Missions
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| Observations on Zimbabwe | ||||||
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Every so often I am reminded that I’m in an exotic location. There are elephant-crossing signs right along side signs for cattle crossings. Rumble strips on the roads are definitely the African version – each rumble looks over a foot wide and feels like a speed bump on the suspension. Even the moon is brighter here – Fanny had to use his sun visor when driving at night because the moonshine was enough to blind you.
and the thatching supports were inside the huts. On the way to Victoria Falls, the thatching was “terraced” – there were visible layers and it looked quite a bit more decorative. Also, there were wood poles (or sticks) surrounding the huts and supporting more of the thatch – I’m guessing to provide a larger overhang, or “porch” area. Everywhere we saw both round and rectangular huts, large and small…some wood frames, some were fired brick or cinder block, and some were plastered with mud while others were not. They were used for granaries, wells, livestock, or to live in. It would have been interesting to stop and spend some time in one of these places. They contain more pockets of wonder to us foreigners.
As a nation though, the story is sad and complicated. The country is being starved – a slow death of accelerated inflation, loss of infrastructure, and thereby a loss of goods and services. It seems like a vicious cycle. We can see it first hand – the accounts are primary, not through the grapevine. First, the inflation. The articles I read before leaving on the trip estimated about 165,000% inflation rate. A week ago I bought a bottle of pop for $120 million. Yesterday, I bought what I believe was a smaller bottle for $200 mil. When we arrived here, it appeared that $1 U.S. could almost buy you three 50 million Zim dollar notes. Now as we leave, it buys you over 6 of those notes. And those Zim dollar notes have the equivalent loss of purchasing power here – prices of this are raised every day. You may pay more for your bus ride back from work than you did in the morning, if you are fortunate enough to still be employed. You may pay more for a connecting bus ride that is part of your same one-way route than you did for the standard fair at the beginning of your ride. We think of these Zim dollar notes as real money and we use them like money (except that my stack of bills worth $50 US was several inches thick), but they are not. Printed right on the bill is an expiration date – of next month! This stack of paper might be able to buy you something today (if you can find something for sale), but tomorrow they are worthless. It is a concept you have to wrap your head around if you are to understand what is happening here. Fanny uses these Zim dollar notes to buy fuel coupons that expire later than the bills so that he might have the chance to exchange the coupons for fuel later if he is fortunate enough to find a station that actually has the fuel and accepts the coupons. Nothing is guaranteed. A newspaper headline we saw on Saturday proclaimed “Zim Dollar Devalued”. You might wonder if that shouldn’t be the headline every day. But no, officially the Zim dollar has never lost value until now (government statement). It’s just the market economies that dictate the buying power of the notes that the banks distribute. I think it was also on Friday or Saturday that the banks started distributing a $500 million Zim note, which is an indicator that they can’t keep up – if the largest note available is worth less than $2 US. Then there is the infrastructure. It’s hard to fathom. These people really can look back to the “good old days”. Back when they had electricity, when they had running water, when they had working phone lines, and when they could take public transportation. The thing is, there are some areas where these commodities are not completely gone – they are just randomly sporadic. The electricity can go off at any time and it’s usually when you want it most. Nobody seems to know why or question why there is not even a blackout schedule to go by. It is very frustrating for me to see these “newer” churches that are actually wired for power, but there is no power when people gather for worship. And there is no family in the church wealthy enough to buy candles for use in the church in addition to candles they need at home. So they either sing in the dark or disperse early. We are not that far from the equator so it gets dark shortly after 6pm here. That makes a light source pretty critical. Some churches have battery operated lights that can be charged during the day if and when the power is on. There is evidence for extensive telephone infrastructure in the country. You can see the telephone poles because they run the lines above ground – could be 20 or 30 cables supported by each pole. But what I see are missing lines, or no lines, or missing poles everywhere. It looks like the system that was put in place years ago is either not maintained or deliberately saboataged, and from our experience it is some of both. When we stayed with David, the white farmer in Karoi, he said it was really hard to get in touch with his wife in Chinhoyi the past few months because someone had stole 4 km of cable. Then someone else stole 7 km nearby. But amazingly, the lines had just been fixed shortly before we arrived in Karoi. If it’s copper, possibly people are as desperate for that here as in the U.S. Unlike electricity, landlines have a natural alternative – cell phones. Many people do have cell phones (if they can afford it), and service seems to be decent in a lot of areas. But dial-up internet access remains a casualty of the landline system. Fanny’s service has been out for the last 4 or 5 days. Transportation and fuel. There are a few tar roads between major cities, but these are over 20 years old and the heavy truck traffic has made them quite bumpy. The same is true in the cities themselves, but roads are decent enough to get by on, but your vehicle had better be hardy enough to take the abuse. Most rural roads are dirt and these are likely to get washed out in the rainy season. Busses may not be running in a particular area any longer or if they are running, (1) they are likely to be from only one company (whereas before you had competition) and (2) it’s likely the bus will break down in the middle of your journey. We saw four broken down buses in between Gweru and Bulawayo on our way to Botswana. You many wait a day for one to be fixed. Consequently, there is a lot of waiting in this country, especially in rural areas wher your destination might be scores of kilometers away and walking is just not feasible.
75% of the population is rural – that’s huge. Say one of these people needs to get into town. They wake up at 4am and walk to the nearest main road, which could be quite a distance. There they try to hitch a ride from any passing vehicle. We saw clusters of these people along the road all the time. It is not very likely they will be successful (we never had space to pick people up during long journeys), so about 4pm, they head back home and repeat the process the following day. Or if they have traveled a long distance to a main road, then they will just spend the night by the road or in a nearby village. In the “old days”, hitching a ride was not much of a problem. It was common courtesy to pick up travelers if your vehicle had room. But now, several factors work against this. First, the scarcity of fuel means there are many less drivers and vehicles on the road. It reminds me of the country roads in Iowa – once in a while you meet another car, but not all that often. There are still a significant number on the streets of the large cities, but my understanding is that situation is largely dependent on the black market for fuel right now. So many gas stations/convenience stops stand idle – crumbling skeletons or shells of a once thriving market sector that no longer exists. A few stations still open might have diesel, or unleaded, or a blend…but rarely one that had all three. I saw empty attached shops, shelves ripped out because there were no goods to place there, cars parked by the pumps but not gassing up, attendants milling about but with nothing to do. One might expect this situation to create ghost towns. On the contrary – there are always a lot of people moving about, walking places. If it’s after dark, better hope for a moon because flashlights are unheard of and street lights are dark when there is no power. The lack of fuel inducing a loss of transportation affects society at all levels. A couple of examples:
I could go on and on about affects of the fuel situation on the public sector, but we can look at that from another angle. We’ve examined colossal inflation rates and the loss of infrastructure. The third leg on this stool is the loss of goods and services. I’ve mentioned several already connected to the loss of infrastructure: education, police departments, and public transportation. Most other services are affected as well. For example, the postal service – not a good idea to trust that anymore for mail delivery. Because the economy is collapsing, businesses have collapsed or are in the process of collapse. Zimbabwe is not producing much at all. It used to be a huge exporter – the breadbasket of the African south and sported one of the strongest economies on the continent. No longer. Everything that is available for purchase is imported, and in many towns, there is nothing available. This is easy to see. Walk into a grocery store and there is very little on the shelves if anything is available at all. The establishments that do sell things likely get them from Botswana or South Africa, but the cost of transport (in a fuel starved society), plus the duty the government imposes, continues to drive prices up and the buying power of the Zim dollar down. The common person is left with only a few established basics – they can incubate eggs and raise chickens, and harvest what they can from their vegetable gardens. An outstretched arm dangling live chickens by the side of the road for purchase is not an uncommon sight – just like the orange sellers that proffer the few bags they are able to harvest. There is still a certain amount of agriculture going on, but it is only a fraction of the production output of 10 years ago. And that sad puzzle piece is directly related to the “land reforms” that began in 2000 when white farmer’s land was forcibly taken and redistributed to other nationals by the government without the new landowners/caretakers given any training or tools to do the job of farming. A simple domino effect has ensued. Equipment breaks down and there is no maintenance. No high yield farming principles employed, so low yields leads to less available food. The former landowner/farmer that we talked to, explained this directly. When he farmed before the land reform actions, he employed many people. The new farms with low production of course do not and cannot employ very many. He said his attitude when he farmed before was not just to make a profit, it was to provide for his countrymen since they all considered themselves Zimbabweans, and not descendents of colonizers for example. But today, the attitude is not the same for the land now controlled by Zanu-PF cronies. As an aside, we learned during our stay that the government has decided to postpone the runoff elections – maybe until June or July. You should have seen what a devastating effect this news had on Martha. “Many people will starve. Many people will die,” she lamented. This is because the unresolved political crises feeds into the economic crisis. In addition, Zanu-PF can continue their campaign of rural intimidation to pressure votes and keep people’s lives in a deadly holding pattern. This is difficult to understand. Post election violence like granary burning and cattle killing just compound the already detrimental government policies of declaring certain farmland as not ‘workable’ for what must be political reasons. It really is a death spiral. But the fact remains that a political resolution will not solve the agricultural problem, at least in the short term. Right now, you also have the threat of drought hitting the country after a bout of flooding last year. The flooding followed by very dry weather severely impacted the maize harvest in many areas, causing further shortage. Also, you’re dealing with property rights, the situation is in such a mess that it will take bureaucrats of genius caliber to unravel it and architect a resolution of any sort. No, the best hope (naturalistically speaking) for the Zimbabwean economy in the short term probably comes from the mines. The country is rich in precious metals like gold, platinum, silver, and nickel as well as coal mining. These are industries that could be developed more, and allow international export, but of course these types of jobs carry added risk, and historically, mining companies get greedy. But back to the loss of goods and services. A “situation report” that came out from the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance while we were in the country talked about the food and agricultural crises above. But it also mentioned the following: “Due to the increased number of politically motivated incidents of violence, many villagers now sleep in the bush at night and return to farms during the day, as attacks during the night grow more frequent. USAID field staff report that the worst violence is occurring in northeastern and eastern parts of the country. For many rural residents facing violence, medical treatment is difficult, partly due to the growing number of roadblocks preventing medical evacuations. Pro-government groups have targeted hospital staff, exacerbating existing problems associated with overcrowded conditions and inadequate medical supplies.” So this brings up the service of health care, which is also in a grave state. There were several reasons why we did not bring a load of medical supplies to the Chidamoyo mission hospital in the northern part of the country, but one was the violence targeting hospital staff and we did not wish to make the problem worse. One piece of good news we received was that the violence in the Chidamoyo region was lessening by the time we arrived in Karoi, but the medical supply problem remains acute. Mission hospitals like Chidamoyo are very dependent on donated supplies. Public hospitals and other health care clinics are basically very short-staffed and empty of needed supplies. This is the report we heard anyway. There were stories of women going to a hospital to give birth, but they were required to bring their own blankets and any drugs they wanted to take. It was pretty similar with other cases we encountered too. If people could get a hold of their own drugs, syringes, bandages, etc., then the hospital would try to find a staff person or nurse to administer the treatment. The supply problem is on top of the issue of paying for the medical services. People with chronic conditions like AIDS are pretty much out of luck. Drugs and treatment are not available except to a very exclusive few. But I need to get back to education because this is the primary/critical service being lost. It cannot be stressed enough and everybody knows it. I talked to many youth and got responses from many youth in the urban area of Gweru and in the agricultural region of Karoi. The primary concern of these young people was that of getting an education and going to a good school. This is what they prayed for and asked for prayers about. It’s amazing how clearly they see their country being drained of its brainpower and feeling powerless to stop it. Their immediate situation of poverty is always right in front of them, and their only long term remedy to improve their situation (personally and nationally) is getting an education, especially a college education. Even five year old Joshua is super sensitive to the reality that his school has no supplies and his teacher is seriously considering going to Botswana to teach instead. There just isn’t much left for her where she’s at. Martha tells me that whenever Joshua sees a package of donated pencils (from churches in the U.S.), for example, he asks if he can bring them to school. Martha says, “No, those are donated for Sunday school classes.” Joshua says, “But can’t we share them?” He thinks that he can bribe his teacher to stay a little longer by supplying her with materials, and not without reason because this is exactly the reason why some educators are remaining in Zimbabwe. So, I see this desperation in the youth, but also a strong faith that things will improve and God will provide. They cling to that faith with their whole hearts. This faith is actually indicative of the church as a whole. Despite all the problems, the church in Zimbabwe is spiritually strong. At least I sense much more strength than I do on the U.S. And that is precisely for one of they reasons we went – because it is still strong. So that we might encourage it to remain strong and so that we might be encouraged and spiritually strengthened on returning to the U.S. Every day brings the Zimbabwean church closer to that critical point of weakening. From a physical, naturalistic standpoint, it’s not easy to avoid musings like, “It must be running on fumes.” But this only demonstrates my own poverty of faith. The church exists and lives in the small victories that transpire every day and in the celebration of God’s providence for each little step. There are so many worldly reasons and excuses for the body of Christ there to suffer heart failure, but none of those reasons are important when weighed against the power and encouragement available to those saints. The question of racism will naturally come up, and it’s hard to put one’s finger on it. There’s definitely a historical undercurrent here because many times Fanny (or other leaders) would bring up the fact of how great it was that we could be brothers in Christ regardless of our skin color. This seemed like a trivial point to us, but not to these people who experience history on a more personal level. It was emphasized that we were not the “colonizer”. They certainly dislike the idea of colonizers and any white colonial rule. And there were hints of separateness seen in the white Zimbabwean culture as well, but things seem to be getting better and more integrated. Or I should say that they would be tending that way except that the Zanu-PF party repeatedly brings up the race card and the colonization issue as an approach to remain in power.
-Carl Pecinovsky
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©2008 DustySpirit Ministries |