“More begets the urge towards even more. At least Hollywood stars affect learning by having mansions filled with bookshelves and art. The palaces and mansions of Borrowdale Brook are all marble staircases and obviously homes to show-offs and dunces. All this in the name of a liberation ideology, so that self-conceit blends with self-deceit – as the ideologues liberate the economy for themselves.” Stephen Chan, Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai (2010)

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Two (2) IT Interns
Deadline: 8 October 2013

Duty Station: Masvingo 1 / Harare 1
Position Code: PS-ITI13

Job Summary
CARE International in Zimbabwe is inviting applicants for the position of Information Technology Intern. Reporting to the Information Technology Assistant, the incumbent will be responsible for providing ICT technical support to Harare, Masvingo and Midlands Province district offices. Based in Masvingo/Harare s/he will carry user service requests and will also be responsible of the following:

Duties and responsibilities
-IT support and maintenance: the student will provide first line technical support to users on Windows applications and general computer use, install, assemble and configure computers, network infrastructure, peripherals such as printers, scanners and related hardware
-Networking: s/he will assist troubleshoot networking problems including router, switch and ISP backbone problems
-Email and Internet Administration: assist with WAN monitoring to ensure availability and accessibility of IT systems
-IT Inventory: Maintain an updated inventory of the sub offices and district offices

Qualifications, skills and experience
-Prospective candidates should be holders of an IT related degree/ diploma
-Good interpersonal skills
-Hardworking and flexible

To apply
Interested and suitably qualified applicants should submit application letters together with updated Curriculum Vitae quoting the position code on the subject for email applications to:

Human Resources Manager
PS-ITI13
CARE International in Zimbabwe
8 Ross Avenue
Belgravia
Harare

Or email: vacancies [at] carezimbabwe [dot] org

Note: Please indicate the area of preference in your application.

I am re-reading Zimbabwean short story anthologies and one of them is Brian Chikwava’s Seventh Street Alchemy.

An excerpt:

Sue has no birth certificate because her mother does not have one. Officially they were never born so will never die. For how do authorities issue a birth certificate when there is no birth certificate?

“If your mother and father  are dead and you do not have their birth certificate, then there is nothing I can do,” the man in office number 28 had said, his fist thumping the desk. He wore a blue and yellow tie that dug into his neck, accentuating the degradation of his torn collar.

“But what am I supposed to do?” Fiso asked, exasperated.

“Woman just do as I say. I need one of your parent’s birth or death certificates to process your application. You are wasting my time. You never listen. What’s wrong with you people?”

“Aaaah you are useless! Every morning you tell your wife that you are going to work when all you do is frustrate people!”

We have a new constitution that gave people false hope and it’s still more of the same!

What:  Chimurenga (SA) launches THE CHRONIC at Book Cafe
When:  Thursday 3 October, 5.30pm
Where: Book Café, 139 S.Machel Ave/6th Street, Harare

On Thursday 3 October, the Book Café Bookshop invites Zimbabweans to the Harare launch of South African magazine “The Chronic” by Chimurenga, an innovative Pan African cultural platform based in Cape Town, whose network of cutting-edge contributors has gained an audience that includes public intellectuals, social leaders and activists who are instrumental in shaping Africa’s trajectory.  The launch will be presented by Teresa Ayugi, with a documentary film interview and Question & Answer session.

The Chronic is a quarterly gazette published by Chimurenga. It is a publication born out of an urgent need to write our world differently, to begin asking new questions, or even the old ones anew.

When will the new emerge – and if it is already here, how do we decipher it? In which ways do people live their lives with joy and creativity and beauty, sometimes amid suffering and violence, and sometimes perpendicular to it? How do people fashion routines and make sense of the world in the face of the temporariness or volatility that defines so many of the arrangements of social existence here?

These questions loom over a contemporary Africa. Yet most knowledge produced on the continent remains heavily reliant on simplistic and rigid categories unable to capture the complexities that inflect so much of contemporary life here.

The Chronic is one small, deeply subjective attempt to do things differently. They recognised the newspaper – a popular medium that raises the perennial question of news and newness, of how we define both the now and history – as the means to best engage the present; this question of thinking and writing critically about contingency and human agency today. They selected the medium both for its disposability and its longevity, its ability to fashion routine in a way that allows us to traverse, challenge and negotiate liminality in everyday life.

They favoured writing, art and photography that is open, plural, and inflected by the workings of power, innovation, creativity and resistance, and arrived at “a gazette, a collaborative living document that seeks out our capacity to continually produce something bold, beautiful and full of humour. We titled it the Chronic, a nod to both the art of chronicling, of documenting historical events in real time (the time-zone we call ‘now-now’), and because things are, well yes, chronic.”

Southern African Political Economy Series (SAPES)

Policy Dialogue Forum

Topic: Towards the final resolution of the land question: principles and framework for compensation

When: Thursday, 3 October 2013
Time: 5pm – 7pm
Where: SAPES Seminar Room, 4 Deary Avenue, Belgravia, Harare

Chairperson: Rudo Chitiga
Speaker: Charles Taffs, CFU President