Zimbabwe - Cry the Beloved Country

Dear all,

In which Ilana goes to Zimbabwe to join the first Children in the Wilderness camps run there. Warning – mainly heavy bits. “Cry the beloved country” was a refrain that went through my head a lot here as I watched so many Zimbabweans who love their country try to help. Hence the title.

I returned a month ago determined to write this up on the first day back! (And how’s that working for you, Ilana?) Problem has been that I tried, I really did, but it always seemed to devolve into a very intense and let’s face it, fairly depressing read. Not my usual, but then, Zim hasn’t been usual for a good many years. I decided that I wanted you to know what is happening there – the good and the bad. Because I think the point is that Zim – like many tragedies in the world – brings out both what’s best and worst of the human spirit. From the Old Man as Mugabe is called and his henchmen to those who are a little better off thanks to a job with Wilderness but who do more than just their jobs; they go out of their way to help others.

So a quick recap on Children in the Wilderness. Feel free to skip.

As you all know, CITW is our programme where we host a group of disadvantaged, poverty stricken children, who are also often AIDS orphans or HIV-positive, at one of our camps. We close down one of our luxurious places that I certainly can’t afford and we bring in the kids for a week of fun and lots of excellent programmes – on AIDS, nutrition, and most importantly to teach them about their natural environment. Before this, when they see an elephant it’s usually as a threat to their vegetable patch and now we show them the ellies in the wild which begins the process of seeing wildlife as a resource and not a negative/white colonialist invention.

The thing is that when I see these lovely happy black faces having a ball, it always gets me by the throat. One can never smile at them running around playing games or singing a beautiful prayer before a meal without getting tears in one’s eyes at the same time. In Zimbabwe that feeling – of laughing while your heart breaks – was magnified a thousandfold. 20 children from a village called Mpindo arrived at Linkwasha Camp in Hwange National Park for five days. While thin, we couldn’t tell how bad things were at home for them (we also had a bit of a language barrier – well, those of us who don’t speak Ndebele – the others were fine), but when we read their profiles – there are no words to truly describe the emotion that comes from facing horror, real horror, head on. Written on a few pages torn from an exercise book by their teacher, each profile read like an indictment of the evil Old Man:

Buhle: 11 years
No parents living; lives with her aunt. Seems to be abused.
Eats once a day, usually fruit off wild trees if she can get them.

Sunboy: 14 years
Father died, lives with mother who is very sick.
Eats once a day. Eats fruit off wild trees.

Gugulethu: 13 years
No father. Mother at home, no work for her.
Eats once a day, sometimes less. Intelligent but doesn’t always come to school because she’s too hungry to walk.

And on and on and on. It’s real. I saw it with my own eyes.

And then we realised that the slowness in some of the kids, the unwillingness to engage was not about intelligence or lack thereof. It was about malnutrition. In fact, on the first day, we thought they’d attack the food, but on the contrary they held back and we worried like Jewish mothers, nu, why aren’t you eating? But by the second day, perhaps they’d realised – yes, this is for me, I can have some! And they would scoff their heaped, steaming plates of sadza (mealiemeal/maize/pap) and chicken or beef and salad – and come back for seconds! By the last day they were trying to stuff in thirds and fourths – they know better than we do what they’re going back to.

On the first day we wondered if little Buhle was mentally disabled. She couldn’t seem to keep up, her eyes a fog of incomprehension looking at us doubtfully as we tried to explain a game. Five days later, this little girl chattered gaily to her tent leader and apparently was singing “Ride, ride, ride the zebra!” (an energiser game they played every morning) in the shower!

This is the power of CITW. And of course especially in this group where malnutrition is such a big factor. We couldn’t ‘cure’ Buhle of course, but her potential crept through by the end. And it’s not just the food. It’s the discovery by these kids of a world filled with possibilities (admittedly here in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe these are almost nil for rural children). But the glimpse they had of these has hopefully changed them, given them hope in a land where there’s little of everything including hope. Now, Marvellous, Given and Khaliphani (who would grin at me whenever he saw me – apparently he’d never seen a white person before) confidently state they want to be game rangers as they loved learning about the animals. Another amazing thing was that when they had to write what they liked best at the end, many of them said that what they liked best at the camp was learning about HIV/AIDS. Knowledge – even a little – is power in this land of the powerless.

The most heartbreaking thing for us was the fact that we could only do so much for them. We couldn’t teach them the usual CITW things about nutrition (there is none) or the importance of education (no teachers). But we can feed some – so on the day they left, I took a drive with Obert Mafuka (assistant manager and guide extraordinaire of Linkwasha Camp) and Sue (who runs CITW in Zimbabwe and is one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met – just won’t give up) to the communities who live just outside Hwange National Park’s Ngamo Gate. Sue wanted to see at which schools we could start a feeding programme for the kids. More like where not to start - it was an eye opener and heartbreaker of note. The villages are all very pretty, neat round huts of mud decorated with lovely designs – but there’s nothing happening in them, there are no crops growing because there are no seeds. Luckily the Christmas beetles are out, says Obert, these are a good source of food now that much of the wild fruit is finished….

And the schools – we saw four – are devastatingly broken down. We met the aptly named headmaster Moses at Zika Village School – who was so excited that we’d come. All his teachers have run away to South Africa (because here they get paid in Zim dollars, might as well receive old toilet paper) so there’s just him, his deputy and two women who are volunteers from the village; he tells them what to teach). All the children came pouring out of their classrooms (if one can grace the broken-down, missing bits of roof building with such a name) to sing and dance in welcome. Again, that tear-filled smile came into use.

We visited Mpindo School too, where ‘our’ children had just been dropped off after their week – they were proudly showing off all that they had received to the younger kids – T-shirts, trousers (from a French tour operator), stationery, ‘lap-desks’ (great invention: large round hard piece of plastic that you put on your lap – and voila – a desk!), drawings they had done and masks and beads that they’d made. When we walked into the classroom they burst into song and told the other children (wide-eyed at these unexpected visitors) that “you must smile for the camera!” You could see so clearly the ones who had been fed and loved – their confidence shone out of their faces.

Things got even worse. Mpindo’s headmaster asked us if we could take him, the teacher and Sunboy, one of the kids we’d had on the camp, to Sunboy’s village a few kilometres away. Why? Because Sunboy’s mother had passed away the day before. She’d been sick for two years and there was nothing anyone could do for her, the clinic is too far away, so she lay in the village, slipping away. So they jumped on the vehicle with us along with a few other kids who were going in the same direction. But when we got to the village, a red rag was flying outside. Some men were sitting on the side of the path/road next to a rough-hewn coffin. And Gugu, Sunboy’s cousin, burst into tears; they all knew something had gone wrong. Sunboy got down as in a dream and was covered in ashes by his grandmother and other old women. It is a tradition that if a twin has lost his brother, and then loses someone else, he must have ash put on him to stop his heart breaking. And Sunboy lost his twin brother a long time ago.

But combined always with the horror of the wasted opportunity and lives, is the inspiration of the beautiful people of this land of lost hope. The volunteers for CITW camp, both black and white, worked hard to give these kids the time of their lives, from energiser games at 6 in the morning to running all the brilliant programmes that Sue put together, to serving meals, going on game drives, you name it there was plenty to do – well, just think back to any Bnei camp. Zimbabweans of all colour showed me what it means to have hope in a land that has none.

And a refusal to give in. For example, we usually give the kids a little daypack at the beginning of camp with all sorts of goodies including a toothbrush and toothpaste. It seems that, on their way over the border from SA, the stuff was stopped by customs officials and inexplicably the toothbrushes didn’t make it in. No matter. Obert went to some blue bushes just nearby and cut of twigs for everyone and showed the kids how to use it – and how important it was to brush your teeth every day – even if just with a twig!

One afternoon we watched a sensational performance by a dance troupe called Ingonyama – local guys from Dete, a town outside Hwange, have formed this troupe with the theme “Conservation and Creativity” – where they use large amounts of the latter to teach the former. They tell a simple story through song and dance of a young man obeying his aging grandfather to go out and discover nature and to rekindle his relationship with it. Out in the bush he meets a variety of animals – and just by using a few sticks and their bodies they transformed into elephant or giraffe, imitated a baboon or lion – Broadway Lion King eat your heart out. And as always with such a performance, at the end, everyone jumped up to dance and sing, feet moving with speed and grace that my two left Jewish feet envied. (By the way, we wanted to show them the Lion King one evening, and had a DVD which apparently was made in China nudge nudge, anyway, when we opened the folder to find the Lion King to play – it wasn’t there. They did have the Loin King though… numbers 1, 2, and 3, but we decided not to take a chance on its possible subject matter and showed them A Bug’s Life instead.)

Moving off heavy stuff for a while, I must describe Linkwasha Camp to you – wouldn’t be my dear all without it would it? It’s an older camp (in fact it was built 10 years ago and the people who built it have all been employed at the camp ever since, such as Isaya who began as builder, then became a lamp lighter – lighting all the lanterns that hang outside each tent – then cleaned the kitchen, and today he’s a chef! In fact Robson the maintenance man was a tent leader for the kids – big, smiling man who was fabulous with them – another instance where CITW brings out the best in the people you don’t even see in a luxury camp. And everyone here has the most beautiful smiles that light you up inside….

But where was I? Oh yes, so the camp – Wilderness style tents made up of canvas walls with thatched roofs and old-style scarlet stoep-type floors – overlooking a pan surrounded by a dry and dusty plain (that’s cos it’s the end of the dry season see). But it’s not raised so that when you look out across the plain you really feel part of the landscape, looking eyeball to eyeball with any passing animal (well, they don’t come that close, but you’re on the same level as them, which makes them seem closer). When I sat reading by the ‘window’ (gauze) one night, I heard loud crunching sounds just outside. I was sure it was a buffalo at least – but it turned out to be a springhare, a little critter that makes a really loud noise eating grass, who knew. It stopped after a bit and in the silence I heard a soft crackle of a twig being snapped. I turned off the light and looked out to see a row of dark shapes moving silently across the full-moonlit plain: elephants who had come to drink at the pan and were moving off. The sight of pachyderm-shaped darkness moving in single file across the blue moon-shaded sand was a mixture of otherworldly yet comforting, homely feeling. Of being in my place. (Elephants can do that to you.)

At this time of year, Hwange – no make that southern Africa – transforms into YBK land. Huh? Yellow-billed kites my friends – large, yellow-beaked raptors who’ve arrived for the summer and they’re everywhere, flapping enormous wings, diving low at insects and other prey, being chased around by lilac-breasted rollers, hanging out at the pans to drink, all over the runway at Vic Falls… there are so many they’re like pigeons – only larger and much better looking.

One morning we went on a bushwalk. And in true bushwalk style, Obert would stop every 10 steps at something – a termite mound (he showed them how to eat them, smacking his lips in delight), some dung, and finally at a full elephant skeleton. It must have died a while back, the bones bleached white in the sun strewn across a wide area. Obert told the kids they had to rebuild the elephant, and so, shouting and laughing, they all hauled bones into a semblance of an ex-elephant (dem bones are HEAVY!) until the skeleton sprawled out in front of us in a semblance of its former self. There was a quiet sadness about the old bones, a feeling that we needed to respect them for the incredible creature they once carried. The kids moved off to make bracelets out of twine but I sat a while looking at the world through the circular frame that the hip bones made. (Weird, I know. Elephants can do that to you.)

I know it’s odd but I need to talk about the weather. Or rather the rain. I admit, for someone who prides herself on being all oh so natural, I do a lot of whinging about the rain in Johannesburg. I have been rebuked about this – “never complain about the rain in Africa” – and I hear it, I really do, but I haven’t listened.

But I need to tell you that after seeing the dry dusty bowl of the earth, watching the heat haze shimmer day after day across the yellow sands – at 9 in the morning! – watching the clouds build up day after day, then slide past leaving behind just that tantalising moist smell and a few paltry drops, feeling my bones fairly crack from dryness and lethargy stealthily take me – after that, I figure I learned that lesson – at least for a week or so.

The first three days at Linkwasha were cloudy and hot, a fierce wind blowing through in the afternoon which helped give us a little more energy but mainly hurled dust across the plain in front of camp in choking mist-like waves, leaving us all covered in the stuff. Eventually on Shabbat, it dawned clear and bright, but got hotter and hotter as the day wore on; we became obsessed with the weather, and by three o’clock we all watched the dark grey skies to the north “it’s coming this way,” “no, it’s sliding past,” etc, and then we saw the trees on the horizon disappear into what were clearly sheets of rain.

And wham! That storm hit us, sideways rain, mad wind and lightning and thunder. Bridget and I went and stood in the wet howling madness while the children sang and played games in the dining area and the camp staff tried desperately to keep some of the (very open) camp dry. It was over in half an hour but oh, the difference!

When we pray for rain we ask for rain that is a blessing not a curse and I saw that day what happens when the rain is a blessed one. As the earth became saturated, it exploded with life. Not plants – these would appear only in a few days – but tiny frogs, dung beetles and dragonflies all leapt, crawled and flew out of the womb of the Earth, followed by the acrobatic contortions of bulbuls, starlings and yellow-billed kites as they flew to catch the bounty. The air, clear of the dust and sparkling, was filled with the sounds of frogs burping and some seriously happy ducks.

(Of course all this profusion and explosion of life becomes less attractive when most of it starts clustering around your light when you’re trying to read at night. Well okay, not the ducks but otherwise….)

The pan tripled in size in that half hour, and when we plopped through the mud to the edge of the pan (following in the frogs’ um footsteps), we found that it consisted of shallow water no more than 20cm deep literally heaving with millions of tadpoles.

Dead earth comes to life. The world is bright with colour again and life is pregnant with possibility.

I thought then that this might be the other explanation for that statement in our prayer for rain: not only that too much rain can be bad, but that we should be given the eyes to see the rain as a blessing and not as a curse. Funny how I got the message with all my senses in the ravaged, beautiful land of Zimbabwe.