On the process of dying

3 08 2012

I’m at the age when I’ve started to wonder how I’m going to go, you know, die. Two people who I knew well have died over the past few years, admittedly from smoking which I have never done. I rather like American scientist Carolyn Porco‘s comment in a Scientific American magazine some time back that went something along the lines of “It’s not death that I fear but I am not looking forward to the process”. I think that just about nails it for me. If it’s like the thief in the night and I don’t wake up one morning – well, it couldn’t really get much better than that. If it is like the long drawn out and excruciatingly painful process that my mother went through in her terminal cancer, then no thank you very much.

I am betting that I will “go” in a vehicle accident. The driving in this country is getting to the stage that I think this is a very real possibility. When there weren’t so many vehicles on the road I wasn’t so concerned but they have multiplied a lot over the past 3 years or so with the usage of real money and whereas once traffic jams were  unheard of now they are common in the centre of Harare. Melissa, who works frequently in Nigeria, tells me that even the driving in Lagos is better than Harare. That’s some statement.

I was going in to Avondale to meet my French teacher at 10h30 this morning and arrived at the turn into Cork Rd off 2nd Street just as the lights turned green with an arrow for me to turn right across the oncoming traffic. I’m not sure what inspired the white 20CD (I didn’t get the last 2 digits of the registration plate) Land Cruiser to accelerate towards me as I was about to turn but I had to take substantial braking action. I was not unprepared as I know this intersection is a problem and drivers coming out of town get frustrated with the long period of the red light and are prone to just ignoring it but I still let the driver know what I thought of him. The police of course were nowhere near; in fact they were on Churchill Rd traffic lights busily fining motorists for going through an amber light which is not a fineable offence (see Policing Amber post). So I missed that particular potential “process”. Now if only I’d read the last 2 digits of the number plate I could have at least given the Canadian Embassy a call. Coincidently there was a 20CD Land Cruiser at work when I got back this afternoon and it was also white but it was the smaller Prado model.


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The art of keeping going

31 07 2012

It’s official; we have the world’s best weather (see the previous post) and at this time of year it is really predictable and dry which means it’s the season for garden art shows. The Verandah Gallery in the Emerald Hill suburb of Harare has just had its annual exhibition this past Sunday. It’s a very sociable affair with a jazz band and loads of art on display but from my point of view it’s a bit commercial – designed for the mass market and more than a bit expensive. It is all for a good cause and profits go to the nearby Emerald Hill Children’s Home for the Deaf. There will be more garden exhibitions all through to the end of September as Zimbabwe’s artists struggle to make a living in what are exceptionally hard times even by world standards. My favorite gallery is the Gallery Delta in the old house (one of the oldest houses in Harare) that belonged to Robert Paul, an eminent Zimbabwean artist. It’s run by Helen Leiros, herself a well-known artist both locally and abroad, and her husband Derek Huggins and they have monthly exhibitions that are anything but commercial. Most of the art that I have collected over the past 10 years or so has come from there. It has not been easy of late for Derek and Helen who had to sell off some of their own art just to keep going. So I support them when I can.


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We have the best weather

30 07 2012

Jenny’s family left this country in the 1960s when it was called Rhodesia. The Unilateral Declaration of Independence had been declared and things were not looking good so the family settled in Australia. She now has a 16-year-old daughter who is interested in coming here for a visit. Her father (the parents are separated) has determined that Zimbabwe is too dangerous and has forbidden Jenny and Meg to come here which he can legally do until Meg turns 18. Maybe he saw the Australian government travel warning on Zimbabwe which even I have to admit is pretty impressive. I also have to admit that everything on it is true though when one compresses all the woes of just about any country onto one page it is bound to be impressive. Some of it is downright daft; “A comprehensive indemnity is often required by safari operators before they accept clients” (italics are mine) – of course it is required, you are going to come close to wild animals which are dangerous! It completely fails to mention that most Zimbabweans are law-abiding citizens, are friendly to anyone who cares to be friendly back and will go out of their way to help out. “There has recently been an increase in armed robberies, assaults and other violent crime. Security risks are heightened at night, especially on city streets, and in or near parks and the city centres”. Yes, but how does that compare with say, Jo’burg?

Then yesterday I got some spam advertising various safari options for the whole family in Zimbabwe with a mention of a survey and report by International Living on which countries are a good place to live taking into account a whole host of factors that in their opinion contribute to quality of life. The quality of life index page makes for some interesting reading. Zimbabwe is 12 from the bottom just above Haiti. Somalia is at the bottom, where it should be in my opinion.

Let’s look at the table column by column. First from the left is cost of living. Zimbabwe is quite expensive and shares indices with the Ukraine, Uruguay and Latvia. Our neighbour, Mozambique is slightly cheaper to live in. No news here; Zimbabwe got expensive after the changeover to the US dollar from the doomed Zim dollar.

Sort the Leisure and Culture column and Zimbabwe is listed there between Brazil and Chile. Scrolling to the top of the page we see that France and Switzerland top the list. France I have no doubt should be there but Switzerland? Scroll down a bit and we find Swaziland ahead of the UK! Just how objective IS this list?

Sort the economy list and not surprisingly the USA is at the top but where is Zimbabwe? Oh dear, we are right at the bottom with a score of 0. Looks like I will have to change the script below the title on this blog. I knew things were bad but THAT bad? But where’s Haiti? What, they have listed Haiti’s economy ahead (just) of Brazil’s!

Let’s move on. Environment. Zimbabwe doesn’t score well on this one either – they must have had a look at Lake Chivero recently or seen the fires on the AFIS site. Iceland is right at the top. I guess it’s been a while since a volcano erupted there.

Freedom Hmm, this is not going to be good and… no it isn’t. Well, at least we are ahead of North Korea, Somalia and Saudi Arabia. The lower rankings are depressingly shared by our fellow African countries to the north. Russia is not highly rated either. Maybe this list is reasonably objective.

Health is topped by France and Japan and Zimbabwe is a bit further down. Well, it’s actually quite a long way further down with other African nations. That has not always been the case. I know a public health doctor and she’s told me that once upon a time when had a really good health system. But that is no reason to not visit the country. The private clinics have some fine health care professionals and specialists.

Infrastructure is not a shining light for Zimbabwe. We are ahead of Mozambique though and I am on the internet on “broadband”. Our version of broadband. Not yours!

We have a quite respectable score of 57 under Risk & Safety. Just about all the other nations listed have a higher score. Except Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti. It must be the driving but I cannot believe that anyone’s minibus drivers are worse than ours.

What about weather? Click on the weather column and there we are; right at the top with Malta! I’ll accept that ranking. I don’t suppose the Aussie government bothered to look at our weather ranking. I don’t care that much, I KNOW we have great weather here in Harare. I’m not sure that I’d want to live in the south-eastern lowveld but it is pleasant enough in winter. Summer it gets very hot and humid.


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Not saving the planet

26 07 2012

“Yes it is expensive” commented the travel agent, “but I have just started booking the tickets for the school holidays and they are 900 dollars”.

I looked in disbelief at the sum of $535 she’d written on the printout of my itinerary and wondered if it would be cheaper to drive to Jo’burg. I had to go for a follow-up consultation for my knee replacement but the thought of driving through the lowveld heat in October was distinctly unappealing.

It’s 970km to OR Tambo airport in Jo’burg from Harare. For a return trip that makes it US27.5c a km. It is slightly further to drive but $535 would buy me about 420 litres of diesel which in my Land Cruiser, which is not very economical, would take me some 3360 km. Where is the incentive to take a more eco-friendly flight? The convenience of a flight is obviously a big factor in flying, driving is tedious over that sort of distance, and I can be home the next day if I fly. Unfortunately SAA and BA are the only carriers on that route and they can pretty much charge what they like.

I would be interested to know if there are any other international flights out there that compare with this one.


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Ngomakurira

15 07 2012

Ngomakurira  (“place where they beat the drums”) is a very large granite dwala 30km from the outskirts of Harare. At one time the drums were regularly beaten there at a full moon and I know someone who once spent a night on the rock listening to the drumming but I am told it rarely happens now. I met Lucina and various friends of hers at the base of the path this morning though I opted to drive the Land Cruiser up the 4×4 track from the south. It is a popular outing for the local 4×4 club and the challenge is to touch the beacon on the top with the bumper of the vehicle though I decided my driving skills were not of that calibre. The more energetic people opted to cycle their mountain bikes up the track and they were not much slower than the vehicles – the track is that rough!

The weather was unusually warm and very hazy so I contented myself with subjects other than the view.


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Photo break

11 07 2012

I decided it was time to take another afternoon off for photographic purposes so took a drive out north of Harare towards Domoshawa and then took a right turn at Ngomakurira down an appalling gravel road that I suspected would bring me out on the Enterprise road at the farm where I used to live. It did. Next time I will have to allow more time to stop and get the photos I wanted.


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Brothers in the sun

10 07 2012

“Do you have a letter?” the tax official at ZIMRA (Zimbabwe Revenue Authority) asked.

“What letter?” I replied.

“There’s a notice on the door” he waved vaguely in the direction of the entrance. “You need a letter from your company authorizing you to collect the ITF263” he continued.

“But I am the director!” I exclaimed.

“Well in that case we need to see your CR14 and your ID”.

I got up more than a little perplexed. I’d been to Kurima House in Harare to get an ITF263 (tax clearance form) and never been asked for company documents (the CR14 lists the names and addresses of a company’s directors) but I’d never won an argument with a tax official so there was not a lot to do except go and get it back at my house. I checked on the door on the way out and there was indeed a notice listing the requirement for a letter for a non-company official to collect the ITF263 but nothing else.

Arriving back at the tax office this afternoon the tax official banged on the office window as a walked past and told me to come directly inside ahead of the queue. Given the length of the queue I didn’t think that was a bad idea. I went to the next free desk and nobody there was interested in my CR14!  Just less than an hour later, with just 5 minutes left on the parking ticket that I’d bought, I was back at my truck with the precious green document and feeling more than a little pleased with myself. All the tax payments had been in order and though I had to visit a few other offices in the interim I was now clear to import raw materials for the next 6 months.

I was waiting for the traffic to move behind me so that I could reverse when the man with albinism appeared at my window. Blacks with albinism are easily spotted in this country of a black majority and while once they were shunned they have become much more accepted in the last 10 years or so. He held up a container of sunblock and said “Can you help me please sir, I need some money to buy some more of this?”

I paused a moment and then reached down into the foot well of the passenger seat and retrieved the ¾ full bottle of factor 30 sunblock that I keep in the pickup and handed to him. Fully expecting him to be disappointed at not getting cash to spend as he liked I was pleasantly taken aback at his obvious delight. I gently remonstrated him for not wearing a hat but he explained that he’d washed it that morning and it was still wet.  I’d once given my cap to an albinistic girl in the Zambezi Valley when paragliding there but unlike her this man did seem to be looking after his skin. The poor girl whom I gave my cap to was pathologically shy and was obviously taking the brunt of the teasing of the other kids.

I thought it a smart move approaching a white man who’d very likely be sympathetic and know what sunblock was. Blacks do of course get sunburnt but nothing like the extent that we whites do in this tropical climate. What the man who’d approached did not know was that I was a soft target on another front – my mother died of malignant melanoma in 1992, a high price for living in the tropics.


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A fine weekend

2 07 2012

I took the weekend “off” and went to stay with Gary and June and some of their friends at Tsoka re denga on the very edge of the Honde Valley in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. It’s not a place for small children as they could easily wander over the edge which would be fatal but we are all past that age and had a great time. The weather was warm for winter and we also got in some long overdue paragliding at our Samanga takeoff (not pictured). One the way back from Mutare today I indulged myself in a slower trip and time for some photos. Such are the perks of owning one’s own business!


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Where have all the skills gone?

28 06 2012

For 20 minutes I sat and watched an abortive attempt to tow a heavy steel structure across the car park of the engineering works that specialised in welding. They were using a thoroughly inadequate chain which kept breaking and it was getting boring so I decided to go and see what was happening with the coffee pot. I’d bought it at the gym coffee shop towards the end of last year because it seemed easier to use than the espresso pot that was probably older than me and, despite being very expensive, I thought it had to last a long time as it was made of stainless steel. I’d never been over-impressed with the marketing guff on the side of the box; “The Signature Collection is 100% craftsmen made because objects that are made by craftsmen resonate with emotion. Pick one up and you can sense the time and effort invested in its creation“. It felt to me distinctly machine mass-made to me but what the hell, it was a Nick Munro design (whoever he is if indeed he exists) so it had to be good. Then last week the spout began to leak and lo, with minimal effort, it came right off! Some craftsmanship this was but having paid $60 for it I thought it worth getting fixed.

They still hadn’t managed to get the gas lit so with an increasing sense of foreboding I decided to hang around and watch. Eventually things started to happen but it seemed to take an awful long time to merely re-attach a spout. The welder then made off with the pot and my concern turned distinctly nasty when a stub of a file was found and the inside of the pot attacked. I asked for it back, told the foreman I wasn’t paying and made off with the pot and my money nearly and hour after arriving.

It’s well know of course that skilled artisans are in short supply worldwide. Zimbabwe is no exception. In the dark days of the Zimbabwe dollar’s plunge in 2007/8, large numbers of professionals and artisans left for more stable and better paid jobs elsewhere. It was at that time that I had my Land Cruiser engine rebuilt at a machine shop in Harare. All seemed well but after 2000km it self-destructed and I opened the engine to find all 6 liners (hard metal sleeves in the cylinders) broken. I found out later that the original owner had sold up, emigrated to Australia and then sponsored all his best machinists to go over from Zimbabwe and join his new business. As I had done the re-assembly of the engine I was advised that I could not try to pin culpability on the machine shop even though it was obviously their error. Quite how they’d managed a blunder of that magnitude nobody could really tell me.

On a far larger scale the commercial farmers who were kicked off their farms in the land grab in this country took their hard-earned skills to the Middle East, New Zealand, Afghanistan, Iraq, West Africa and even Russia amongst other places. Zimbabwe is not an easy country to farm and we are now paying dearly for these skill losses.

As for my coffee pot I will have to see if the mess can be cleaned up (he even managed to BURN THROUGH THE SPOUT!) enough to make it useable. So it’s back to the old espresso pot (on the right in the photo) which although more fiddly to use does, in my opinion, make better coffee. Who knows, it might really have been put together by real craftsmen all those years ago when they weren’t in such short supply!

 


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About nothing and DIY in the middle of winter

22 06 2012

I haven’t written anything for sometime now. Nothing much has happened though I’ll have a go about writing it. Actually, quite a lot of nothing has been going on in Zimbabwe. I’ve heard of at least 2 Spar supermarkets that have closed their doors recently due to lack of trade. The small sawmill that operates off the same premises as my nursery is also on the verge of closing. They had a run-in with a union some time ago so paid off all their staff and now just employ them on a day-to-day basis as and when they have work. I got them to cut 1200m of battens for the greenhouse that we are recovering with plastic. We are not that busy either so are doing the maintenance that we ignored for so long in the dying days of the Zimbabwe dollar (LONG may it stay that way!). Actually this is traditionally a quiet time for us so I am not that concerned – yet.

I know that in the developed world there are specialist greenhouse covering and maintenance companies but that is not how we do things in Zimbabwe. If there’s a problem on the farm you get on and fix it yourself. ART Farm where I live has a fully fledged workshop that does all the on farm repairs and maintenance and on occasion I do use their skills. The senior mechanic is a pleasant fellow and I have used his help on the Land Cruiser after-hours on a Saturday. Though I have to admit (with head briefly bowed) that I thought replacing the oil seals on the half shafts would best be done professionally in town this week. Then I got the bill and thought that for $580 I should have had a go myself!

Building is not my forté but what the hell I gave it a go this week. OK, I supervised the builder who did the building. It’s nothing much, just a pit toilet known as Blair toilets in this part of the world after the government laboratory that many years ago developed the standard. It’s simplicity itself; a sort of square spiral wall (work it out!) over a squat hole in a concrete slab with a roof and vent pipe. There’s even a plan in the CFU (Commercial Farmers’ Union) handbook. Pretty basic stuff but it still required me to supervise the builder for the best part of the day while he got the plans wrong. It has taken him the last 3 days to do something that a skilled builder would have done in a day. At one stage I began to think that I should have got in a skilled builder and just paid but actually his building is OK for a farm builder and the skilled builder is “not reachable” according to the cell phone service provider. Which is a pity as we have some tobacco ponds to construct and it really does need accurate building skills. A previous builder “had a go” at some ponds a few years back and when I queried about why the walls were not visually level (no spirit level required to see this) he told me that it was not the walls that weren’t level it was the water in the ponds that wasn’t level! Harsh words were exchanged and I refuse to employ him. Maybe I’ll have to give it a go myself. I know that Tony has a dumpy level and I watched the skilled builder doing it just in case I needed the knowledge.

Maybe I’ll just go and employ a builder off the wall I see being built around a property on Harare drive. It’s certainly straight and level enough. And big. It’s at least 3m high and 300m long on just the road side – they have yet to build the other 3 sides but the bricks are there. That’s certainly someone with plenty of money and no taste. It’s been painted a light pink with mauve on the top. Mind you, I saw another like it (though much shorter on the Rolf Valley road) that was painted lavender and had a mirror in the electric gate. The lavender did not last; something much less brash now though the mirror is still there.

I suppose I should also have a go at repairing the coffee plunger pot at my elbow. Stainless steel no less and not cheap the spout is in the process of coming off and there is coffee leaking onto my desk. I could be catty and say it was made in China (which it was) and what does one expect except I do still have the box and it goes on about what a quality coffee plunger thing it is but it does claim to be designed in the UK and the English is genuine. Or I could just get on and have a go at fixing it. I have no idea how to solder stainless steel but I suppose I can find someone who does though I suspect it would be cheaper to buy another coffee pot. Though I did see some “cold solder” in an auto supplies outlet yesterday…


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