Winter

Door: Annemarie

Fijn dat het in Nederland warmer wordt, hier dus niet: met twee truien aan en een muts op achter de computer; thee drinken om warm te blijven; winterjas ipv witte jas aan tijdens visite lopen.

Lennard breng ik lekker ingepakt naar de creche, om hem vervolgens ook weer lekker ingepakt op te halen. In Nederland is er de bij-de-deur-ceremonie van alles aan- en uittrekken. Hier niet. 'Lekker makkelijk' volgens Lennard. Ook praktisch; binnen is het ten slotte even koud als buiten, dus waarom zou je je jas uittrekken als je gaat spelen en slapen? Hij had het in ieder geval niet koud met zijn trui en jas aan onder een dikke deken. Alleen zijn pet hadden ze afgezet. Wel grappig hoor, onze oudste peuter de hele dag met een pet achterstevoren op zijn hoofd.

Jasper houdt niet van een hoofddeksel. Zijn oplossing: snel in de luieremmer gooien als mama even niet kijkt. Inderdaad, heel effectief. Gelukkig valt zijn haar ruim over zijn oren, dus toch nog warme oren.

7 million have no access to hospitals: Biti

Source: http://www.newzimbabwe.com/

10/06/2013
by Staff Reporter

HALF Zimbabwe’s population of 13 million people is not using conventional medicine due to poverty, according to Finance Minister Tendai Biti.
As a result, thousands of Zimbabweans are dying needlessly every year as they seek help from traditional healers and self-styled prophets.

Biti, speaking during the launch of the Poverty Income Consumption and Expenditure Survey Report last Thursday, said the government had to review its expenditure to increase health services access for the poor.

He said: “Half of the country’s population is not using modern health services and facilities, varikuenda kumapostori nen’anga, the marabous and the igwes.

“It’s frightening that after 33 years of independence, 50% of the population does not have access to modern health facilities.”

President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai last year spent US$45.5 million on foreign travel, accounting for 1.2 percent of total public expenditure.

Biti says the government should urgently cut non-essential expenditure – including foreign travel for government officials – and redirect resources to the health sector.

Zimbabwean 'taken to village court for failing to give husband best chicken pieces'

A Zimbabwean man assaulted his wife and dragged her to a village court last week where she was found guilty of disobeying custom by failing to give him the juiciest pieces of chicken.

By Peta Thornycroft in Johannesburg 2:48PM BST 15 Oct 2012

Nomusa Sibanda, 24, gave her husband the gizzard, wings and one drumstick and ate the chicken breast and second drumstick herself, according to local newspaper, The Sunday News.

Jabulani Ncube, 40 was incensed and beat up his wife who fled to her grandmother's house.

The next day, he forced her to attend the village court where he complained to the traditional leaders in the Nkayi Communal Land, 100 miles north east of Zimbabwe's second city Bulawayo, that his wife was "uncultured and disrespectful".

He warned that he would seek a divorce if she again failed to give him the drumsticks and breast which in traditional culture are due to the man of the house.

Mrs Sibanda was unrepentant and told the court: "How long shall I slaughter chickens and not taste the back portion?"

She was found guilty of ignoring custom and fined a chicken, as was her grandmother Gogo MaDawu for failing to teach her granddaughter "how to treat her husband and dish out meals". 

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk

A nice summary of How Zimbabwe is for travelers at the moment

From: http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/aug13_2012.html#Z14
By Ross Borden On August 6, 2012 ·

On an 8-day trip to Zimbabwe, Matador co-founder Ross Borden saw a country still trying to find its feet after a disastrous decade, but far from the crisis portrayed in the media.

WHEN I WAS ASKED TO SPEAK at the 37th World Congress of the African Travel Association, hosted this year in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, the preconceptions I had about the country began to run wildly through my mind. Here are a few that I was dead wrong about, and one that I wasn’t.

1. Zimbabwe is dangerous.

According to multiple people I met who live there and work in the tourism and safari industries, if you want to go to Zimbabwe, the best months for both adventure and wildlife are September, October, and November.

At Matador, we believe most travel advisories and American perceptions of overseas destinations being ‘dangerous’ are way overblown. I enjoy visiting places that some consider dangerous, so I was interested to see how Zimbabwe stacked up to others that struggle with this stigma — Brazil, Colombia, Iran.
The big cities are where most violent crime is concentrated. It wasn’t a surprise then that Victoria Falls, as well as the couple national parks we visited, felt just about as safe and friendly as a place can get. In fact, Vic Falls has such a small town feel that other journalists joked it had the vibe of a US National Park in the off-season.

2. Zimbabwe’s wildlife has all been wiped out.This was a big one for me since I love seeing wildlife, and it was my strongest misconception going in. I’d read well-documented reporting that, following the fast-track land reform program Robert Mugabe instituted in 2000 targeting political opponents and white farmers, many of the well-protected wild areas and national parks had fallen victim to unchecked poaching, and that much of the country’s wildlife had been completely wiped out.
I was relieved to see troops of baboons and packs of warthogs trotting along the road from the airport after we flew in, but nothing could prepare me for getting woken out of a dead sleep at 3am on the first night in Victoria Falls, to the sound of four bull elephants destroying trees outside my hotel room at the A’Zambezi River Lodge. This herd of wild elephants wandered right into the garden of our hotel to gorge on all the tasty things planted there. The hotel manager wasn’t pleased the following day, but I was beyond stoked to spend over an hour that night following them (very cautiously) around the grounds and watching them destroy the hotel’s landscaping.
Keep in mind this encounter wasn’t even inside a nature reserve — once we made our way to protected areas like Hwange National Park, the numbers of elephants we saw increased dramatically, and we also spotted lions, hippo, water buffalo, hyena, kudu, zebra, and water buck. I was thrilled with the amount of wildlife we were able to see in a short period of time, and after speaking with different naturalists we ran into, it seems like the wildlife in most places is on the road to a full recovery.

3. Hyperinflation will make buying things a total hassle.After seeing years of news coverage on the hyperinflation of Zimbabwe currency, I was expecting that money would be a pain in the ass and I’d have to carry around bricks of 10 billion dollar notes to buy a beer or some lunch.
But the currency of Zimbabwe has become so worthless they’ve retired it completely, and the country now operates on a mix of foreign currencies, including the South African rand, the GBP, the euro, and most commonly the US dollar. It’s difficult to assess how this transition has affected prices for ordinary Zimbabweans, and although some things are more expensive now, it’s nice not having to do insane math to convert currency. There are a couple ATMs in Vic Falls, but I’d recommend bringing a decent amount of US dollars to get you started. The only Zim dollars you’re likely to see are those sold by kids in the street as novelty souvenirs. They got me…I paid $5US for a stack of worthless old Zim notes. I just had to own a real 10 trillion dollar bill.

4. Beyond the wildlife, there’s not much to see/do in Zimbabwe.If I were Zimbabwe, I’d brand my country as a destination for adventure travel in addition to safaris. Here are a few options that stand out:

• Rafting the Zambezi – Both above and below the 350ft-tall, 5,600ft-wide Victoria Falls, the Zambezi River flows through dozens of tight gorges that make for wild rapids. To get the best of the rafting season, make sure you go somewhere between August and December.
• Bungee jumping / Rope swinging / Zip-lining – All three of these activities can be done from the same place — the bridge spanning the gorge right below Vic Falls, which also marks the border with Zambia. My favorite was the rope swing, where you basically step off a 390ft bridge and “free fall” until you’re only about 30ft above the river and do a massive pendulum swing out across the gorge (way scarier than the bungee jump).
• Micro-lite flying over and around Victoria Falls – This can be done from the Zambia side of the gorge and is the best way to see Victoria Falls, even better than a helicopter, not only because it’s cheaper but because you can FEEL the falls in addition to seeing them.
• Fishing – If you’re into sport fishing there are some great day trips you can take up the Zambezi above Victoria Falls, with plenty of river monsters to be pulled out of the murky water up there.
• Swimming in Devil’s Pool – This is the one thing I was really hoping to do, but unfortunately the water was way too high to do it safely during our visit. What is Devil’s Pool? When most of the rainy season’s water has drained out of the jungle and passed over Victoria Falls, the water on the Zambia side of the gorge becomes low enough to hang out in a hot tub-sized swimming hole right on the edge of the plunge. The best time to do this is October to January.

5. Since tourism has been on the decline for years, Zimbabwe won’t have many high quality hotels and safari lodges. From the A’Zambezi River Lodge, where wildlife mills around the garden 24 hours/day, and the more upscale, colonial-style Victoria Falls Hotel (great for evening cocktails), to the over-the-top luxury of a tented safari in the bush at The Hide in Hwange National Park — you’ve got a wide range of high-end resort and hotel options.

6. Given the repressive regime of Mugabe, border crossings will be difficult and expensive.It always seems that the shadier a government is, the more difficult its country will be to pass in and out of — especially overland. I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy it was to cross the border to Zambia for the day and come back to Zimbabwe that afternoon.

When we did the bungee jump/rope swing off the bridge (the operation is technically in Zambia), we weren’t even required to buy a visa, and when we drove over the bridge later that week to spend a full day in Zambia, we were only in line for about 5 minutes at the crossing.

7. Robert Mugabe is still running a full-blown dictatorship.This is the one thing I had correct going in. It’s great to see a country recovering, but very sad and disheartening to see one that’s a shadow of its former self, where political opponents die in “fires” and “car accidents” on a regular basis, or just disappear altogether.
As a tourist, you’ll be far from the crosshairs of Mugabe’s henchmen. But I felt really bad for all the amazingly friendly Zimbabweans I ran into, who were either ignorant of Mugabe’s ways or too scared to talk about it openly. At the end of the day, it’s easy to feel conflicted. Part of me wanted nothing to do with a country run by such a government, and part wanted to enjoy this amazing country and not punish its citizens for the mistakes of its government by avoiding travel there. I’d encourage you to pick the latter and go enjoy Zimbabwe.

This is Zimbabwe - change

This time not an article I wrote, but something I could have written. It takes place in the supermarket we normally go to.

It is noon on Saturday and I have just left OK Supermarket in Masvingo, a small town in southern Zimbabwe, where I had gone to buy some necessities.

The supermarket shelves were jam-packed, and there was a wide assortment of commodities, in stark contrast to the situation at early 2009, when there was virtually nothing on most supermarket shelves across the country.

The introduction of the multicurrency regime, which allows shoppers to use international currencies, chiefly the US Dollar, South African Rand and the Botswana Pula, stock levels in shops have manifestly improved, and the biting shortages of three years ago have become a thing of the past.

There was a hive of activity throughout the supermarket as shoppers filled trolleys with various commodities. There was no doubt in my mind that they enjoyed the shopping. I observed that the majority of shoppers were happy, and most looked generally healthy too. They chatted away, small kids cried for toys and chocolates, and most parents did not hesitate to give in.

This is testimony that life in Zimbabwe has appreciably improved. People have relatively higher disposable incomes than three years ago.  They eat better, and they have enhanced access to health care. They now lead lives that are substantially less traumatic.

I enjoyed the shopping too. But heading to the till was less exciting. The glee that had been apparent on the shoppers’ faces vanished as they painfully crawled towards the tills, leaning forward and resting their elbows on the trolleys.   Babies strapped on their mothers’ backs began to cry; obviously from the humid condition in the supermarket…the generator was evidently struggling to run the air-conditioning system.

I counted ten people in front of me in the queue and, using the clock on my mobile phone, I calculated the average time taken by the till operator to serve one shopper…it was a disappointing 4 minutes! Only two of the ten shoppers had trolleys. The rest had small shopping baskets, and most of those baskets were not full.

I sighed with desperation and remarked to the guy behind me about my observation, and he actually thought our queue was one of the fastest. But why 40 minutes to serve only ten customers and how many customers would a single till operator serve in 8 hours?

The problem lies in the multicurrency system. The system has no doubt brought about the much needed relief, as it helped to stabilize the monetary system and helped to impede the galloping inflation of 2008. But the authorities have done nothing to ensure the availability of small denominations. As a consequence, retailers struggle to find change. The unavailability of change is the principal reason for the queues forming at the tills.

The customer immediately in front of me purchased groceries worth US$40. 33 and he tendered a US$50 note. His change was US$9. 67. But the till operator did not have the 67 cents, so she had to engage in some lengthy negotiation with the customer, beseeching him to buy more things worth 67 cents.

Initially the customer strongly objected to the proposal, arguing raucously that he did not want to be coerced to buy things he did not need. As the till operator tried to explain to him that she had no way of helping, he threw tantrums and shouted unprintable profanities at the innocent lady, who visibly showed signs of tiredness, having dealt with irate customers since morning.

Eventually, realizing that his protests would yield nothing, the disgruntled customer cooled off and agreed to buy the things he didn’t need. But there were not many things whose prices easily added up to 67 cents. So he took some bubble gums, a biro and an extra plastic carrier bag, which all added up to 65 cents. The till operator then printed the receipt, and she hastily shifted her focus to me. Although he knew he had lost 2 cents to OK Supermarket, he didn’t believe that any further protestations would be a worthwhile investment, and so he left.

My turn came, and as sure as sunrise I also left with a couple of items I definitely did not need, and left 3 cents at the till.

So, if the said store is open 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, serving 15 shoppers an hour, making an average of 3c per customer in unpaid change, with 5 tills in the shop – it comes to a monthly revenue of US$432, the average wage of two teachers!  It would be impossible to estimate the monthly added revenue to the business of the goods bought under duress.

This is what happens to shoppers across Zimbabwe, day in and day out. It is a double tragedy…valuable time spent in queues and the loss of hard-earned money to retailers. But while these are real grievances, they are rarely discussed in public.  Zimbabweans seem to be more concerned about other issues, such as how to make more money, corruptly or otherwise.

source: http://www.sokwanele.com/thisiszimbabwe/archives/7699

Harare it is

A lot has happened the last month. It’s about time to give you an update. As we write this, we are in Harare, the capital. Two weeks ago, we received a phone call that Annemarie could start her acclimatisation that next Wednesday. That was the first of June. As we already had an offer in our pocket to stay at the house of some people that are on holiday, we were able to leave and move the next day. So that was how we ended up in Harare. It’s quite a different life here. We have running water and electricity all day, there is a cook, a wonderful garden and shopping centers close by. So we really get spoiled in Harare. Mark is now a full time ‘baby minder’, and this is very nice, but also tiresome. Annemarie works in the hospital for three months. Here working days are from 8am to 4pm, but in reality she is sometimes home for lunch already, and other times just after dinner.

Lennard is growing fast. He started to crawl, but whenever he has the change, he will find something to pull himself up. That gives him a lot of opportunities to grab interesting things. You’ll understand now why we said that looking after Lennard is also tiresome. It is nearly impossible to do something else next to this. Well, some work can wait, as we will stay another six years of so...

Message from Morgenster

Dear all,

We are here, Morgenster Mission, Zimbabwe. Eight days ago we have had a blessed commission service in Leiden and then a good trip from The Netherlands to Zimbabwe. God blessed us in many ways. You can read about it below.

It is what we expected, yet different. We arrived in a house that was left by our predecessors in December. They left some important first things and as I, Mark, was able to bring stuff along in the past months, it is quite livable. After two days we even had a filled fridge, a nice bed, hot water and internet! But what makes it strange is that you cannot start working (no permits) and have to deal with new situations like personnel, power cuts, responding to new names (MaiLennard for Annemarie), no transport (the nice 4wheel drive is in the garage, but some paperwork needs to be done first). It is good, but also feels strange that you don't know how the processes are. Along the way, we find out what we need to fill in and where. Situations change.

But what is very good is the attitude of the people. Neighbors come and welcome us, people show us the way etc. And the house is great, as is the garden and the environment.

Reading through the goodbye letters from the tutor group and college made me realize again how wonderful the time was. For those from All Nations, thanks for your prayers and lovely goodbye messages. We miss you.