I'm here in Zimbabwe. Technically, I'm on holiday. Let me qualify that: I'm not currently at university (I start that again on the 19th), I'm at my parents house. As a treat, Mum booked for some time up at (what used to be) a four-star hotel in Nyanga (a tiny town in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe), so we drove up there on Friday and got back today. I'm not quite sure how I feel about some of the things that happened this past few days.
There are things that irk my inner foodie - being served margarine instead of butter in a supposedly four-star restaurant (and the waiter had the nerve to insist that it was real butter), and being offered JC Le Roux as though it were a bottle of Moet (seriously, it's not even a proper bubbly, it's a soda-stream wine).
There are things that make my blood boil - acres of pine (which was bad enough - pine was never intended to grow in Africa!) that has been deforested by land invaders and not re-planted, so it's now just stands of wattle (a highly invasive Australian plant that takes over and ruins entire ecosystems), huts erected in the middle of what used to be productive farm land, cows that are so thin and badly kept one wonders how they stay alive.
And there are things that make me wonder whether I'm supposed to laugh or cry. Two separate moments that I viewed casually from the back of the car spring to mind immediately. The first, we were shopping in Nyanga village (and by 'shopping', I mean 'driving from store to store looking for butter and bread and finding only margarine') and we drove past a corner store that had spades and wedding dresses in the window. Garden implements and wedding dresses. That's quite a combo - quite telling of the town as a poor, rural community. The dress cost US$20. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the combination and the thought of buying one's wedding dress in a corner store. Then I realised that, for some women, that's the most beautiful dress that they can afford. Now, I can (and do, given the opportunity) go on at length about the amount of money wasted by modern brides on their dresses (seriously, if you want to throw $20,000 away for a few hours of attention, give it to Medecins Sans Frontiers and get interviewed by a local news station. It'll be better for the world in the long run), but the heart-wrenching...is the word "patheticness"? "poverty"? "simplicity of expectation"?...of the image of a woman spending her savings on a $20 dress from a corner store is more than I can process. To be fair, for a $20 polyester-satin dress, it was a pretty dress, but it is very jarring to think that a garment that I demean because of its price and the fabric from which it was crafted and the shop it's being sold in will be the one some woman wears for one of the happiest/proudest moments of her life. Then, on the way home this morning, we drove past a man pushing a baby in a doll's pram. The image of a daddy and a baby will always make me go "aww", especially if the man is from a traditionally patriarchal society where child-rearing is "womens' work", so I found myself torn between the urge to giggle at a person being tiny enough to fit in a doll's pram, the urge to turn to goo over a sensitive dad, and the urge to cry because he couldn't afford a pram that wasn't a toy.
I suppose that all of the above events are all just a product of this being a very poor, very oppressed country. The crippling poverty experienced by people in this country is holding them back. Nyanga (despite being covered in bluegum, wattle and pine, which all inspire a chainsaw-and-arsen urge in me) is a beautiful place and desperately needs the money provided by tourism. However, I wouldn't feel good about recommending that anyone go there, simply because everything is so very run down. The roads all need re-grading; the buildings all need a coat of paint; the woodlands, gardens and golf courses are all in dire need of some radical weeding; the hospitality staff are all in desperate need of proper training and stern management. The one thing that I do have to say for Nyanga is this - the people are fantastically friendly and helpful.
There are things that irk my inner foodie - being served margarine instead of butter in a supposedly four-star restaurant (and the waiter had the nerve to insist that it was real butter), and being offered JC Le Roux as though it were a bottle of Moet (seriously, it's not even a proper bubbly, it's a soda-stream wine).
There are things that make my blood boil - acres of pine (which was bad enough - pine was never intended to grow in Africa!) that has been deforested by land invaders and not re-planted, so it's now just stands of wattle (a highly invasive Australian plant that takes over and ruins entire ecosystems), huts erected in the middle of what used to be productive farm land, cows that are so thin and badly kept one wonders how they stay alive.
And there are things that make me wonder whether I'm supposed to laugh or cry. Two separate moments that I viewed casually from the back of the car spring to mind immediately. The first, we were shopping in Nyanga village (and by 'shopping', I mean 'driving from store to store looking for butter and bread and finding only margarine') and we drove past a corner store that had spades and wedding dresses in the window. Garden implements and wedding dresses. That's quite a combo - quite telling of the town as a poor, rural community. The dress cost US$20. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the combination and the thought of buying one's wedding dress in a corner store. Then I realised that, for some women, that's the most beautiful dress that they can afford. Now, I can (and do, given the opportunity) go on at length about the amount of money wasted by modern brides on their dresses (seriously, if you want to throw $20,000 away for a few hours of attention, give it to Medecins Sans Frontiers and get interviewed by a local news station. It'll be better for the world in the long run), but the heart-wrenching...is the word "patheticness"? "poverty"? "simplicity of expectation"?...of the image of a woman spending her savings on a $20 dress from a corner store is more than I can process. To be fair, for a $20 polyester-satin dress, it was a pretty dress, but it is very jarring to think that a garment that I demean because of its price and the fabric from which it was crafted and the shop it's being sold in will be the one some woman wears for one of the happiest/proudest moments of her life. Then, on the way home this morning, we drove past a man pushing a baby in a doll's pram. The image of a daddy and a baby will always make me go "aww", especially if the man is from a traditionally patriarchal society where child-rearing is "womens' work", so I found myself torn between the urge to giggle at a person being tiny enough to fit in a doll's pram, the urge to turn to goo over a sensitive dad, and the urge to cry because he couldn't afford a pram that wasn't a toy.
I suppose that all of the above events are all just a product of this being a very poor, very oppressed country. The crippling poverty experienced by people in this country is holding them back. Nyanga (despite being covered in bluegum, wattle and pine, which all inspire a chainsaw-and-arsen urge in me) is a beautiful place and desperately needs the money provided by tourism. However, I wouldn't feel good about recommending that anyone go there, simply because everything is so very run down. The roads all need re-grading; the buildings all need a coat of paint; the woodlands, gardens and golf courses are all in dire need of some radical weeding; the hospitality staff are all in desperate need of proper training and stern management. The one thing that I do have to say for Nyanga is this - the people are fantastically friendly and helpful.
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