Brother aganist Brother, Locking Kids out of School, Physical and Psychological Abuse.
Those are among the effects of Robert Mugabe's war against his own people.
Three vignettes illustrating the human cost of Mugabe's war on the poor:
1. A friend and gardener/handyman who works for us approached me on Monday to inform me that when he came back from Church on Sunday, he found his savings ($140.00 U.S.), 3 pairs of trousers and 2 pairs of shoes (his only ones) missing. Sunday evening, he got a call from a friend of his brother--the brothers had been living together at the gardener's place but he, too, had gone missing--to tell him "not to be too upset when he finds something missing at home". According to the garderer, he could hear his brother telling the friend what to say over the phone. The friend explained that the brother had taken the money and clothes in order to attempt to flee Zimbabwe, via Beitbridge and across the Limpopo river, to South Africa.
2. Two separate examples of children being locked out of school: the person who guards my house at night told me yesterday that his eldest son (age 11) was barred from school on Monday becasue the "top-up" (periodic increases in tuition necessitated by the hyer-inflationary environment) of $1.5 million Zimbabwe Dollars (around $12.00 U.S. at prevailing parallel market exchange rates) had not been paid. A colleague at work, who is raising the two children of his wife's sister (both parents of the children are deceased), was suprised to see his wife's 16 year old niece show up at his door step last week (she attends a boarding school around 120 KM outside of Harare). That child, too, had been barred from school for non payment of the "top-up" for tuition.
3. The same night guard mentioned above, and about whom we blogged in March (after he was brutally beaten in the township area where he lives, Chitungwiza, when he was unable to produce on demand a ZANU-PF membership card for a gang of youths in the pay of the ruling party) told me when I arrived home last night that he needed to see the doctor again because the left side of his head where he was beaten with a metal bar had begun swelling again and blood had been pouring from his nose. Tendai (the name I'll give him, not his real name) has also been subdued and depressed-seeming since the attack on him, probably collateral emotional damage.
In these cases, the victims were able to hunt down the money necessary from family or friends to get new shoes, pay the "top-up" or see a doctor but many victims are not.
