Zimbabwe

The 12-year-old girl seemed OK at first. She was telling me how - just half an hour earlier - she had walked up to the Save the Children reception centre on the Zimbabwe-South Africa border near Mesina. How she’d come from Beitbridge on the Zimbabwe side and led her 9-year-old sister across a mile or so of ‘no-man’s land’ bush to reach South Africa. She said she’d left behind her blind grandmother - her only carer it seemed, after her mother had died and her father had ‘run away’. She said she had come because she and her sister were hungry.

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Would you prefer the child death rate in your own country to be lowered rather than in a country poorer than yours?

When I first saw this question I naively thought that, this being Save the Children with its global commitment to all children regardless of nationality or anything else, it was a non-question. Surely there could only be one answer. It was very chastening to discover that I was completely wrong.

I was invited to a meeting of volunteers and the discussion was dominated by the difficulties that two of them experienced collecting door to door in, as one of them put it, their predominantly white middle class neighbourhoods. Apparently they were frequently asked how much of the money collected is spent on British children and why it is so little. As one of them said, she was not being racist but it didn’t help that our promotional literature usually featured brown faces and never white ones. As she put it, she felt like part of a threatened minority in her own country.

I have no idea how widespread this view was in the meeting let alone Save the Children as a whole, since nobody, myself included, made any comment. I did however find it very disturbing and quite incompatible with Eglantine Jebb’s original vision. I have to say also that had this been my first contact with Save the Children it would probably have been my last.

This is my farewell blog from Zimbabwe: I am heading back to Wales tomorrow.

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Today is Save the Children’s 90th Birthday and we are celebrating with Save the Children Norway staff altogether in the Harare office. It is also the 20th birthday (not to the day) of the UNCRC. Luckily for me, I had the chance to also celebrate the birthday with children rather than just with Save the Children staff… it felt right to watch children launch their hopes and vision for children’s rights into the sunny, blue Zimbabwean sky on Save the Children’s birthday.

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Getting there is a youth group in Musina which i’m apart thats still in its early stages of development.We are based at Save the children in Mesina,which is home to many teenagers from Zimbabwe who came to South Africa looking for greener pastures.We had never interacted with the children so when we were given the oppotunity to do so on Saturday May 9,we were both eager and wary of how it would be like.they look like the average/normal teen on the outside,but there inside bare heart wrenching stories of experiences thet no one-especially a child-should go through.

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Tiripo!! I’m doing great, thanks. I’ve learnt the correct Shona response at last! People here in Zimbabwe never forget to ask, no matter what troubles they may have at home. Even as I walk in to work every morning, passersby will say, Mamukasei! Good morning! They smile and wave from across the street.

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Walking to work, I took a back road, behind the Embassies that line the usual route to work along the main San Nujoma road. I walked past a man digging the soil by the road-side, with rows of maize planted alongside him. It is not allowed to cultivate land in the city, but many people have no choice other than to do this.

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Another conversation in Vic Falls - and a story about Nyaminyami, the River Serpent God from the Zambezi.

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Have you ever eaten a mopani worm? It’s big, black, chewy and, three worms later, I got a certificate to prove it!

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I went into the main Save the Children warehouse in Binga. I saw what looked like plastic sheeting. “What’s this?” I asked. “Body bags” came the reply.

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It’s amazing what you can find walking to work in Harare. Just past the sign that says ‘MARS’, a fresh 50,000 Zimbabwean dollar note was just lying in the mud.

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If I were Zimbabwean, I’d be dead.

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I walked into work early this morning and was surprised to see a long queue stretching along the road ahead of me, into the distance. At first, I thought it was people waiting for buses home after the Easter break. I then realised that the queue led to the South African Embassy and that people were waiting in line to get out of Zimbabwe and go to South Africa. Someone was wandering along the line, trying to sell pens, paper, and what looked like passports!

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It is common practice in Zimbabwe, she says, to name your children in order to goad or taunt your neighbours, so that when a child’s name is called, the message going to the neighbours is crystal clear!

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A group of Village Health Workers and Volunteers that Save the Children has trained in hygiene promotion are sitting together under a tree. When I ask about the impact on children, one of the women laughs and says ‘Cholera knows no boundaries’.

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The two nurses on duty – Sister Besum and Sister Kuona – tell me that what Save the Children provided to their clinic helped to turn the cholera situation around. ‘In December’, they said, ‘we had nothing – the food we got from you meant that we did not have to go home – we stayed because of that….

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It is break time and the children are outside playing and not in the classrooms. There is only one teacher around: the Head Teacher, Mr Chatembwa.

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We turn off the tarmac road at a T-junction where we have a warehouse serving our two main sites in the Zambezi Valley. If we turn left, we head to Binga; if we turn right (and we do), we head to the Save the Children office in Siyakobvu in Nyaminyami.

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We talk about the cattle who wander past and Cuthbert says a cow ‘is like a bank’ – ‘money on legs’!

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We have nine reports to do for donors by the end of April, so I am sent to Nyaminyami, one of our two main programme areas in the Zambezi Valley, to collect information. It is only a three-day trip (one day to get there; one day spent there; one day to get back) but the Easter shut-down is nearly upon us and we need to catch people while we can.

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We drove out of Harare to Domboshawa, an area of high granite rocks with (for me) challenging walks! As we left Harare we passed two billboards: one said ‘Smile: you are in Spar Country!’; the other said ‘Life is Sweet’.

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I have been working in the Harare office for three days now, walking into work and getting a lift home from a local driver or another ex-pat at the end of the day. I am staying temporarily in a bungalow in an area called Avondale, close to the office in Belgravia, but will move into a flat with two others later in the week.

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In little more than a day, I have gone from sitting at my desk in the Cardiff office, looking out at Sophia Gardens, to travelling across Africa, via Nairobi, to Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.

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As a volunteer for the Global Children’s Panel week in London, I was helping to show the young people around London. Following a slightly scary rush-hour tube journey to Waterloo, we enjoyed a 45 minute flight on the London Eye where we were all overwhelmed by the breathtaking panoramic view of London at night. I can safely say I have never seen a more snappy happy lot in my life, the cameras never stopped flashing.

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save the children in south africa is a well known organisation becouse it involves young poeple on eveything that they do, they dont think for us they first listen to our stories than come with solutions and they stick to there promises , they are always faithfull to us as young poeple.

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It has been a while since I visited some of the livelihoods projects in Kariba Rural (Nyaminyami) district. Today I put that right and spent a day with our field officers and partners from the agricultural extension services visiting rural farmers. I came back feeling very excited and encouraged.

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“As Mugabe throws parties in Zimbabwe for his 85th birthday, one in ten children in his country are destined to die before their fifth birthday. Most of their mothers won’t even live to half the president’s age.”

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Today I had the pleasure of meeting Sitshengisiwe, our HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Health Coordinator in the Zambezi Valley. In the valley there’s no safe water, electricity, transport or communication systems. So if someone gets ill they will have to walk, or at best be transported in an ox-cart, to the nearest basic health centre.

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Today I visited a cholera treatment clinic in Harare where staff have been working non-stop since mid November.

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Venture just 15-minutes out of leafy, downtown Harare and you will find some of the capital’s oldest and most neglected suburbs. Today they are home to those displaced by Operation Murambatsvina in 2005 and bear living testimony to the real state the country is in.

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Arriving in Zimbabwe is a slightly surreal experience.

En route from London I passed through South Africa’s plush Jo’burg airport. While waiting for my connection I sleepily breezed through the vast souvenir shops and chatted about Obama’s inaugural speech (and his wife’s inaugural dress!) with the laid-back check in staff.

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We started the February distribution of food aid this morning. The distribution I visited was in the vicinity of one of the schools I had visited yesterday. When I got out of the vehicle I met the lone teacher who was on duty yesterday. He had come to ask if he and his family could be included in the feeding programme because, as he had told me before, he has not been able to pick up his paltry pay for months.

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I am a teacher by profession and taught in a teacher training college in the east of Zimbabwe for 6 years in the early – mid 1990s. During that time I was privileged to visit schools in the furthest flung parts of the country and was always hugely impressed with the quality of education and commitment of the teachers, even in the remotest places.

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This week I am in another district in the Zambezi Valley where Save the Children is working. Nyaminyami is one of the remotest places in Zimbabwe and is ranked the lowest district in the country terms of development. This is brought home when we arrive at the centre where Save has it’s offices. There has not been any electricity or water here for months now.

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Over 50 villagers, mainly women, have been brought in to the district hospital where they are being given an opportunity to talk about the situation in their community, to learn about how to prevent cholera and how to respond if someone does contract the illness.

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Patients are still coming, many being brought by relatives in wheel barrows or being carried. I saw one woman carrying her sick child on her back. She told me she had walked for 5 hours. Thankfully, this child recovered quickly when given fluids and medicines. The centre staff were able to give the mother a meal. She said that it was the first proper meal she had had for more than a week.

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I went with the team to visit probably the remotest and poorest part of the Binga district. Save the Children has not been working in this area for very long because another local agency had a programme there.

The area is reached by probably the poorest road in the district – possibly the country! This road is often impassable during the rainy season which means that for part of the year the area is cut off.

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I paid a visit to one of the very remote Rural Health Centres today. The centre is a long drive from Binga centre along a horrible road. There are some incredibly rough and rocky stretches that often shred our tyres and then in other places the road is muddy and very slippery when it rains. Today it didn’t just rain, it was torrential, and the journey took even longer than usual, a full three hours!

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I arrived in Binga yesterday and was immediately requested to attend an emergency meeting. It seems that cholera has reached this district and there are reports coming from a number of sites in the district. It was decided that a “Task Force” would be chosen to visit one of he areas affected to make an assessment and to report back to the district development committee.

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I’ve just spent the festive season in Harare, Zimbabwe where I’m Save the Children UK’s Emergency Programme Manager. I should be here for two or three months and the main aim is to get the consolidated response to cholera, nutrition and malaria sorted with some child protection and education work included.

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