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with elephant-back-roofs.
Like any urban settlement, workers leave early to their different stations: children go to school and the unemployed remain at home, each playing their part in the inescapable cycle of life.
Women engage in their routine domestic chores, systematically twisting their faces and subconsciously clearing their nostrils to ward off the heavy foul smell wafting across the teeming suburb.
But when night falls, everything changes as family members reunite after running different errands. Like the proverbial chicken, they will have come home to roost.
By nightfall, a family of up to seven people, for example, huddles in one room, divided into apartments by unfashionable curtains or blankets. The night does not stop. It goes on, so does life in that room.
This is the legacy of Bindura’s MaOne section, where the bizarre and the unthinkable happens.
“The more innovative ones use torn card board boxes. But it is just not life for human beings. It suits animals. Sharing a room with teenage children is unafrican,” says Ms Thabita Chidowe popularly identified Mbuya Rojasi.
For instance, what happens when nature calls on adults and children alike, is yet another untold story.
Then when intimacy demands its answers from the hormones, the children are forgotten in the madness that ensues.
“This is an accommodation crisis and it is common here to see five or seven people share one room. At times boys and girls aged 18, share a room with their parents, their apartment only divided by curtains. One wonders what children we are raising here,” added Mbuya Rojasi.
The old-fashioned buildings which depict ghosts of the taste of time have become a hot seat at Chipadze, the sprawling suburb of Bindura, where life is a ghost.
From the scenario one needs not to be introduced to the suburb’s pioneer section popularly known as “MaOne section” named after blocks of one-roomed houses in the area.
“MaOne section” is recognised for being the pioneer housing project of the suburb and is historically known as a home to first citizens of the suburb that hardly sleeps.
If one visits “MaOne” section it is certain he or she will be greeted with a busy lifestyle which is far placed from the one of decent urbanites making it quite frustrating is if you are a stranger. A passer-by can easily realise the accommodation crisis.
Visiting this section of Chipadze suburb is not an easy task as one is greeted with a foul smell of ever flowing sewage wafting across the location.
Blocks of 20 one-roomed houses with external communal and unhealthy toilets from which sewage flows like a perennial river, are an eyesore.
Also to go unnoticed is the emergence of makeshift verandas extended on front of the single rooms in order to create more space as rooms for accommodation.
The makeshifts extended as rooms are made up of gum poles frameworks encircle with plastic polythene while roofed with scrap iron sheets. In some cases grass thatching is over scrap iron sheets used as walls.
Mbuya Rojasi, who is in her 60s, said she was born and bread in Chipadze and accommodation crisis in the area has been a growing concern which has pushed other residents at “MaOne” to put up makeshift verandas.
“Those who happen to know the Oxford school doorway understand that necessity can be the mother invention and in our case here at ‘MaOne’, we have improvised accommodation with these makeshift verandas which are now serving as both kitchens and bedrooms.
“Here I stay with my four grandchildren so as you see these are my blankets, so I use this extension as my ‘apartment’ because I cannot share with my teenage male nephews,” she says.
To kill time and sleep late teenage boys and girls are always seen milling around the shopping centre at night, where smoking of mbanje, beer drinking and prostitution is the order of the day. This has exposed the teenagers to prostitution.
A 14-year-old school girl said she was always milling around the shops at night as she finds it difficult to sleep in their one-roomed house together with the parents.
“We are a family of six including my parents and our room is divided and but the situation is no longer tenable for me, so at times I sleep at my friend’s house.”
The majority of the girls here are exposed to abuse and early sexual relations because of accommodation problem.
“I have fallen prey to the trap and I sometimes charge US$2-3 depending on negotiations for a short time,” said the teenage girl.
Another boy who was part of the group of secondary school going age boys roaming around the location said his friends were sleeping around with prostitutes at tender ages. He said the guardians who are mainly grandmothers had lost control simply because of accommodation constraints.
“You see this group of boys here are as good as married man. They have known ladies of the night for so long and this has become part of their life. Our parents have lost control of the situation. It is a home-made crisis,” said the boy.
An 18-year-old man who declined to be named said he has since his childhood been sharing the same room with his grandmother and sisters divided by curtain but has now resorted to spending nights at the pubs to avoid the embarrassment.
“It is so sad my brother that I have been sharing the same room with grandmother and this arrangement has pushed me to sleep around,” he said.
When the story of “MaOne” section of Chipadze is told, it sounds like fiction but this is a theatre of reality, where the uncommon has eclipsed the common.
Meanwhile, life goes on.
Online Reporter