They get up before dawn every day to cook and clean, draw water and carry wood. They till the fields and pull up weeds. When they’re finished, they care for the sick and attend meetings where they bake bread, make jam, knit jerseys, weave baskets and produce everything from shoe polish to peanut butter. And still they don’t have enough to survive.
For many women in rural Zimbabwe, Herculean effort and unceasing toil is no guarantee that their children will eat tomorrow, or that they will get an education or survive an illness.
At a tiny village in the Gutu district, Florence Manzu (21) doesn’t understand why this should be so. “I am a hard worker. I get up and plough the fields and I work all day. All I need is fairness. I want to buy seeds at a fair price and I want to sell my goods at a fair price.”
Instead, Rose faces the dilemma many poor people experience: the less money you have, the more expensive services are. The nearest bus stop is a 16km walk, and bus fare to the small town of Gutu costs $US5 each way. She can’t afford to go to town, but at shops in the village she can expect to pay way over the odds for basic necessities, even in a country where prices are already high.
“Things are much more expensive here. A bar of laundry soap costs US$2,50, but in town it is 80c. In town, salt is 50c — here they charge $1,50. But what can I do? I don’t have $10 to get to town.”
As we speak, a crowd of women gathers round in immaculately laundered snowy headscarves and home-sewn outfits, all keen to make their voices heard.
“We have no water to drink. We can walk 20km looking for water, and it’s a job for women.”
“We have no toilets so we’re very much afraid of cholera.”
“The clinics have no water or medicine and sometimes no qualified staff. They tell us to bring candles, but how can we? We have to go the next province and cross a river to get our ARVs [antiretrovirals], but we need enough food so we can take our pills.”
“Schools are deteriorating but we have to pay more.”
“There’s no market where we can sell our goods, so we have to barter on unfavourable terms.”
A lack of access to hard currency after the collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar and adoption of the US dollar has meant that most people in the rural areas are forced to barter livestock and their meagre harvests to pay for basic fees and services.
Teachers now receive a $100 a month “allowance” from the government — far more than the average parent earns — but children are expected to pay up to $10 each a month to their teachers, and many parents tell of an endless stream of demands from teachers, from money for food to bus fare.
Some parents sell livestock to raise the cash, others send a chicken or a bucket of maize meal to school. As the saying goes, the biggest religion in Zimbabwe is education and parents will starve themselves to ensure children go to school.
At the next village Emilia and Eustina Nyamandi are sitting on sacks of grain, waiting for their turn at the mill and swiftly rebuking anyone foolish enough to try to jump the queue. Eustina (26) is a subsistence farmer who grows maize, pearl millet and peanuts.
A third of her maize harvest will go to the owner of the mill: “It costs $2 to have your maize milled. If you don’t have cash you have to give them 7,5kg of maize as payment for milling a 20kg bucket.”
The milling also costs time — a luxury these women don’t have. “I have been here since 10am and now it’s 2.30pm,” says Emilia (29) wearily.
“The food from the last harvest will last until about September, then we’ll have to buy food or barter our goats and chickens,” says Eustina.
“Sometimes you don’t get much by bartering because commodities are scarce and the price goes up. Last year I had to sell everything I had to get food, so I had to get more livestock this year. If I thatch someone’s roof I can get a chicken.”
She also makes peanut butter and trades it for soap and cooking oil.
Eustina painstakingly rebuilt her livestock, but will probably have to sell it all by the end of the year once the ‘hungry season’ hits.
“The rain is getting less and less each year. If we have two bad seasons in a row, it will be too difficult for us to live. There is no indication it will be better tomorrow.”
Emilia and Eustina’s families survived last year because the grain marketing board sold them maize at a reduced price and they received food aid from NGOs for three months.
But neither woman expects a handout from anyone. “We need projects, like sewing affordable school uniforms or knitting jerseys,” says Emilia. “We need to earn money for our families.”
In the neighbouring district of Chirumanzu, an innovative project run from the Saint Theresa’s mission aims to address many of these concerns. The mission hospital not only cares for orphans and vulnerable children, and offers voluntary HIV counselling and testing, it also runs an outreach project for people living with HIV which provides home visits, psychosocial support and income-generating schemes.
Sister Andrea is deputy matron of the hospital and the coolest nun one could meet. She takes us to a village to visit one of the women’s support groups and, as we arrive, they burst into vigorous song and dance. Without missing a beat, Sister Andrea joins in the song and, in her starched white veil, keeps up with the most energetic dancers. Â
Then she sits down on a rock with the chairperson of the group and admires the baskets they have woven and gives advice on pricing, while explaining how the women extract fibre from sisal and use tree bark to dye the sisal in various colours.
Sister Andrea says that the biggest obstacle the women face is that they have nowhere to sell their products and no way to get them to the big cities, where buyers with ready cash might be found.
At the Takashinga support group in Chengwena, Sister Andrea and her colleague Frank Mafusire are greeted with affection as the women proudly display the progress they have made with their baking project. Sister Andrea is asked to sample a freshly baked batch of buns and loaves of bread, still hot from the ovens dug into the ground, and served with wild-melon jam.
The women drum and dance joyously around a small fire. They are making shoe polish by drying pieces of black rubber and grinding it into a fine powder. Paraffin and candle wax was then added and the mixture is cooked up before pouring it into old shoe-polish tins.
The group plans to sell the bread and jam at schools “because it is hard for the children to get something to eat at break”, and the shoe polish to people who can’t afford to buy it in town. Mary Ngoya (26) explains that even if they can’t shift all their stock “we sell to each other. It is cheaper than the shops.”
Nicole Johnston is the regional media coordinator for Oxfam GB