Waiting for the rain

Blessing Musariri Shelling the Nuts
While we are all waiting for the rain, the heat that is beating us into submission put me in mind of the frog in hot water anecdote. The premise of the story is that if a frog is placed in boiling water it will jump out but if it is placed in cold water that is gradually heated it will adjust to the incremental changes without becoming aware of the threat and will be cooked to death. At the moment I feel a certain kinship with this slow-boiled frog except in my case, the water has reached boiling point already.

A few years ago, my sister and I had a catchphrase we used every time visiting Diasporans complained about something. We would listen, smile and say with a certain amount of smugness: “You obviously were not here in 2008.” We considered 2008 the defining period for any Zimbabwean worth their mettle. If you survived and/or thrived in 2008, you were immediately a member of the Tried and Tested Zimbabwean and this was something of which to be proud because those were no small matters that we dealt with.

In most crime stories when people are looking to solve a mystery of who or what is behind the events they are trying to piece together, you will hear the words, “Follow the money”. This is sound basis for getting to the basis of almost anything in the world nowadays and in our Trial by Fire Decade in this country, money made criminals of us all. By definition, black market is the illegal trade in officially controlled or scarce commodities. We broke the law everyday and from then on, things became fluid.

We woke up every day and made a plan. It could be an adjustment to the day-before plan or it could be an entirely new plan depending on the operating protocol of the day. The first thing that was needed in order to make a plan was to pick up your phone and call someone in the know who would tell you what rate the US dollar was trading at that day.

Then you would start lining up your contacts to find out who was selling what, how much, where and would it involve an RTGS. If it did and you didn’t know anyone who knew someone who worked in a bank then your day was going to be very long and near to impossible and it was probably a good idea not to bother get out of bed, but of course, that was never an option. The true Zimbabwean got up and showed up on the battlefield.

There are many many fascinating stories, urban legends and innovations that took place during those days but the question to which no one could ever give me a satisfactory answer was (and still is), who is the person or entity that the first person used to call every morning to say, “Good morning your highness #dollarsign, what currency trading rate are we using today in Zimbabwe #millionaires?” And how did the next person know to phone that person and so on? No one could ever tell me. No one could even show me a yellow brick road I could follow to go and find the answers myself.

Seven years later things are no longer as chaotic, however, there is still no clarity about the end of the line. Who does an ordinary person go to for answers? It’s not just answers about what is the actual state of things in the country or who is the person at the end of the line who is calling the play, but it’s answers about daily challenges on a personal level, such as where will I get money for school fees this month, how am I going to look after myself and my family now that I no longer have a job and I haven’t been paid the salary owed to me for the last five months? What do I do with all the great ideas I have in the face of widespread lethargy and paralysis?

If we were living in a children’s fantasy story, we would be joining Dorothy, Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion on the yellow brick road to the Emerald City to see the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy wants the Wizard to help her return to Kansas, Toto is Dorothy’s dog, the Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Woodman, a heart and the Cowardly Lion wants courage.

We would get to the Wizard of Oz and ask, “Are things getting better or are they getting worse?” Yes, simply this question, because for the ordinary person on the ground, we can’t tell anymore. It’s because we have adjusted by degrees, to everything and we have lost our measure of what feels normal.

When you wake up at 11pm to do ironing because that is when you have power, when you walk a few kilometres everyday to an NGO-sponsored borehole to fetch water for household needs in the sullen face of your in-house plumbing, but your internet service provider comes to your rescue promptly and efficiently every time and you have digital satellite television and you bought a car last month from Japan and last month you were frying and selling fresh chips from your outside food stall but this month you are the boss of your first employee while you are manning your second chip fryer worrying about school fees and the fact that not one member of your family has health insurance. It’s not easy to take the measure of whether you are advancing or stagnating.

Sadly, even in the children’s fantasy story there is no magical resolution to Dorothy’s question, or those of her companions. The great Wizard of Oz turns out not to be a magical being with the answer to life’s problems, but a ventriloquist and balloonist who had been mistakenly identified as a powerful magician by the Munchkins, and who then chose to prolong the masquerade and had the population build the beautiful emerald city over which he reigned.

A couple of months back, I asked a recent acquaintance what his thoughts were about how things are in Zim and where we might be headed. He just shook his head and said, “It’s a time for cuddling.”

Bemused, I had a vision of people just finding someone to lie down and cuddle with until the worst is over. This didn’t make sense so finally I asked what he meant. He said: “Well, you listen to people’s troubles and often there’s nothing you can do to help except give them a hug and say, you’ll get through this.”

In the past I argued robustly on the side of optimism, saying amongst other things, that to make an omelette, you’ve got to first break the eggs. Well it seems the eggs have been broken and the cooks are arguing amongst themselves about who is in charge of the kitchen, meanwhile no one has paid the power bill, clientele is dwindling and the whole enterprise is in a state of disrepair.

So maybe instead of the Wizard of Oz, we need Gordon Ramsey (See Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares)! If only it was as simple as that. Every economic initiative so far just seems like another way for those people making deals already to make more deals and the rest of us are just limping along. I don’t even hear the phrase, make a plan anymore.

We used to be able to make a plan but now it’s difficult to find the beginnings of one. It reminds me of a time many years ago when someone from Mozambique said to me, “You people are living well. You are still complaining. Us in Mozambique? We no longer even complain, there is no use in it.”

This is true, complaining doesn’t help, especially when one is complaining all the time about the same things which do not change. However, it seems infinitely more alarming when the complaints stop altogether and all energy is now focused on simply adjusting and adapting to the rising temperatures. Will the rains come in time?