Giving Thanks, Backdated Blog #2

It’s thanksgiving. People are always giving me thanks here. Going out of their way to tell you what a big heart they think you have. What astonishing feats of altruism warrant this outpouring? Lending $10 when a mother living in a distant village is sick and the money to finance a visit home is short; contributing to the cost of automatic basic human rights like an education or a decent house; letting neighbors and friends take water from my full tank during the last dry difficult weeks before the rainy season starts. All this presumed generosity on my part never really threatening my access to excess. My relationship to most of the people I know here is at least partly tinged by my role as boss or benefactor. Sometimes I feel like I represent nothing so much as a big bobbing life preserver in a sea of need.

We had an amazingly abundant Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. Nearly all expats, we gathered to celebrate the lives we were born into. Turkey, stuffing, homemade fresh mango chutney in place of the cranberry sauce, gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes. Even pumpkin pie and peach cobbler. As I drove home, sated beyond reason, I passed the lines of Mozambicans filing out of their small adobe, thatch-covered churches; walking home to their small adobe, dirt-floored homes.

It finally rained today. We can only hope it marks the beginning of the now two-month late rainly season. I would be most thankful for that.

Back home? Backdated Blog # 1

So I’m back home. If that’s what this is. I’m not sure I have a home these days, certainly nothing that has that gemütlich feel too it. My eyes had to readjust and I noticed funny things. In a sea of abject need, oodles of broken things, what is chosen for spiffing up?

There are shiny new reflectors along the curve of highway leading into town, right before you come to the supermarket. It’s just where the population density starts to warrant some sort of protection for the folks living in the huts nearest the road, where the demographics shift from “rural” to “semi-urban.” It’s a dangerous spot to live if a fast-moving truck takes a few extra seconds to gauge the trajectory of the turn and careens off into the neighborhood, but not sure I would be comforted by some flimsy reflecting metal posts in the few feet separating me from the steady stream of rickety semis barreling into town.

In the middle of nowhere, on a barren stretch of pock-marked asphalt connecting two small towns, some men were carefully painting the railings bright blue on a 20 foot bridge over a seasonal creek. The gates guarding the two railroad crossings in town now have festive red and white stripes.

The average skin-color of Shoprite (the only supermarket in town) clientele continues to get paler. It’s dramatically lighter than when I first arrived and I was often the only Mzungu in the store. The white Zimbabweans have really started to put down roots here, or more accurately, to put up walls. The number of compounds going up around town continues to multiply, cement houses with the beginnings of imposing brick walls surrounding the acre or two or three adjacent. They have no country of their own anymore, so I suppose that makes them overreact in their defense of whatever spot of land they are currently calling home.

There are moments, days, when I feel I shouldn’t be here. The Sub-Saharan African environment is clearly not meant for northern-European skin if the Rhodesian complexion is any indication. Their blotchy-red, sun-scarred faces would make good before photos on Extreme Makeover.