Zimbabwe journal: 2005 Louis

This is a journal about my trip to Zimbabwe in February 2005, when I stayed in Harare with my friend Louis. We met in person for the first time in the airport, so this was something of an adventure. This post is about Louis.

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Louis was at the airport, as promised, took me to breakfast, tea and dinner the first day I was here, and has been great. He has not cohabited with anyone since his marriage broke up eleven years ago, and god knows setting up housekeeping in Zimbabwe is a first for me.

We went shopping at the biggest supermarket in town on Weds. What a sight, the person-who-has-become-a-bachelor wheeling around the supermarket cart looking at things he hasn’t thought about in years, like flour, and at his side the fledgling transient Zimbabwean who wonders what fruit that is, and where are the walnuts? (Nowhere) I am creating tonight’s dinner (Thursday), which was detailed in my more general press release. The pie is presently in the oven, a little worse for the wear at having had to wait until the workman finished the security gate, and it is also paying for my lack of knowledge about the centigrade system. I have a suspicion that I set the oven at around 525 Fahrenheit.

Louis is good-humored and patient, has patiently set me up on the internet and figured out the various connections here and there. He is a really good listener (and a really good talker) which I value. He often has a kind of surprised look on his face. He took me with him as he made his rounds Wednesday. To his office, which is in a one-story house like the one he lives in, like the one that most people live in here. Luxury is not exactly the style, though there are many lovely homes behind gates and walls, I see. I learned on the plane just from observing, and from talking to my seatmate that unpretentiousness is favored.

“That’s Mugabe coming to the airport,” Louis remarked as a cavalcade, including an open truck bristling with machine guns and the soldiers who love them, raced past us. It was about 20 cars long. Louis’s car is a truck, a 1997 Ford pickup with various things missing and a battered from the Zim roads. He is, however, a man after my own heart, having bought it new, figuring he’ll drive it until it collapses, then buy another new one. There are lot of battered old vehicles tooling around which apparently belong to people who would be driving BMW’s in Montclair. Other members of his family drive an SUV and a “little Mazda.”

He took me to a clinic which he had designed and got into operation, and for which his office runs the billing and computer systems. I learned that the down payment for medical treatment is 800,000 Zim dollars.

The house is, well, a bachelor pad. The maid has gotten away with coming, doing one day’s laundry in the bathtub, ironing it, using a whisk broom to sweep the rugs, and a wet rag to clean the floors. I thought maybe it would be nice if the curtains in the bathroom were cleaned. It had been a while. She was very accommodating about it and whaddayaknow, the curtains are not grey, they are white!

I have my eye on a couple of other little feminine improvements over the next month. As most of you know, I am not exactly a obsessive housekeeper, but I do have my standards, and there is somebody here to enforce them for me, the maid, Susan. She comes with her 18 month old daughter who is good as gold all day, making little peeps and funny remarks to her mother, then taking naps in a towel which is securely tied so as to shelter Vivek, the baby, against her back. A very humane way to treat a baby, and not so hard on the mother either because the baby never cries. Louis hasn’t seen the curtains yet, but he will probably be surprised that they are white. I take that back. He won’t even notice, but will be very appreciative when I point them out.

He is insulin dependent and has to inject himself with insulin before every meal and with long-lasting insulin in the morning and night. It does not impede him in many ways, it appears, though he was thrilled with my gift of a box of Power Bars so he never will be caught going into diabetic shock with nothing to eat. He tucked one in his shirt pocket to take with him to work. I have been on my own all day, which has suited me fine. It’s so quiet – no radio, only a tv with yucky things like President Bush talking on CNN and the BBC. No thanks. The silence is soothing.

I guess he likes me because he said that if he gets the full Zambia assignment, he wants to “give you the full treatment, Cape Town, Zambia, Kariba” and then he added, “free.” Hmmmmm. “I guess you must have thought I’d be good company,” I answered. His judgments had been made from our emails, and we had at that point known each other in person for about 10 hours. He laughed across the dinner table, “I wonder why,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

He is a businessman through and through – entrepreneurial, clear, aggressive at work, polite to his staff, absorbed in making things work, impatient with unserious people. I asked him if he missed being a farmer, the connection to the earth and all that, “No, I was never interested in that side of it. I just looked at it and said, ‘How much money can I make out of this land.’”. His spiritual side also needs a little work.

He has a lot of friends. One of them is coming down from Scotland around the 20^th of the month and there’s going to be a big party for him, which I will go to, of course. We WILL still be speaking by then.

He has a South African accent, with the “u” tending toward the French “u” and “bahth,” and whatnot. It’s charming of course. He was raised speaking Afrikaans, until he went away to school, I guess around junior high.

We are driving tomorrow to Nyanga for the weekend, and will drive straight through his old farms. He lost them during the war in the 70's. His house was mortared to oblivion, and then he at least got some kind of compensation from the government, which he used to build the house in Harare now inhabited by his semi-former wife, and to start his new business. He was also a lecturer on Agricultural Economics at the U. Of Zimbabwe for 7 years. He’s done a bit of everything, not a 9-5 type. Maybe a 6:00 -6:00 type sometimes, but he takes off when he needs to. For example, we’ll leave for Nyanga about noon tomorrow and won’t come back until Monday afternoon. Nyanga is way up in the mountains; rafting, trout fishing, swimming, hiking, etc. In the “Blue Mountains.”

Next week we will drive to Zambia, I think. Because he doesn’t have American dollars available (long, common story), he couldn’t buy my plane ticket to Zambia, and I know he was feeling badly that I would have to pay for my own airline ticket, for HIS work. Now that I’m here I understand why that is the case. So he has resolved that problem by suggesting that we drive up to Lusaka, and then take two days to drive back down again, stopping in the Luangwe Valley in Zambia, a prime spot for seeing wild life.

He does what he says and he says what he is doing, and that is a set of qualities which I highly value.

We are both having a lot of fun playing house for a month. I think that will be sufficient for the time being. He’ll have his white curtains and a few good home-cooked meals, and I’ll have seen Zimbabwe and Zambia somewhat and been spoiled rotten. Last night he said that this is the first meal that has ever been cooked (other than the occasional steak and breakfast porridge – he meant “meal”) in his house, and he was just delighted. I described the process of preparing the meal – the wine bottle rolling pin, the power outage, the incorrect oven settings, the burned meat balls because I was talking to him on the phone – over a beer when he came back in the evening, and made myself laugh till my stomach hurt. I thought I was very funny. He did too, but was not convulsed in giggles as I was, just smiling and laughing. He plied me with the wine inside the rolling pin after I finished the beer, and by the end of the meal I was thinking everything I said was hysterically funny. And everything he said too.

All in all, I would say I recommend going to the nether parts of another continent to spend a month with a married man (or woman) you’ve never met. Makes a nice change.