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Thomas, I sometimes feel that poverty is a state of
mind as much as a reality. I'm not poor now, but when I was a child my
family was very poor. The feeling of being poor is still there in the
background. It has alway been a little inhibitory - like I can't do or
expect something because that's for rich people, and beyond my
class.
A peculiarity is that I've always had trouble with
toast. When I was a little kid just starting school the teacher would
sometimes ask what we had for breakfast. The rich kids, or the kids who I
thought were rich, would always say they had toast. I never had
toast. That was for the rich kids.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 2:13
AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] (no
subject)
Thomas:
After just writing my sardonic piece on my poor
childhood, I am shamed at realizing how far I am from true poverty and I
apologize to the Universe and to you who read this for my
arrogance.
Thanks for sharing Harry,
Thomas
Lunde
----------
From: "Harry Pollard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:
"\"Futurework\" <"<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:
[Futurework] (no subject)
Date: Mon, Dec 15, 2003, 3:37 PM
Hi!
Here is another letter from Zimbabwe.
Looks
bad there.
Should we get ready to invade before the Fedayeen get too
powerful?
Naaaaaaaa!
We’ll pass a strong resolution at the
UN.
After all, we have Christmas to enjoy and Africa is none of our
business.
Incidentally, a naartjie is a tangerine.
Harry
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Irrigating nothing
Dear Family and Friends,
It has been a diabolical week for Zimbabwe. The
Abuja decision to
renew our suspension from the
Commonwealth caused a tidal wave of
recriminatory statements, propaganda and threats.
First
President Mugabe pulled Zimbabwe out of
the Commonwealth
altogether and then he, his wife and
two dozen officials went to a UN
Information Summit in Geneva.
President Mugabe used this world forum
to publicly slate
his critics saying that the email and internet were
being used
to destroy Zimbabwe and recolonise the Third World.
Meanwhile back
at home Zanu PF turned up the temperature. First they
pushed through Parliament a ratification of the decision to leave
the
Commonwealth. Then a Zanu PF caucus meeting
resolved to expel the
foreign diplomats of
Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand from
Zimbabwe. Finally, having used the fear factor to the limits,
Foreign
Minister Stan Mudenge announced that
the diplomats would not be
expelled
"at this time."
Sitting on the edges of our seats and praying for
sanity, wisdom or
just plain common
sense, these are extremely worrying days
for
Zimbabwe. The consequences of statements and decisions
made in anger
and to try and soothe hurt pride, are
almost too awful to contemplate
and describe. And, through it
all, the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans,
just plummet ever
downwards.
One night this week the usually pitch black view from
my window was
disturbed by a brilliant but
un-natural spotlight. The light came from
the direction of a nearby
cemetery and I didn't stay to inspect it,
rapidly
closing the curtains and praying that the light was in
fact
coming from further away.
Goose bumps covered my
arms as I thought about the latest horror story
in Zimbabwe. At
night grave robbers are descending on cemeteries and
digging up newly filled graves. They are removing
the corpses and
taking the empty coffins for
resale. I don't know if this appalling
practice is
being conducted by money making entrepreneurs or just by
desperate people trying to get enough money to stay alive.
With unemployment now at well over 70%
in Zimbabwe, people are
resorting to
desperate means in order to feed themselves and
their
families and stay alive. Zimbabwe has now entered the
fourth growing
season in a row
without any sort of decent agriculture
being
practiced. Every half hour, 72 times a day, our state
radio churns out
the latest propaganda jingle
telling us that "Our Land is our
prosperity".
The government have seized 11 million hectares
of prime agricultural
land and yet, for the fourth year
in a row, half of our population
needs world
food aid and people are starving and digging up coffins
for re-sale. The majority of the seized farms have not been
ploughed,
the resettled people have no seed, no chemicals, no
fertilizer and no
money with which to buy the inputs they need
to grow food.
A recent overseas visitor to my home walked around my
small garden and
said it felt like looking at something from World
War Two. In every
flower bed, between daisies and
lilies, there are vegetables: onions,
carrots, cabbages,
beetrots and spinach. Along one wall, standing tall
and about to
blossom are sunflowers which I am growing in order
to
supplement the feed I give to my half a dozen chickens.
In flower pots are chillies, strawberries and climbing beans.
Up and
down my driveway my six laying hens patrol and
scratch, crop the lawn,
dig out worms and beetles, feast on flying
ants and eat weeds.
From my kitchen pelmets hang great heavy strings
of home grown onions
cropped from one small bed in the corner
of the garden. In my pantry
cupboard are two dozen jars
of home-made marmalade, jelly, jam and
chutney made from the jealously guarded single naartjie and
paw paw
trees in my back garden. In the fridge is
home-made butter and in the
deep freeze home grown chickens.
You have to be extremely hard working in order to survive in
Zimbabwe
these days but mostly, you have to have access to
a small piece of
land and learn to become
very inventive. This is the ironical tragedy
of Zimbabwe's so
called agricultural revolution.
With so much land having apparently
been given to the people, why the
hell are we all starving?
Why are people digging coffins out of newly
filled graves? Why
are young boys sitting in filthy rags on pavements,
starving and
begging? Why are people living in cardboard boxes in shop
doorways?
Why are families of four or six living in one room
with
neither toilet or kitchen and without even a window in
which to put a
flower pot and grow one strawberry or tomato
plant ?
The biggest tragedy of all is that we are wasting the
fourth growing
season in a row. In Marondera we have
already had 8 inches of rain
this season and
yet it is irrigating nothing. It is tragically clear
for
anyone who cares to see, that this
supposed agricultural
revolution has turned
Zimbabwe into a nation of beggars, thieves,
racketeers and grave robbers. These are the realities of
our daily
lives here and as we struggle to cope with
them it is hard to look at
the bigger picture and to
concentrate on caucus meetings, diplomatic
decisions and
UN Summits.
Until next week, with love, cathy.
Copyright
cathy buckle
13th
December
2003.
http://africantears.netfirms.com
My
books on the Zimbabwean crisis, "African Tears" and "Beyond Tears"
are now available outside Africa from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ;
www.africabookcentre.com ; www.amazon.co.uk ; in
Australia and New
Zealand: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ;
Africa: www.kalahari.net
www.exclusivebooks.com
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