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By Root 1334 0

for once, by a Zimbabwean architect–we sit in a room with a young woman, Shona, who is responsible for the health of the district. She is highly educated, full of energy. She could get a job anywhere, with her qualifications, but she is here, with the Tonga. This makes her unusual, for it is hard to persuade nurses and teachers out into these remote places. This hospital, designed for thirty-six nurses, still only has eighteen. The doctor, much liked, came to grief through drinking too much, and will not easily be replaced. ‘Almost certainly it will be an ex-pat. They don’t mind how hard a job is, they take on the dirty jobs. God knows what these remote hospitals and schools would do without them.’ ‘But,’ says this man’s interlocutor, ‘remember that the ex-pats choose hardship for three or four years and then go back to the flesh-pots. It is understandable these people, experiencing the good life for the first time, find it hard to give it up and sweat it out in the bush somewhere.’ ‘Why shouldn’t they choose hardship for a year or two and then have a good time?’ ‘Ah but you’re forgetting, if you step off the ladder, it’s hard to get back on again.’

The young black nurse is clearly thinking that she has better things to do with her time than sit and talk with us. But she is polite, and smiles. ‘I treat women who have been malnourished since their conception. You never see women like this in any other part of Zimbabwe. You see an adolescent girl, and then you realize she is a woman with five or six children: she has been dwarfed by bad food. We have terrible problems with childbirth. Ninety per cent of these people have bilharzia. There is still some leprosy. Nearly fifty babies and small children died of malaria this last wet season. Malaria is getting worse. Oh yes, AIDS–I knew you were going to ask.’ She makes herself smile. ‘We know about AIDS. But it’s not the worst thing. Are you surprised I say that? Look, you can tell illiterate people that a mosquito will give them malaria. They can see the mosquito. But you try explaining a sophisticated disease like AIDS. “There is a very small thing, but you can’t see it, called a virus, and it can adapt its shape to become like another small thing, which is just a bit bigger and it lives off it and kills it…and remember it can take eight years to become fatal.” These people don’t believe us when we talk about AIDS. We have shelves full of condoms–unused. Yes I see people dying of AIDS all the time but we don’t call it AIDS. No we don’t routinely test for AIDS–that is regarded as an infringement of the liberty of the individual.’ She laughs, but she is angry. I think it is probably a generalized anger: the one we all feel: how can they be so stupid? ‘They tell me the campaign against AIDS is beginning to work in other parts of the country, but here…’

Soon she says she has to go, she must, she’ll never get through her work.

We are told that this young woman and a male colleague continuously travel over a large area, exhorting, teaching, holding clinics: that is, when they aren’t holding classes and clinics here. ‘They never stop working. When I see them I believe everything will be all right, Zimbabwe will make it.’

The Outpatients of this hospital is a large space under trees. There is a shed-like building where people can sleep if they want, but most prefer the open air. Women come in from the villages to wait for labour to start, or for treatment. They are all, every one, undersized, apathetic. The comparison between them and the exuberant noisy people at the Training Centre hurts. I wonder if they have ever, in their whole lives, eaten plates loaded with sadza and meat and gravy and vegetables.

A young woman sits directly in the dust under a tree. A small child sits quietly beside her. The woman is making a basket. The Tonga baskets must surely be the most beautiful anywhere. Between her thin dusty hands this miraculous thing is coming to life. Inside that head of hers, which seems more like a child’s head, and is dusty, are the subtle patterns that her fingers are making.