April 2010 Notes from the Field

April 1

On the first day there is always planning and packing.  Nancy and Prisca plan to leave from Harare for Masvingo Saturday (3 April) morning. The five-hour drive south is sometines treacherous as the one main road south has had no maintenance for nearly five years...potholes that can swallow you up and wreck the car are serious hazards.  Fuel is plentiful, though priced so high that only a very few can afford it.  At least there are no gas lines at all, and likewise for food.

April 3

I (Jim) talked with Nancy this morning and actually had a very good connection via satellite phone. Today they had tried to travel to Berejena but all night and this morning it had been raining very hard. The dry river bed we usually cross was flooded with nearly five feet of water so today was an unplanned "planning" day.   Since Monday they have completed health assssments of child-headed household populations in three villages -- lots of records and lots of eye-opening findings. They discovered one child with cerebral palsy. Accordingly they went into Masvingo and are trying to arrange to have the District Health Office come out and complete an assessment and begin the process of getting some kind of assistance to this young man.  Nancy can be rather persistent in this type of request for services so I suspect that it may happen.  The water and power situation has reverted to "OFF and on" but as always they are managing.

As to school fees.... [In Zimbabwe, public education is not free. Fees must be paid even in primary school. Despite improved economic stability brought on by the adoption of the US dollar, school fees have been rising faster than Zienzele’s ability to pay them for all the orphans we support.] Nancy and Prisca went to the district education office and learned that the district has not in fact raised the fees more than $10. The view was that the headmasters have been doing this on their own.  This places an impossible demand on the families in terms of avalable dollars for educational fees. Armed with this information, Nancy and Prisca are headed back for "discussions" with several headmasters. Oh to be a fly on the wall for those meetings!

April 5

The house has had water and electricity since Nancy returned there yesterday!  That is about 24 hours straight .... amazing!

Nancy and Prisca met with the Zienzele representatives (the calendar ladies) today (Saturday).  The school fee situation is chaotic and frustrating.  There is still no clarity as to what the fees will be. The past inflation of millions of % still permeates discussions even though the US dollar is now the currency of choice.  We discussed options, and Nancy and Prisca intend to meet again with the representatives to get their input (and thereby the input from the village folks) before approaching the school headmasters. None of the choices seem ideal. Two possiblities: pay for fewer children or pay partial fees for all our children....where the difference would come from remains an issue. Suffice to say that few organizations are paying fees at this time. I (Jim) tend to think that if we pay partial fees along with the "teacher incentive fees," eventually they might waive the balance.  This is an ongoing negotiation for sure.  Stay tuned.

April 10

Today there was a series of five intermittent calls from Nancy. Either the satellite connection was jammed ( I don't know how they would do that) or just overloaded.  Anyway, it has rained for five days in a row. This is extremely unusual for this time of year, and it has prevented Prisca and Nancy from getting through (to the villages) on two of those days. (They have to keep an eye on the weather because if the rivers rise, they get stranded on the wrong side and can't get out of Berejena and on to the next villages.)

Health assessments are going very slowly. Finding the families is a difficult process and accordingly limits how many can be done  a day.  It seems to average two to three a day, with lots of walking and inquiring with villaagers as to the whereabouts of different Child-Headed-Household families.

Yesterday a large cooking oil transport truck jack-knifed on the road back to Masvingo. Hundreds of people appeared from nowhere to scavenge the bottles of oil scattered all around the wreck.  Considering the food shortage and the high prices of what food there is, this comes as no surprise.

The oranges in the backyard at the house in Masvingo are ripe ... like clementines ...so Nancy and Prisca are enjoying them in the morning.  I have been advised to bring freeze dried hiker meals.

Nancy brought with her a rolled up Brunton solar panel with which to charge the lanterns.  However, security concerns have prevented her from leaving the panel outside charging while she and Prisca are away each day, and with the days they have been forced to stay home due to rains, there has not been a lot of solar charging going on just yet.

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Field Report: April 2009 — Reports appear twice each year.   

For the first time since 1998, I can say that things are better in Zimbabwe. Every other year I have felt that things could not get any worse, but they always did. This trip changed this trend. Things were not great or completely resolved, but they were definitely better.

There had been rain, there were crops to be harvested, prices had stabilized due to abandoning the Zimbabwean system and using only the US dollar and the South African rand, and there were promises of schools reopening. These things alone would have been a huge improvement over what I experienced in October, but there was also a different sense of calm, open discussions and there were now two voices speaking for Zimbabwe. The Unity Government may not have achieved all that the world hoped for, but there is a definite change and a sense of no going back

A big part of this trip was the partnering with Batanai, a Masvingo based NGO, whose goals are the education and counseling of those affected by HIV/AIDS. We had planned with them a series of workshops to work with both the Zienzele caregivers and youth. Each village selected the caregivers and the youth to participate, with the understanding that they will go back to their villages and pass on their newly acquired knowledge.

The workshops were a week long with the youth staying at Berejena Mission Hospital and the caregivers met at the community building in Berejena. There was a great mix of fun and games, meeting new people, discussing hard issues, gaining new information regarding HIV/AIDS, learning counseling skills. We had a end of workshop meeting with all the participants and the feeling was unanimous that the workshops were very successful, provided good food, the counselors were great teachers, and that everyone felt empowered to go back to spread the information to their community.

In addition to the workshops we added two new villages to our project, now there are eleven. Chomuruvati and Nemauzhe are in the same ward and are both very enthusiastic to get underway.  We bought baskets from each of the villages, reviewed the status of projects, and tried to determine if schools really will reopen after this break. People are hopeful, but the teachers also have to get paid

There was food, there was water (1-2 hours a day), there was electricity (4-5 hours a day), great workshops, lots of baskets, and a wonderful group of people…..who could ask for anything more?

— Nancy Clark

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