Arrival

We arrived at Karanda Hospital at about 1:30pm Saturday.


The electricity was off from about 3pm - 8:30pm, but there are two backup battery lights in the ceiling by which we ate supper. The water system here is dependent on electricity to refill, so we have cold water from the hot water tank and no cold water until everything recharges- but that doesn't happen until someone turns the switch back on in the morning, and that time is early but somewhat variable according to the people here.

The guest house accommodations are actually very nice- nicer and more homey/Americanized than Ghana even, which is nice for a little less culture shock. We are also staying just across the drive from the hospital, much closer than we were in Ghana. The hospital sits on a hillside, with a river at the bottom of the hill, and we literally had to drive through the river to continue on the dirt road up to the hospital. There is another route that is about 10-20 miles longer that they take during the rainy season. Neither the hospital nor the government have been able/willing to come up with the money to build a bridge yet.

Overall Zimbabwe has been interesting- outside the capital (Harare) it seems to be made up of very poor bush people like Ghana in one sense, but there are a lot of "white Zimbabweans" in Harare who had settled here just as many Dutch and English did in South Africa. The history is very interesting- back in 2000 many (actually I believe all) of the white farmers were forced to leave their farms, which were given to black Zimbabweans. (I actually met one of these Dutch farmers in Paraguay in 2000 without realizing the significance at that time. I just remember he was devastated and trying to re-create a dairy farm from nothing). Since then the farm economy in Zimbabwe has crashed. Before that Zimb. was a huge exporter of crops to this part of Africa. There is a lot of interesting history both here and in South Africa, and most of it has happened in the last 30 years. This country has a lot of gold and diamond mineral wealth, and huge agricultural potential. In the capital the weather was gorgeous, and sounds like it is most of the year; palm-ish trees everywhere, and the missionaries have multiple different kinds of fruit trees in their yards. But this country has been hit hard by AIDS (they say it has essentially lost a generation between the ages 20-40) and there are the economic issues that I mentioned above. If the economic situation was different, I think everyone would want to move here.