Across the bridge 1

I have filled seven sheets of paper. The other six are already too long. I have to trim this list down. Using what formula though? Everything looks very important. The purse will ultimately determine if any of this ever gets bought. I worry about how I am going to carry all this stuff across the bridge.
And so it came to pass. I got a new job back home in Zimbabwe. I leave my present one and my little nest in the Johannesburg sky, in three months’ time. I should be doing cartwheels. I should be planning farewell cocktails. Instead, I am stressing myself out with putting together what I now call the “Zimbabwe survival kit”. It is not supposed to be this hard. I do have a home in Harare to go back to. It was my city of choice when I first looked for a job, after University. My best friends are there. My family is in Zimbabwe - STILL, to use that strange word I always find weird when people ask, “Is your family STILL in Zim?” As if, what? They were supposed to have all upped and left, all 102 of us, moving to Johannesburg? Leaving their homes, lives, and other pursuits to go where? On whose wages? Let me not start on that one.....
I don’t really know my real “home” anymore. A lot has changed since 1999. I was not there when all the big political and economic upheavals happened. Each time I went back, and I did so religiously each Christmas, August school holiday and Independence days, I couldn’t relate to this new country. I also went back for all the family funerals. And there were so many I lost count. I became a visitor in my own country. I no longer belonged. When I finally put lodgers into my house, it was a sign that I could no longer keep up this illusion of “two homes”. I threw my hands in the air when I could not figure out who to call to fix a leaking pipe, and where to buy something as simple as bread. Over the last five years, when I went back, I stayed with my friend Nozipho. She became my mother, and I her little child. When I needed airtime, she would simply whip it out of her bag. I would express an interest in sweet potatoes and magically they would appear in front of me. When the power went off, I would sigh and lie back in her nice bed, knowing that soon, very soon, someone in her house would figure out how to cook the next meal, boil me some bath water, and even provide cold water to cool it down! I don’t think she will be driving from the Eastern end of the city across to my Western part, just to bring me bath water!
My friend Bella became my transport manager. Needed to get home-home to see my parents? Bells provided the car, the driver and the fuel. Need a one night hotel booking? Bells knew every bed and breakfast in town and I would zip in and zip out like a business executive. Our wonderful driver-tour-guide-handy man-reliable third hand Andrew knows where to find everything from tyres, to cheaper beef to hair salons that open on Sundays. Geri the doctor had to make house calls when I got the odd flu or needed some hard to get drugs.

When I visited any of my family, I was feted and spoilt. Nobody expressed any impatience with my stupid or strange questions; how much is bread? When will the electricity be back on? How do you get money these days? How much do we put in the Sunday collection plate? I was a visitor you see. I was sister/aunty/the child from Joburg, a whole planet away. I was smiled at and tolerated for my not being in the know. “Sister, this is how it is done in Zimbabwe now”, one of my brothers always chided me. That kept me mum for the rest of the fortnight. When I finished reading the books I had brought on holiday, and I got tired of bathing from a bucket, or the lack of internet access got to me, I simply changed my ticket and ran away.

I will no longer have this luxury. This is why I am putting together my ‘survival kit’. The big essentials I will need to cope in my now dysfunctional “home”. I have listed plastic buckets for storing water, a gas stove, long lasting lamps, matches, candles lots of candles. Someone says I need a bread maker - but who will be making the bread? Moir? This is stuff I never had, let alone knew where to buy. I have also been advised to buy a power generator, an invertor, a water tank. Eish! What size do I get? Where? I haven’t listed the groceries yet.
The political conversations, if one can call them that - are what I am particularly dreading. Over the years I had learnt to just listen, smile, and shake my head in a non-committal manner. Depending on where I found myself, it was along these lines; Tell us what Mbeki/Zuma are saying? What are they saying in South Africa? What will they do? The high expectations of what South African mediation was (and is still), supposed to deliver still baffles me. This very South African government which from where I have been sitting, lurches from one crisis to another of its own? When people asked me “what the South Africans are saying”, I wondered which ones they were expecting to hear from? The media here which if it devotes an inch to issues beyond national borders it is about an American celebrity or the Greek debt crisis? Or did they want to know what black South Africans in the townships think of Zimbabweans? Was May 2009 instructive enough?

In civil society, what I consider my real political turf, the conversations were along the lines of: Haa, Chipo? Don’t talk to her she is Central Intelligence that one! We don’t work with James anymore, he is very MDC-T. Ugh, what can you tell us about Stella? That stupid woman who is sleeping with all the men in MDC-M, and you know she is also sleeping with that guy in ZANUPF. So really she is ZANU PF”. All this would be said with such hyper-ventilation. So much venom. You had to jump backwards to avoid the inevitable spit that would follow. You had to take sides in these “conversations”. You had to declare your interest. I was scared into silence.
On more than one occasion, when the ‘conversations’ got so hard, I switched off, packed my little bags and feigned some important meeting I had to get back to Joburg’ for. I have avoided political debates in the Zimbabwean diaspora spaces because the debates were no longer debates. I refused to speak to the media because I did not want to be pigeon-holed. I chose instead to write. That way I could be in control of what I wanted to say, when to say it and to whom. I will need more than survival strategies for my return. I need re-engagement strategies. Who to engage with? How? I will need to think long and hard about that. For now, I will continue to write.
So since you asked. Am I excited about going back home? Umm, erm, ahhh, well, yes. Sort of. I am ecstatic in the morning and by nightfall I am in a complete state of panic. I do not know how to survive in the new look Zimbabwe. I have become used to an easy, on the tap lifestyle. For the last 12 years, I have slowly become removed from my rural credentials that I like parading around. At least in the rural village I knew where to find firewood, or clean water. It was a given that we went to bed at 7pm, because that was the life. I read books by candlelight because that is what we did. I do not know how to speak the political languages anymore. The shark infested political pool and discourse looks too murky to wade into. The social languages of getting by how you can and screw the next person, is one that will take me years to get used to.
Now where do I buy that good Indonesian coffee in bulk?