's surgery, on its back, and people are laughing.

I'm trying to work this out. I think that the bird "belongs" to the maid of the woman who's wearing stilettos and a cordoroy suit and studying a file on "International Best Practice in Labour Relations" (I read it over her shoulder). The maid took the bird out of her handbag, and gave it to the toddler ("Chichi", the pair keep calling her). The toddler is fed up -- I am too, I've been waiting for two hours -- and the bird is hurt in some way. To begin with, I think it may be some kind of a pet. But as I reassess the sitation, horrified, not knowing what to do, I think that what's more likely is that the maid has found/trapped the bird and plans to eat it tonight.

The child squeezes the bird. The receptionist comes out from behind her desk to see what the squawking is, joins in the laughter.

Chichi runs outside with the bird and when she comes back, it's nowhere to be seen. Then the maid zips up her handbag. There are tiny little downy feathers on the waiting room floor.

I give the wailing child a plastic pink pocket mirror I got as change in a zhing-zhong shop (Better she plays with that, why on earth didn't I give it her before?) and stare out of the window. There are things here I still can't understand.

bottom enhancers

"They're called apetitos but they enlarge one's butt," texts Tadiwa. I've just read about Zimbabwe's latest craze -- bottom-building pills -- and sms'ed her worriedly.
The pills are called Super Apetito, Power Apetito and General Apetito. They're smuggled in from Angola and Mozambique and -- according to Kwayedza, the Shona-language daily -- they're selling like hot cakes. Zimbabwe is, after all, a country where a recent survey concluded "men are looking for women with huge behinds." (You can count me out then, and probably Tadiwa, since she fits into my cast-off Paris trousers)
At around 60 pence a packet, the pills are eminently affordable, even for working girls struggling to get by on Zimbabwe's standard monthly salary of less than £120.
But there are side-effects: sleeplessness, strange gait (one woman said her client was now "walking like a crab") and goodness-knows-what-else in the future. Local doctors are urging women to stop buying them but it's an uphill struggle: the standard wolfwhistle here translates to (and I've got this on state media authority): "This woman is very attractive, she wiggles."
"Don't use those pills, girl," I text Tadiwa. "You've got a beautiful figure."
She doesn't reply.

teenage mum

"I've got some depressing news," Shingie's mother says. She is shorter than me, half my size. I feel like a giant. "Shingie's pregnant."

She has to repeat it. "Shingie is pregnant." Not Shingie. I have a photograph of her in her school sports gear, navy-blue and white. She's standing with eight or nine team-mates, against a stunning red poinsettia bush. Shingie is the smiling girl, not a stunner, not plain either. She has two sisters. Chenge isn't married yet: J has two children, F and N. F showed me her 12 US dollar phone yesterday. Mummy sent it for her 9th birthday, she told me proudly (What about brain tumours? I wanted to say but stopped myself just in time).

How old is Shingie? 15, 16 maybe? Her mother took her out of boarding school only last year. Baring, near the Old Mutare Mission on the way to Africa University, where Ndabaningi Sithole was buried. Shamie hated it there. Her mother insisted she stay though. Was she trying to avoid this sort of thing happening? Then the money ran out and Shingie had to come home. Her father doesn't live with them. I met him once, downtown in Mutare. He had some kind of grain-selling place. Shingie's mother insists she is a Ms.

She looks up at me, her braids laced with grey. Mai Bruce always teases her about that grey. I wonder how she reacted to Shingie's news. Did she shout, scream, threaten to throw her out?

"I was shocked, mostly," she says.

We do not voice the unvoiceable, the 1,300 who die of AIDS here every week. But the question hovers.

poison

I count out malaria tablets quickly. She wants to take a kombi to Nyanga straight away.

When the 'phone call came, Mai Agnes dissolved into tears. I got the story little by little.

It's the youngest brother, Didymus. Twenty-nine years old, separated from his wife. He has three children. The eldest, Alice stays with him and the grandfather in the mountainous Nyanga district. One of the children had just sent them money to buy maize seed. The rains have started: there was no time to lose. Didymus went to the dealers in Ruchera. He bought the maize. There was a small amount of change. He decided he'd buy a scud of beer. A scud is the local measure, a carton-ful. He bought the beer, drank a bit, placed it on the bar. He went to the toilet.

When he came back, he took up his scud. The beer had a strange taste.

"Barman" -- this is Mai Agnes speaking and she's echoing what her sister Letizia told her who's echoing what her father's friend who was drinking at the same bar told her -- "barman, did somebody put something in this scud while I went outside?"

"I saw nothing," said the barman.

Didymus took another drink, started to complain of stomach pains. A few seconds later he collapsed on the floor. His father's friend took him to Ruchera clinic, and from there to Nyanga hospital.

A doctor there told them he'd been poisoned with temic. You die if you drop a few grains of temic -- sold here with a purple label as rat poison -- into your boot: it enters your body through your pores. Didymus had swallowed it. "There's nothing I can do," the doctor said.

guessing

After eight years living here, I still find it impossible to gauge Zimbabweans' ages. The sister who takes blood from me tosses her ringlets as she writes my name on the test-tube. They're reddish-purple corkscrew ringlets, the sort you could thread your little finger through. It's an elegant wig, I realise (there's a tell-tale gape at the neckline)"Do you have children?" she says. "A boy." I've warned her I might faint. "I have two, a boy and a girl. But they were close together and the girl did whatever the boy did so it was like having two boys." We discuss night wakings, how if you've only had girls you'd never understand how exhausting it is having a boy. "How old are your children?" I ask as she corks up the tube. Her face is smooth, unlined, firm - she's not much older than me, surely. "Old," she laughs. "What, 8 and 9?" "No, 21 and 20," she says. I gasp. "But that means you are.." She laughs.

It works both ways. A few minutes later, hurrying from the vegetable shop with a sachet of cayenne pepper I hear a steady "Sss." And again. "Sss." Yes? "Please, come over here." I take a few steps towards a trio of well, what are they, youths? Not so long ago, this would have been an offer of sugar, US dollar change or diamonds. One of the youths steps towards me. He's wearing a cap and a white-striped polo shirt. Breathtakingly white. He probably is a diamond dealer, come to think of it. Definitely a dealer of some kind, anyway. "I just want to say," he says, staring into my face. ""that I think you're very beautiful." "Thankyou." I laugh. I've slipped to the wrong side of 35 now, if I'd started having babies at 16 I could probably be your mother. That's if you're as old as I think you are, which you probably aren't. I hold bag, laptop and pepper tight and turn to cross the road. His voice floats after me. "Please, are you married?" .

Dove soap

The leather chair has such a large hole in the middle that I'm momentarily foxed, wondering if it's one of those ominously-named delivery chairs that I've heard of but never actually seen.

But no: it's just an old broken chair the nurse is perched on, in the middle of the childrens' ward. The ward is shabby, but light and clean. There are hand-painted guinea fowl mobiles floating over each bed near to felt-tipped green apples (or are they hearts?) with the message: Get Well Soon.

"I've brought you something," I tell a nurse. I'm waiting to interview a senior consultant. I've learnt it's often best not to arrive empty-handed in these cases.

I hold out my package: seven or eight individually-wrapped Dove soaps, some Dove deodorant (Black Dress Friendly, apparently it's a new line) and some toothpaste. A family friend has been sending these packages for seven years. His Dove soap has gone to childrens' homes, MDC officials' wives ("She'll use it at the church camp this weekend. None of her friends will have nice soap like this," the official in question told us happily as we skulked round a deserted building in the east of the country), victims of the Murambatsvina slum clearances, a would-be hairdresser in Mabvuku, Mrs Dube-who-gives-me-mealies and, and...

An older nurse appears. "I am the sister," she announces. "These are nice. Are they for me or for these girls?" Until January, nurses were being paid the equivalent of 50 US cents a month. "You must decide," I say, embarrassed by my heels and a tan leather Longchamp bag that's at least 10 years old but still looks expensive.

A chair appears, as if by magic. "Sit, sit while you wait," the nurses say, smiling. I do -- and the seat is solid.