The second event was the ‘dollarization’ of the economy, whereby the Zimbabwe dollar has been replaced by the US Dollar and the South African Rand. As a result inflation has been halted in its tracks and is now close to zero, and the Zimbabwe dollar is, if not dead, then mortally wounded. On this latest trip I brought home a 50 Billion dollar banknote, which I was reliably informed would just about pay for a bus ride across Harare and roughly approximated a value equal to 50 US Cents – that’s an exchange rate of one Billion Zimbabwe dollars to the US Dollar. However for most rural Zimbabweans access to USD or SA Rands is hard to come by, and in many rural areas people have reverted to a barter economy exchanging goods and labour rather than cash.

A combination of political compromise and the end of hyperinflation has for the moment pulled the country back from the brink. However it is clear that this is still only a holding action as the political marriage is very shaky and the MDC and ZANU PF are very uncomfortable bedmates. It smacks of an arranged marriage more than a love affair with an element of rape within the marriage characterising the relationship between ZANU and MDC.

My task was to conduct an emergency assessment in the south east of the country in Chiredzi District, bordering Mozambique and South Africa. This was based on uncomfortably high levels of infant and child malnutrition, a serious cholera outbreak in this region in the last year and successive years of crop failures in an area characterised by unreliable rainfall. This region was also once one of the areas in which the former white farmers held large tracts of land as farms and ranches, and as a result, where much of the controversial land redistribution had taken place. It is the area known as the ‘lowveld’; hot, dry and best suited to cattle and wildlife; indeed the second largest national park in Zimbabwe, Gonarezhou, is located in this region just to the east of Chiredzi.

A week’s work in this region actually produced the conclusion that for the moment, the expected emergency is on hold. Decent rains in 2008 (and a promising outlook for the 2009/10 season as well) have produced a better than average harvest and although we did see enough hungry kids to be disturbing, levels of malnutrition were not at emergency levels. It was notable that in this region those who are suffering the worst deprivations are the peasant farmers resettled onto the former white owned farms. These farms are now with almost no services, including no clean water, no tools or seeds, and limited access to health care and education.  The dispossessed remain dispossessed, whatever the political promises of the ruling classes.

My journey took me to within a few kilometres of the South African border, where most of the male population has disappeared across in search of work, and where the women struggle to bring up their children on the few remittances that make it back home, and on whatever little they can produce in their gardens from their own labour. In the dusty frontier town of Chikombedzi I watched the idle youth gather around a storefront to watch the latest Nigerian drama unfold on the Digital Satellite TV network being beamed into the store as the only entertainment in town.  There are few vehicles on the rural roads, as few can get hold of the Dollars or Rands needed to buy petrol, and the roads themselves are falling into disrepair, as there is no money in the government coffers to pay salaries or but the materials needed to supply basic services.

The real emergency in this part of Zimbabwe, and indeed in much of the country, is the HIV/AIDS epidemic , with adult infections rates of 23%, or nearly one in four of the adult population. The health service is unable to cope, with many healthcare professionals having abandoned Zimbabwe for greener pastures, where they are able to earn a decent living. A large proportion of the population has essentially been abandoned to their fate, which is a miserable lingering death. The doctors and nurses I met were working hard against impossible odds.

Back in Harare life seemed to be more ‘normal’ than in recent years. However my memories of Harare from the 1990s are of a clean, modern, functioning city; now it is far more like any other archetypal African city, with piles of rubbish in the streets, potholed roads, power and water shortages, and hungry demoralised people let down by the failures of the government. For all the traumas it has experienced it is not yet a basket case, and indeed, compared to many African destinations, with which I have become familiar in recent years; Freetown, Darfur, even parts of Nairobi, it is still liveable and could still be a very pleasant place to live given access to foreign currency and a decent house and transport.

Zimbabwe, therefore, remains on the brink of a precipice but has maybe eased back a few steps. The future remains very much in the hands of Mugabe and his ZANU PF cohorts and until the MDC are actively, rather than grudgingly, engaged in the Governance of the country, then the future is still in an uncertain balance.

The recent post-election violence in Kenya has done enormous damage to the reputation and economy of a country famed for stability, peace and for being a tourist-friendly environment. While the political power sharing deal, signed in early March, has done much to pull the country back from the brink, and in general restore peace; deep damage was already done – to the economy but more particularly to the ethnic bonds that hitherto the country had enjoyed. This has now been replaced by mistrust, anger and feelings of revenge, and the wounds of this brief conflict will run deep for years to come.

In mid-March I travelled to the city of Kisumu, the capital of Nyanza province, on the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya. On arrival at Kisumu airport all seemed normal, the regular morning rotation of flights from Nairobi, full of businessmen and other visitors, was arriving for meetings, family visits and other purposes.

Driving into the city, immediately one could see the results of the violence – shops and offices shuttered with temporary steel sheets, and other businesses, many owned by Kikuyu businessmen from the Central highlands of Kenya, had been torched and gutted and reduced to rubble. In fact such had been the outburst of ethnic hatred here that any property and business that was owned by people not of the local Luo community was in ruins. It seemed incomprehensible that people who had otherwise lived closely together for decades could so suddenly turn on each other. It resonated strongly of Rwanda’s past.

Ominous patches of buckled tarmac on the main roads spoke of bonfires that had been lit at roadblocks, as gangs of rampant youths stopped all passers by, demanding to know their ethnicity. Woe betide those of the wrong tribal group. I had pointed out to me the gutted ruins of trucks and buses that had been burned with all occupants inside perishing. I passed scrawled graffiti, ‘Welcome to Darfur’, as the youth turned their neighbourhoods into a sad replica of that war zone. It seemed inadvisable to lean out of my car window and take photos, there is still too much simmering anger and it is still too easy to spark that anger.

I also visited one of the remaining camps for people displaced from Central Kenya and the Rift Valley, who had fled their homes in that region, terrorised out by the ‘Mungiki’-led gangs taking revenge on people from the west to pay back the killings in Kisumu and the northern town of Eldoret. On all sides great brutality had been enacted and great injustices and crimes perpetrated. I spoke to women who had fled with their young children from Nakuru and Elburgon, who had no idea what had become of their husbands. One can imagine the terror of their flight as they passed through the roadblocks fearing that they may have escaped one terror only to meet their ends at another.

One of the few optimistic signs in Kisumu was that businesses were quickly reopening. That is largely thanks to the return of some of the Kenyan-Asian businessmen, who had fled when the violence flared (and many of whom had also had their businesses torched) but came back when given assurances by the political leadership that it was safe to do so. They are single-handedly rebuilding Kisumu’s economy at the moment.

People from Central Kenya are not so lucky. A group of ‘matatu’ mini bus drivers tried recently to return but were badly beaten by a mob before being rescued by the police. The security presence is still high in Kisumu and I saw many Humvees, filled with the Kenyan army, patrolling the streets. There was still tension in the air but a feeling of hope and expectancy that the politicians, who many Kenyans saw sitting on their hands for too long, while Kenya burned, finally opted for peace and a new future for the country.

In Nairobi they were wishing me ‘Happy New Year’. The real Jan 1st had been too traumatic to celebrate. But now all are hoping for a new beginning; for a new Kenya, pulled back from the brink of disaster.

Author – Vince Gainey.

For any of you living in a cave since last year, on October 8th 2005 at 08:50 a category 7.5 earthquake with an epicentre in Pakistan-administered Kashmir struck the region. In Pakistan, India and Afghanistan over 73,000 people lost their lives and up to 3.3 million lost their homes, and now live in tent cities around what is left of major towns, such as Muzaffarabad and Balakot and Srinagar in India.

I spent two weeks around Muzaffarabad, the regional capital of Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, the region referred to locally as Azad (free) Jammu and Kashmir, or AJK. I was also taken by helicopter up to the Neelum valley, north west of Muzaffarabad and close to the disputed line-of-control with Indian-ruled Kashmir – one of most heavily militarised regions in the world, and the site of a major military standoff between these two nuclear powers.

This area, close to the line-of-control (LOC), is normally off limits for foreign visitors, but the pressing need to get assistance to earthquake survivors has meant that military forces on both sides of the LOC have relaxed access regulations sufficiently to allow the aid operation to proceed unhindered. In fact one of the remarkable things about this situation is the role and co-operation of the military on both sides and the vital function their capacity to heavy lift has been in providing emergency relief to the earthquake victims.

I have to admit to a great sense of shock on seeing the extent of the devastation caused by the quake. Huge swathes of the city of Muzaffarabad are in ruins. In particular the Government buildings failed to withstand the shock and most were left derelict, taking with them students, doctors, police officers, prisoners and prison warders alike, clerks and administrators. In fact anyone caught sitting at their desk on the morning of 8th October in Muzaffarabad, was doomed to become a victim. Most poignantly, over 17,000 children were killed in the quake in Muzaffarabad. The city is a children’s graveyard and you can tell it in the silence of the empty spaces; the lost voices, the lack of play, the sadness in parents’ eyes.

Boarding an Mi8 helicopter for the trip into the mountains was an exciting, albeit slightly unnerving, experience. There have been several aid choppers lost in this region since October and with fickle weather, overworked machines and rugged mountain terrain, I could see why. All went well though and as we flew over the city, the multicoloured splashes of the tented camps told their own story of lost homes, lost lives and destruction. A huge raw gash in a mountain overlooking the city was also startling evidence of a whole mountainside that sheared off at the earthquake epicentre, sweeping away homes and blocking and diverting the Neelum River, down below.

I spent a few days at a field hospital that had been set up at 5,500 feet on a mountainside above the valley. While extraordinarily picturesque, with snow capped peaks all round, the landscape was also treacherous and at night we could hear the rumble of landslides, and by day watch the clouds of dust, another section of mountain fell away into the valley.

Earthquake survivors were still coming in for treatment, but four months since the quake, most of the critical trauma injuries have been treated and the medical teams are back to dealing with more routine medical conditions such as illnesses, pregnancy, childbirth and the occasional accident. There are a lot of traumatised people out there though who have lost all that they had put together in their life, and it was heartbreaking to see these tough, mountain people breaking down with the despair of their losses.

I just missed the ‘cartoon’s protest on the way through Islamabad and was careful not to broach politics when in polite conversation with Pakistanis or Kashmiris. This is still too much of a raw and sensitive subject at the moment and I felt my own opinions would not be understood or accepted too readily by a people with an entirely different cultural mindset. I also thankfully just missed the visit of Dubya, although by the time I left, Islamabad was already crawling with crewcut marines and suspicious looking men in dark suits and shades, talking into their lapels.

I Expect I will be back in a couple of months to get the ball rolling there on our own project work. Watch this space.

Author: Vince Gainey.