A Kind of Holiday

Last weekend we drove just north of town to Domboshawa. It was a nice afternoon with scattered clouds that kept us from getting too hot on the walk up to the cave where the rock paintings are. Another family arrived when we were there, and Miles started introducing himself. When he asked them where they were from, they said Zimbabwe. Miles said, “You don’t look like Zimbabweans.” It was a quick first lesson on white Africans.

We walked up to the top of the hill which was bald, rounded reddish stone. Families and group of friends were settled in different places to catch the view: round thatch roof houses, green fields, trees, layers of hills that reminded me of the Appalachian Mtns, and afternoon showers in the distance over Harare. Miles kept introducing himself to people, and would be annoyed when I’d intercede to give the poor people some relief. Then he started wandering down the hill out of sight.

About that time, Eliza announced that she needed to go to the bathroom, so we started packing things up and getting ready to walk back down. Unbeknownst to us, Eliza was already taking matters into her own hands and was bare assed and peeing on the rock. Her shorts were off but in the direct line of fire, and of course I’d left spare emergency clothes in the car. She announces she’s ready to do a caca, but luckily, she was dissuaded. Meanwhile, Miles has been out of sight for a while so once we get E back in her panties, we start trudging down looking for him. We found him finally and gave him a good talking to about snakes and such. He proceeded to walk down a wet trail that turned into a rock slide which he proceeded to slide down and just stopped himself before falling in a pool. D was concerned about bilharzias so advised against the kids actually playing in the inviting water.

One more week until school starts. This has felt like a long break without a holiday. David didn’t really have much time off, just a day here and there which was spent unpacking or setting up house. The office was quiet, so convenient for D to get oriented. The kids and I have had time to find our way around a bit, but other than that, it’s been uneventful, considering. There’s been no vacation agenda or frame of mind to do a holiday thing. It’s been great to go to parties, but meeting people for the first time doesn’t compare with getting together with family and old friends.

Still, the view from the balcony off our bedroom and from the ground floor veranda at this Chisipite house is divine (as were the gardens at the Bronte the first 10 days we were here). The pool, in-ground trampoline and swing set are surrounded by a diversity of plants and tall trees all lushly green from the afternoon rains. We have been hanging out by the pool, reading books, taking day trips around the area… This would be a great set up for a holiday! One need just relax and suspend the wondering and list-making for a moment.

Settling Down

The good news is that our second shipment is in Harare, and David’s got his residence permit to claim it. So any day now…That shipment includes some basic furnishings like a couch, chair and end table for the living room, a bed and bedside table for us, a kitchen table and two chairs, some dressers… We didn’t ship everything in storage from the States, and it looks like that was a good decision in the end since our staying in this Chisipite house (that Rob and Nadia had rented) has fallen through. The owner sold it just days before we left Amman, but we are allowed to rent it until June while we look for another place.

That means that we could potentially find a furnished or semi-furnished house which will relieve us from the financial burden of furnishing a place from top to bottom. I had been looking forward to creating a space that felt like ours and was an investment in our future, i.e. furnishings we could take with us around the world. But MC’s policy is to support shipments limited by weight instead of a container, so it’s not really feasible to plan for that anyway. It’s one of the few drawbacks of living abroad. I don’t want to sound like an unappreciative whiner…I feel lucky to be living our dream life. It’s just that when we go back to the States, the contrast in our lives and most everyone else’s there is always a bit shocking. While we’ve been flitting around here and there, they’ve grown up and moved into houses full of furniture and matching curtains.

Christmas in Zim

We had a day of exploring, a Sunday drive. Typically for us, it was ad hoc, the idea not even discussed until eleven.

We took the kids to the lion and cheetah park just outside of Harare – a mini drive-through safari. We saw lions, several kinds of antelope, zebra, wildebeest, a spotted hyena, baboons, an ostrich, a peacock, and a 306-year-old tortoise. No cheetah seen, but there were two lion cubs that were very cute. However, at the walk around bit, a chain-link fence isn’t much when a full grown lion leaps at your kid. It’s disconcerting to say the least the way the lions only have eyes for the children.

Then there was Snake World where they (I opted out) saw some local highlights: a puff adder, some cobras, a black mamba, a crocodile, but no python (shucks). The nearby Lake Chivero wasn’t much to see during an afternoon shower. According to Lonely Planet, it is “all the rage for Harare day-trippers who love to fish, boat, party and organize lakeshore braais” (aka bbqs). Hopefully there’ll be more to tell about that place another day. The dirt roads around the lake turned to red clay puddles that D enjoyed splashing through in his new (to him) Land Cruiser.

We finally ended up eating dinner in an English pub back in Harare full of Zimbabweans watching Aston Villa play Arsenal. David nailed it when he said: back in the States you don’t often see a pub full of black people cheering a soccer match. There were other moments like that today of feeling – whoa, we are not in Amman any more. This is Africa: driving along in a 4x4, looking at the green rolling hills dotted with red rock boulders, conical thatch roof houses, women walking along with babies tied to their backs and bundles balanced on their heads, African music on the radio.

Granted, there is also the sound of rats racing across the attic floor above our heads in the early hours of the morning. And there was a smallish one doing laps in the pool the morning after Christmas day. (We didn’t tell our friends who brought their daughter over later to swim in the pool.) There are other living things that share our space: flies, spiders, mosquitoes, fleas from the dog that Rob and Nadia have left behind until they can ship him to Amman (thanks!).

At about 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, I thought…man, I better come up with a plan for Christmas! It has been so busy with the move and trying to find our way around, and also to meet with people here. We moved into the house on Monday the 21st, got our shipment from Amman that day (a miracle, expensive, but miraculous nonetheless), and spent the next days unpacking and filling in gaps where we could. There were power outages those first days for about 48 hours…and we don’t have water when there’s no power. We do have a generator, but running it all day isn’t feasible since it uses so much fuel… So much to figure out here! ( …including driving a stick-shift from the right side of the car, avoiding getting eaten by mosquitoes at night, finding a place to get an internet connection, figuring out when the holidays are…oh, so you get the next 5 days off, ok…)

Very unfortunately, I lost the battery charger for the camera on our move, and we have not been able to find a store that sells a replacement here. Needless to say, I’ve been suffering. No photos of the kids this Christmas!

Fortunately, nice people have been helping us out. Just about every night, we have been invited over to someone’s house for dinner or a party or poker or whatever. And even though we literally have zero appliances or furniture in our house [we did bring a coffee maker and toaster (smart) but no vacuum cleaner, washing machine or dryer, dishwasher…we acquired 4 mattresses that are on the floor, 3 pillows, and a few bar stools that came with the house, and that’s it…linens arrived with the shipment, as well as some kitchen things], we do have a very worn rattan set that was left behind: 2 chairs, 2 loveseats and a coffee table that are on the outside patio which is well-shaded (though not fully protected from fleas since that’s where the dog sleeps at night since we kicked him out of the house.) So, twice people have brought their kids over here. Other than the rat infested pool and the flea infested furniture (I am exaggerating a little), we also have a tree swing to offer which is amazing (if not exactly checked for safety), a trampoline, and a couple of swing sets, one of which has a dinosaur the kids can climb on and open and close its mouth with a lever. We brought most of our toys from Amman, too, so the kids can play in their carpeted playroom with those things and their few new xmas things. Also, beer and wine is not only plentiful here; it’s cheap.

So to be a bit more specific on the friends front: there’s Clementina, her husband Olivier, and their son Sebastian who is now a tough little 2 ½ year old; Keith (MC’s global agriculture specialist) who’s staying here for a month with his wife Donata and their 5-year-old daughter Alegra; Veena and Olga who are MC staff who D worked with in Sudan and who are now the Deputy Country Director and Finance Manager, respectively, for MC Zim; and there are the others who have been introduced to us. Clem and Olivier hosted a Christmas party for 15 which included the braai, swimming, and a gift exchange (to which I contributed the “Chinese” twist concept) and lots of drinking. I also made a peach cobbler (my first, I think) which was edible.

So back to Christmas Eve…while David was sleeping off his afternoon beers (he had been hosting while I was shopping), I picked a potted plant (a bit ant-infested I discovered later), to decorate with tinsel I had brought with me from Amman that was left over from Falastin’s going away party. I put it on the coffee table and skirted it with a red headscarf Miles had worn for Halloween, and after a few rounds of Oh, Christmas Plant with the kids and some discussion of how Santa would use his magic to travel all over the world that night, we were set. To make the night just a bit more special, we started the Star Wars trilogy, which we continued for the next two nights. (Other than “the force,” some interesting depictions of aliens, and inspiring special affects, it really is just about blowing things up, I was a little disappointed, as an adult, to discover. And, yes, it is a bit scary for a 3-year-old, even a hardened one like Eliza.) DVDs can be watched on the laptop or if we hook up the projector, on the painted brick wall of our bedroom as we cuddle on our mattress on the floor.

The children enjoyed their paltry gifts...we'd been giving them one here and there during this not-so-easy transition period to help soften their experience. But they weren't phased at all by the smaller pile of presents or lack of snow/tree, etc. They are thankfully still too young, or else just getting used to this crazy uncertain life.

First Impressions

Although the move and settling-in are challenges are stressful, we are all excited and feeling positive about our choice to make a life here. The climate and nature are gorgeous, the people friendly (both international and local), the aid scene apparently energized and growing, and the surrounding area has a lot to explore.

I felt giddy even at the Johannesburg airport. It was much more developed than Amman or Doha’s airports: lots of stores with safari camping gear and the usual African souvenirs: carved wooden masks, statues of elephants and rhinos, zebra skins, clothes with tribal and animal prints, pith helmets and khaki vests with countless pockets. This compared to Amman/Doha with tiny gold painted glass tea sets, elegantly embroidered head scarves and black floor length robes, and framed golden Arabic calligraphy of scripture from the Quran. The airport was of the high-ceiling, glass and steel frame enclosed design, and restaurants jutted out into the parking lots of 747s. We were probably more excited by the real English breakfast with delicious bacon (hello pork!). Instead of the usual young guy serving us in the restaurant, a middle-aged local woman waited on us. Seeing women in areas of work that I haven’t seen them in for the last 5 years in the Muslim world has been surprisingly refreshing. It makes me feel more relaxed to see women drivers, women bagging groceries, women waitresses and hotel managers. Because that used to be me—I used to work jobs that my many of my Jordanian and Sudanese friends could only imagine very down-and-out women doing. Yet seeing these women reminds me that I used to feel like I could do anything, and that is a freedom worth having. While there are advantages to the dignity, respect and honor that are important in Arab cultures, there are also advantages to just be taken for yourself and to be free to make something of yourself without worrying about how it might have a negative impact on one’s own (or one’s family’s) reputation.

Granted, these are first impressions. Still, I always remember vividly those first moments upon arriving somewhere. How can I forget that I had to be careful not to shake hands with the guy who picked us up at the airport in Jordan because despite his being a really nice guy who is well educated and fluent in four languages, he’s a devout Muslim who practices “not touching women.” In that first drive into town I was highly irritated that I had to monitor my behavior and that I had to worry when I accidentally grabbed his arm to stop him from giving something to the kids. He respects me, but he will be defiled by shaking my hand? After a while, one gets to sort of understanding these things. In a way, he’s showing me respect. It’s the same reason why a (male) cashier will put the change on the counter instead of in a woman’s hand. Same goes for eye contact. That stuff I didn’t like getting used to. Like thinking twice about a man making eye contact with me… What kind of woman did he think I was? Another loose Western woman?

In Harare, the sky was overcast when we arrived but the clouds were far away. I sensed the altitude from the depth of the sky and lightness of air. While David checked into the Bronte’ hotel, the kids and I explored the garden. There was a small fish pond in the middle of a green lawn. Around the perimeter were countless varieties of plants and trees. After years of desert and rock, the diversity of the nature was overwhelming – leaves of all sizes, shapes, colors and textures, sticking out in every direction. I felt like I was in a Matise (?). The hotel was white with dark wooden door and window frames. The rooms were off open air brick passageways that link to the garden patios under the huge jarcanda and cactus trees. Dozens of the locally made statues dot the gardens. There’s one of a mother swinging her daughter playfully that’s on our way to the room that Eliza likes.

...more later