LETTER FROM HOME(23-11-06)

ouple about their children and grandchildren and they told me of developments in their lives – one family in South Africa and another in England. How very sad it is to take in the fact that there is nothing to keep Zimbabwean children in Zimbabwe any more.
Even worse is the fact that Zimbabwean parents now actively encourage their children to leave the country – to go to places where there is training, opportunity, stability and – the prize of all prizes: jobs.
This week an opposition MP has been exposing the horrific facts about life expectancy in Zimbabwe. Men are expected to stay alive for 37 years and women for just 34 years. Today you can expect to live longer than this even in Sudan or Iraq. When you know those figures you know why parents encourage their children to leave Zimbabwe. If you think about the fact that a woman is only expected to live for 34 years, you must also think of the children she bears when she is 25 – they will be orphaned before they even get to senior school.
What then are the chances for those orphaned children – will they live as long as their mother did, will they even be able to finish school and learn a trade in order to support themselves and their children? It is very unlikely and paints a very bleak picture for the future of Zimbabwe.
Talking about all this with another elderly man, recently widowed and in his seventies, he wiped a tear away. He said I’d made him think of his three sons, all in their thirties. One son he had buried last year, he was just 33. Another was now in Malawi, trying to make a living as a stranger in a strange land and the third was desperately trying to find a place where he could settle and survive – he had tried and failed in four countries in the last five years.
Nowhere felt as good as “home” – if only there was a way for him to survive and make a decent living he would come home to Zimbabwe in an instant. In true Zimbabwean style we cracked jokes as I left – it is not the done thing to leave people on depressing notes in these dreadful times and so we laughed about his new underpants. He had finally managed to save enough money to buy three pairs of new underpants – each costing the same as half of his entire monthly pension.
In a couple of weeks time the ruling party will be holding their annual congress. They have been in power for 26 years, just eight years less than most women are expected to live. At the time of the Zanu (PF) Congress in 2004 inflation was 132%, by December 2005 it was 585% and now it is 1070%. What disgrace for a party who have 26 years experience at running a country.
Maybe this year the delegates will find the courage and moral responsibility to stop patting themselves on the back and start thinking about the ordinary people: about the children who can’t wait to get out of the country; about the parents who can’t wait to send them away. About the elderly who are destitute and alone and about the orphans – over a million of them. If the delegates to that conference want to grow old in Zimbabwe and have their grandchildren playing barefoot in the sun nearby, then those delegates know what must be done and that it must be done now.
Until next time, thanks for reading, ndini shamwari yenyu.