Tea and Biscuits

The job hunt

sibusisiweyona — Sat, 17 May 2014 21:51:00 GMT

After that salty kiss with a salty ending and salty memories, I had preserved my interests for saltless, effortless ideas and individuals. I had not ever spoken to him again and he had not bothered to write of look for me. Apart from the sheer disappointment that we shared we shared nothing else and all the times we had shared and converstions we had had also turned into a lump of salt. I resolved to find a new joy and had hoped desperately to find it in Lubumbashi. There were no goodbyes exchanged and I boarded the Zambezi airlines flight bound for new beginnings. The immigration officer at the airport had been brusque which had saved me the rehearsed responses I had been practicing for weeks. I had been told a lot of stories about Congo and the bulk of them shared the bleak and theme of disappointment and violation. I had expected to see, streets thronged with armed gunman and wailing women and children. When I did not see any of this it suddenly made the veiled warnings from family members back home seem naive and ridiculous.

The company had sent someone to meet me at the airport. A small stout man holding up a sign with my name misspelt. We had driven to the office in silence and the language barrier had made it hard to tell if the man was naturally taciturn. I had held on to my handbag very tightly and had decided to keep my passport on my person. There had been no signs of the Zimbabwean flag so far, I had armed myself with the hope of spotting the Zimbabwean embassy as soon as we had landed. The nervousness that gripped me had not even allowed me to savour the memories of my first flight. My mind was also occupied firmly with interview jitters, my first job interview in a year. The desperation of looking for a job had gripped me so firmly that I had also contemplated never returning home if I had not gotten the job. It was not the job that I had always dreamt of, it was one that I had longed for, for the sake of being employed and for the sake of returning the 600 American dollars that I had borrowed for the plane ride.

Everyone had packed several blessings into my suitcase and many more into my pockets and they all believed that I would get the job. My grandmother called it my time. My time to shine, the ancestors have heard your cries she had said. I wish the cries had been heard sooner. Everything in me had become a pale shadow of its former self. I now possessed diluted joy, diluted hope and I came to believe that my degree had also become diluted, diminished in value and efficacy. I was now practicing how to smile as we turned into a driveway with a green gate. I did not want to give away my anxieties. The article I had printed on how to comport oneself in an interview had said always smile. I got down from the car with a smile as I etended my sweaty palms to the gentleman who had presented himself as my welcome party. Mr. Patel, the Human Resources Officer at Jambo Mining company.

El Niño

sibusisiweyona — Sat, 17 May 2014 21:44:00 GMT

The man next was drenched in the familiar stale hostile smell of cheap alcohol. Lawidzani had been declared an illegal substance in Zimbabwe after it had been discovered that the alcohol content was close to 70% and not the 14% that was written on the bottle. It was now being illegally imported from Mozambique through the bush. The boarders between Zimbabwe and Mozambique had always been porous which made the poverty and desperation porous between the 2 countries. We had become kin, a kin-ness formed by the similarities in our suffering. Ever since the landmines had been removed in the 90’s people would walk freely bribing the soldiers who manned the boarders with cups of rice and cans of fish.

On our way to my grandmother’s house in Zimunya after the cyclone had ripped the roof off our house, cyclone El Niño they called it. The landlord had said that he would have the roof fixed within the next 3 days but it had been a week and we decided to go to my grandmother’s house until the roof had been repaired. I had spent the last week going around looking for plastic bags to take home to cover the little possessions that we had. I had prayed particularly for our bed, it was the sofa, the chair, the dining table; the everything that we had.

This bed had been the centre of our belongings for the past 12 years and it hurt me to think that mother nature could easily turn it into a smelly pile of rubbish. The emotions that I felt just for a bed made me question myself, I felt a deep hollowness and a pervading sense of defeat that made me grieve even though no one had died. It was forbidden to mourn at random, mourning was strictly reserved for the passing of life. Even when someone was so ill and you could see the life slip away from them, you had to reserve the mourning for the time they would be declared dead. On most days like this, my faith usually overtakes my grief but today is not one of those days.

I am resigned to an overwhelming pain that makes me question a lot of things. I start blaming my father who left us years ago to marry another woman. I blame their children who I had never met, I blame his wife; someone had to be blamed. The rain had come all of a sudden accompanied by big bursts of wind. The corrugated iron sheets that made up the roof of our one roomed cottage were old and rusted. We heard creaking sounds then a big tearing noise that I will never forget as the iron sheets were torn off the house by the hurricane like wind. My mother had tried to console me but the despair she tried to mask with her counsel is what made me force myself to find strength in the tragedy we both shared. I was glad that Yolanda had not been there to witness what had just happened. She was in boarding school and I knew for certain that the roof of their dormitory had not been blown away too.

My mother and I were huddled in the corner of our beloved bed trying to find warmth from each other as all our blankets had been soaked wet. Cyclone Elnino, this is what they called it. This fiendish weather had a name? “I wonder what El Niño” means, I said to my mother. We had always lived from hand to mouth and my mother had taught us how to be content with what we have. Our poverty was just enough to humanize us and we had not felt bloated by suffering until this El Niño day. Our one room had been enough and big enough until El Niño showed us that it was so small and could be destroyed in one day. I am sure El Niño is a man I said to my mother. He can bring you to your knees the same way my father had brought my mother to her knees begging for her life as he pounded her with a brick in the head. The blood had flowed from her temples to her floral skirt. I could no longer see the pink and green flowers that had made it the envy of so many women. Any reminder of my father had always discomfited my mother, but today I had hoped that she would find solace in blaming him for our suffering the way I had done.

Tea and Biscuits

sibusisiweyona — Wed, 14 May 2014 03:35:01 GMT

I had hoped to meet and make a friend on the bus as we were all headed to Harare to register as first year University students. I enrolled into university motherless and on the brink of womanhood. The boy seated next to me on the bus had smelled of dried cassava root mixed with fish and cheap alcohol. He had talked and talked pontificating about politics and the withering economy. There were no more free seats so I sat there and stared outside the window wishing that my mother could have been there.
The events of that day will be etched in my mind forever like a tattoo. The pastor’s yard had always smelled distinctly of freshly cut grass and pine, from the pine trees that flanked his wire fence. It was always a fresh satisfying smell that masked the fetid scent of neglect that had taken over the entire city. This scent was enshrined in the potholes, blocked drains and the cracked pavements that the city council no longer bothered to maintain. We were so excited to have tea and biscuits at the pastor’s house.
I often wish that they had not served us biscuits that day. After they broke the news to us something in me broke. The love of biscuits and tea broke with it and I have not eaten a biscuit since. I banished biscuits from my mouth and my stomach forever. The pastor’s expression was sullen and his wife’s countenance was betraying. A pervading look of finality and sadness had enveloped my mother and we could hear it in the sound of her voice as she recounted the worst news I had ever received. She spoke slowly with cracks in between words, cracks that I have today every time I remember that day.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), we had learnt this in school. Big words whose meaning were translated into death, stigma and fear all mixed up in one big bowl of shame. Each ensuing visit to the clinic became even more foreboding and we came to see her weekly appointments as an augury of her return to the ancestors. My mother became slight and her hair flowed like a new born baby’s hair. Her skin became dark and shiny and her eyes became so bright. Always bed ridden she began to lose her sight, her joy and her life. Her gait became stiff and I often had to lift her up to take her to the toilet and back to her bed. The whorls of despair that we had; became insurmountable. Flu became an arbiter of doom and the slightest chill in the atmosphere made everyone panic looking for blankets to heap on top of my mother.