Hello everyone,
It is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, and I am well aware of the family gatherings taking place across the country. Here, the spring planting season will begin soon, as the rains are expected to being in a few weeks. This notion of planting season is different here, because in fact, they grow all of Newfoundland's summer crops in their winter time!! Fresh local food comes all year around.
The full moon rose over the African desert this week and the leaves are beginning to form on the Baobab trees. These are both signs that I have been here for a number of weeks. I also received my first postal letter, a definite indication that I have been here quite a while!! Thanks to my sister Carolyn for that treat. I love the speed of E-mail, but I have enjoyed having a written letter to carry around with me and read over and over again.
After a serious case of culture shock last weekend, I had a good week in Buhera. I am sporting a bit of an African look, as I now have 48 braids, compliments of the daughters in my host family. Much to the amusement of those around me, I carried a 10 pound bag of flour on my head from the market, and I got to try carrying a baby on my back, wrapped on with a beach towel. I wouldn't exactly say I'm starting to blend in, but I am trying as many of the local customs as I can. I also paid a visit to the home of a Buhera co-work. The kitchen hut is round, made of home-fired bricks and covered in sun-baked mud. The huts are lovely, often with concrete floors. The shelves for kitchen utensils are immaculate with the bowls and cups perfectly lined up. I was honoured to be there, and was offered five eggs to take home with me. Then we stopped by her sister-in-law’s place where I was given a bundle of vegetable. (Vegetable refers to a specific green leaf plant similar to kale, and here, called rape) Later, I learned that it would be customary for them to cook the eggs and vegetable for me, but they were completely uncertain as to how a white woman might like them fixed.
When Mr. Melusi and I went to Buhera, we carried the monthly salaries for the workers there. Since they would have no access to any banking services, we take it in cash. In the office we prepared an envelope for each person and counted out between $8,000 and 13,000 per person. This is the equivalent of $240 and $390 Canadian, or $160 and $260 US dollars. Much of this money will go home to families that live elsewhere in the country. Moses, for instance, lives 200 kilometers away from our camp, and can afford to go there once every two months due to the cost of bus fare. At home, his wife cares for 5 sons and 3 daughters with his salary.
On the topic of money, I have noticed that street vendors will charge me 50-100% more for an item than they would charge an African person. $25 for an avocado rather than $15 they charge one of my host sisters. This is a little irritating and I can get all worked up it for any number of reasons. My host mother says she gets charged more if a vendor sees her get out of a car rather than arriving on foot. But this week I had a light go off in my head about this practice. I realized that I basically believe in the concept of a sliding scale, and that it is appropriate for people to pay based upon their ability. So I have decided that I will pay $25 for an avocado, because, in fact, I do have a greater access to resources than others in my environment here.
I had an interesting conversation with a carpenter in Buhera. He was impressed to hear about the generosity of donors giving to Africans in the Supplemental Feeding Program. At first he said that you do not find such generosity amongst his people. (Not true, as evidenced by the eggs and vegetables I received). We got to talking about how it is easy to be generous with things you have plenty of. I pointed out the generosity I receive from his people in terms of friendship and warmth, things in abundance here. Maybe people don't readily share their incredibly scarce financial resources by they give willingly of their time and emotional support for friends in need, their physical labour, etc.
For the mapaholics on my mailing list, I traveled along some back roads this week, through Marange, to deliver some well digging equipment to some people there. This is about 60 kilometres from my usual camp, but the terrain was subtly different. There were more dramatic granite outcrops and huge boulders. The placement of huts and villages at the base of these rocks reminded me of camping in Joshua Tree National Park.
The final thing I will mention this week has to do with people's names. Here, the naming of a child is a way of creating a bit of oral history, and the child's name is a word in Shona that represents what was going on at the time of the birth. So names aren't different than other words, maybe like how Hope or Joy would be names used in English, and have other meanings in the language. So, in the past all of these names were in Shona, but recently, English words are used as well. So in the supplemental feeding program, we have children with names such as the following: Prosper, Privilege, Gift, happiness, More life, Marvelous, More Blessing, Confidence. With some of the names it is easy to guess the oral history, such as the children named No More, or Vigilance. It is quite entertaining, and I find it very similar to the names of towns in Newfoundland, such as Heart’s Delight and Come by Chance. It is nice to feel that connection to home, oral history is manifested in just a slightly different way.
