Jeff Way

We do our grocery shopping for the month when we go to Harare for our monthly immigration visits.  We try to have a detailed shopping list so we don’t forget anything.  Usually there are a number of trips to the city in a month from the orphanage and someone can usually pick up something we are missing, but it’s a hard enough trip for people that we don’t like to add to someone else’s already unrealistic errand list.  We buy eggs, chicken, beef and vegetables from the Eden farm, but other staples we have to buy in Harare.  Our meals in Zimbabwe are much simpler than what we eat in Canada.  We eat a lot of vegetables and eggs.  Unfortunately we eat a lot of bread too, just because it’s easier to put a peanut butter sandwich together than cook a meal.  We eat a restaurant meal once a month on our Harare day, that’s our big treat.   Our favourite place to go is St. Elmo’s Pizza, where they make pizza in a wood fired oven.

Lia has always liked to bake and she has taken it up again in Africa.  Thankfully we have an oven in the house and can buy the ingredients she needs to make cookies, squares and cakes.  We have a Bible study on Tuesday evenings and she always makes an entrance with a plate full of baked treats, which get devoured after the meal.  Lia has a loving heart and has really taken to serving the community by making treats for all of us.  It is fun to see how much everyone looks forward to seeing her come through the door with cookies, such a small thing, but comfort food like chocolate cookies can be a real boost.

Three evenings a week a group of men come to our house to exercise with me.  Mashayamombe asked me if he could come over to exercise one day and of course I said he could.  Then it became a group of six men.  I found an exercise machine in a storage container and repaired it and put it on the veranda and the men love to use it.  I made a pull up bar and hung it up, as well as a heavy punching bag.  We work out together and have become friends and are breaking down racial walls.  Again, this is something unusual in the community and is new to everyone.

We love to watch the sun set in the evening.  If I miss it I feel like I’ve missed out.  I will often just stand on the back veranda to watch it set, which takes about 2 minutes from the time it hits the horizon, then go back to making supper.  It’s really nice when Carole and I can have a cup of tea or coffee on the veranda and watch it together and chat.   After the sun is gone the real show begins with the sky turning bright red and purple.  In the spring when there are wildfires burning everywhere the sunsets are especially beautiful, another paradox in Africa, the danger and destruction of the fires against the beauty of the sunsets.  The veranda really is my favourite ‘room’ in the house. Reading, watching sunsets or thunderstorms, exercising, praying, watching passersby on the path, it all happens on the veranda.

We don’t have electricity in our house without a generator but I put off starting it because of the noise, but it usually gets started before we make supper as the sun goes down around 5:45 and it’s pitch dark by 6.

Lunch break is two hours long, which drove me crazy until I found out why.  We live in a very rural farming area and when the Frys first moved there almost twenty years ago the local farmers asked them to use the same workday schedule that they were all using to avoid hard feelings and jealousy between Eden and the farmers’ workers.  The break is two hours long because the workers are usually out in the fields and would have to walk home, often several kilometres away, cook their lunch and then walk back to work.  Eden has stayed with this schedule and I’ve learned to appreciate it, especially since the day starts so early.  Lia and Naomi finish school at 1 pm and usually don’t have to go back after lunch, so I get to see them at lunchtime and I hear about their day at school.  I head back to work at 2 and work until 5.

It’s fun to watch people at quitting time.  You can see people watching the road to see if a tractor is heading back to the warehouse so they can try to get a ride.  Every day you can see a tractor go by with at least one passenger on the tractor and a flatbed trailer with 20 people on it.  This is African public transport.

Guveya often wants me to go with him to look at something and discuss a problem.  A common issue is getting building materials.  In Africa everything is built with brick and mortar because termites and carpenter ants eat every piece of wood in sight, so we use a lot of cement which has to be brought in from Harare, a three hour drive away.  The closest hardware store where we can get smaller items is 100 kms away, so running out of nails, screws, window frames or steel is a real nuisance.  We plan our projects and trips to the city as well as possible, but there are often times when we have to ‘make a plan’ and find something else to do until we can get materials.  Eden has a few tractors, but they are all quite old and it is normal to have only one operating.  The building crew relies on a tractor to get sand, gravel and water to make concrete and cement and when the tractor is busy working the farmland we have to find other projects for the men to work on.  It is a constant juggling act to make sure we have everything we need to keep projects moving forward and it always comes down to Rory and I to organise it.  Living in Africa has taught me that I can still be task-oriented, but that I have to change my expectations of what’s possible to achieve.  The normal solution to a problem is to get more people working.  We don’t have a backhoe to load sand and gravel so we get eight men with shovels and it takes all day to get enough material to last the week.

Teatime is very important to Shona people and the builders are no exception.  One of the tasks that one of the younger men have to do each morning is to get a fire started and get a pot of water boiling for tea.  I don’t know how they organize it, but someone brings teabags, sugar and milk.  I don’t know if they all pitch in to buy tea ingredients or how it happens.  Sometimes they will have two pots of water boiling and cook up a pot full of sweet potatoes that they fish out of the water, peel and eat at teatime.  The men don’t eat breakfast before starting work at 6:30 so this is their first meal of the day and will have to keep them going until they quit for the day at 3pm.  Everyone else at Eden takes a 2 hour lunch break at 12 and then work till 5, but the men work through till 3 and then quit for the day.  Again, I don’t know how this came to be, but it works for them.

Sometimes the men are working in our compound and I’ll go over with my cup of coffee and sit with them.  It’s not uncommon to see someone drinking tea out of a diet Coke can that they’ve pulled out of my garbage pit and taken the top off.  If some of the handymen, like Cloud, are working in the compound I’ll make tea or coffee for them and find some cookies and we’ll sit on the veranda and chat together, something else that is new to them.  What seems normal to me, making coffee for friends and drinking it together, is foreign to them because I’m white. Work starts again after tea and we all go off to our jobsites.

I will usually work with the building crew on whatever project is currently underway.  If it’s something they don’t need my help with I’ll go work on something else.  We have a lot to do just to keep up with the maintenance on all the buildings at Eden, so there is always something for me to be building or fixing.  I like to work with the men so that we can be learning from each other.  I tell them that they should be either teaching or learning while they work.  We have a few young men on the crew and they are learning on the job from the experienced men.  Due to living in a respect culture they are also at the bottom end of the hierarchy so they get the hardest and most menial of jobs, like moving bricks or mixing cement by hand.  This can be a challenge to deal with because the young men often have good ideas to make the work more efficient, but because of their age they aren’t given a voice and are shut down by their elders.

As a foreigner this is a cultural situation that I have to work through with Guveya.  We talk about things like this and try to come up with middle ground solution so that the young men don’t feel suppressed and the older men don’t feel disrespected.  It seems like there is always something like this happening and I’ve learned to talk to Guveya first to find out what the culture expects and we work through it together.  I don’t want to be the foreigner with all the answers who comes and makes others conform to my expectations.  Learning that just because something works back home doesn’t mean it will work in Africa is a valuable lesson that can head off a lot of frustration.

I love getting out of the house and riding to the farm.  Sometimes I’m struggling with something, feeling tired, or maybe I’m worried about our impending immigration visit, but when I get out the door and start seeing the students heading to school, the workers heading to their jobs, I get out of my headspace and I can feel my anxiety and attitude change.  I can almost feel how my attitude changes from one of looking inward at my worries and problems to one that looks out and sees others and it reminds me why I’m in the middle of nowhere in Africa.  I’m not there to worry about myself and whatever I’m going through, I’m there for others and greeting everyone I see is a great reminder of that for me.  I love that Shona people acknowledge others, that they tell each other that they see them, that they aren’t alone.

One Saturday I decided to work on the path and make it safer for people riding bicycles.  I found a wheelbarrow, an ax, a pick and a shovel and I worked my way down the path digging out the small stumps and sharp rocks.  During the rainy season the path gets eroded so I filled in ruts and holes.  The wheelbarrow got filled with stumps which I took home to burn.  I worked for about 4 hours on the path and got a few blisters on my hands from the pick and ax.  The whole time people were using the path, I’d step out of the way to let them pass, and everyone thanked me for what I was doing.  Some would stop to talk to me, some wondered why I was doing this, while others just wanted to talk.  Some were surprised to see a murungu digging with a pick while others who know me just said hi and smiled and weren’t surprised at all.

I also make a point of picking up litter on the path.  People just throw candy wrappers, bottles, papers, cigarette packets, anything on the ground without a second thought.  I will often take a shopping bag and walk to the farm to pick up litter.  When I get close to the workers’ village the little children will run to meet me and one boy in particular runs at top speed and leaps at me every time, so I have to drop my bag of litter and catch him.  I throw him into the air and catch him and he squeels and then everyone has to have a turn.  They are the grubbiest kids I’ve ever seen, but I love to pick them up and hug them.  Then they help me pick up litter, making a game of it.  They are the only ones who ever help me clean up the path.  I never give them anything for helping, except a toss in the air and a hug, but they love to help.

If you missed the previous instalment click here.

There are usually one or two men looking for me to help them with a problem or looking for instructions for the day.  Every day I hear “Mr Jeff, I have a problem” over and over.  I don’t mind usually.  It’s part of being a murungu in Africa, but I love to work through problems with the men, rather than always for them.  Sometimes I get asked to lend someone money, because the assumption is that I have a lot of money, being a white foreigner.  If you do lend money you will get asked repeatedly by the same person and others because that first person has told others.  Carole and I talk about whether to lend money or not, and make a decision.

The building crew is usually split up into a couple groups and I go and check out progress and see what’s going on.  We have a lot happening at Eden.  Right now we are constructing a new school building, which is the biggest project the crew has ever done.  Before we started I had the men come to a meeting where I showed them the blueprints and talked about the importance of what they were going to be doing and that it was the biggest project yet.  I heard from Guveya afterwards that the men really appreciated that I took the time to do that because it made them feel part of the team and nobody had ever done anything like that before.  I wanted to inspire them and take ownership of their work and the project.

Lameck Guveya is the building foreman and is really taking his position seriously.  He went to school to be a bricklayer and has just passed his exams to get his building license.  Guveya is younger than some of the men on the crew, which can be awkward in Shona culture.  Shona people have a respect culture that governs how they interact.  Elders are shown respect, regardless of who they may be as a person.  For example, if you meet an older person on the road you clap your hands quietly in front of your chest and say hello.  Younger people do not tell their elders what to do, but on the jobsite it works well, Guveya still works within his culture and because of his knowledge and position all the men show respect and obey his instructions.  I’ve been working closely with him, teaching him how to be a good foreman and how to work efficiently and get the men to have input and try to resolve problems on their own.  This is something they aren’t used to.

I meet with Guveya every Monday morning to talk about the progress of the previous week, the plan for the coming week and how the crew is doing.  We talk about what it means to be a foreman and how to work with the crew.  After the work talk we get into our personal lives, how we’re really doing.  This is one of my weekly highlights.  Guveya and I have become great friends.  We talk about our struggles and pray for each other.  He fasts and prays for my family and our immigration situation and asks his church members to do likewise.  I meet with Wilfred Mashayamombe, the thatching crew foreman, on Tuesdays and do the same with him.  He’s another one of my good friends at Eden.

The girls have gotten used to me waking them up with music from my phone that I play on a little Bluetooth speaker. It is our sound system in Africa. I start the music at 6:30am and go upstairs to make sure Lia and Naomi are getting up. Carole gets up and dresses in her scrubs for working at the herbal clinic, or a visit to the government clinic to see if there are any women giving birth that day. Lia and Naomi put on their school uniforms and come downstairs for breakfast. They usually have cold cereal with UHT milk that we don’t have to store in the fridge until it’s opened. I make oatmeal porridge or fry some eggs on our propane stove and make tea for Carole. The girls grab snack food and fill a water bottle and are out the door for school which starts at 7:30. It’s a short walk over to the church where they attend classes.

The missionaries have a devotion time together at 7:30am on weekdays, so Carole and I hop on our bicycles and ride down to the path and over to the farm. It’s a rough path that sees a lot of traffic every day, but it’s fun to ride on and I high-five kids as I try to go as fast as I can without hitting anyone, or a stray goat or cow. Everyone smiles and says hello, either in English or Shona as we ride by. In Shona culture it is extremely rude to not say hello to people you meet, whether you know them or not. Sometimes I stop to talk to the building crew or one of the students.

There is a small hill as you approach the workers’ village and unfortunately this is also where the pen for the male goats is, so just as you are working a little harder as you go uphill and are breathing heavily, the wind carries the stench from 50 goats wafting over and you get a noseful of goat. I try to hold my breath on that section, but it never works. The path goes past two of the teen girls’ houses and the house mothers are always outside, cooking over the wood fire, sweeping the dirt around the doorway or hanging laundry on the fence.

We go past the new herbal medicine clinic and the staff is already there. A queue of patients has already started, the benches are usually full and someone is giving a devotion talk before the gate opens and the day begins in the clinic. By the time we get to Rory and Judy Ervine’s house, about 1.5 kms from our house, we’ve already greeted 50 people. It’s awesome.