Well, here I am in my beloved Zimbabwe and there are so many things about it that I love – and there are so many things that make me laugh.
Arriving at the airport I was truly amazed. 10 years on and they’ve finally put a roof on the airport building! I was amazed at the progress that had been made. In the meantime while they are building the new airport terminal which of course is for the masses of tourists coming to Bulawayo, the temporary terminal is in use. What this involves is landing on the (one) runway and then being bussed (imagine that, a bus instead of having to walk on the tarmac!) to the temporary terminal which is a converted corrugated iron aircraft hanger – no joke. The sign proudly proclaims “ Joshua Mqabukwe Nkomo “Temporary” Terminal” to all and sundry who arrive. Inside there is dry walling to separate customs and immigration from the waiting area and it’s about 100 degrees in there. Your luggage arrives through a whole in the wall and gets packed on a shelf and you retrieve it yourself. Just as well, because when there isn’t power, conveyer belts wouldn’t work anyway.
Another pleasant surprise greeted me when I left the airport tin shack - they have actually tarred the road leading to the airport – a vast improvement on the rutted and pitted dirt road that you used to have to drive on. Wow!
The potholes here are unreal – they are everywhere. To drive in Zimbabwe you need a PhD – a qualification in Pot Hole Driving. All the cars, which are going at a snail’s pace, wind over the road lurching like drunken sailors. If you see someone driving straight, you know they are drunk. And frequently dodging some of the larger potholes means swinging right onto the other side of the road onto oncoming traffic – which mercifully isn’t coming at you very fast. Half the robots (sorry, traffic lights) don’t work and even worse, some of them work only on one side so even if you think that the light isn’t working and you have to give way to your right, you better be careful that it isn’t green for the other side. The opportunities for accidents are limitless and yet they hardly ever happen.
Then the best thing ever. My mum and I were leaving to go to tea at a friend’s house and she shouted for Trust who is our houseboy / domestic worker / servant (I have no idea what’s politically correct anymore – he’s worked for us since I was a child). I asked her what she needed him for and she said that he had to come and check for rats in the car before she would get in. I thought she was joking, but apparently the rats come and hide in the engine overnight and chew all the wires, sometimes getting into the car. She found a dead one once under her seat and given the smell, it had been dead for some time. Only in Zim!
Trust has 6 children now and my mother keeps shouting at him that he mustn’t have more. They are Prince, Angela, Blessing, God Knows (yes God Knows), Alexandra and I can’t remember the name of the youngest. But the best is the story of how child no. 4 got his name. My mum asked Trust why he had named his son “God Knows” and Trust responded by saying “ Madam, I am not sure about that one, if he is mine.”
Everything here is available now which makes a vast difference to the last time I came here a year ago. The reason for this is that now everything can be paid for in foreign currency. So at every shop and petrol station there’s a sign with the rates for rands, US dollars, GBP sterling and pula. It makes a hell of a difference to be able to pull up to a petrol station and actually get fuel instead of the ubiquitous “No Fuel” signs that were dotted all over the city. You may have to queue for a bit, but only 4 or 5 cars instead of queues that stretch for 4 or 5 km. Apparently you have to shop around because the rates differ from US$0.95 to $1.10 but at least you can get it if you have the cash.
No rubbish gets collected because no one pays their rates any more - they are just too high. This morning when I went for a shower, the water pressure was so bad it took me ages to rinse the shampoo out of my hair because the water was just dripping from the showerhead. At least it was hot - but it turned out later that the water had been switched off. Never mind no power, no water is WAY worse. In the end there was a burst pipe down the road and they turned off the water to fix it (wow – on the same day! Highly unusual.) Dad initially thought they cut the water because he hadn’t paid – but at least it wasn’t that.
Even funnier, in town the parking meters don’t work because of course, there are no coins and they would never be able to cope with different currencies. So the town council came up with what they thought was an ingenious plan. You would have to go to Revenue Hall and pay for parking vouchers (standing in yet another interminable queue) and then display that on your car. If it had expired, or if you didn’t have one, they would clamp your car and you would have to pay a substantial fine to get the car released. The problem was that the clamps were the old type and they didn’t cover the hub of the clamped wheel, so motorists would simply jack up the car, take the wheel off, put the spare on and drive away. In the end you had loads of motorists with a clamped wheel in their boots and the city ran out of clamps. They gave up that idea and parking is free now. Only in Zim.
The weather here is gorgeous with long sunny days around 28 degrees with cloudless blue skies that are a shade of blue to be found nowhere else on earth and the nights are chilly. Even though most of the surrounds are overgrown with man-high grass (lack of rate-paying again) so many gardens and the outer border of the houses are well kept and beautifully maintained with emerald green grass that I have never seen anywhere else. Zim might be a crazy place, but it is beautiful.
I still have lots of friends here so it is really nice to be able to catch up and listen to the craziness that is my home. There’s nothing much else to do here but kick back and relax which is exactly what I am doing. At the moment I am halfway through my third book. I’m sure that because I am staying here for a month, I will have more funny stories to add whilst I continue to work my way through the library here at home and ponder my state of (un)employment, so watch this space!
Soundtrack for the day: Eminem feat. Dr Dre and 50 Cent - Crack a Bottle
Did you ever watch Fraggle Rock as a kid, there's a character named Uncle Traveling Matt who would tell about his adventures in "space" which really was his observations of humans. It was super funny and reading this made me think of that for some reason....not that I think you're a puppet-like Fraggle-like. Oddly the part which made me laugh the most was after reading about a life without some creature comforts (water, roofs at the airport, proper parking meters) your fave songs are Eminem & Dr. Dre
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