Zimbabwe Journal: Journal, part 5

This is part of my journal during my trip to Zimbabwe in February, 2005. I was staying with my friend, Louis, and his black African maid was Susan. Susan always brought her daughter, Virimai.

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Monday, February 14^th, Valentine’s Day, also the second anniversary, plus one, of my mother’s death. I remembered her today.

Before leaving, Susan went through the house and closed the curtains. “Be sure to close the windows when you go to sleep tonight,” she said. “There are thieves around.”

“But there are bars on the windows,” I noted.

“They cut them.”

“If they cut the bars, wouldn’t they also break the window, even if it was closed?”

She shrugged and laughed.

“Tell me something, Susan.

“Yes, medem.”

“I like to take walks and I walk up and down Drew Road and ...”?

“Oh no problem, medem. That is safe during the day. Where I live it is another story. Now with the elections coming up it is very dangerous there.”

I couldn’t get her to elaborate on that, especially since I had seen an election rally right up the street from us here yesterday, but then that was in a mostly white neighborhood.

“I’m the only white person. And the people look at me like ,’ what is she doing?’”

Susan laughed.

“Where are all the white people? I know they love to take walks. So I wondered if maybe it was dangerous for me.”

“No medem. Not during the day. Don’t go out during the night.”

Susan told me that today she will walk home, and that takes two hours. “Because I have no money.” When she does have money, she takes the bus, which takes about 45 minutes. The maid in Nyanga, Rainier, walks three hours to get to the house, where she stays every weekend.

I spoke to Louis about it. Susan is his employee, not mine, and I wasn’t about to give her money for the bus. I don’t exactly believe every word out of her mouth. He explained her history with him, how she is a part-time employee, and could work for him, say, two days a week for the same money, and hold down another job, thus making a lot more money, but she doesn’t want to do that. In other words, it’s her choice. She’s got a pretty cushy job, relatively speaking, working for a single person who doesn’t eat at home, only spends a few hours a day here. Of course, it has been different with me here. Twice the laundry, though still not much, and I have gotten her to clean things which she hasn’t ever cleaned, like the windows. She actually seems to like the guidance and the activity. I detect no feelings of jees, I wish this woman would go away. But she IS working a lot harder. Louis says that since she only has about an hour’s work for him, doing the laundry, cleaning the pot he makes his morning porridge in, etc., she spends the time waiting for the laundry to dry watching movies on his tv. That’s okay with him. But with me here it’s a different story. Still, she leaves at around 2:30 or 3:00 every day, arriving at 8:30 in the morning. Not a bad gig.

I sat out in the back yard this afternoon, Tuesday, just thinking and eating some toast, watching birds which were the African equivalent of crows, robins and starlings, and realized there were no squirrels. When I first arrived here, I found no nuts (except peanuts) in the supermarket. I guess the two go together. I miss nuts.

It feels odd watching Middle East news from underneath it. When things are happening north of you they feel differently from when they are happening east and south of you. It is summer here, and the news shows English and German and American people all wrapped up in winter clothes, the weather report speaks of snow. When in America I so rarely even see the weather report for Africa that I don’t think about the fact that somewhere it is summer. My skin is not dry, I can wash dishes without the skin on my hands chapping and cracking. One could possibly live in summer all year long – the goal of so many.

I still do not feel the absence of “stuff”, as George Carlin calls it. I would like some paper towels. There are paper towels in the supermarket but they are very expensive and rarely used, and I have substituted “mutton cloth” which is a kind of cheese cloth, for paper towels, drying and chilling the salad in it, for example. I also miss Saran Wrap, but use the little plastic bags from the supermarket to wrap things in the refrigerator. I have noted already that the presence of Susan makes me not miss stuff because a lot of our stuff is just tools to make everyday chores easier. Sweeping with a whisk broom is entirely satisfactory, as long as I don’t have to do it.

You wouldn’t have time enough to read of all the stories I have heard about having employees here. They go walkabout regularly, in the most amazing ways. One of Louis’s employees, a young white man named Craig, asked if he could use Louis’s truck to do something. Louis said okay, and Craig called in the middle of the day saying he was broken down at the side of the road a couple of hours outside of Harare, in a place totally unrelated to the place where he had said he needed the car to go. What’s more, he had forgotten the spare tire at home, so couldn’t fix the tire and get back to Harare, and would Louis arrange to have him saved. Louis said hell no. Lorraine, a secretary in his office, has a soft spot for Craig and made Craig’s case, and Louis sent Givemore 1) to get the spare tire from Craig’s house, and 2) to go pick up Craig. When Givemore got there he found Craig and a few members of Craig’s family waiting at the side of the road. Craig asked Givemore for money so that they could all eat, claiming that they had not eaten all day. Givemore gave them some money and the whole family went and ate. Then they all drove back to Harare in the two separate vehicles, all gas compliments of Louis, at considerable expense overall to Louis, not to mention that Givemore was not available all day to do things he should have been doing.

Stuff like this happens all the time. Alfred, a talented young black African employee, said he needed the truck because his father had died the day before in Gweru, about an hour and a half south of Harare, and the family needed to take the body to the funeral home. This sounded kind of fishy to Louis, but he gave him the truck. I won’t go into the whole story, but it turns out that Alfred didn’t need the truck to take his father’s body to the funeral home, but rather to go an hour and a half NORTH of Harare to bury his baby by one of his many girlfriends. Louis had meantime made a couple of phone calls to the Gweru hospital and discovered that of course people didn’t need to transport their relatives’ bodies to the funeral home, and also that nobody had died there the night before. Instead of submitting himself for a discussion with Louis, Alfred went walkabout for a week or so. He’s on probation for that and other reasons.

I saw a white woman walking to the supermarket today. Wow. She was using her umbrella, as so many do here. The sun is no stronger than it is in Montclair, but they carry umbrellas. Maybe we should carry umbrellas in Montclair during the sunniest days. I am loving the 85-90 degree weather.

I made a mental calculation this morning. If half the people in Montclair walked instead of drove to do their shopping, you’d probably have a similar number of people walking on the streets as here, coming out of side streets with bags in their hands, walking with others or alone. The streets would be full.

When I got home from the gym on Tuesday I found Susan anxious to go out (she’d stayed here so she could buzz me in the gate) to the supermarket I had just come from to get some mealie meal (corn meal).

“Did you see mealie meal at Bon Marche?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t really look,” I answered. “Mealie meal” is the basis of “Sadza” the national dish, at least the Shona national dish. It’s like polenta and they serve is with “relish” which is a meat and vegetable stewish mix. I haven’t eaten it yet, but Louis promises to take me to a new restaurant which serves native food, where I will have to eat it. Sadza is just about it around here. It’s what they eat every day. Without it, Susan feels lost.

So she got dressed and steamed out, with Virimay, her daughter, fastened to her back with the towel carrier to find sadza, coming back over an hour later wth no mealie meal There was none where she lives, and somebody had told her there was some at Bon Marche. There is a shortage of corn in general, and I won’t go into all the corruption and mismanagement that has caused this shortage, but it’s massive.

Louis reviewed the tax situation for me here. 40% top rate income tax, and the top rate kicks in pretty low. VAT tax of 15%. Licensing fees for cars, radio, etc. 200% import tax. 30% inheritance tax. We figured it out that if everybody paid every tax they would be in the hole. So, the inevitable happens. People decide to survive and avoid taxes. Mugabe is a trained economist, which deepens the mystery.