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.
