The Housekeeper Thing, Take Two: Why I’ve Changed My Mind

Sleepless nights. Stomach aches.  Teary eyes.  I was fighting tooth and nail last week.  But it wasn’t for myself. 

It started when we heard from the wonderful people that will be living in our house after us.  A few excellent email exchanges later I knew they would love our yard as much as I do.  The problem was, I wasn’t so sure they’d love our staff as much as I do.  Coming from the same place I found my own self two years ago, they had good questions and concerns and just weren’t so sure that the housekeeper/gardener thing was for them. My heart broke as I realized our housekeeper and gardener may not only be out of jobs due to our departure, but even worse, would lose their home.

Suddenly I found myself thinking deeply about this concept of “staff” (housekeeper / gardener / driver / ironer / nanny) once again, this thing that sounds so bourgeoisie that I have tortured myself for two years over my participation in it. As I tried to rationalize the conflict of having staff with the value of doing things one’s self, I suddenly realized. I have entirely changed my stance on having staff. Two years of Zimbabwe has completely altered my concept of this important piece of the African economy we call “staff.” I recognize its value deeper than appeasing someone’s laziness or serving someone’s aristocratic values. 

As I rationalized staff to the newcomers emailing questions and concerns, I suddenly found myself emotionally writing a cathartic ten page love letter about our staff.  I typed faster than ever before, pouring out my experiences and opinions in a jumble of typos and sentimental notions and logical explanations.   So here it is.  My change of heart.  My explanation (a little more succinctly and with hopefully a few less typos) to anyone who asks why it is so very important to get over the foreign baggage and discomforts of the concept of staff in order to truly embrace and experience the culture that is now Zimbabwe:

-Being “served” by someone is a gift. An uncomfortable gift if you let it be uncomfortable.  And an amazing gift if you let it be amazing. It is all about attitude and how you respect others, whether the person you are dealing with is your boss or your employee.  It’s true.  When we first arrived here I referred to the Zimbabwean form of “having staff” as closely looking like bigoted households from the 1950’s American South.  I have seen some horrifying attitudes and have witnessed some atrocious words.  But we cannot group mistreatment in with every person who has staff; it is entirely dependent on the household.  Racial differences can be complex –or simple, depending on how you look at them- but either way, they can add layers of richness when a person is treated with love in an employer-employee relationship that becomes strangely intimate as your lives grow together.

-Having a job is honorable. Period.  An important notion I did not recognize until recently was that our staff do not find being of service to someone else at all embarrassing, dishonorable, or below them. Therefore, my discomfort has to end there. Gardeners and housekeepers who have come from the rural areas to make it in the cities as “staff” are incredibly well respected by their families and communities.  They are often the biggest bread-winners of the family, able to support many who have stayed behind, and eventually able to return to their rural areas to build homes for their retirement. If staff see themselves as respected professionals, I should get over my guilt of putting someone in a service oriented role.  Just because it is often work I’d rather not do, does not mean I am using someone or valuing them less.  I am employing someone. 

-Having staff is not about laziness. This city’s landscape was organized and set up by British people with British concepts of homes, gardens and yards.  To upkeep that concept on a continent like Africa takes a lot of time.  Africa is work.  More work than having an equal-sized home in the US.

-Plants can grow inches a day during the rainy season.  Or require watering every day during the dry season.  Electric fences must be kept clear and lawns mowed more than once a week during the rains. 

-A layer of red dust settles inside every window and door during the dry season.  Mud splatters every surface during the rainy season.

-There are poisonous spiders and many bugs.  If homes are not swept or dusted and furniture not moved regularly, they inevitably have infestation problems.  In Africa a person must be okay with having animals in their home. We occasionally have a bird in the house, we often have skinks and geckos on the walls, and there are spiders called “flatties” and giant striped-legged rain spiders that show up during the rainy season.  Most animals are harmless.  But if we do not sweep and dust things often, we start to be taken over by these things.

-All laundry needs to be heat-treated because of the pootsi and tsi tsi fly eggs.

-Having a fire in the home every night is common during the winter in these non-insulated concrete homes… but someone must chop the wood-often.

-A home owner should always have someone on the property when they go away, especially for longer than a few days. This is to deal with alarms, storms, maintenance, etc, but also to have a presence on the property. Abandoned properties do not last long here; even the plants can be stolen.

-I can go on and on.  The point is that this is not a place in which vegetation and yard work takes a break for even a day.  Mother Africa’s wild side is always pushing on the pieces that have been built/planted by humans.  Even if I took on our household and garden as my only fulltime job, I could still not do everything that would need to be done daily.

-Employing one makes a difference to many.  This country has the third lowest GDP in the world.* Unemployment is one of the highest in the world.  I mean poor, poor.  For every staff member one employs, another ten mouths at least are fed.  Our staff alone supports another 10-12 people.  Unemployment is so high that the culture of having staff is one of the only stable employments keeping many people fed across the country.  For every job a privileged person can offer to another, whether it is low paying or not, the effects trickle far down into the economy and the lifeblood of the nation as a whole.

-Having staff is like building a bridge. A very difficult bridge that will never quite be built until guilt/jealousy is set aside and it becomes a beautiful picture of two families helping to provide for one another in a symbiotic dance. It becomes a way of introducing both sides to a new culture.  Zimbabwe is full of wall after wall.  It can be hard to meet people and isolating to feel like the privileged person driving from those wall-to-walls. Our staff have opened a door for me to come to love people different than myself, to more deeply recognize the value and inner-workings of another culture, and to therefore learn more about this great country.

I could wallow in my guilt. (I am great at that- can you tell?!) Afterall, I did that for the first year we were here.  But slowly I came to realize that just because I cannot offer someone a house and living as equally large as the one someone gave me does not mean that it is not a gift worth giving anyway.  I have evolved away from my guilt toward something much more life-giving and meaningful than brooding away, pondering what I am not able to provide for someone I appreciate.

“The Housekeeper Thing,” as I called it, is so incredibly complex for a foreigner to move into.  It’s not just about having an employee.  It’s about sharing your yard.  Your home.  Your privacy.  And it confronts your privilege daily.  But as I look back on my time in Africa, it may just have been one of the most rewarding and biggest learning opportunities out of everything I’ve experienced here. 

In the end, our outcome is great.  I am happy to say my heart has changed and whatever difficulties of awkwardness and guilt I arrived on the continent with have now greatly subsided, opening me to deeper possibilities of friendship with those I now value so much.  And even greater, I am breathing huge sighs of relief to find out that we have convinced the new people coming into our home to take on our soon-to-be-ex staff.  Oh, what love and lessons we have learned from them, these wonderful friends:

  

 

  

* http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115925/zimbabwe-prices-why-are-they-high-new-york-citys

Rush Hour in Zim

 

 

 

 

Bananas for Banoffee

Word has it that if I introduced American readers to pavlovas last week, I should not wait too long before also getting to another coffee shop classic in Zim, the banoffee pie.  Again tied to colonial roots, this dessert adopted in Zim was actually only developed in the 1970s in Britain but quickly made its way here by popular demand and a never-ending supply of bananas!  Made from gooey toffee, fresh bananas, whipped cream, and a crumbled biscuit or pastry base, I am convinced it may be impossible to find a better pie out there... Meet another dessert in The Bubble: the irrepressible, irresistible banoffee.

Guinea Fowl

Guinea fowl can be found anywhere throughout the country of Zim. It does not matter if one is in the city, out on a rural farm, in the middle of the bush, and in a coffee shop restaurant garden.  Guinea are everywhere.

 

To illustrate the country's love for the beloved guinea fowl, I want to share the secret -but actually quite well understood- recipe for guinea fowl that I have heard from a number of Shona and Ndebele master chefs:

Step One:  Clean one guinea fowl.

Step Two:  Put the guinea fowl in a pot of water. Add one large rock.

Step Three:  Boil the guinea fowl and rock for one week.

Step Four:  After one week, take the guinea fowl out of the water.  Throw away the guinea fowl.  

Step Five:  Eat the rock.

Save Valley Conservancy

"It will be like driving through a zoo," our friend Jacqui had told us as we prepped for our trip.

Jacqui's words had stood in stark contrast to the conservancy's urgent motto, "Kana Yapera, Yapera" (when they're gone, they're gone), and I found myself unsure of what to expect from a place famous for its "dwindling wildlife numbers due to poaching", it's "large populations of tourist-attracting wildlife", its popularity among happily welcomed vacationing hunters, and its farmland.  It was confusing.  Could all of these things fit into one space?  And how?  

Though I visited the Save Conservancy a month ago, I still have not gotten around to blogging about it. This usually happens for one of two reasons: A) I am too bored or tired of it to write about it, or B) I have too many fantastic photos and dread having to put into words and pictures such a hard-to-describe place.  My lack of motivation up until now falls entirely under the B category.  I find myself more motivated suddenly, though, as we have just gotten word that poachers there took out two more rhinos -one with an eleven day old baby- just days after our visit.  Though chalked full of animals, these rhinos once again remind us that places like Save need as much help as they can get.

 The Save Valley Conservancy is a 3,400 square kilometer trek of land found in the South-East Lowveld of Zimbabwe.  It is a "non-profit," though this term is personally confusing, since much of the land within its territory is also used for farming.  Though there are many more complex explanations often involving attempts to avoid farm take-overs, here is a snippet from the organization, which (though it looks long) will say things much more succinctly than me:

As the livestock population grew, so the environment deteriorated.  Cattle ate all the native fertile vegetation and caused a degradation of topsoil.  The result was an overused and unproductive landscape.  Over time, a combination of events brought the cattle industry to a standstill.

Fortunately a new black rhino conservation strategy from Zimbabwe’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management catalysed the formation of Savé Valley Conservancy.  With growing awareness of endangered wildlife and interest in ecotourism, a Conservancy offered an ideal solution.

In 1991 Devuli Ranch was divided into 15 smaller land units, and in November 1992 members agreed to shift operations from cattle ranching to wildlife preservation.  Cooperative and respectful interactions between landholders allowed the move to sustainable natural resource management.  The wildlife and habitats were acknowledged as assets to be nurtured, to ensure their benefits continued into the future.

Cattle and internal fences were removed, and in conjunction with the Department and the The World Wide Fund for Nature, we began monitoring and managing the restoration of the habitat.  In 1995 a 330km electric perimeter fence was built as a protective enclosure to protect the 3400 square kilometers/340 000 hectares of the conservancy.

The main goal of Savé Valley Conservancy was to restore the land’s full natural potential while protecting the black rhinos from extinction.  Today we reap the successes of nearly two decades of work, and continue to focus on reinstating the land to a balanced ecosystem.

For those of you tired of reading, here are a few personal photos -selected from my shutter-happy hundreds- to give you a taste of this gorgeous wildlife expanse:

 

Africa's supermodels: Please appreciate my 8,000 giraffe pictures.  I paid them to pose.

 

     

     

   

  

 

We had to forge the Save River to get to the lower half of the conservancy on our route.

Farmland in the middle.

Baobabs galore.

        

Impala galore, too.

 

 

 

Tracking a herd of buffalo in the hot hot sun.

To read more about the conservancy, please check out their website:  http://savevalleyconservancy.org/