]]>But then; how do we get or develop these qualities? I mean, how do I get more patient? How can I develop more…um… staying power or endurance, when things go pear shaped? Perhaps I should ask, “How else can I develop patience, except through difficult circumstances?” How do I learn forgiveness without the opportunity to practice it? Troubles can shape our character (if we let them) like a sculptor chisels away at a piece of rock, or they can destroy our resolve to go on. Some have gone through hell and seem to have more substance to their character: more patience and perhaps more grateful. Others have had similar experiences and ended up bitter, disheartened and … let’s say worse off emotionally. Nobody wants to go through hardships in any form, but when they do show up (and they do always – in different forms) how do we handle them? What will my attitude be? Will it be: I won’t let this break me! Or is it: God get me out of here right now!! One thing I’ve learnt is that you cannot develop certain qualities from reading a book – even a good one!
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]]>The two ladies stepped off, what turned out to be a ledge of some sort, into deep water and …I suppose at this point, realised (or remembered) that they could not swim. Fred was woken by a scream and looked out to see two figures, with hands flailing, bobbing up and down in the water. He got out of the car and raced towards the water’s edge, removing his sandals and t-shirt as ran. One of the “boyfriends” dropped his beer and ran towards the water’s edge getting there before Fred. He proceeded to remove the belt of his jeans, trying to kick off his sneakers as he did so. Fred gets to the water’s edge a few seconds later and is about to dive into the water, when – let’s call him BF # 1 – says to him, “Oh s*%t! I just remembered I can’t swim!” Freddy was in the water and soon rescued one of the girls. The other had managed to find the ledge and wade back to safety, coughing and sobbing as she finally collapsed on the ground. BF # 2 was still on the hood of the car with a shocked look on his face – with beer still in hand – it was clear he had no idea what to do. He just sat there with his mouth open. Needless to say the two ladies were soon “cured” of their fascination with water and wanted to leave. They got into the car with sheepish looks on their faces, followed by their rather embarrassed boyfriends.
]]> The real shocker is the cost of obtaining or renewing a passport. In South Africa (I’m talking of the most expensive one) it is somewhere around ZAR325, which, at the time of writing, is about USD$33, a friend of mine in Greece told me recently that, to renew her passport she’d have to fork out 22 euros. Canada’s 48 page adults’ passports are in the region of 75 Canadian dollars. In Botswana, I hear that their most costly passport is their P1656 (about USD 208) Jumbo Biometric 32 page document. I have no idea what a jumbo Biometric passport does but Here is Zim’s we find ourselves having to part with a paltry USD$675! Of this amount, USD$20 is just for the application form!! So for most of us, travel is okay, but just not outside the country. The thing is, freedom of movement is considered a right in most parts of the world and is enshrined in their constitutions. This must include the freedom to enter and leave one’s country of origin, but this cannot be the case where passport fees are orbiting somewhere around Pluto, beyond the reach of 95% of Zimbabweans. Could this be a ploy to stem the exodus of skilled labour from the country? Perhaps not, but it really has put a spanner in the works for those wanting to go off to university abroad and for those wanting to shop in South Africa or the UAE. Right now I want to travel on holiday but my passport will cost me more than my ticket? Anyone know how I can teleport myself to the UAE? 
What I’d like to know from you all is how much your passport cost you (if anything). Armed with loads of comparative info, I’d then like to write to our Minister of Home Affairs with a copy to the New Finance Minister (who happens to be the MP of our constituency) to convince them that the current fee system is, at best…utter madness.
]]>"Sesame Street Zw has been brought to you by the letter 'C' and the number 17.5 quadrillion."
Just about everything I take for granted here has become a source of both stress and amusement. Take for example this couple, friends of mine with 2 great kids. The little boy, the older of the two, attends a great, but pricey, primary school in Harare. He recently won some poetry recital and speech contest held at his school. So naturally he was looking forward to the schools end of term prize giving day when he would recieve the reward for his accomplishments. And naturally mom and dad looked forward to attending this event,with a camera in hand to capture the moment their sons name is called to the stage. The problem came up when it became apparent that, for all his oratory skills, it seems the boy could not stir the hearts of the school board, enough to get them to actually buy him a prize. A few days before prize giving his dad was suprised to receive a message from the school asking him to ...um....buy a book prize for the boy and then hand it to the school. They would then hand it to the boy as his prize. of course the boy must be blissfully unaware that the gift is not actually from the school.
Needless to say dad and mom were not amused with this setup, but this is life in Zimbabwe: nothing is ever simple, at least not any more. 
We are in the middle of a cholera crisis here and the situation is really bleak. With the major hospitals closed and the water delivery infrastructure in a sorry state,(there was no council water in Harare for two days almost two weeks ago)the words uttered by our health minister (in an apparent bid to take the lead in dealing with this crisis) were not the most encouraging. At the time when cholera was on the increase and water was not available in Harare and hospitals were closed and the little water people had access to was not clean enough.At a time when the national water authority had no chemicals to treat water (hence the reason for shuting down city water supplies) and people had no money to buy bottled water and there was often no electricity to boil water and firewood was too expensive, the minister is rumoured to have said that people must
...refrain from shaking hands.
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It’s not something our Central Bank would like to admit, but it’s a fact that, in recent months, our economy has been dollarising. The USD is rapidly becoming the de facto currency of Zimbabwe. It’s understandable given that our local currency is virtually worthless. The frustrating thing is that even though people have millions of dollars transferred into their accounts as salaries they have found it virtually impossible to spend it before it becomes useless. Banks only allow withdrawals of a whopping ZW$1000.00 a day. This barely covers peoples bus fares, so, in essence everybody queuing at the banks (and they pour from the aisles of the banking halls, out of the bank doors, onto and down the streets) is queuing to draw bus fare that will take them home and bring them back again. Minimum bus fares are at about ZW$500 and this usually constitutes one leg of the journey for most commuters travelling to work. Most buses go to and from town. The commuter then has to catch another bus to work. By this time the traveller and his $1000 would have said their tearful goodbyes and parted ways. So its back to the queue again and the wait could go on for an entire morning. So I gather that there is not a lot of work being done with half of Harare at the bank for up to 3 hours a day.
I finally managed to get a haircut today! Just a simple haircut; but I also took up their offer to wash the little hair I had left (after all, it cost me the equivalent of three trips to the bank!). Now here’s what I don’t understand about this particular salon; there is Ragga music blaring from the stereo speakers and the hair-dressers trying to compete with the noise by shouting their conversations across the room. So t gets quite noisy, especially on Saturday mornings. So here they are shouting across the salon, with the ghetto blaster just about popping my ear-drums with some Shaggy tune. And quite frankly the shouting was getting to me (they two ladies were on either side of me) and Shaggy just wasn’t cutting it, so I almost left in the middle of the haircut. This thought reminded me of a barber I went to some 15 years ago. Got there at lunch time on a Saturday afternoon and asked for a brush – cut. The place was getting ready to close for the weekend and I was anxious to get home. I remember the barber cutting exactly one half of my head to brush size and then the unthinkable happened – power went! It turned out that ZESA, the Electricity Company, was scheduled to do maintenance at 2pm and would shut down power at a nearby sub-station that provided power to at least 4 city blocks. They warned all businesses that they would shut down power at 2pm and this was not negotiable. It was 2 O’ clock and with half my head shaved I had a pretty hideous looking hairstyle. I still had to take a bus home! So I was quite desperate. It took 20 minutes to get them to switch power on for 10 minutes so the barber could just about Hoover the other half of my head. At one stage he suggested that I go home and, “…come back on Monday.” I nearly bit his head off.
So the US Govt has to step in to bail out the banks? It hasn’t been long since the Fannie Mae and Freddy what’s ’is name bail out, now $700 billion is needed. The question that comes to mind; Does this give the impression that when banks make huge profits, it’s theirs and only theirs and then when they start to haemorrhage money, the resulting losses are shared with the tax-payer?
I was like… “…but we only supposed to make a spectacle of ourselves at the end of the show!”
At one stage I tried to “blend in” to the crowd, but it’s a little difficult when you are the only non-white person in the 1st 20 rows! I’m also quite tall so she weeded me out, pulled me up and began to gyrate and contort her body into positions I didn’t think were mechanically possible. Then Eric, a German friend of Sue’s, began to do “the walk” from his station at the right front exit towards us to the strains of “Here comes the sun” (he came across the front row of the auditorium- meaning that if anyone had not noticed us on the left, they were aware of our antics by the time Eric got to us) just short of ruining, for me, what is, in my opinion, a really great classic. Then I had two of them gyrating and twisting their bodies into some “folks don’t try this at home” positions. And guess who had to dance with them? Sue is at least 80! Eric must be approaching 84, but boy can the man get down and boogie! I don’t like dancing at all and work hard to avoid it when I can. Well actually it’s because, I can’t dance. I got no rhythm at all – best I can do is the Madiba shuffle. So the idea of having me dancing in front of a 200 plus audience on a Saturday evening is, at best, unthinkable! But there we were! Not lekker!
Finally left REPS Theatre two and a half hours later with a sore back, battered ego and feet that seemed to be yelling, “Dammit Leo! What the hell is wrong with you?”
Guess who is NOT ushering another musical again?
Started a new job on a rose farm, so it’s been hectic trying to get stock control and budgeting systems into place, but I’m getting there. Good to see that agriculture is still alive in Zims, considering the battering it’s been subjected to over the last 8 years or so. Although our agri-sector is on life support, the economy as a whole is in need of a resurrection, of the “Lazarus come forth” variety. Prices have a life of their own and already scarce goods are beyond the reach of most of us. I mean, if you see packs of imported milk on the supermarket shelves at unaffordable prices, you may as well go home and tell the wife, “Honey there is no milk at the shop.” Of course what you really mean is, “There is no milk for us.” Even pet food is scarce and the imported brands cost more than our own food. So it was no surprise when three weeks back I could not find any food for the 4 kitties and Kaiser the dachshund, all waiting with hope written all over their little faces at home. After three days of scouring Harare for anything resembling pet food I returned home, unsuccessful and had to contend with the nibbling of my ankles by 3 hungry (and understandably cheesed off) cats. It was when Oscar (the 4th fairly large black cat) sauntered in at sunset expecting to find supper that I realized that I had to act quickly before getting my ankles gnawed into oblivion. So… I check the existing stocks to find not enough to go round, so I am forced to dig into the pantry and part with my tinned meat and tinned pilchards (large tins) in my bid to keep the …um… ravenous felines and a rather timid Kaiser, at bay. Not for the faint hearted.
If the man had any sense he’d have a few rats and niloticus breams hanging in that pantry of his ready for us to munch on twice a day. What the hell is wrong with these people? Over the last couple of years they’ve been getting slack. Even they have cut down on their meals and they expect us to do the same! What happened to the occasional steak we were treated with once in a while? And what in heavens name do they have against milk? We never see it. All we see now is this power stuff they seem to guard with their lives and which finds its way into that hot liquid that they scald their mouths trying to drink (usually in a hurry) each morning? And what’s up with this … touchy feely urge that they have around us cats? I mean I’m a male and he is a man. Duh! What if one of the other toms saw me getting cuddled by …this man? And what of…whoa, there he goes towards the pantry again – maybe I can persuade him to…damn! Turned back towards this desk and this blasted pc. Better get off this chair then…
I think it’s important that we work to boost our capacity to grow food here in Africa. Given that the whole world is facing a food crisis in one form or another, it may be wise to consider investing our time and resources into growing as much of our food as possible on a large commercial scale. Even so called peasant farmers need to change their mindset from one of growing on a subsistence scale to growing as a business. I mean there’s no point in dishing out all this land if the people don’t have the mindset and are not empowered with the wherewithal they need to build up a viable farming enterprise that will contribute to restoring food security. I’m getting pretty tired of having to import some of my food stuffs from Down South.
Somewhere in the middle of the opening credits of his 2nd dream his nostrils pick up this strange smell. He woke up and turns his head to find his sheets being mercilessly engulfed in flames. Needless to say it took him 0.8 secs to leap off the bed to safety, but during this brief flash he had the "presence of mind to ask himself a really pertinent question: "Where the hell did the fire come from?" He quickly attacked the flames with some yet to be identified object and then inspected the damage. The sheets have this new gaping hole and the mattress has a matching hole as well. Ray takes off the mattress and turns it around and then upside down, puts on fresh sheets, gets back into bed and settles down to a well needed rest. minutes later he feels a warm sensation in his feet.... Yes the night is warm, but this is a little too warm for comfort. he gets ups to inspect the mattress only to find a smouldering hot inferno burning the base of his...yes, wooden bed. So, in desparation, he dashes outside in his pyjamas to find as much sand as he can carry, under the watchful eye of the dog with an understandably puzzled look on its face.(Its amazing how difficult it is to find sand in the moonlight, with a burning bed indoors - try it sometime...)
Finally the fire is snuffed out but the bed is not very useful, so Ray packs his bags to sleep by his moms house (where there is power), I suppose for his own safety... Just as he finishes packing, the power comes on!!!
]]>"Um… who?" I said.
"The tsotsi's" he said with immense enthusiasm. (Tsotsi is a colloquial expression here in Southern Africa for a thug, a robber or a thief). I was a little uneasy, so I asked him how. His idea was that we go out into the yard and sit in the bushes at about 2am in the morning for at least an hour and a half and, here's the hard part…wait. He organised himself a knobkerrie fashioned from possibly the hardest plastic known to man. And I found myself a thick piece of wood which I converted into my "rod of correction and retribution." I can't imagine what we both aimed to achieve as we didn't know how many thugs would one day show up and whether or not they had a firearm. And the thought of sitting in the dew layered, mosquito and bug infested undergrowth (we had to be hidden!) didn't really have much appeal, at least not at 2am in the morning. But I did it anyway. Naturally Jones refused. Said that we were crazy. Then one night we were "on duty" in the bushes, cold, damp, tired and irritable, when we heard a noise next door. Donny signaled for us to approach the wall and, because only I was tall enough, asked me to take a peep next door as his sweat palms tightened their grip on his plastic …um thingy. I looked over the wall expecting to spot intruders breaking into the house next door. What I did see was my next door neighbour, who we hardly knew, apparently a little drunk, banging the door so his girlfriend could open up. It was about 3:30am and I guessed that he had been to a night club. Open and shut case. It seemed that Donnie had a different idea why this chap was knocking on his door at this time of the morning and what he said next confirmed this: "Is he still there?"
"ER…yah!"
"Still at the door?"
"Well…it is the way in, isn't it?"
Why don't you ask him what he's doing?
"Excuse me? I can't do that!"
"Just do it! Why is he out this time of the night during the week?"
"Why are we out during the week at this ridiculous hour?
Our whispering must have alerted the neighbour because he began to approach the wall and then wanted to know what we were doing outside. Really embarrassing. We never did catch anyone in our nightly vigils and, needless to say, "operation barn-owl" was soon suspended due to lack of sleep.
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