How Did Moses Cross the Red Sea - Part V

Originally posted: April 8th, 2008

You haven’t heard from me since the Zimbabwe elections, because I figure that most of you are able to follow the news as well or better than I. (Since we now pay for Internet by the minute, I don’t spend much time surfing.) I’ve been waiting for some firsthand news from Zimbabwe, and yesterday I got it.

My friend Marty is back in Botswana. She was given 14 days in the country, so she is once again pounding the pavement looking for work. Yesterday she came for a visit and brought her cousin, Chance, with her. This is his first trip to Botswana. I wanted to cry when I saw him. He looks like a scarecrow — a bony figure with clothes draped on it. Chance is 27 years old and has a degree in accounting from a polytechnic college. He was offered a job in Zimbabwe, but it paid only 290 million Zim dollars (less than five U.S. dollars) a month. Transportation to get to the job and back would cost him 600 million Zim dollars a month. There was no way he could afford to take the job, so now he, too, is in Botswana, walking the streets, looking desperately for any kind of work he can get. It used to puzzle me why Zimbabweans come here and do hard labor for such low pay. Surely the money they spend going back and forth isn’t worth it? The 290 million Zim dollars that Chance was offered for one month’s pay, however, is the equivalent of, if he’s lucky, what he can earn in less than one day here in Botswana.

Chance has never owned a bed. “A bed costs 18 billion dollars,” he said. “Can you imagine how many years I’d have to work to buy a bed?” Marty and Chance said that eating meat is unheard of. “Fruit is available,” they said, “but you wouldn’t think of spending your money on it. One banana costs 20 million dollars. It’s a luxury, not a necessity. You save your money for soap and cooking oil and salt.” They also talked about the collapse of the medical system. “Pregnant women who need C-sections have to go out of the country, because of the shortage of anesthesia. Other patients are told to provide their own sutures, IV’s, and surgical gloves.”

I sat for nearly three hours and listened to them talk about life in Zimbabwe. As horrible and desperate as the situation sounds, Marty seemed much more optimistic than before. She and Chance both feel that the end of Mugabe’s regime is near. They don’t think that he’ll go quietly, but they feel that the tide has turned. The Zimbabwean people are tired and hungry, and they can’t take five more years of the Zanu-PF in power.

According to the news, a run-off between the Zanu-PF and the MDC is inevitable. My fear is that Mugabe and the Zanu-PF will use the time between now and the run-off to bribe, threaten, intimidate, beat, and even kill the electoral commission, the opposition, and the voters. (I just checked the news, and apparently they’ve already begun doing just this.) It has always been their means in the past. Marty said that the elderly voters are the ones who are still gripped by fear. They believe that their pictures are being taken in the voting booth, so they don’t dare vote for the opposition. And, they believe that Mugabe will go to war if he loses. They’ve lived through one war, and they don’t want to go through another. And apparently a large chunk of the voters are elderly. According to Marty and Chance, more than half the population has fled Zimbabwe, and most of them are young and middle-aged adults. The elderly and the children are the ones left behind. I asked why the millions who have left don’t come back to vote. “Because,” said Marty, “the constitution says that you’re not eligible to vote unless you’ve been resident in the country for the past six months.”

Marty and Chance are both lovely Christians. Before they left, Marty asked Chance to pray and then said that she would pray, too. To my surprise, they didn’t pray for Zimbabwe. They prayed for Kg and for Mark and for me. They asked God to continue blessing us, and they asked God to continue healing Kg and performing miracles in her life. Do you know how humbling it is to sit in your beautiful, comfortable living room and listen to two desperately poor people ask God to bless you? Twenty-four hours later, and it still brings tears to my eyes.

I have never been good at math. When Marty and Chance started talking in millions and billions of dollars, my brain threatened to quit. I think, though, that 20 U.S. dollars is worth more than a billion Zim dollars. Marty and Chance laughed at the thought of 20 U.S. dollars. “If it was changed into Zim dollars, we’d have to carry it in a duffel bag!” I’m sure that if I filled a suitcase for them, I could still afford to eat meat and fruit every single day.