17/07/08 - Update 6
Even though I’ve been able to get home 2-3 times a year over the past 2 years, the change is always striking. Yesterday, I was driving back from the Baptist Church where I had taken Rich, my grandmother’s loyal house-keeper, who is quickly going blind with age, to see Dr Beaty, an American ophthalmologist who spent a significant part of his childhood in Zimbabwe, and now comes back once a year on charitable missions to do eye examinations, cataract surgeries, to distribute eye-drops and other medicines, etc. On the way home, I was stopped by the police who asked me for my driver’s licence. In Zimbabwe, one does not have to carry a licence by law, but if asked for it, one is required to present it at the central police station within a week (or something like that). I did not have my licence on me as I had taken my small pouch of documents and money out of my bag when we went to Gwanda on Monday. I didn’t want to have to go to the central police station, so in an attempt to throw the police off, I said that I had an American driver’s licence and that it was at home, and I’d be happy to go and pick it up for her, as my house was just around the corner. She instructed me to send Rich! I refused, telling her that Rich is blind. She then asked me if she could check my rear brake lights. I said I know that one is not working; however, I am waiting for the spare parts to come from South Africa (a bit of a white lie). She made me get out of the car, out of earshot of Rich, and then asked me, in her words for “Five Yusa”… I didn’t immediately understand and then clicked that she was asking for 5 US dollars… about 250 billion Zim, and a lot more than the average person’s weekly salary. Not wishing to give the filthy police a cent, I told her I didn’t have any “Yusa’s.” She then asked me to give her one. I explained to her that the situation in this country is such that when one arrives in this country, and spends all one’s money, one cannot take their card to the bank and simply withdraw (unless you want to give your foreign currency away to the bank at the bank rate, which will then be put towards Grace Mugabe’s spending allowance for her shopping trips to Italy and Malaysia and the rest of the world), and that I have spent all my money and am currently borrowing. She then asked, “So what are you going to give me?”… to which I responded “my love… but unfortunately you can’t eat it.” I told her I’d take a picture of her and send it to her via post. She wasn’t interested, probably fearing any evidence of her corruption, or just not caring. She let me go.
I got back into the car, and told Rich the story. Shaking his head, with a troubled look on his face, he said, “they just want money. This never would have happened in Smith’s time.” This is the tragedy of Zimbabwe today. Many black people here look back on the age of discrimination, of white-rule, of the Ian Smith Regime, with nostalgia. “At least we could feed our families then,” is something I hear repeatedly, as though dignity is secondary to a hungry belly. Indeed things change.
The existence here is a strange dichotomy: because then there are things that seem to always stay the same, no matter how the surroundings change. And so I was forced to chuckle as I drove back home, after dropping Rich off, and seeing old Harry Schmeizer and his wife, driving down the road at snail pace, in their little beige Mazda 323, as they have always done, ever since I can remember.
Perhaps this sums up all the emotions of the Zimbabwe that exists for me today. All the frustrations of the negative changes, the political decline, the hyperinflation, the desperation of the people… and the excitement of wheeling and dealing, of the making-a-plan mentality, getting off scot free when stopped by the cops… indeed, this is the land of improvisation. This, combined with that old charm of things that never seem to change, that retain their character and semblance of decades gone by.
