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Zimbabwe diary: Wednesday
The Economist
September 19, 2007

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9821376&pub=170907&fsrc=RSS#wednesday

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ZIMBABWEANS amaze me. In spite of unemployment, in spite of hyperinflation, in spite of shortages, in spite of having to be incredibly creative just to survive, in spite of everything, they keep their sense of humour and generosity.

I talk to a teacher living just outside of Harare. She is struggling to put food on the table and pay school fees for her three children. She still goes to work, although some of her colleagues have given up. She sits in her small house with no heating, and cooks over a fire in her backyard. She stores water in buckets whenever taps work, and boils it, as it is no longer safe to drink.

But then she jokes when showing me the vegetables she grows in her front yard to feed her family. "We have to grow a lot of those," she bursts out laughing, "because they are our chicken, they are our beef, they are our eggs, and they are our pork."

I meet another teacher in rural Mashonaland. From a well-established school, he was assigned to a satellite one started on an occupied farm. He lives in the looted farmhouse, with no running water.

The place is empty, except for a bed and a few chairs, and there are still lessons scribbled on the living room walls, where classes used to take place after the farmer was kicked out.

He has turned what used to be lodgings for farm workers into three tiny classrooms. All the windows and doors are gone. There is no money from the government, so parents helped build toilets, and spread cement on the wall to be used as a blackboard. Planks balancing on stacked bricks are used as benches, and makeshift tables have been made out of scrap wood.

Since he arrived, he has raised his primary school students- exam pass rate from 0 to 70%. We spot two of his pupils hunting a monkey with a slingshot—their only hope of meat. They are painfully skinny, and their clothes are in tatters. But some of the other children on the farm do not even make it to school.

We visit one of his neighbours, the only former employee left on the farm. The farm has been subdivided into plots given to other people, and his former colleagues all had to go. He explains that the place where he has been living for years was also part of a plot supposed to be given away to someone else.

With a glint in his eye and a cunning smile on his face, he recounts how, when the new owner arrived to check out his plot, he showed him the adjacent wooded and sloped area, convincing him this is what he had been given. The disappointed rival went back to the authorities, declining their land offer. The farm worker was on his heels, asking whether he could get the land instead. He stayed on.

We all laugh at the clever trick, and he gives me a high five. He is lucky enough to have a few cows, which is more than most of his neighbours. But when I ask him how he will feed his family for the five months between the end of his small maize stock and the next harvest, he smiles broadly and shrugs.

When I arrived at the teacher-s dilapidated house, I was offered tea. Water—fetched from a well quite a distance from the house—had to be boiled on a fire outside, and, in spite of severe sugar shortages, I was served a brew so sweet I felt my teeth were going to fall out.

When I leave, the teacher offers one of his chickens. I thank him profusely but have to decline. My hotel may not like to have guests keep live chickens in their rooms, I explain.

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