Zimbabwe Absurdity

So it’s all over. Bully for Barack Obama but will he live up to the charisma? We will have to wait for the answer on that but his election will almost certainly do nothing for the Zimbabwe situation. Why should it? We still don’t have anything that the US wants. Curiously the results of the US election were known within 6 hours of the poll closing. We still don’t know the results of ours some 6 months later!

Yesterday was oppressively hot as only November can be in Zimbabwe. There were vague promises of storms but the real rains only start around the middle of the month. I needed to make a short trip of around 50km to go and pay for the next load of used peat moss that we use in the nursery. It costs 3 dollars (all prices are in US now) a bag of 100 litres which is expensive for a waste product but we are getting used to paying high prices in Zimbabwe now; 26 dollars for an oil filter for my pickup, 275 dollars for switchgear for a borehole that would have been expensive at 75 (it consisted of a capacitor, overload relay and metal box to hold it). Anyway, I was looking forward to a trip out of town which is something that I rarely do these days.

On my way out I crossed over some traffic lights that were not working (power cut) which is one way to control the traffic; people are much more cautious when they don’t know what’s going on. About 100m down the road a white Jack Russell dog ran into the road. I had plenty of time to avoid it and as it did not look lost I hooted and it moved off the road. There was a lot of hooting behind me and looking in the rear view mirror I was horrified to see it back in the road and running in front of a large and impatient pickup. Fortunately there was plenty of space to pull over which I quickly did and opened my door and called. A very scared little dog leapt into the cab and literally burrowed under the clutch pedal. It took me a while to extricate her and she then burrowed under my left arm. It was not long before a concerned (I think he thought I was stealing the dog) gardener ran up to the cab to claim the dog back. I handed Candy back to him and carried on out of town. Somehow the rest of the day seemed a bit more tolerable.