The Plastic Bag is No Longer Caught in the Barbed Wire

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Kondwa and Beyond...
So for the past three weeks Meg, Ally, Nick and I have been spending our days at the Kondwa Day Center for Orphans doing S.E.E.D. stuff, painting and attending Home Based Care visitations for HIV/AIDS victims. It has been a really positive experience, I have new hope for the world - and a new perspective- more on this later.

(character description: Nick is a sucessful rasta painter/ sculptor whom we met at an art gallery. He decided he was in love, Angela hijacked him to come paint at Kondwa, we all became jolly good friends. He invited Meg, Ally and I to come stay at his place, so we moved in.)

Our lifestyle in the evenings was unabashedly Bohemian. After the long walk home from the orphanage we would bang on drums, sing, dance, paint, ponder life, and cook over hot coals when the electricity went out (which was pretty much every night). For three weeks we shared our lives, our thoughts, our tea- brought together by the randomness of life and held together by friendship.

And just like that it seemed like we were all heading our separate ways. Meg tearfully hopped on a plane to Canada, Ally got on a train to Dar en route to Zanzibar, I was headed to Malawi (for no particular reason), and Nick was off to Czech for a twelve- month artist's residency in Prague.
But then life did one of its bizzare little swivels.
At the bus station in Lusaka I spotted a bus that was leaving immediately for Harare, Zimbabwe and hopped on board. (Spontaneous as it may sound, it was a well thought out decision. For one, I really liked saying 'Zimbabwe', also- many people told me not to go, thereby beckoning my rebellious inner-child, and I missed Meg, who had piqued my curiosity as to what all of the political fuss was about)
Anyhow, after I had boarded, Nick (who had escorted Ally and I to the bus station) randomly decided to postpone Prague and hopped on the same bus to Harare. He had only the clothes on his back- artists never cease to amuse me.

So we arrived in Harare late last night and followed some whispers and winding paths for a back- room currency exchange. (This seems to be a recurring motif of this journey: an arrival by night followed by some sort of sketchy black- market exchange.) The black - market foreign exchange is the norm for locals who transit. Despite the fact that its highly illegal and frowned upon mby Mugabe, you get roughly five times more Zim dollars for your kwacha or dollar than you would in a legal bureau or bank. How exactly does this process work? I will look into it. We've been spending most of our time with Nicks friends, sculptors, photographers and painters that exhibit at the main gallery in Harare, so I had the opportunity to ask how the locals feel about the political situation. "Its like having been married to a mean, ugly person for quite some time - after a while you get used to it and start seeing glimmers of beauty, however hallucinatory they may be".
Ill keep you posted. Im off to hear some live jazz and am pretty psyched. peace be with you.

PS. I miss you, Meghan Bruni.
"

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Comments

[Loyd]

Interesting
Becky, I am learning a lot rom you, and you should know that I will need a whole 5 hours debriefing once you come back...You are damn good at writing your stuff- It describes your experiences so vividly that I feel with you all the way Loyd