into the jaws

She's a student at Africa University. It's the end of the semester and she's desperate to go back to see her family in Harare for the Christmas holidays. There's just one problem: the family live in Budiriro township, the epicentre of Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic.

"Don't go," I say immediately as I hand her a cup of soup (Super Chicken Noodle sent by mum -- should it be this watery?)

It'll be fine, she says ("and this soup is great"). There have only been two cholera cases in her area (Two? Isn't that two too many?)

Her part of Budiriro is the part near Glen View, the old part. They haven't had running water for a matter of years now: her father brings containers of water from the office every day at lunchtime and in the evening. Paradoxically, the lack of piped water makes the cholera risk a tiny bit lower. "There's no sewage," she says delicately. Residents have long found their own "solutions" to human waste disposal -- pit latrines etc. The real problem comes in the parts of the township where there is occasionally running water. Then people flush the loos but the sewerage pipes are overloaded so they burst and flood. Mix that with no rubbish collection, no schools (kids playing outside in the flooded streets), poor immune systems and what do you get? Cholera.

"You know in our area now you're not even allowed to hold funerals now," she says. "You have to tell the police when someone's died, their officials come, they wrap the body in a blanket and then in plastic and the body is buried straight away.

"In our culture funerals should take three or four days. Everyone comes to your house. You eat and drink together. But the officials are saying that's how the cholera will spread."

Africa University is organising a bus on Friday to take Harare students back home, she says. "I can't wait."

tickbite

The reason I got tickbite fever and she has never got it, says A., is because she's "a sturdy Mashona" and I'm not.

The reason I got tickbite, my mother-in-law says (and she's never had it), is because I should have stuck a match on the tick's tiny bottom and burnt it off me. Or smothered it with vaseline so that it suffocated and fell off.

Not scratched it, like I in my foreigner's ignorance did.

earwigs

remedy for ear-ache:

Crush a cockroach ("it has to be a large one") until "the white stuff" comes out. Mix in a small amount of cooking oil. Pour down ear. "It really works," T says.

diamond snapshots 3

Philippa and Mel were minding house for two foreign diamond dealers in Mutare's Toronto (?) suburb. The girls were employed as cleaners, paid good money (because that's what the diamond dealers had). But the plainclothes CIO came. The girls lied that the men weren't there. The officers started to beat them ("with iron bars, Mel couldn't sit down for a few days, it was just last week") and went through the house, trying every door. One was locked. "Open it," the officers said. "We can't, there's a key in the other side," the girls said. They beat them again. "We will keep beating until whoever is in there comes out," said the officers. The dealer did come out -- eventually. But the answers he gave to the questions weren't the same as the answers the girls gave. "I used to envy those people with diamonds, the ones who had new clothes for school while we could barely make ends meet," T. says. "Now I don't."

no they don't

Tadiwa's mother remembers being out in the fields in Mutare a long time ago. She was a child at the time. There was a mother with a young child there, ploughing. It was a strip -- Tadiwa measures with her eyes -- from this table to the fence round the swimming pool. What mothers did then when they got to the fields was to dig a small hollow to put their babies in while they were working. This way a child learned to sit up on its own ("though I think it's awful, leaving your baby like that," Tadiwa says). When this mother got halfway along her strip, she dug another hole, sat the baby in and carried on. She looked round.... and saw a snake coiled round the child (a python?). She started to scream, wanted to yank the child away but she was stopped by an elderly man nearby. "Leave the snake," he told her. "If you grab your child the snake will squeeze." The mother did as she was told and eventually, the snake slithered away. Snakes do not bite babies, the man said.

so they do bite

L. has a story about boomslangs. Her brother-in-law was bitten one Christmas. He was walking under a tree with a chameleon balanced on his forearm. It's an easy thing to do: adults and kids alike are fascinated by a chameleon's slow movements. What the brother-in-law didn't realise was that on a low-lying branch a boomslang had spotted its prey. It reached down, missed and bit the man instead. "Fortunately it was a dry bite," L. says. "But it caused a bit of stress for a short while."

luna park

Luna Park is Zimbabwe's travelling fair. In the midst of Zimbabwe's worst-ever economic crisis, it's still operating. The rides are exactly the same as they were in the 1970s, my husband confirms: the Joy-Ride, Vroom-Vroom, Boats, the Sky-Ride, Shells.

The Octopus is still operating, even though it lost a leg mid-ride some years ago, my mother-in-law says darkly.

There's even a rollercoaster, wending its way in the semi-darkness at the edge of Meikles Park. When my husband was eight, he was so terrified he made them stop the ride. His two brothers loved it, of course.

Teenagers and young black families throng the fairground this time round. The local Manica Post newspaper says even nightclubs are feeling the pinch: patrons prefer the fair. Streetkids beg for money for a ride. We have no Zimbabwe dollars. You cannot ask a four-year old to just stand and watch the merrygoround, I realise.

"Auntie!" It's Mai Sean (Sean's mother) in a T-shirt and tight jeans. We exchange news. Her father, a prominent charity worker, is back from a trip to Uganda. Her beauty studies are going well, how it's impossible to get cash from the bank: the little nothings that make up a conversation, knots in the net of community. Sean stands on tiptoe, clasping his arms around my legs.

"It's my birthday," he says. "I'm 5."

Mai Sean's brother slips off quietly to change our 2 US somewhere behind the ticket shack. I watch two small boys sharing a pack of pink and white marshmallows as the jet planes whirl and the fairy lights flash onto their faces. "Time to go home", I say at last.

For now, this is the home we have.