November 25

Early last year, we came home to find the dogs going absolutely nuts.  Tallulah even jumped onto the bonnet of the car, she was in such a frenzy.  What we discovered was that the large jacaranda in front of the house had been hit by lightning.  A number of electrical appliances, including the modem, lost their lives that day.

            Since then, every time there is a strong wind, the branches creak ominously.  It is something that has been getting steadily worse and today the branch eventually falls down. Luckily, it misses the house and causes only minimal damage to a nearby frangipani.

            No rain is forecast until next week.  The heat is stifling. We are plagued by insects and mosquitos.


            The electricity is on all day.
 

November 24

In the afternoon, we are invited to a friend's house for tea and cake.  My friend, who is Russian, is going to the UK for part of the Christmas holiday and will be taking a parcel for my sister.  The post is generally so slow here that I cannot rely on it getting to her by Christmas.  Anyone going to the UK over Christmas will tell you how they are given parcels and Christmas cards to post.  It can be quite annoying when you are given vast amounts that take up a lot of space in your suitcase. Why the postal system is so slow, I do not know.  When I lived in the UK as a student, letters from my mum in Bulawayo would take about a week at most to arrive and, in fact, if she sent it on a Thursday, her letter would come through my letter box two days later.  

Another Russian friend is also there and she has made the most amazing cake with something like eight layers.  It is delicious.  The friend going overseas is very excited.  She has only lived here just over a year and is battling to settle into Zimbabwean life.  I must say that I would find it very difficult.  For those of us who have enjoyed better days, we can at least remember a time without all the current problems, but for somebody coming here now from a First World country, it must be hard to get used to all the things that don't work.  

I don't tell her, but I have over the years come across a number of people, mainly women, who have initially hated living in Zimbabwe, but give it a couple of years and they do eventually come to enjoy it.  Some may even come to love it.

November 23

The day begins with the sighting of a bird I have not seen before.  It is a plum coloured starling.  What a beautiful bird it is and I make a mental note to mention the sighting at the next gathering of tweeters and twitterers and general gardening people. I can't wait to see their reaction.

On my way into town, I am nearly involved in an accident at the traffic lights.  When the lights are not working, chaos reigns.  The rule of giving way to the right is generally not adhered to; whoever can make their way across the intersection without bashing into someone else or being bashed into by someone else is the 'victor'.  Some cars do not even slow down; they just shoot through with their hazard lights on as this obviously makes one quite invincible.  I have already entered the intersection when a car speeds through from the left, narrowly missing us.  The driver looks at me as though he can't understand what I am making all the fuss about when I blast him with the hooter.  To observe people's behaviour at times like these is to view a social experiment: how people react when there are no rules or regulations.  What so many people fail to realise is how, through their impatience and total disregard for others, they actually make their own journeys longer and more complicated.

In the evening, we have our film night again.  This time we watch Vita and Virginia, a film that documents the relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.  We have a visitor, someone who lived in the house before us.  He is now living in Nigeria and describes how limiting and claustrophobic it is to live in an expat compound.  He misses the ease of Zimbabwean life.

November 22

The council announces 96 hour water cuts from Monday. We will be off from Monday to Wednesday and Friday to Sunday.  This is devastating news for us. The majority of our visitors stay at the weekends.  We will be fine as long as there is power, but that is certain to go off at some point over the weekend.

I am sitting in the car park at Ellie's school, waiting to pick her up.  A woman I would describe as a 'yummy mummy' gets out of an expensive looking car with her young daughter and proceeds to the school buildings.  She is on the phone and from the tone her voice, she is complaining.  Her language is terrible; she swears profusely, and very loudly, at the person on the other end of the phone, oblivious to her little girl and the rest of us in the car park.  It sounds as though she is talking to someone either at TelOne or ZOL, who are both Internet providers.  I know exactly how she feels but cannot imagine making such a scene.

It may sound a bit prudish, but I hardly ever use bad language. It has never sat right with my personality.  I do wish in many ways that I could be as forthright as this woman, though.  I think of the terrible person who phoned yesterday and completely threw me for the rest of the morning.  I wonder how many rude people TelOne and ZOL receive on a daily basis.

November 21

We don't often have to deal with obnoxious people, but today is one of those days, unfortunately. I message a man who booked three weeks ago to confirm that he is definitely coming tomorrow night.  He replies in the affirmitive and asks for directions.  The next thing, his daughter messages me to confirm the price. Her answer is 'That's great.'  However, half an hour later she phones me to ask how the pricing system works. I explain that the price per person decreases if more people stay.  There is a pause before she launches into a tirade of nastiness, demanding how we can charge what we do.  I explain again, and I am then told that we are more expensive than the last place she stayed at in Bulawayo!  

I have gone past trying to make people happy; I advise her to find somewhere else, preferably the cheap place she stayed at the last time she was here.  'No, no, no,' she insists, 'my father made this booking so we have to stay.'  I am not sure I see the logic in this line of reasoning, especially as she won't let the matter drop and starts again.  'So you are not going to bring your price down?'  Funnily enough, no.  This woman obviously has no idea of psychology.  Being nasty does not automatically qualify you for a discount.  I do not want her to stay; she is the kind of person who will look for everything that is wrong. Again, I suggest that she finds somewhere else to stay and this time she says that everywhere is booked up.  I assume she means all the very cheap places. Ten minutes after the end of our call, she cancels.  What a relief.

In the evening, we go to speech night at Ellie's school.  The guest speaker talks about maintaining the essence of what makes a Zimbabwean education unique.  Here is another subject I could do a PhD on.  If there is any subject that is bound to bring people to blows at dinner parties, it is not politics (we all united on the fact that the government is useless), it is education.  The Zimbabwean education system used to be the best in Africa, but it has deteriorated greatly over the last few years.  The private school system has survived, but at great cost.  There are many good things about it, but it is struggling.  Based on the old British public school system, it represents values that are often highly contradictory in nature.  Good manners are always impressed (to the extent that boys are taught to doff their hats), but only recently have any of the boarding schools begun to take the issue of bullying seriously.  I agree with the speaker that Zimbabweans do work hard and their attitude is highly valued in countries where people have not grown up in a system where seniority is respected.

However, as a Head once told me, our school system is a replica of our government.  We give far too much attention to the people at the top and treat those at the bottom with little respect.  We also teach pupils to keep quiet, constantly reminding them that those who don't toe the line, won't be rewarded.  We don't teach them to question or challenge the system within which they exist.  The challenge for us is to be able to move with the times, but also maintain what is good about the system.

November 20

Ellie goes to school dressed as a pirate.  I wish school was this much fun when I was there.

We receive the Airbnb newsletter.  I read an article about a woman who has a beach house in California. She describes all the things she does to make her guests’ stay enjoyable.  If she finds out that it is anyone’s birthday, she leaves a cake for them and, depending on the make up and interests of the guests, she will leave different information for them: lists of things for children to do in the area, places to go walking, craft fairs and festivals.  When she found out that one of her guests made patchwork quilts, she left a flyer about a quilt show. For a couple celebrating their wedding anniversary, she left a bottle of wine, a box of chocolates and roses. All this has earned her very positive reviews and customers who return time and again.  She also sells local crafts – many of the ornaments in the beach house can be purchased and she has compiled an online shopping directory for her customers to look through.

Some of these things are a little beyond us, but I like the idea of the personal touch. Three years ago, we had an American missionary couple stay with their 90 year old mother.  Her birthday was the day after mine so we thought we would ask her up for tea and cake.  I still have a very clear image of her in my mind: she was dressed entirely in the colours of the American flag; even her earrings were small replicas of the star-spangled banner.  Despite her age, she was incredibly sharp.  She was also very pro-Trump and for the next hour and a half we heard every conspiracy theory in the book concerning Barack Obama.  I don’t think we got a word in edgeways. 

I did have plans with someone I know to put homemade soap in the bathroom with a note that more could be purchased if wanted.  The soap was made by people in a co-operative and I thought it would be a good way of promoting it, but unfortunately the project itself then folded.

The only thing I do have for sale are copies of This September Sun.  There is one copy in the cottage and my general hope is that people won’t have time to finish it and so will ask if they can buy it.  Only one copy has ever gone missing and that was with the man who helped me take frogs out of the swimming pool.  Maybe he thought it was fair payment for lobbying them over the wall.

November 19

There is something wrong with the electricity; it is has been on in the early morning and evening, when it is usually off.  I often wonder what the ZESA control room is like.  I imagine a whole lot of switches with the names of all the suburbs next to them.  I wonder how it feels to flick a switch down, knowing you have plunged hundreds of people into darkness and frustration. When the power cuts began, there was some sort of timetable that was followed, but now it is completely random.  It’s a bit like holding out two closed fists and asking someone to guess which hand has the sweet in it, except that there are more than two choices.

As soon as you start thinking that your day for electricity is Monday or that you never have a cut on a Thursday night, beware – everything will change.

            Thankfully, we have rain in the afternoon.  It’s amazing how much better I always feel.  However, the rain brings the frogs.  Every evening, a great chorus starts up; some people love it, but not us. We are lucky, though, that we have not had the invasion that we had last year and the year before.  I suspect that we got such a bad review on Frog Airbnb, that all prospective customers have been put off.

            Both John and I have been known to be out in the garden at 1am, scooping frogs out of the pool with the net and putting them in a bucket.  One night last year yielded more than forty frogs.  I have even had a guest help me; he thought it was very funny, but even he gave up in the end.  When we didn’t like our neighbour, we used to empty the bucket over the wall into his garden.  This went some way to making up for the rubbish he threw over into our garden.  Now, we release the frogs at the bottom of our garden, far away from the swimming pool.