My young Zimbabwean helper.

Once a week I employ the services of a young Zimbabwean woman to clean my house.  As do so many others from up North, she came to South Africa in order to have a better life, as well as to be able to send money home to her family. 

Africa is pretty much in dire straits a lot of the time. Bad governance coupled with drought and civil wars, has rendered this continent a place where many of the people live on less than an American dollar a day.

My young lady calls herself Brilliant, simply because she thinks her name might be too difficult for a white person to pronounce.  I believe though, that one's name is very important, and so I take great pains in order to get the pronunciation correct, and to refrain from calling her by her"western" name.

In December, she departed a few weeks before Christmas in order to celebrate the festive season with her family.  The cost of travelling back home in a sixteen seater bus, is pretty expensive relatively speaking, four hundred rand from Johannesburg to Bulowayo and a further three hundred from Bulowayo to her home, which is part of what she calls a "Reserve." She proudly showed me on her cell phone, photo's taken on Christmas day.  There sitting on the ground were her mother, brother, sister, her two children and various nieces an nephews.

The shelter they were sitting under, was part of her house to be.  On the one side I noticed about fifteen five gallon containers filled with water.  No such luxury as indoor plumbing. Water has to be fetched from the communal tap, which stands in the middle of the Reserve.  She proudly pointed to a square room a short distance away, which she informed me was the kitchen. Other solitary rooms were pointed out as being the bedrooms. 

I asked her if she had had a good Christmas, and with a big smile on her face she said "Yes, it was lovely.  I cooked rice and afterwards we had biscuits."  I felt very humbled and ashamed because, there I was with a turkey and vegetables and puddings and drinks, while her big Christmas lunch consisted of rice and biscuits. 

On her way back to South Africa, she encountered a huge problem.  At the Zimbabwean boarder, she was informed that the stamp she had in her passport from a previous trip was fake, and she would have to pay five hundred rand in order to proceed on her way.  She was told by the official that the police would be called and she would have to go to jail for six months.  Being a born fighter, she said "Call them."  At this point the bus driver intervened by saying "I can't wait for you. I will have to leave you here." There was nothing more she could do, except pay the bribe.  I firmly believe that the bus driver was part of the scam!  

About fifteen months ago she was called to come home urgently, as her four year old son was ill.  About three weeks later, I got a call from her to say she was back in South Africa again and ready to start work.  As she climbed into my car, the first thing I asked was "How is your son?"  With that, she burst into floods of tears and wailed " I didn't get to see my son."  Apparently, her young son had been bitten by a snake, which caused his leg to swell up to three times it's normal size, resulting in his death. Being in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Summer, with no mortuary to place the body in until she arrived, they were obliged to bury him almost immediately.  How hard that must have been for her to endure. 

Africa is a harsh continent, and those who live here have to be pretty resilient.  Many have a fatalistic outlook to life in this vast, yet rather beautiful continent of ours.  Drought, coupled with scare water, as well as food shortages, is something we have all learned to live with.