Life in Zimbabwe. Sometimes it’s hard. But the everyday challenges of the average Zimbabwean are not mine. I have a decent roof over my head, security, electricity and running water. The threatened one day per week supply of water to various suburbs hasn’t materialised here (an area of embassies, hospitals, private medical clinics and emergency rooms). The Airbnb host installed a water tank which I have only needed on occasion, other than for drinking water (potable, unlike town water). I have fuel in the car which should last me 2 weeks, by which time I hope things will have improved. If not, like everyone else, I will be destined to give up hours to queue for a mere 5 litres or stay put to ensure I can get to airport on the 23rd of the month. Once the fuel gauge hovers below half fullI realise this is causing a small, almost unconscious anxiety (it’s it weird how the first half of the tank seems to take forever to depreciate and the second half dematerialises before your eyes). I have since, with access to a foreign credit card or US$, purchased a fuel card with 100 litres which can be used at 3 services stations (one 24 hour station just around the corner) where I am guaranteed fuel and no queues. The cost is slightly more but worth it to quell my disconcertion. The ethics of easy access to fuel does cause a pause, but I quickly rationalise that my efforts to share skills will be a worthless if I can’t get anywhere. So now my affordable little car will transport me to Safe Hands, DVZ, AOZ, and other sustaining activities (meditation, yoga, park or pool, or the Village Walk on a wet day for retail therapy — the only things worth buying being cheap Chinese toys for work). Three weeks in, the lengthy fuel lines are not going anywhere despite new petrol stations opening (meaningless when the country doesn’t have the hard currency to purchase enough fuel). The fuel queues have only affected me in the traffic chaos they cause.
I discovered today that Food Lovers who were offering a 70% discount for payment with a forex card, is now charging 1:1. Interesting given even the offical government rate is now 1:2.5. But I have ecocash, bond notes and access to change more at 1:4. Given the limited supply of bond notes it will be interesting how long the dual currency can continue. I have internet but now must pay for it myself. That, along with the airtime bundles, has cemented the concept — Zimbabwe has the most expensive internet and telecommunications in the world. My Airbnb has only the most basic DSTV so, other than a middle east focussed BBC world news channel, there is nothing to watch. I soon learn the true cost of streaming, using 50 gig in 4 days. I hope it was the VPN that chewed up most of it. The great Australian SBS and ABC will wait a few weeks until I relocated to an Airbnb with unlimited internet. I am now rationing my Netflix fix. I have no idea where the airtime I purchase goes as I typically don’t call or text anyone, relying instead on Whatsapp. I finally worked our how to log in to check my usage for my phone, but to do so for the router has me stumped!
The new Airbnb is fine but dark, not good for my soul. The bed is OK but just. The domestic worker is surly, left used soap upon my arrival, and guards toilet paper as if it were gold. Avondale is central and therefore not as tranquil as the ‘leafy northern suburbs’. I feel a little despondent but when I peruse Airbnb I discover a brand new listing, a beautifully renovated cottage, light and modern, set at the back of beautiful grounds with access to a lovely pool. The owner, a young white Zimbabwean guy, seems pleasant and wants payment through Airbnb, so much easier than bringing in or transferring money. Even with the Airbnb fees it’s the cheapest option yet. There are 2 dogs and 2 cats (soooo missing my animal friends). And most importantly, unlimited wifi.
So what’s hard?
Last week tested me in ways expected and unexpected. Harare is not Melbourne, the quieter pace welcomed and the dearth of social activities anticipated. The local solution to this is church or drinking. I have yet to oversubscribe to either. Watch this space. Will I succumb to the apostolic faith, donning white to gather with KKK-like robed Shona in a nearby empty plot? Or will my social life budget be consumed by South Africa shiraz, my new drink of choice Grey Goose Cherry flavoured vodka, or good old Tanqueray? You see, this is why I need unlimited wifi. Netflix and SBS are far healthier addictions until my social life develops.
Moving to another country to live alone has the anticipated challenges. In the place of deep friendships there are acquaintances, some with an immediate connection, others you stick to with in a ‘wait and see’ mode. Luckily I am a fairly self sufficient person, adept at being alone. But that’s not to say I do not feel moments of loneliness or isolation. It would be disingenuous to say otherwise. The first few months of living in Brighton (Hove to be exact), living in Marondera (only survivable because Sarah and I became friends), translocating to Harare where I had friends, and even moving home in 1996 after almost a decade away, were all challenging. The process to find my place and connect with likeminded souls takes time. As I’ve said to friends “it takes time, years really, to feel solid in a place that is not home”. So none of this is new. It just is. And as an ‘elemental’ a major area of my being is not being sustained in the manner I am used to.
Elementals — we are born networkers, driven by fun and pleasure. We love the exploration of new relationships, new frontiers, and ideally plan our week around social life — not work. We love starting up new endeavours and projects and know others (usually the dragons, even the angelics) will stick around to maintain the creation, others always happy to stick with what elementals see as the mundane. We are typically happy drinkers and, yes, we like a drink! Our creativity extends to our work, clothes, home, cooking. We are driven by admiration. I own it. I have laughed at myself when frustrated at work, reflecting, ‘oh my, I’m not being admired for my hard work’. Others of you, the Angelics, the Dragons and the Star people, you want appreciation, acknowledgement, authority. Not for me thanks. Good old admiration works fine for me. So in the gestation period, with the absence of a vibrant social life, sustenance must take the form of creativity. And this is where the past week failed me.
Safe Hands advertises itself as ‘an inclusive child care centre’ offering ‘individual learning plans’ with the support of ‘rehabilitation staff’. Inclusion is a government priority. The challenge in Zimbabwe is the profound stigma that still shrouds disability. So many children are kept hidden at home, cared for by a young, inexperienced, untrained and probably unloving ‘maid’. As a result early identification is merely a concept here, many children not officially diagnosed till 5 years of age or later. The options for intervention are scary and frequently unaffordable. Jairos Jiri, an NGO, seems to have fallen to frighteningly low standards, some of the mothers I have met withdrew their children, their facial expression pleading for me to not to ask why. St Giles, still held as a relative ‘gold standard’, charges fees for a questionable educational program, no rehabilitation and no care (parents must arrange care for toiletting and feeding). I was told of the rape of a young teenage girl by one of the drivers — she was many months pregnant with twins before the abuse was identified. We know this also happens at home, but Australian families have many more choices, even with the dysfunctions of the NDIS.
Safe Hands provides a safe place. Where the rehab room is a little dark, the classroom is light and airy. Most days water and electricity enable basic care. If not volunteers build a fire to cook on and cart water from a nearby borehole. The meal plan for the week includes mealie meal porridge, sadza, rice and spaghetti, mostly donated by fee paying parents. These are accompanied with muriwo (greens), ‘soup’ (the vegetable sauce largely tomato based), beans, and sometimes meat, usually a smattering of mince. So the basics of nutrition are cared for. The staff are kind, or at least not harsh. Local educational and child rearing practices are miles removed from our ‘child as the centre of the universe’ approach at home. At the pool the other day I heard an obese swim teacher yelling at an obese boy to ‘stop swimming like a penguin, swim like a fish’, the tone harsh and ridiculing. When he was unsurprisingly reluctant to swim she threatened, ‘If you don’t start by the count of 5 you know what will happen’. This week the Minister of Education was discussing the place for corporal punishment in schools.
There is a little physical rehab offered at Safe Hands by the child care assistants, designed by an experienced rehab tech who has only come once this term, and I am told by others outside the organisation she will not return. Then there are the programs I have set up. The Matt and Molly narrative program is purely for the 5 physically disabled children who have enough cognition to make some sense of it. They squeal with glee when they know Sipelile and I will take them outside for the simple story, question time and drawing activity. I stick paper to a firm board (which having shown the teacher, I am frustrated to find she continues to ignore, failing to assist her disabled charges). After asking Noku which colour she wants and placing the crayon in her hand, Noku scribbles her version of the story, her athetosis resulting in lines of colour dragged down the page. Having chosen colours that reflect the features of the story, I ask Noku yes/no questions “is the red Molly? Is the green the frog?”, her answers “ehe” with her winning smile, or “aiwa” with a head shake. Tadiwa is a solid, not big but heavy,10 year old with spastic athetosis (if that’s a diagnosis, I’m not a physio, it is certainly what his body is doing). He does not have a wheel chair, the one at home needs repair — we are trying to fund one for him at Safe Hands. If successful, my hope is the staff would allow him to stay in the classroom. Currently his day is spent lying on a torn mat where his athetosis results in arms, legs and mouth getting caught up in the rips. The morning sun, hot by 9 am, streams in and his already hot body is soon boiling, no one thinking to remove his jacket or shoes as they sit on chairs watching the children. The others in the room, with varying degrees of severe to no physical disability, present with significant behavioural, cognitive and autistic features and Tadiwa is left there the whole day with no stimulation. After being a bit of a heavy, talking about ‘duty of care’, the staff seem to at least occasionally consider if Tadiwa needs his jacket off. One new volunteer, Loveness, has been working on shapes and colours (too easy for Tadiwa) and now number (proving a bit challenging). They have also, after my explicit direction, placed him on the un-torn mat. Too heavy to lift, we drag him outside on the mat outside for the Matt & Moly session, using humour to make the indignity seem like fun. After answering the Matt & Molly questions with yes/no and the occasional single word, I support Tadiwa to draw. It’s hard work. Again, sticking paper to a board, asking yes/no questions for colour choice, Tadiwa, lying on his side with arms in spasm, somehow connects with the paper. His English is pretty good so the other day, with a hand over hand support and encouraging him to ‘relax’ he even did some circles and ‘colouring in’. I feel sad when at the end of the activity we have to return him to the rehab room. If he was in the classroom he would at least be listening to appropriate lessons. I had success with this 2 years ago, when I encouraged the staff to place Noku in the classroom. She now leap frogs around the room moving to the play area or to greet others, and is probably one of the brightest kids in the room. Having suggested Tadiwa be in the room, there is little more I can do.
So why is the honeymoon over? From observations of Safe Hands over the past few months, hours of conversation with Irene discussing the challenges — economic, organisational, staff moral, the list endless, my role seemed to be morphing into a consultant, not of speech therapy but of business, management and leadership, all things lacking at Safe Hands. Seeing the need for the place like Safe Hands, feeling Irene had just become overwhelmed, enjoying a challenge and being a creative elemental who loves setting things up, I explored the idea of really committing to make Safe Hands something sustainable. But soon it was clear Irene prefers to spend her day behind a desk far removed from the program, occasionally venturing out for a minute or two, seeing issues but unwilling or unable to lead a way out. When a child approaches she pulls away in what feels like fear. Irene has no hands on contact with her charges, knows little about them, and her lack of knowledge of disability is concerning. When I am not there, despite many session training and mentoring, providing the activities and materials (in response to staff’s refrain for sitting and doing little ‘we have no activities to use’), nothing is done.
At the golf club yesterday purchasing a ticket to walk, the attendant asked if I was ‘from around here’. Our conversation lead to my work in Kambazuma. His surprise and acknowledgment quickly turned to ‘those people need money’. Trying to explain that in a way I was giving money, not as a hand out but by not earning money for a year, spending my savings etc, I was giving money in a different form. Fair enough, I was not helping with electricity bills, school fees, food or fuel but I was spending money here and more significantly, offering a scare resource. He sort of got it, and I get what he is saying. But I am not here to give handouts.
How to get some passion happening at Safe Hands? How to elicit initiative? How to foster commitment to the work, not just turning up? I would not contribute to salaries, but I could offer a bonus, set up some KPIs perhaps, with the long term goal that perhaps I might create some behavioural change, with the hope that the inherent rewards of helping children may eventually take hold and become the motivator (naive as my thinking may be). Bonuses are not an alien concept here, so I would not be committing a cultural faux pas. Sadly it was clear that currently there was no clear motivator for the staff.
So an idea, a partnership of sorts, was floated. Irene was excited. I was motivated. Until Monday last week. Irene’s contribution is not insignificant. She did set the place up and has been subsidising the monthly shortfall. But I was getting a sense that this was all she is willing to commit. I had given Irene the benefit of the doubt, ‘she was motivated but overwhelmed, she just didn’t know how to manage, with support we’d get there’. Yet her use of the social work student on placement as free admin, her delegation of writing position descriptions and fund raising to me, asking volunteers to door knock to get ‘new clients’, avoiding approaching big companies herself for donations, avoiding meeting with agencies that could refer, asking me to find funds in Australia to sponsor children, to sell macrami bags in Australia, to do training for her as income generating for Safe Hands. The list goes no. The signs had been there. One week we completed a capacity assessment. It, along with a review of the University’s guidelines for the Social Work placement, revealed a litany of tasks she just avoided, abdicated. The selection of a governing board to become a private volunteer organisation (pvo) had been delegated to a parent, five members in place and Irene knows not a single one.
Frustrated and feeling I was carrying the load, I fell into manager role telling her and the SW student off. The next day Irene proudly reported ‘Nathan and I worked yesterday, I visited a centre, Nathan wrote a letter’. I kept silent.
The idea had been to come to Zimbabwe without a plan. Phase one is coming to a conclusion. My efforts here must be as sustainable as possible. I did not come to set up a child care centre. I did not come to be a manger. With two other organisations that appear professional and passionate, my time at Safe Hands will reduce. The children, parents, and staff of Safe Hands who are committed, will in that order get my time.
Recently I discovered the mother of a disabled child whose school fees I had been paying has been exploiting my assistance. I am aware life here is tough. But honesty and integrity, hard work and care of children are non negotiables. Being the other side of the world away from family and friends, with fewer comforts, familiar and unfamiliar frustrations, I am in a position of giving. The receiving I need to sustain me is the joy of children, the passion of others making children’s lives better, the integrity of the cause, and yes, as an elemental, a bit of admiration.
