Zimbabwe

The flight to Zimbabwe is long and hard – not made any easier by sharing the London / Johannesburg stretch with what appeared to be an Afrikaner Rugby Club reunion dinner and booze up. Several chaps, with very little neck, in khaki shirts and shorts, drank and sang and squabbled their way throughout the eleven hours – one even deciding he needed to change his clothes in the aisle halfway through. Then there’s a charming five hour wait in the airport for the flight to Bulawayo.

Finally arriving at the ‘temporary’ Joshua Nkomo Airport Terminal (the new one has rested, unfinished and unloved, swathed in scaffolding – which is gradually being stolen – for the last ten years), it is a shock to be ushered into the customs and immigration hall by smiling customs officers, asking whether we have slept well, and whether we are enjoying our visit.

Now, say what you like, but the Zim economy is a basket case. The day we arrived the Government issued a new set of bank notes – ten to fifty trillion dollar bills. The morning paper costs six hundred million dollars. Now even our own dear Gordon Brown doesn’t have problems like that.

Though come to think of it, the two Supreme Leaders do have quite a lot in common: both unelected, both in charge of collapsed economies, both arrest opposition MPs and neither have got much of a sense of humour.

And by God you need a sense of humour to survive in Zim. It’s hard to believe, but the people are unfailingly polite and cheerful, gentle and optimistic.
There’s 92% unemployment, bread and meat queues outside the few shops that have anything to sell – most are closed and boarded up. And everyone gently reminds you not to drink the water – “We don’t want you to catch cholera” – it’s rampant in the countryside, where perversely, the much needed rains also wash sewage into the streams and rivers used for drinking.

The hospitals have no drugs or equipment, and the schools are on strike, probably because the teachers’ pay – in Zim dollars – no longer even pretends to put food in their families’ mouths.

Yet they stay cheerful.

Someone quips: “There are so many potholes in the Bulawayo roads, it’s the only town in the world where the police arrest you for drink-driving if they see you driving straight".

So it’s a little miracle to see the SPANA funded Donkey Protection Trust out every day on the roads around town and in the surrounding countryside, gently treating the animals that pull the carts that now service the region’s economy – whatever little that might be.

We went north to Gueru to meet two brave young vets, Keith and Lisa, also trying to help the donkeys of the struggling people up there. They also happen to be wild-life specialists – many of the game parks and reserves are being decimated by hungry poachers.

Before we had fully grasped the severity of the situation we had been recruited to help them dart and immobilise about ten fully grown lions. Somehow that Pope fellow got himself the safer end, sticking a thermometer up the unmentionables, while poor little me got the sharp end. Literally. I had to open the jaws of recumbent lions, draw out their tongues, slip an electronic sensor on the end, and try to concentrate on the readings (blood oxygen level and pulse rate), while Lisa kept asking disquieting questions, like “Is he coming round yet?”.

I can tell you, when he started growling, I “came round” pretty blooming quickly. I went out through the gate like a whippet.

I wish I could be as nifty in that blessed marathon.

Jeremy Hulme