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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