Ethical Dilemmas

The other day I bought a sugar doughnut as a treat. After I started eating it, a man came up to me and started begging. My dilemma – give him the half-eaten doughnut or just keep eating it in front of him. I ended up giving him the half-eaten doughnut, but it felt terrible and undignified to give him something half-eaten, and not even healthy.

Flour is scarce in the shops these days. John promised a friend of ours that we would give her some. So, I went into the jar, and there were ants crawling in it. My dilemma – give her flour with ants or nothing at all. I went for the ants, but again, it felt like an assault to her dignity to give her something “tainted.”

Of course, I know the easy answer to these dilemmas – go buy another doughnut; go buy some more flour. But friends, keep in mind that we make $10US/month! Speaking of being poor, this relates to John's last post about my article in Faith & Friends (a Canadian Salvation Army magazine). The article is about how Zimbabweans have really been teaching us the art of sharing. The article finishes with, “It makes me wonder, who are the poor ones: them or us?” I never wrote that! It offended me too. I live my life trying to break down barriers between “us” and “them.” I am not naïve enough to think that there are not differences between us, but people in Zimbabwe aren’t “poor people” to us – they are our friends.

ABCS of Survival

I forgot to let my fans (ie Mom and Dad) know about my second blog
posted at SalvationArmy.ca/blog. Here's the link so you can check it
out: http://www.salvationarmy.ca/2006/10/26/abcs-of-survival/

Enjoy. I really like what Jeremy Watt's done with the Army's website.

I'll have a new post coming out there next week. Who knows, if I keep
working at my writing, perhaps Rochelle will let me start posting on
this blog more frequently...

By the way, Rochelle wrote a nice article for the November issue of
Faith & Friends. They even included a picture of each of us that they
took from our Flickr account. For the record, Rochelle did not write
the concluding sentence.

I'm fine

Greetings are very important in Zimbabwe. When you walk into a room, you usually greet everyone one by one. When you pass people on the street, you greet them. Clapping is always involved. We usually greet people in Shona, but sometimes we use English. For example, this morning when I was out for my walk, I greeted people with "Good morning!" Most people responded "I'm fine." This is one of my favourite Zimbabwe-isms. Whether or not you ask people how they are doing, they will tell you, "I'm fine." It's sort of ironic though, because actually the sense we get is that most people aren't really fine. We were away for 2 weeks, and both the real exchange rate (as opposed to the government's fixed rate) and inflation have soared. That means all prices are up. In the six months we have lived here, the pensioners' rent on our compound has gone up from $1,000/month to $25,000/month. That is quite a dramatic increase, and yet their pension is still at the $1,500/month rate.

We arrived back in Zimbabwe a bit later than we had planned. Sunday we flew to Nairobi, and still managed to miss our flight to Harare despite being 6 hours early at the airport. The rumour is that Air Zim never arrived in Nairobi, and just didn't bother to let anyone at the airport know. (By the way, they don't call it "Scare Zim" for nothing - when we got on the plane to fly to Kenya, my seatbelt was broken, as was John's seat, and let's just say it was quite a shaky flight!) Kenya Airways put us up at the Hilton Nairobi for the night (brie cheese and satellite t.v. - imagine!) and then they flew us in the morning. Unfortunately, they had to take everyone's luggage off the flight. They needed to bring extra fuel because there was none at the airport in Zimbabwe. No fuel at the airport. Sometimes it feels like a sad joke. It's good to be home though - to see friends, and to hear Shona again. We re-started classes last night. Our vacation was incredible, but it's also good to come back to some normalcy. That is, if you call this normal.... :)