Building a pedestal

In 2004, I spent the year in the Greater London area. When I first arrived, I stayed with a relative who lived next door to someone who lived in a big house and drove an obnoxious 4x4 (it should be noted that the most hazardous thing in that neighborhood was the leaves that collected on the verges in the evenings). The pretentious neighbor had landscaped their garden to have a "natural" pedestal on which the Discovery was parked every night. There were also some subtle garden lights around the little knoll to show their 4x4 in good light overnight. I snorted at how flash they were trying to be 1) for living in that neighborhood (there were only named houses on that road, not numbered ones), 2) for driving such an obnoxious car and 3) for displaying it so ostentatiously (seriously, do the words "living green" mean nothing to them?).

Skip forward to today. We've been having electricity trouble of late (as in, a maximum of six hours per day, usually in the wee hours of the morning. We're told it's because the main power station has died from lack of maintenance. The official line from the power company complaints line is that it "should be fixed by the end of the year"), and Mum was complaining about the power-cuts and our inability to afford a generator to a friend at church. Said friend (read: angel) told Mum that he knew of someone who was selling a generator. Long story short, we're getting a genny...not a big one, not one powerful enough to run the fridge and freezer or geyser, but enough to keep the lights, laptop and TV/satellite dish going. It's ot a wind or solar powered one (I'm working on a design for one that combines both for when my parents move house), which is unfortunate, but we'll take what we can get at this point so a diesel-powered one it is.

Mum and I were sitting in the lounge chatting this afternoon and she asked where we were going to put the generator. My first instinct was to say "In a shrine, framed by mirrors so we can fully admire it, in the front garden, with space to kneel before it and chant 'Oh magnificent giver of power, we praise God for you' whenever we need to use it." Then it hit me that I'd be doing exactly what the pompous neighbors in Surrey did with their Discovery. Yes, I know, we'd need to put the generator somewhere near the electricity mains box where it's protected from the weather, but allow me to dwell on the point for a moment. Perhaps what we choose to display in front of our houses says a lot about our priorities. Our family's priority is obviously not looking cool, but surviving. As fossil fuel reserves dwindle, we're going to need to switch to more sustainable ways of meeting our energy needs. When we get a wind generator (I've already got one picked out. It's adorable. It's called a Turby and it doesn't mind turbulent wind), I have a suspicion that I'm going to plant pretty flowers around the base to decorate it so that the neighborhood can also admire the beauty of wind power.

Dear Zim

Dear Zimbabwe,

I'd like to ask you a question: why? Sure things were awesome in the '80s - our dollar was one-on-one with the British Pound; we were the largest exporter of maize and tobacco in the sub-region; we all wore the same trainers (because there were economic sanctions and apparently only one shoe company existed in this country back then); we had Bovril (which is a less awesome version of Marmite made from dead cows not yeast, so it's lower in the vitamins B); you couldn't tell who the rich kids or poor kids were (because there was also only one carpet manufacturer, ceramics company, swimsuit manufacturer); our moms all had crazy lions-mane perms; we were all super-proud of our power station that was fuelled by the largest open-cast coal mine in Africa (I'm leaving discussion of the Gukurahundi massacres out, because that's not really the point of this post. Also, that was one of the not-awesome parts of the '80s, so shouldn't be listed here) - but that was more than two decades ago.

Since then: America has invaded Iraq (twice); other countries have had elections and changed presidents; we've found out about the down-sides of burning fossil fuels for energy; we've started driving cars that were not assembled in Zimbabwe with mostly-the-same bits as their overseas counterparts; we've discovered the joy of Marmite on our morning toast; scientists have proved that margarine is bad for you; nutritionists have repeatedly demonstrated the benefits of a varied diet; the population of the world has increased exponentially.

Yet here we are. I should probably mention that it's 4 a.m. as I'm writing this, because that's the only time when the electricity is on (I've been awake since my bedside light blinked into life at 11 p.m.). Sure, I'm all for living green, but I do need electricity to achieve things and (finally) finish a remunerative piece of writing. We're still being powered by the open-cast coal mine, and the generators at the power station regularly give up the ghost. In addition, we're sending electricity to Namibia (y'know, because, like, we totally have enough to spare), so we're upping their national carbon footprint as well. We gave up using our own dollar, because inflation was exponential, not incremental (no word of a lie: a few years ago the same bottle of cooking oil in the same store was $12,000 when the store opened, $24,000 at lunchtime and $48,000 by the close of business). Now we have American dollars, most of which are so tatty that you need to squint to determine which denomination it is. A number of times in the past decade, our economy would have failed if it hadn't been for people who had left the country sending money home to their relatives. Our municipal water is virtually non-existent, and when it does come through the pipes, it's got something in it that gives us all diarrhoea (I'm not counting the cholera outbreak we had a few years ago in this discussion. Nobody ever proved where that started). We need food aid just to keep our population alive, and now the government are considering planting genetically modified crops just to keep the food down.

So I ask you, why? Why are you content to sit and let s**t happen to you without so much as a squeak of protest? We're all (well, not all of us, from the looks of the mealies [that's maize for the non-Zimbos] that are growing on verges and in green belts around Harare) doing the Foundations for Farming mealies for the nation project to keep ourselves from starving this winter, and that's awesome, *hi5*. But nothing else is improving. Everyone is working so hard at damage control (whether it's buying a new generator, digging another borehole, or whatever) that nobody's even stopping to think what can actually be done. There are almost no solar panels or mini wind turbines (which, let's be honest, would be so much more convenient than having to find diesel to run the gennies), and we're all content with the bog-standard "it's load shedding" reply that we get whenever we call the electricity faults line to find out why we don't have electricity for another day. Why? How have you not all gone stir-crazy from being thwarted at every turn? Or maybe that's the answer - you're all so busy trying not to let it make you insane that you have nothing left to give when it comes to making progress?

Holidays in Zimbabwe

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.

F1 and freedom of expression

You probably know by now (given the header of my blog) that I'm Zimbabwean. We have little-to-no freedom of speech. You have to carefully watch what you say in public, on the phone, via text, and in emails. They're all monitored by an organisation called the CIO (Central Intelligence Organisation), which is known to be behind large amounts of crime (political violence, intimidation, armed robbery, car-jacking, gang rape, etc. The usual for African law-enforcement, I suppose). Thus, you don't want them to know where you are, what you're doing and what you think about the 'president'.

China, however, has taken the restrictions on freedom of expression to entirely new levels. We (should) all know by now that China bans Google search (although, according to Google, this has been lifted. For an up-to-date report, check here). It provides access to 'sensitive' information, and they don't want their population exposed to ideas that will make them question the status quo. Well, they ban twitter too. I'm not sure how a social networking site is damaging to the delicate communist balance...oh wait, they'd come into contact with people who aren't unquestioning communists, and this would be a horrific thing for the nation. [/sarcasm]

Part of me is hoping that, by F1 being in China and telling people about the restrictions (Karun Chandhok tweeted that fans had showed him how to get around the firewall [creepy that they'd go to the airport and hang around waiting to accost an F1 driver; *hi5* to them for spreading the anarchy and making sure that we get normal race coverage], and that people are asking him for tweeting lessons) the world at large will become aware of how restrictive it all is. I suppose the point would be best put across by them being unable to tweet at all, but I can't possibly advocate that (let's face it, we all need our twitfix). F1 has an audience of about 1.5 million viewers. If we all stood up and said something about the situation in China, maybe something would happen? 1.5 million people shouting loud enough might be heard...yes? Perhaps I just live in hope too much...