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Hooray for Zimbabwe!
R. Maclaren, CHIPAWO
March 23, 2009

Some time back, CHIPAWO acquired a very nice Renault minibus - from someone who said he was doing us a favour! The only problem - which I am sure he was well aware of - was that it is an extremely rare kind of Renault. Even Renault in South Africa did not even know it existed! I had to track it down on the internet and discovered that it mostly served as an amnbulance in Germany and the UK!

I did once find a place in London that specialises in Renaults and they provided me with a coil. But then we needed a distributor and nothing could be found. around here. So it has been standing around for a long time in a new coat of yellow paint - one of CHIPAWO's colours - looking rather regal and distinguished. It's actually quite a large and imposing vehicle. But it no longer moved. It managed to crawl once to Mutare for the Africa University Arts Festival last year but got no further than Marondera on the return and had to be towed. When we had to leave the CHIPAWO office, it come here and joined the queue in my driveway of CHIPAWO non-runners.

As the Ford Transit is another one of them, we actually had no way of moving either our staff or our children except in an open truck, which as you can imaginne during the rainy season has been a trifle irksome and with the ensuing winter propbably worse.

So I SOS'ed someone in London, rather aplogetically mumbling something about I know this is not exactly his cup of tea and so forth and and asked him if he could scout around. This was his reply:

"I'm afraid the news is not good for your van. According to a Renault spare parts specialist that van is "extremely rare" and one would struggle to find the part in question. I will continue to look but I just thought I would let you know that the prognosis is not good."

Gloom and doom? O, no! Despite years of multiple meltdowns, collapses, disintegration, bloodbaths, genocide, mass starvation and lethal epidemics all reported on or prophesied for Zimbabwe, we still stand. How! Listen to this.

A little man down the road in Mountbatten Drive, Marlborough, Harare, not far from Greencroft of glorious memory, called VaMakonya, has left all the boffins in South Africa and the UK with egg on their faces. Va Mokonya decided to tackle the problem that had stumped the world. He looked for a distributor which looked like it might fit. He fiddled and filed and welded and willed it to work - and after countless little adjustments and tinkerings, yesterday afternoon, under his patient hands, the dragon roared into life - full of French esprit, elan, eclat, eclair and all that. By the way I am eating a superior Zimbabwean jam doughnit right now as I write - don't tell me anything about Dunkin' Donuts'!

It's on the road and pulling like the other great and historical vehicle, our Ford Cortina (1982), fondly but very aptly called in these parts, Nzou (the Elephant).

And so three cheers for the little man. Three cheers for the Fifth World - we must have gone down a few divisions by now. And three cheers for Zimbabwe!

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