My Husband These Days

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For those of you who need another glimpse of him in his hat.

Little by Little

We moved into an unfurnished house in May. I had about 3 weeks before we left for the States in June to figure out how to fill the gaps. Nights looking at Home & Garden by the fire. Ah. Some furniture of ours was shipped here: couch, our bed, an end table, a couple of kid chairs and dressers. I wanted to make this house seem like ours and not just a temporary residence, but most things we will probably not be able to bring with us, so no point in investing in something terribly nice or unsalable. So here's some of what it looks like thus far (a work in progress).

The "lounge"...our living room / den...is the largest room and is both the formal and informal family gathering place. 

We need something bigger over the fireplace and more on the walls. The teak coffee table and wicker seats are new. We have a matching love-seat in the office. The bookshelf is one of a few things we had made by a local carpenter...by far the cheapest option.

Replacing the curtains was my least favorite project - but here they are.
Better than rose polyester with silky mauve tasseled trim. 

Kid's corner.

Love seat in the office.

One of our new local paintings,

Veranda off lounge...where we eat meals, do homework, socialize. Life in Zimbabwe is spent on the veranda.
All this furniture is locally made: simple and cheap.

We bought this old wicker set, had it patched up and stained, then reupholstered the cushions.

We were going to rip the bar out and make a den, but then we had a big party and decided it was useful.

We moved the bed under the window which means no view of the garden but morning reading light.

And space in the bedroom for the art deco vanity with cane chair, essential equipment for playing dress up.

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)