Posts Tagged africa
I can’t claim to know what it feels like to be poor. My dad always had a steady income. When my mom started working, I was mostly at the University. Although we were never rich, we always had the essentials – food, clothes, a house, and love. Here in Zimbabwe, as contrived as it might sound, I have started to feel what it’s like to be poor.
Working with SHAPE has been an experience. At times rewarding, at times an eye-opening introduction into the way that many people live in Zimbabwe. First, let’s talk about the bills. SHAPE has no money in the bank account. Well, there’s $700 in the Zimbabwean Reserve Bank, but the bank doesn’t have enough hard currency to allow people to withdraw. So, SHAPE has to transfer it to Barclays so they can withdraw it there.
Because SHAPE has no money, it can’t pay its employees. Some are going on their second month without pay. In addition, SHAPE has too many volunteers and employees, which means that the little money allocated from the one grant they do have has to be spread around everyone there. Of the 12 or 13 staff members, 5 are fully paid for. As you can imagine, the organization can’t pay its bills. There are no office phones and they can’t afford to repair the cars that break down on a regular basis. Because the staff hasn’t been paid, they can’t afford to buy airtime, put gas in the cars, or do much other than travel too and from work.
But Chris, what does that have to do with you? You see homeless people on the street in New York and you can’t really say you know what it’s like to be poor . You’re right. That’s not what’s given me the feeling. It’s that when you don’t have access to money – there are no ATMs to just withdraw the small cash savings I have left – you quickly take stock of your situation and think about how you spend it. I found myself wondering if I had enough cash on me to buy food for dinner, and pay for gas to get around town, and buy airtime because someone else used all mine to get a friend to rescue us when the car ran out of gas, again. Quickly, these expenses add up. Equally as quick, my reserves deplete.
The worry about money is ever present. As it the reality of not having enough of it.
Because you can’t get everything you need in Zimbabwe, my host family’s car is still not repaired. Hence, we make use of one of the dilapidated clunkers that SHAPE owns. This clunker ran out of gas. It’s an expected occurrence, first because there is a leak in the fuel tank, and second no one has any money to fill the car up. Because I’m the only one who ever really puts gas in, I don’t want to pay for other people’s errands in town.
Back to the story. Everton and I walked to the gas station about 10 minutes away. When we arrived, the power was out so no gas was pumping. We used my phone to call around for someone who could help. When the friends arrived with the gas about an hour later, they had unfortunately poured $7 of petrol into a container that used to hold oil. Of course, we didn’t know this, so when we poured it into the tank, we all felt our stomachs sink when we saw black stuff moving toward the tank. My stomach sank even further because I knew that $7, my $7, had been wasted and we wouldn’t be leaving the university any time soon. After a second ordeal – gas stations refusing to pump into a plastic container after waiting in the queue for 15 minutes – they returned with the petrol and we could finally leave the office.
When Everton and I finally arrive at home, it had taken three hours to go 11km (~7miles). There was no power at the house. Do folks ever get a break? No.
It’s this not-so-atypical day that makes me think this is what it’s about to be poor. Money constraints, car problems, stress about food and family. Add to that no power, no running water and you just feel like you can’t get ahead. This is the grind.
Compared to the Lower Zambezi, the still waters of the wide Upper Zambezi gave me the feeling of being on a lake rather than the mighty Zambezi that had tossed me around like a rag doll yesterday. However, adrenaline still coursed through my veins as I kept my eyes out for crocodiles and hippos surfacing near the canoe.
The morning was chilly, especially in the open bed of the truck carrying us and the canoes. We drove about an hour or so from town, into the Zambezi National Park. The road wasn’t too bad and the scenery was about person-high bushes, shrubs, and the scattered tall tree. It was mostly brown – it is winter and the dry season down here – and we saw a small herd of water buffalo checking us out as we drove slowly by.
At the river, we disturbed a group of baboons, but otherwise, we sat on the beautiful banks of the not-so-mighty-looking Zambezi. Here, the river is wide and dotted with hundreds of small, sandy islands that disappear at the height of the rainy season. For now, we enjoyed out breakfast and a safety brief before going for a lazy paddle.
I felt a little disappointed at first. We didn’t get on the water until the sun was well above the horizon and we didn’t see too many animals at first. Just a few birds, really. Then, our guide spotted a few hippos. These guys can move quick in the water and are pretty territorial, so we gave them wide berth.
A little later, we rounded the corner and, voila!, two elephants at the water’s edge. We quietly maneuvered the canoes so we could watch and take photos. I would say the elephants were no more than 50 to 100 meters away. Next time, I’ll be sure to bring my laser range finder to give you the exact distance.
We saw a few more elephants on the far bank of the river. You could tell they had been in the water because they were two toned. Light for about the top one-sixth of their body and dark the rest of the way down. When I saw the elephants, I felt the trip was worth it.
Just being outside in the sun, paddling on the river was great. The air is clean and the water cool – although you don’t go in because you might tempt a crocodile to nibble gently on your toes. I could easily have spent another day or two on the river, just watching the banks go by.
I love the outdoors and the adventure activities that put you close to nature. I can’t think of anything that puts you closer to the power of the mighty Zambezi (a.k.a., the Slam-bezi) than hopping in a raft with people I don’t know to paddle through some serious rapids. If you can think of something better, let me know.
On the Zambezi, there is low-water and high-water rafting. Apparently in the first ten rapids, there is a class 6 rapid – which means that your insurance company doesn’t provide liability coverage if you, a commercial enterprise, try to run through it with customers. To run the entire rivers, the rafting companies have their clients walk around this particular class 6 rapid. When the water is high, though, there is no place to walk, so the companies start at rapid number 11. In perhaps two-weeks time, they’ll be starting at rapid number 1. Ah well. Next time, on my five day float.
Despite starting on rapid 11, the river was great! The first wave that splashed into my face – maybe it smashed into my face – nearly knocked out my contact lens and had me sputtering and coughing after I swallowed some of the Zambezi. Naturally, I worried about parasites, toxins, blah, blah, blah. But two days later, I’m still alive.
After the first rapid, it was brilliant the rest of the way down. My favorite was number 17, where we rode the wave train up and down. That was such a rush. What was disappointing was my lack of stamina. Wow, I felt so weak. So weak. I could barely paddle for more than a few minutes at a time. Afterwards, I was wheezing, straining, and wanting to cry for my mommy. OK, it wasn’t that bad, but I definitely felt weak and stiff.
Amazingly, though, the guide decided to put me in the front. I don’t know if that was because he noticed how weak I was and the front doesn’t matter too much, or if he noticed that I actually pay attention to the other guy paddling and try to paddle in sync. There were two Ozzies, two Pommies, me, a Zim, a Zam, and our South Korean rafting guide (not really, our guide Colgate grew up around Vic Falls, but told us he was South Korean as a joke).
Colgate was a trip. So full of life, singing, and just ready to help everyone have a fun, safe time down the Slambezi. We went down the river with another raft – one steered and powered by the guide only. We switched guides at a calm point in the river. Colgate managed to convince the Belgian guys in the other boat to flop on their stomachs right at the bow of the raft. I think he told them it was a safety drill. He demonstrated, then had them practice a few times. On the last forward flop they did, he used the oars to quickly push the boat backwards. End result, they’re flopping forward, boat is moving backward … and voila, in the water. We laughed hard watching it. The Belgian guys in the boat laughed even harder!
At the end of the trip, we had to climb out of the gorge, probably 150m from the river back to the top. There, before us, was a veritable open air market of goods to buy for a shoe or a t-shirt or sun glasses and a little cash. Perhaps other people don’t know the value of their goods, but giving an $80 pair of sandals for a $2 item and giving cash does not appear to be the height of an astute bargainer.
I bought a couple things and thought it was reasonable, but I suspect I still over payed. I still loved the day.
I’m sitting in the Jungle Junction restaurant located in the Victoria Falls Hotel. I have a stunning view of the Falls’ mist and I can’t tell you how gorgeous the day is, with clear blue skies, light breeze, and nice, nice temperature.
When you’re inside the compound, it’s easy to forget and not acknowledge the reality of what surrounds you. You have about 13,000 residents in Vic Falls town. The industry here is tourism. Unfortunately, there are few tourists. I walked around the Kingdom Hotel, a big, Vegas-like structure with a casino, shops, big dining area, and lots of rooms. It definitely feels like an all-enclosed resort where you don’t need to leave for any of your needs, except for viewing the Falls in a helicopter or doing the bungee jump. Inside, though, it was empty.
I talked with two different workers in the gift shop, where they sell outrageously priced stuff. Well, they’re like US tourist-place prices. A hat for $20, a small souvenir picture book for $12, and postcards for $1. I couldn’t bring myself to buy anything, but I felt bad for the workers. At 10.30am, I was the first person to walk into the shop.
If you choose to leave the confines of your compound on foot, the hawkers descend upon you. This morning someone who obviously smoked more than a fair share of weed came to offer me trinkets – stone carved representations of the Zambezi river god called nyaminyami. I told him, and the guy with him, that I wasn’t interested, yet, the stoned guy with his glassy eyed look thought that perhaps no meant yes, so he offered me Zim dollars instead – a crisp one trillion note. I was rude to the guy – I asked if he was deaf because I had already said that I wasn’t interested in anything. He then glared at me until he decided I really meant I wasn’t going to buy anything. He left with, “You come and you don’t want to give us anything. It’s just like you …” the rest I don’t remember, but he was really saying you’re a white tourist, so you must give me money – you owe it to me.
Other people have tried to use a similar tactic. First they try to be friendly, then they try to use guilt to make you buy something. They may be smooth talkers in their own mind, but they have yet to learn that business is about relationships and until you’re in the business of hostile take overs, getting angry with people who might at some point in the future be inclined to buy something is not a way to generate business.
But it’s these interactions that you deal with, when you walk through town to and from anywhere, that tend to wear you down. There is always a Zim dollar to be traded – “Five dollars for one trillion.” Um, I can easily get three trillion in change from the bus drivers in Harare. I ‘m certainly not giving you $5. It gets old real fast.
Despite how old it gets, I’m not oblivious to why. These guys – and they’re all guys – are hustling for anything. They’re all young, too. They’re not old men and they’re not young kids, they’re maybe the 16 – 30 year-olds who don’t have work. Life is tough for pretty much everyone in Zimbabwe, job or not, so I can’t blame them for trying to hustle the tourists. I try to be firm, but not rude.
I felt bad about being rude to the stoner. I saw his compatriot – Temba or Trust in English – and apologized for being rude. He said, “No problem. That one is crazy. He smokes to much weed and drinks too much beer. If you don’t want to do business, no problem. We are just trying to make money.” I asked about the t-shirts, everyone wants old clothes, “Do you sell them or keep them?” “We keep them. We can’t afford to buy new ones. Some of the mean ones, like that guy, they try to sell them.”
A little later, I saw the stoner and apologized. He wasn’t interested at the time, but later in the day, he smiled and laughed with me when I saw him.
I return my attention to the gorgeous view in front of me. The green, manicured grass being watered as I type is a good metaphor for the compound. Where the sprinklers reach, it’s green and carpet like. Just outside the reach of the sprinklers is the dry, brown natural vegetation of this area at this time of year. The boundary is clear and abrupt. It’s just as abrupt as walking outside the gates of your compound and onto the streets of Vic Falls.
When you earn a few hundred dollars a month, you don’t have money to fill the tank. When your car is so old and beat up that the fuel gage doesn’t work, how are you to know when to fill up? Well, you actually figure out how many liters of gas you put in the car and keep track of how many kilometers you drive the car.
Literally, when we put gas in the cars, it’s a few dollars at a time and the driver always makes a serious mental note about how many kilometers they can drive before they run out of gas. I have never seen so many people who know how many kilometers it is from the house to work, from Harare to Masvingo, Harare to Bulawayo.
Yes, we generally have an idea of the distance between Richmond and Virginia Beach, or New York and DC, but … how many people can tell you exactly? Almost everyone I’ve talked to who drives a a car knows it’s 346km from Harare to Mutare. Folks know it’s exactly 11km from home to the office. New Yorkers may know how many minutes to the subway and from the subway to work, but we’re thinking in time, not distance.
It’s amazing how attuned to the different rhythms of life you become when adversity is imposed upon you. Low wages, expensive gas, and crappy old cars all conspire to make driving less than reliable and always a challenge.
I needed another pair of pants. I came for about 30 days and brought one pair of work pants. Not only are the people in the office getting bored with my drab, monotonous wardrobe, I’m tired of wearing the same slightly itchy polyester pants day-in, day-out.
So yesterday, I went on a mission in Harare to find a new shirt and a new pair of pants. I thought I might pay $5 to $10 for pants and about $5 for a shirt. No, try $15 for each. You want a short-sleeve polo shirt? Try $18. All the stores offered their wares for about the same price.
Well, that’s what you get for high-quality, Zimbabwean made textiles. Not so fast. These prices are for the cheapest, Chinese imports available. My friend told me Zimbabweans usually go to South Africa to buy clothes where prices for the same exact brands are about 1/5 the cost of Zimbabwe.
Another eye opener from Zim-land. Think about how far $15 goes at Old Navy, TJ Max, Ross, or the thrift shop. Then think about earning just a few hundred a month for a family. So, yeah, it’s expensive. You either pay in money to have the convenience of shopping in Zim, or you spend your time on a bus to South Africa where everything is cheaper.
And remember, $15 may still not seem like much, but the government workers here earn about $100 a month. Some nonprofits pay $400 a month. Then you need to pay rent ($100 – $250), utilities ($50), gas if you drive, food (minimum $100) … not much left to buy a $15 pair of cheap trousers.
I’m not quite sure what drives these high prices. Are there import restrictions, high duties, high demand, low supply? What? It’s probably a combination, but the government recently suspended duties on all products imported into the country, effective immediately. Hopefully that relieves a little pressure on the cost of goods; I still need to buy a shirt!
So, at around 8.50, I received a text message asking for help. A friend ran out of petrol (gas) in a dark area (as in, there were not many light) in the city center (Harare). (Do you like the parenthetical inserts?)
Everton and I jumped in the newly repaired Rasheen. What’s that you ask? It’s looks like a poorly miniaturized Jeep of some sort that Nissan made for right-hand drive countries. Luckily, they don’t exist in the States, but we do have equally, as well as more, ridiculous looking cars named the Aztec, the Rav4, and the stretch Hummer limo.
Now that you know what the car is, you should know it’s had trouble working. The mechanic assures SHAPE that it’s fixed, but a quick drive resulted in at least one stall, erratic engine RPMs, very low idle RPMs, and trouble shifting gears. Mint condition.
It’s into this beast, we jumped to rescue our friend. And, I was driving. Not really knowing rules of the road in Zimbabwe, I made a left turn on red (that’s the equivalent of right on red in the States) and Everton laughed a nervous laugh and said I couldn’t do that. Anyway, we made it there with only one stall the gas station. Did I mention this is an automatic, so there are no gear shifts for me to botch.
Amazingly, we had a real, spare gas can. It had a flexible nozzle, a rubber gasket to create a seal between the flexible nozzle and the hard cap, as well as a rear air vent to allow the gas to flow into the thirsty tank. Our friend was also shocked to see a real gas can.
With 5L of gas, he was ready to go. Except his car wouldn’t start. We didn’t have jumper cables. So, we ran down the street pushing the car that wouldn’t start. No luck. Hmm. Maybe our Rasheen could push the car somewhere. Let’s try … turn the key in the ignition … and … all power in the Rasheen is lost. Completely dark. Luckily the friend knew what he was doing and quickly reseated the terminal on the battery and the Rasheen was up and running.
Then, he took our battery, ran it to his car, started his car, put his battery back in, then put ours back in and it’s all good.
So, that was a fun evening and something a little out of the norm for me, but something that’s probably a not-so-uncommon occurrence here.
I arived in Zimbabwe a few days ago. Shep met me at the airport and I was wisked to the SHAPE International Offices. After quick introductions to the staff, I headed to my host’s home. Bleary eyed from a long flight to Harare, it was all really a blur.
Over the weekend, SHAPE had some student musicians in the recording studio for an upcoming album release. Brilliant! Their voices were great. If I had a cord to download the video from my camera, I would upload it to YouTube and post the link here. In the meantime, text will need to suffice.
On Sunday, I rested! Thankfully. I met some of my host’s friends on Saturday evening. We played a game of 30 Seconds until 3am. I still can’t think of what the game is called in English, but you have things you want to get people to say, like garfield or To Kill a Mockingbird, and you can use any clues you like except sounds like and saying the answer. People guess. And, you guessed it, you have a maximum of 30 seconds per card to guess all five. Needless to say, at 3am after a long day, long flight, and little sleep, I was knackered.
Now it’s Wednesday and I’ve had my first few discussions with folks about work in the office. Looks like fund raising, information & communications technology, and some basics in management are the main areas to help with. The next step is to set them up with a few, free Internet-based resources to start organizing their contacts, their volunteers, and their donors. I also have a few management tools in mind. Ever since I was introduced to Salesforce.com, I’ve been a big fan. I set up the resource for HOGC, for myself, and am now in the process of setting it up for Hands on Zimbabwe (aka, SHAPE Int’l).
I have talked with a number of the staff about their individual project areas. There is a real need for project management training, information technology training, and some old-fashioned computer networking. Anyone have old routers or two and a server they’d like to donate and ship to Zimbabwe?
Everyone is quite appreciative of the advice I’ve provided and I hope they feel the same way when I leave.
My first impression off the plane was – flat. Then I felt the temperature – cool. Then I saw the airport – am I in Zimbabwe? I ask, because this airport looks so much better than the one in Delhi. I sailed through customs and was met by Shep, Sisa, and Chenge at the airport.
Driving into town, I was at first reminded of Ethiopia. There was a smell of burning wood in the air, along with the browning grass, and gnarly trees that brought back memories of my first experience in Africa. The more I drove around, though, my thoughts turned to China and Kyrgyzstan. Both of these places had infrastructure before the neglect set it. Kyrgyzstan more so than China, I seem to recall. The houses all have walled in yards. Glass is often cemented atop the wall to discourage unwanted visitors from just hopping over when no one answers the gate buzzer. These aren’t just houses for the rich, but the middle-class.
I learned, though, that houses cost $150 – $300k, depending on the area, so few Zimbabweans actually own them. They simply rent. In some areas, you have million dollar homes. In Zimbabwe? Are we talking about the same country? Who knew? At least rent is cheaper than New York. They are stunned when I tell them how much my rent is.
Food, is not cheap, either. There are no coins for change, so there’s dollar-rounding on your food bill. By that, I mean what ever the final price is, it’s rounded up to the nearest dollar, or you get a bunch of candy as change. You can expect to pay about $3.50/lb for chicken or beef, unless you go to a butcher, where you could get the beef for about half that per pound. A 2L bottle of water costs $0.80. A 1lb box of instant, Nescafe coffee cost about $6.50. Shocking.
Doubly shocked when you think about how little folks make and how high unemployment is. So, even though it’s better, it’s still not a cake walk. But where is it a cake walk? I can go a few blocks away from my Park Slope apartment to find folks struggling to make ends meat. It’s not any easier in the US.
And gas? How about $1.50 per liter. That works out to about $5.70 per gallon. And, this is a city with unreliable public transportation. You ride minibuses, you catch lifts, you walk. Unless of course you have a car and money to continually fill the gas tank to drive along so-so roads, many of which are riddled with potholes. Cars are mostly older models of Toyotas, BMWs, Mercedes, trucks, even Pugeots.
Still, this place is nothing like I expected. If you read the US State Department’s website, you’d think setting foot in the country is tantamount to either a jail term or death sentence. Far from it. I know there are shenanigans that go on here, but the people are friendly. I’m amazed by how many Shona say that they are a peaceful people, not like those South Africans. So, despite the high prices, the pollution, the power cuts, and the lack of running water – all things that I pretty much anticipated (except the high food prices) – Zimbabwe has refreshingly It’s much better. Much better.
