Leaving Zimbabwe

Well, time to leave Zimbabwe. It’s funny how I’m so incredibly nostalgic and hate to leave people and lose touch with them, but somehow I continue to put myself in situations where I have to do that. Oh the irony. I just hate how when I travel I’m constantly saying goodbye to people I love.
It’s also hard to leave a place when you haven’t even been able to begin to understand it. Goodbye to the place where everyone carries everything (and I do mean everything) on their heads. I never did learn to do that. To the place where we were given a chicken, a huge honor, and our camera man sliced off its head so we could cook it. Goodbye to the place where I got let into a secret world of music and dance. Late at night I got to hear mbiera music and dance as shadows were cast by candlelight on the walls of the mud hut, where the room was alive with bodies moving and thick with yells and whistles. That was the Africa I have imagined and hoped to see.
I’m leaving this place but nothing has come clear to me. This is a place where the women work so hard and most of the men drink, where family comes above all else, though I could never figure out how people could keep track of who is who with such large families. I do now see why people don’t use first names in Zim, rather they are identified by their relations to family. Goodbye to this place of such lively outgoing people, thoughtful and philosophical people, who never lose hope despite how poor conditions are.
I have realized how much we take for granted. Here, people wait in line for 8 hours to buy sugar or cooking oil and sometimes still don’t get it. Don’t even get me started on how much I want electricity. Here, students aren’t allowed to live in dorms because the government fears they will demonstrate. Many students walk to school two hours each way and often teachers won’t even show up. Here, I had to watch what I said, what I wrote and couldn’t tell anyone I studied journalism. I couldn’t take pictures in public.
It’s interesting, when people ask me why I don’t want to be in the U.S. when I travel, I say sometimes I hate it because I hate the current government. Try saying this to someone here with the third worst ranked dictator in the world. Usually when I travel I get sympathy, I explain that Bush’s government and agenda makes me feel sick and embarrassed to be an American, but after coming here I have realized that just because you hate the leader, it doesn’t mean you have to hate the country. The Zimbabweans embody that thought all the time. I have also realized just how lucky we are.
One good thing about Zimbabwe unlike anywhere else I have traveled; they don’t have a problem with Americans. This is one continent we have yet to screw up! Other places I often feel discriminated against, at least at first, for being an American. This is the first place that I haven’t felt discriminated for being American, but rather for being white.
By the way, I found the white people I was asking about in my first entry, they were all still at the airport! Other than the airport, I never saw another white person other than us. Even downtown and at the college, no one. I was talking to a white Zimbabwean at the airport. She was shocked I stayed with people who were black the whole trip. She asked me who I talked to. I wonder if she knows that English is the national language of her country. But by all means, it goes both ways. I was devastated downtown when a truck sped up and raced towards me, blatantly the only white person there, and tried to hit me. It was a near miss.
Walking around town with one of my new friends, complete strangers would ask him in Shona if I was his girlfriend. I would have thought it wouldn’t be so unheard of for interracial friendships or couples, but apparently it is. Even at the college (where all the classes are in English and there are no white people) girls made comments in Shona, “that’s what happens when there aren’t any white boys around,” When my friend and I passed. It’s just hard how I can’t blend in at all. In the village most people were curious to see whites, but some of the smaller children were absolutely horrified and hid behind their parents. There is a lot of pressure to represent my culture well when I may be the only contact they will have with it other than from a bad Hollywood movie.
I am sad to have finished the documentary which gave us incredible access to people’s lives in Zimbabwe. We were welcomed in like family. We got to sleep and eat and talk and dream with all these people. I got to meet four guys my age here who I know make the world a better place just for being in it. I will miss them all as I step off into the unknown yet again.
I’m off to Kenya next to help Dr. Karumbu Ringera with her campaign to be a member of Parliament. So many goodbyes, but no idea what the future brings. I met a man on the airplane last summer who told me a quote that rings so true it has become somewhat of a mantra for me: “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” I’m off on my own now and doing what I’ve always dreamed. I am so lucky to be able to do this and I need to learn to not miss the past so much and my old life. Any suggestions on that one? Really, some help would be nice! I miss it even though I realize I need to appreciate every moment of this trip as it all comes apart and together.