Last month my to do list was long like there’s no tomorrow.  It was full of errands mostly associated with preparing to pack up and relocate myself back in the US.   In Zimbabwe, seemingly simple to do items like get cash, pay bills, get mixers for cocktails, etc. can take amounts of time which are unfathomable.  At least (after the frustration and exhaustion) some humor can be found.  Like how I nearly had a temporary Zimbabwean husband, for the purpose of getting Tel One to accept a third party cheque as payment.

And sometimes it’s not so much humor.  More that it can be enlightening, the little nuances of how moving through a to do list plays out.   After completing a to do item in Eastgate Mall, I found myself frozen amidst people bustling this way and that way.  I was wanting to follow the Eastgate routine I had established.   An exit route geared toward stopping in specific shops to see what was on the shelves and/or if there were good deals.  But, no reason for the routine because it’s not like I needed to fill my suitcase with basic goods as part of returning to the US.  My frozenness lasted a good many minutes.  Then the strangest thing happened.  There was a magnetic force which sucked me into the shopping routine.  Nothing good at Chipos Supermarket or the zhing zhong shops.  But in Clicks, my gosh good golly, they had more shampoo, conditioner, and liquid bath soap than I had ever seen on a single Zimbabwean shelf.  Fairly priced to boot!  A gold mine!  Without skipping a beat I was strategizing how much I needed to buy and which scents would be the most soothing.   Once I realized buying was not needed, I thought to myself:   Shame I’m leaving Zimbabwe with all these good bath products available.  A different kind of humor playing out here.  Humorous that I became so well trained with my shopping routines and strategies.  And curious that I found it easier to be emotional about leaving behind a gold mine of bath products and much harder to express my feelings about leaving behind my work, colleagues, friends and all the ways living in Harare enriched my mind and my heart.

One more thought about to do lists.   Seems that Mugabe started 2008 with a small voice which got bigger and bigger as he moved through a carefully calculated set of to do items.   A few of the items that got ticked off the to do list include:  manipulate voters roll, ignore elections if not victorious, blame problems on west, use herald as mouthpiece, eliminate opposition, take grace shopping, ignore agreements, brainwash youth, keep all power, pay military, dictate.  Me and a whole lot of millions of other people are ticked off about what Mugabe’s 2008 to do list included.  Looking for a fresh list for 2009 with items such as:  share, play fairly, food aid for all, return to rule of law, downsize motorcade, get kids back in school, admit cholera is problem, pay civil servants fair wages, be realistic about hyperinflation, enforce one person one farm policy, involve all in constitutional revisions, take foreign aid yet remain sovereign, fade into distance, transition to peace.

This entry was posted on January 6th, 2009 at 11:29 am by Susan Pietrzyk and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.