Domesticity

I feel like I'm just playing house half the time.


Me in my robe, house-shoes and glasses helping the kids in the car, checking that backpacks are remembered and everyone has clean faces. Kisses all around. To Miles: remember to be considerate to others. To Eliza: be a good listener and do what your teacher says the first time. To David: be productive; don't play computer games.

I carry a large flowery cotton tote that can serve as a shopping bag. I purchase a vase for cut flowers from the garden. I make bar cookies for guests of the soccer tournament at the school as part of my PTO responsibilities. I wear an apron on the weekends. And yoga pants. 

I organize play-dates in the afternoon, coffees with other stay-at-home-moms late morning (after the early morning workout), and make arrangements for dinners and parties. I ensure the children make birthday cards for their friends. I pick them up at school and drive them to swimming lessons.

I make dentist appointments for the whole family. (Well, in theory...I'm working on it.)

Most of the time, I'm on autopilot. I make my lists. I drive around. I draw lines through the items on the list. I check the schedule. Have I forgotten something? (the groceries in the trunk again? the meeting with the school counselor? pick up time?)

But sometimes - like when I'm wearing the apron and stirring muffin mix, and my husband comes in and gives me a kiss on the cheek, and I say, how was golf? - I think WTF. This is hilarious. Somebody get the camera.

Winter Garden

Make a Plan

This is the motto of Zimbabwe. When you can't get what you want, you "make a plan."

Today, I was with my Austrian friend, Bettina, who has lived in Zimbabwe for six years. She checked her mailbox. Curious, I asked what she was expecting to find there. "A parcel," she said in her German-Zimbabwean accent. I've never lived in a country outside the U.S.A. that had reliable postal service, so I was intrigued. When I'd had my Mom send a test package, it never arrived, so we'd given up on it as an option here.

"Oh, it's quite easy," she said. "A month after it's sent, you just follow up with a petition. We get parcels almost every month from my parents." Follow up? "My parents file a report with their postal service in Austria, and that usually gets things moving on this end. I think the Zim postal service can assume all unclaimed packages after a certain period, so they just hold on to them unless a petition is filed." Right. "But you mustn't let your family send anything during the holidays. It's too tempting. Usually a few things go missing. My parents always write the contents of the parcel on the inside of the carton now so we know if anything's missing."

"And there's customs. They only allow $75 worth of goods to be mailed in per month per family, and anything over, they start charging 40% tax. We made the mistake of leaving some price tags on some toys once. Now we make sure everything is roughed up, and my parents put fake price tags on them for 25 cents or 50 cents. We can always say they were sold at a clearance sale or yard sale. As long as it adds up to no more than $74, it's not a problem. It was quite a hassle getting the trampoline in. My sister unpacked the whole thing, rolled all the pieces around in the dirt and packed it up again. You know, during those years when it was crazy and you couldn't find anything here, you just had to make a plan. But it works quite well. We get parcels every month."

Back Home to Zim

Nothing beats sitting by a roaring fire. Outside the night sky is full of stars. The kids are sleeping, and the generator is humming (for another hour or so as the adults get ready for bed)…ah, Africa.

We’ve been back for a few days, and it’s already starting to feel like we never left. First impressions on returning were, wow, life’s pretty great here. The house seemed so much bigger, so many rooms all to ourselves, so many toys, and so much freedom and space to play in the garden. It seemed like I didn’t hear from the kids for hours. They were off running around with Shepherd and Panache or lying on the trampoline looking up at the birds. The first couple of days, the weather was awesome, blue skies, warm sun, cool breeze. We spent all day outside.

I feel grateful for the holiday. We got to see so many friends and family, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Appalachian Mountains, the Florida gulf coast and Tennessee. OK, it was really hot in the South, and it was sometimes stressful imposing ourselves on everyone, but spending time with loved ones was much needed. I especially appreciated having two weeks(!) with my sister, getting to see her new house and life in Oakland. Elliott and Eliza played well together (while Miles was with Mom in Chatt!). (See kid blog...eventually... for more on the holiday.)

Here we are at an awesome Mexican restaurant in Sausalito. Yummy margaritas!

Here are the kinfolk on the west coast: cousin Erin (all grown up) and Chuck and Gail. So good to see them!

Yeah, that's the Golden Gate bridge. We were at a children's museum. How cool is that?

We still need to figure out a way to do the holiday just right so that no one has to break the bank, and it’s not too crazy hectic. My thought is that if this life abroad goes on for much longer, we should invest in a timeshare in a place in the States that people can get to easily, and would want to visit any time of the year. We could block out our time for a month and just chill while everyone comes to visit us. What do you think?

The Garden

is beyond the imagination. The avocados are ripening. We have a few avocado trees, the tallest of which is about 50 feet high and produces avocados the size of grapefruit. They are round and the thin green skin easily peels off. We couldn’t eat all the hundred or so avocados that tree produces if we tried.

I made a guacamole this afternoon with cilantro, jalapeños, lemon juice, and a delicious red tomato all from our garden.

The fruit and veg growing in the garden that we can eat now are pecans, lemons, tangerines, avocados, custard apples, oranges, raspberries, carrots, green beans, beet root, turnips, broccoli, lettuce, tomato, small yellow tomatoes, egg plant, green pepper, celery and leeks….plus, all your fresh herbs.

What’s not in season yet but are coming are artichokes, some other kind of berries (young?), strawberries, grapes, pineapples, papayas, bananas, plums, pears, peaches, apples, Jerusalem apples(?), the black skin avocados, mangos, lichis, guavas, cucumber, peas, broad beans, potatoes, onions, and some other things I don’t even know.

When the leeks came in, we had a lot of potato leek soup. When the beans were ready, Miles helped pick them, climbing in among the vines that were tied up and had grown 6 feet high. The beans were as long as my hand and purple but turned green when they were cooked. We put them in everything: stir fries, soups, pastas, even lasagna.

I say we, but Tari is the star cook. Just like Fe, she professed to not know how to cook. I think I must be a real inspiration to these women! We also have great cookbooks, and I dare say Tari is even more proactive than Fe when it comes to finding recipes on her own and trying them out on us. There are so many ingredients all around us to work with here. She made walnut carrot bread the other day.

Oh, and we have three chickens that produce basically one egg a day each which has meant we haven’t had to buy eggs since we moved here. They have a chicken coop and a fenced in little chicken yard that is in a larger fenced in area where we have a compost, a shed with bags of fertilizer (i.e. manure), and a few more beds of lettuce or something. That’s on one corner of the back yard. In the opposite corner are apartments where Herbert, the gardener, lives with his wife and child, Panache, who’s 3, and where Tari lives with her son, Shepard, who’s 5, and Tari’s cousin Fadia who is her helper.


(Side note: Fadia’s name was Vaida until we met her. Eliza kept calling her Fadia, which is more of an Arabic sounding name, and now Vaida goes by Fadia to everyone now because she likes how it sounds. Names here are funny. SOme people have traditional Shona names like Tenday or Tarisai. Other people have English names like Lovemore, Nomore and Nevermore. I'll have to get a comprehensive list together for another blog. You can just imagine those women in labor shouting No More!!!)

Pawpaws (papayas?)

Green Beans

Broccoli
Back garden

Lettuce, celery, tomatoes, berries, herbs (garden by house)

New House

This is it:

Again, I feel the need to qualify this blog with a fact that many, many houses in Harare have huge gardens like this and swimming pools, etc. It did take us 4 months to find this place because we had trouble finding a house that met most of our criteria: was not too far from the school, had a borehole (because city water isn't dependable), electricity most of the time (again power cuts are a serious problem in some areas more than others), room for guests, no serious renovation needs, etc.

This house – the Liemba Close house – is a lot homier than the last one, and we're loving it. It’s cozy, more manageable. It feels better suited for a family with small kids. Not so big they get lost. Not so small you feel you can’t carve out public vs. private spaces. I am thrilled to get to work on finally making a home for us.

Moving down the road was a completely different animal than moving across the world: a few days of loosely packing boxes, a few days of schlepping, one big push with a truck and some extra guys. Having a housekeeper at House A (Tari) and another housekeeper at House B (Pauline who worked for the last family for 12 years) to help with packing and unpacking and dusting and cleaning out refrigerators, etc. also made life a lot less stressful.

We had a few projects to oversee during the transition:
- The razing and reconstruction of the “Wendy house” – kids’ playhouse

- Finding a second-hand, in-ground trampoline and getting it installed...this is David's favorite project... (view from master bedroom window)

- Fencing in the pool and installing the swing set
- Retiling the bathroom
- Pulling up carpet and refinishing parquet floors in the master bedroom
- Repairing the refrigerator and washing machine
- Major pruning: pulling up or cutting back a lot of trees and bushes (oh, that’s not a hill…it’s actually a tree and some shrubs covered in vines)

I'll just say here that I will have to devote another blog to the garden. We have around 20 fruit trees and at least 20 different veggies, not to mention, I swear, about a hundred varieties of plant life. It was a project of the retired Hannaford couple who lived here for 15 years before us. (Very importantly, we employ their gardener now!)

Also, other blogs to come will feature the enormous project (and pleasure!) of furnishing the house which will preoccupy me full-time until we leave for the States June 18.

View from veranda (seen in first photo) of pecan tree

Under the pecan tree

View of house from behind pecan tree and on the tennis court:

Tennis anyone? (it's clay!)

Backyard jungle gym circa 1985

HIFA

The Harare International Festival of the Arts was something we'd heard about prior to coming here. We were advised to join as HIFA Amigos to get certain benefits, like ticket discounts and first chance for buying tickets. So we did that. We were psyched for "the greatest thing Harare has to offer" - or so we'd been told by some. Others who live here don't even bother to go. I was curious about what the scene would be like.

The grounds are small compared to American festival venues, so it was easy to get around. Crowds are kept small and manageable mainly by the need to buy tickets to enter the ground or see any show. Most things are at the Harare Gardens park downtown, although there are shows at a couple of community theaters in other neighborhoods. It annoyed me that you couldn’t just wander around and check out various shows once you got in, and I started to suspect the nature of these rules when I attended the opening concert and was surprised to see so many white people. However, in retrospect it seems that Carmina Burana is just more attractive to that demographic. And the Coca-Cola stage at the concessions area where everyone filled tables and chairs all night definitely was dominated by the non-white crowd.

Sorry, but the whole racial/cultural divide does fascinate me here, and the festival was awesome for people watching. I was happy to see a lot more mixed couples and families than I have for the last 5 months we’ve been here, and it makes me wonder why I haven’t seen more up to now….maybe because I see them during the day when they’re working and not together? The South Asian community also had a good presence at the festival. They have their deep roots here as well. But by and large, the crafts and artisan venders were black African, from old ladies to Rastafarians. They had clothes, sculptures, wood carvings, toys, linens, instruments, jewelry, pottery, paintings…you name it. And it was really affordable.

It was less little-kid friendly than I’d expected. Now I know: you have to be more than 6-years-old to sit through an hour-long play/dance performance/comedic-juggler act. The kids did really enjoy the shows, but because they were targeting a general audience, it just didn’t hold their attention long enough. I’d spend half the time trying to keep them from disturbing people. Another lesson: get there early enough to find a seat that allows for a quick exit.

There was a lot to like though. People did come and go all day to see the various shows and just hang out in the gardens. The music was good, and a few shows were really moving. There’s nothing quite like seeing close up real professionals performing: their charisma, energy, and mastery over the instrument. I also was seeing types of music live that I’d never seen before (Sandra Nkake: funky Cameroonian/Parisian and Mafalda Arnouth: traditional Portuguese fado singer). There were a couple of big shows (Los Atlandticos; Salif Keita) that had everyone dancing…long jamming sessions, complicated, intense, beautifully performed by a stage full of amazing musicians. I mean, when did I last go to a concert where I and a load of other people around me were jumping up and down to the beat and going wild. It was awesome. And the parties on the gardens would go on and on (by my standards) every night after the concerts at the “VIP” tent where we could actually talk to the performers and get further sloshed with our friends (a couple of whom did actually perform).

So another lesson: take off work for at least a day or two to see the day shows and recover from the night shows (and better still arrange for someone else to take the kids to school at 7 a.m.).

(three times photos were rejected from being uploaded...will try to add later...though I didn't get much...left the camera a home most days)