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.
