Tagged with: traveljournal

  • Days 15-47

    The following weeks are spent at the office doing the bulk of the work in the stock control system. I don’t feel this stuff is interesting enough to document, so I take a break from journal writing.

    location:Harare / Reapers office
    summary:Working
    trip:zimbabwe01

  • Day 14

    No word from the service provider about my enquiry for a permanent connection, so I phone them to see if there are any human beings to talk to. There are. They inform me that a radio connection will be required and that the setup cost will be about Z$400,000 with a monthly fee of around Z$6000 a month. Unfortunately a new repeater station may be required in which case the cost may rise to Z$1million, which sounds horrendous, but is actually about £5000. I call two other service providers (there only seem to be three), and am still waiting for them to call back. Whatever the chosen option it’s still going to take around two weeks to install it, so it doesn’t give me much time.

  • Day 13

    Simon runs a small shop for the community surrounding Basil’s Harare office. Today Simon, David and I go to the local supermarket (significantly less local than you might expect), to get some stock for it, and fill up three big trolleys with consumables. The prices are generally about three or four times lower than the UK, but in some cases the difference is staggering. Cigarettes are over fifty times cheaper – no doubt due to far lower taxes, and natively grown tobacco. Good job I don’t smoke.

  • Day 12

    Apart from more Playstation and TV, highlights of the day include going shopping for some new clothes, which are about three or four times cheaper than in the UK, and CDs, which are not. In the evening I go to the local cinema with Simon and Rosemary (his cousin, Mike’s daughter – keep up, willya?) to see The Exorcist. Although I’m a fairly anti-horror person, as many of my friends will attest, I was quite curious to see this famous film.

  • Day 11

    I wake up late, to find Basil has already left for work. I’m not sure if he intended me to join him but there wasn’t anything I could have usefully done so I’m glad I have remained here. It’s just as well actually as the DHL documents dad sent me on Monday arrive at about 09:30. It’s the security questionnaire I have to complete in order to work for the National Air Traffic Service back home. Question 35: Have you ever been involved in activities intended to overthrow or undermine Parlimentary democracy by political industrial or violent means? Well, I hope not, but I have a few parking tickets if that counts.

  • Day 10

    The day of the solar eclipse arrives, and I find myself and Coombi (Basil’s five year old daughter) the only people home when Mike and family arrive to accompany us the the eclipse. My map shows the eclipse happening at 13:16, but I don’t realise this is GMT, and panic Mike and gang into leaving immediately. Basil, Chico, Simon and David arrive home soon after, and we all get into Basil’s 4×4 for the drive to a suitable viewing area. We arrive with plenty of time, despite some erratic driving from Basil, who has no problem treating a single lane road as a dual carriageway, provided there doesn’t appear to be anything coming in the opposite direction.

  • Days 8-9

    Both Tuesday and Wednesday are fairly uneventful – I spend both days at the Reapers office in Harare talking to various people and creating my plan for the new stock control system. I also contact MWeb to find out about upgrading the internet service to a permenant connection. On Wednesday evening Basil and I have dinner with Basil’s cousin, Mike, at an enormous colonial-style house that probably would have cost several million in the UK but was only about £100,000 for Mike to purchase three months ago.

  • Day 7

    Waking up to the sound of dogs barking and general commotion outside, I start wondering what the time is. Gadgets fail me, for I have not a single thing in the room which could tell me the time. I get up anyway, and find eventually (had to resort to looking up the time on my camera) that the time is about 5:45 am. Groan. Have a shower anyway. We leave at around 8am for the factory in Rusape, where this season’s shelling is about to begin. Basil strides around the plant checking the place out, stopping occasionally to talk to the workers in Shona. It’s all I can do just to keep up with him and so I spend the day following him around like a lost puppy. At the plant I feel doubly conspicuous for the fact that I am clearly the only white person in attendance, amoungst a workforce of over a hundred.

  • Day 6

    This morning we go to Basil’s ‘village’, which is to say the village actually belongs to him. On arrival we attend a midday church service, at which I am conspicuously the only white person in attendance, although no-one else seems to notice. The church is very small, just to service the small community, and the service lasts about half an hour, much of it singing in Shona, while moving from standing to sitting to kneeling. At the end a gong sounds about six times, and the service is over. This type of thing is repeated morning noon and night every day of the week, and I’ve no doubt every member of the village regularly attends. I am to stay overnight here and return to Harare tomorrow evening, after spending the day at the Rusape factory where shelling is to start in the morning for the season’s crop.

  • Day 5

    This afternoon I go with Simon and David to the Lion park. This is like a safari park back home, but more wild. The lions were very impressive, walking right past the side of the car, or lounging on the rocks. There were even a family of cubs playing in the undergrowth.