Progress
Right after sending an email today to Herman, my ICCO contact in the Netherlands, about there still not being a PC for me, things started to get moving.
Today, I sat around the table with four other people, one of whom is responsible for purchasing decisions. It took some explaining on my part, but it seems it’s now clear that a new PC needs to be bought for me and that, in the very near future, lots of network equipment will need to be procured.
For lunch, we went to Mereki, inside one of the high-density suburbs of Harare. Between the huts, on an open ‘field’, some 40 amai (mothers) were lined up with pans, stoves and the likes, all serving sadza ne nyama. The kids running around the area called me Semanyika, which means something like From Manyika, a province inside Zimbabwe, where, so it seems, everyone always stays home so that the word for stranger has become synonymous with “From Manyika”.
One eats sadza with his hands. Preferably, you take some sadza and role it into a ball. Before eating, you wash your hands, of course, but surprisingly, you don’t wash your hands with soap.
In the evening, Tawanda and I played squash at the Harare squash club, right across from the president’s residency. We didn’t get shot. At first, I tried to play a game, but Tawanda seemed to be indifferent to the rules. Then, a while into the game, he confided that he had much more fun playing when weren’t actually keeping score.