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Travelogue 2006 - Project III
Week 2
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Picture by the daughter of Epworth Primary's deputy headmistress

 

 

This account was written by William Harvey and does not necessarily reflect the perspectives of Sarah Frisof or Ryan Murphy.

July 13, 2006. "Flying to Africa is always an adventure," a periodontist from South Carolina chuckled as our plane idled on the runway in Dakar. Our pilot had just announced that because of a fuel strike in Senegal, we did not have enough fuel to get to Johannesburg. No, we would not have to get out and push the plane, but we would need to fly to Isla del Sol to refuel, in order to complete the final leg of our twenty-hour flight.

By the time we got to Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, the six of us were already exhausted. I'd flown from Indianapolis to Chicago to New York on Tuesday, rehearsing with cellist Ryan Murphy and flutist Sarah Frisof as soon as I arrived. A night made sleepless by the heat and noise of the Big Apple preceded our early flight the next day to Dulles, where we met Jayne During, director of the Kuaba Humanitarian Foundation and organizer of this trip; Cindy Chapman, a big supporter of Jayne's; and Bekah, Cindy's daughter. After the interminable flight to Johannesburg, subsequent layover, and flight to Harare, I was so used to flying I felt a bit strange not getting on another plane.

We received a warm welcome from Ann Hamilton, a white woman who owns the Borrowdale Country Manor, where we will stay; Dominic Benhura, a renowned sculptor and friend of Jayne's; Patricia Mabviko-Musanhu, a famous TV personality who has arranged much of our itinerary here; Kingston, her husband; and Onias Horiwa, an orphaned musician who used to live at Matthew Rusike Children's Home in Epworth and will help with our workshops there.

Ann drove Sarah, Ryan, and me through the deserted streets in darkness, rolling through red lights to avoid carjackings. The Borrowdale Country Manor is not far from where the president's nephew lives with fifty cars and sixteen wives he knows only by number. As we drove through the gate in the high wall surrounding the bed and breakfast, Ann wondered if the electricity would be on. Power outages occur daily here because of the international sanctions placed on Zimbabwe. Since the country now has a quota of electricity it may use each day, the government constantly cuts power to some neighborhoods while restoring it to others, keeping it on all the time at hospitals and other important buildings.

Perched on top of a hill, the quaint manor overlooks tastefully landscaped grounds, which we could barely make out, thanks to the porch lights (the electricity was on after all). We sat down to a nice warm bowl of soup prepared by Ethel, the wonderful cook, before snuggling into our beds under layers of quilts, which warded off winter's cold.

July 14. Joe Dits, a reporter from the South Bend Tribune, arrived this morning, sharing a very warm greeting with Onias, whom he hadn't seen in the ten years since he volunteered at Matthew Rusike.

Kingston and Patricia arrived with a van to take our entourage to Alexandra Park Primary, one of the two schools where we will give the workshops. Children dressed in pressed brown uniforms lined up to greet us. We discussed our curriculum with the headmaster, who then gave us a tour. Like most places in this country, the school is a campus of small buildings enclosed by a high security wall, rather than one large building.

Next, we visited Epworth Primary, the other school at which we will present workshops. Here, most of the children are orphans from Matthew Rusike. Many have uniforms, but quite a few do not; all are too thin. Thirty percent have HIV/AIDS, inherited from parents they never knew. In hopes of stemming the spread of AIDS with the current generation, the school has plastered its walls with signs preaching abstinence before marriage and fidelity to one partner.

Our last stop before lunch was at Matthew Rusike, where the orphans live when they're not attending one of the area schools. We strolled around the dusty grounds, amid buildings that looked baked by many years of sun. Occasionally, we met curious children. "Mhoroi! Ndinonzi William, unonzi ani?" I'd ask them in Shona, after which they'd grin and tell me their names. Kingston and I came across a kid banging on an aluminum can with some sticks, and Kingston showed him a cool rhythm while I got out my violin to improvise. A small group of kids collected, and I played some Bach as they giggled and smiled and I tried not to notice that their legs were thinner than my arms.

We ate a late lunch of sadza and bones at a restaurant. Sadza, the staple food here, is a bland corn-based porridge with the consistency of mashed potatoes. Carnivore that I am, I still didn't quite feel comfortable gnawing cartilage off cow bones.

At Kingston and Patricia's house, they got out their guitars to play songs they wrote, and we improvised with them. After this evening of music and good cheer, we returned to the manor, where the power had been cut again.

July 15. Sarah, Ryan, Jayne, Cindy, and Bekah wanted to go to the lion and cheetah park, but Onias wanted to show me his hometowns, so Joe, Onias, his friend Lovemore, and I went to get gas. I gave Lovemore a couple of American twenty-dollar bills, and he exchanged them for a six-inch thick stack of tightly packed Zimbabwe dollars, all of which he surrendered at the gas station.

A two-hour drive brought us to the gate of his uncle's home in the village of Wedza. We walked up a path through a field of tall grass to a cluster of small, dilapidated shacks made of brick and thatch. A few men sat on rickety, old benches around the dusty patch in the center; women lounged on the doorstep of what must have been the living quarters for everyone we saw.

We greeted them in the traditional manner, the men clapping slowly with flat hands, the women with cupped hands. Then we all sat down so Onias could catch up with his uncle, L. V. Chirere. He had been sick recently with malaria and bloody diarrhea, but he felt better now.

Since he is famed for his skill at the ancient style of dancing in which the dancer ties gourds to his ankles, Onias prevailed on him to perform for us. He needed little encouragement—soon he was shuffling around, rattling the gourds while singing and waving an ornamental cane he'd carved himself. As my ears focused on the song, I realized it was simply a decorated pentatonic scale. Quickly, I got out my viol in and asked Onias to ask his uncle if I could join in. Soon, we were circling around each other, grinning broadly as we danced and made music and the others clapped.

L. V. brought out some more of his woodcarvings. I loved one featuring three fish that move on sticks and click musically when they collide, so I bought it from him for $3 million. I smiled sadly at the price—in the U.S., that same $3 million would barely pay for a sandwich. And here, a pair of shoes can cost $60 million, while the average man is lucky if he earns $50 million a month.

Onias paid respects to the graves of his mother, grandmother, and grandfather—simple stone markers on the fringes of the weed-choked property—before we took our leave of L. V. and his clan and headed to Wedza's main drag, a short dusty street with five or six shops on either side. The four of us moseyed over to the bar, where a radio blasted loud music. The old foosball table stood idle outside, for the men were all inside, drinking from unmarked jugs. Onias decided this would be a good venue for me to give a concert.

The owner turned down the radio as I got out my violin. Hmm, what to play? I settled on the fast movement of Bach's C Major Sonata. As I played, I saw some men look at me with interest and others with suspicion, while others just ignored me. Halfway through, Onias planted himself in front of me and pointed at his watch. Not sure why he wanted me to stop right after I had begun, I finished the movement. He then said tersely, "Let's go." Turns out one of the fellows who had a bit to drink was anti-American and wanted to make trouble, so we exited just in time.

Determined to justify our outing, Lovemore and Onias stopped to buy yams and sugarcane from a group of about thirty women and children standing by the road. I got out to play violin for the children, who giggled at the up-bow staccato of the Tchaikovsky "Melodie" and grinned and danced to the American fiddle tune "Bile Them Cabbages Down." Several of the women told Onias in Shona that it was beautiful. As drive-by violin recitals go, I was pleased.

Next, we stopped at the home in Marondera that Onias shares with his wife and baby daughter and his sister and her family. We enjoyed conversing with his brother-in-law and eating some delicious sandwiches (using homemade peanut butter) before heading to Tony's Kitchen to hear Onias' band, Rovambira.

Rovambira takes its name from the snake, and also because it means "to play the mbira," which is a steel-keyed thumb piano. The band is the nucleus of the Marondera Arts and Culture Village, a project Onias founded with the goal of preserving local culture. The project became so successful that the National Arts Council—the same council that guaranteed his exclusive use of the name—decided to take the name for their own project and force him to take another name. I hope he finds a way out of this David-and-Goliath struggle.

At Tony's Kitchen, we shouldered past men playing pool and drinking from unmarked jugs to the backdoor, where I paid $800,000 so the four of us could hear the band play in the back lot. If you can hear three electrified mbiras jamming in a polyrhythmic groove with shakers, a guitar, and drums and not start dancing...good for you. I couldn't. Soon I was up there flailing away, believing sincerely that the other guys dancing were laughing with me, not at me.

Onias nudged me as the band played a catchy song he wrote. I liked it so much that I asked him to ask the band to repeat it so I could play along. They agreed, so I got out my violin and got up on stage as the crowd of drunken men cheered with a mixture of enthusiasm and incredulity. Soon I was improvising crazily as the band grinned and the crowd frenzied about.

As we played, suddenly my A-string lost tension, and then my E-string, and then the D, leaving me to play very high on the lowest string. Perhaps I was trying too hard to be heard—all the band members were hooked into a sound system and all I could do was play into the mike. Perhaps my violin did not appreciate its sudden contact with the cold night air. At any rate, the crowd must have appreciated my Paganini-esque antics, for when we finished, they roared their approval. All the guys wanted to give me a high five, and one tried to vault up and play the violin, which I discouraged. Before leaving the stage, I exchanged a handshake and smile with Rovambira's biggest fan—a paraplegic man sitting on the stage with no wheelchair. He cannot talk or use his left hand, which is bent backwards against his arm.

Onias and I arranged another engagement at Tony's Kitchen next weekend, and then we tried to escape from those who wanted us to stay. Finally, I agreed to take a long draught of that foul-tasting home-made alcohol, and soon we were en route to Borrowdale beneath a sky sparkling with stars...I had never seen the Milky Way so distinctly.

July 16. Jayne wanted to have a cooking party, so we spent the day cooking various comestibles. Jayne, Bekah, and Sarah did most of the work. Ann Hamilton came, as did many of the officials from Epworth Primary. We also met the internationally distinguished ophthalmologist Dr. Solomon Guramatunhu, who is the chairman of the non-profit Eyes for Africa and the personal eye doctor of President Mugabe. The evening ended with Sarah, Ryan, and me serenading the guests in the living room.

July 17. The suburb of Epworth is a sight no one should have to see, but which everyone should see until conditions there improve. We drove on dirt roads past impoverished shantytowns to the enclosed campus of Epworth Primary. Children with stick-like legs and torn uniforms gathered to welcome us with an adorable welcome song. However, we learned that the Minister of Education had not yet granted permission for us to conduct workshops there, so we went instead to Matthew Rusike. The primary school would excuse a hundred of its students, mostly orphans from the home, to go back there for a couple hours a day.

While checking out the cafeteria where we would hold the workshops, I met Tapiwa Goronga, one of the orphans. At fourteen, he is too old for our workshops, but he wanted to show me his poetry, so we traipsed back to the small room he shares with two other children. He got out his notebook and I began to read his poems aloud, as he smiled. I read through "School Children" with enthusiasm up until the last three lines:
At last, lunch hour comes
And they all rush off
With curved empty stomachs.
I found I simply could not say the last line aloud. "That's very good," I told him, my voice catching a bit. "Please, keep writing."

The first day of teaching at Alex Park went well. Sarah, Ryan, and I started by playing Ricardo Romaneiro's "H₂O," a piece written for this trip that involves audience participation. After introducing ourselves, we did a large-group improvisation game and taught them the spiritual "Wade in the Water" before we broke into pods—my name for the small groups we would use at both Matthew Rusike and Alex Park to create the compositions. We lucked out in that Cindy, Bekah, and Joe agreed to lead the pods. Onias also became a pod leader, as did three other former Matthew Rusike orphans, now in their twenties: Onias' brother Oliver and their friends Mozyce Ngombe and Jeffresy Chasi. Today in the pods, we did get-acquainted and creativity games.

Tonight at the manor, the power went out again.

July 18. For the first day of workshops at Matthew Rusike, we had to combine the agendas for the first two days so the kids wouldn't get too far behind. They don't understand as much English as the Alex Park kids, nor are they as confident, but they appreciate what we offer them so much more. They have nothing—no parents, advantages, or adequate nutrition.

When we did our instrument petting zoo, they forgot all that. I helped groups of them try out my violin, while their friends banged on glockenspiels or stared at the cello. I'll never forget the delight on their faces as they produced their first-ever scratches on the violin.

After our second day of workshops at Alex Park, Sarah, Ryan, and I performed at the Avondale branch of the Rotary club. Harare has eight Rotary clubs, and since Jayne is a Rotarian, she arranged for us to play at several of them in order to advertise our final benefit concert at Alex Park. The guest speaker held our interest with an address about the government's plan to increase restrictions on the freedoms of speech and information. For instance, Zimbabweans must now wait twenty-five years to access the minutes of any cabinet meeting, so since the cabinet meets on Tuesdays, the topics discussed at today's meeting will be public knowledge on July 18, 2031!

Dr. Guramatunhu treated us all to a lovely French supper at Alo Alo, the restaurant attached to the Alliance Francaise. At his request, I serenaded the guests with a couple of French selections—Massenet's "Meditation from Thais" and Tchaikovsky's "Melodie"—during which he closed his eyes with the air of a satisfied connoisseur. He plans to host a benefit concert at his home on Sunday to raise funds for the borehole pump at Epworth Primary, the construction of which is the ultimate goal of "Sound of Water, Sound of Hope." The suggested donation for his concert will be $10 million. Even allowing for Zimbabwe's exchange rate, I have never played a concert with a ticket priced that high.

July 19. We got up very early to play at Rotary Dawn, a chapter consisting mostly of old white men who meet in an oak-paneled gentlemen's club. "Ours used to be an elite club, but nowadays anybody can get in," one of them remarked haughtily to me. Sadly, I did not have to wonder what he meant by "anybody."

Today's lesson plan at both Matthew Rusike and Alex Park came to us from Chris Gross. In the plan, called "Performer, Composer, Audience," students learn the difference between the three types of people involved in the performance of classical music. The plan begins by having the students compose three-sentence stories, and at Matthew Rusike, we noticed many stories like this one: "I am at the hospital. I am taking medicine. I feel sick."

I tried to ignore that as Sarah and Ryan continued with the lesson plan. During the part where I talked about famous composers, I pointed to the face of Beethoven on my shirt, saying, "This is the face of a composer." Then I pointed to my own face, since I write music, repeating, "This is the face of a composer. Now, look at the kid on your right. Look at the kid on your left. This is also the face of a composer, for at the end of these two weeks, you will all have written music." An excited murmur rippled across the room.

In between our sessions at Matthew Rusike and Alex Park, we visited a shantytown in Epworth filled with crumbling concrete shacks, each of which held several children but few or no adults. We threaded our way along the dirt paths to the area in front of a shack where a little girl sat on a blanket in the sun. A crowd of children collected, curious to see the wealthy foreigners and the community adults who had come to see them.

 

The girl looked at nothing, for her eyes couldn't focus. Her emaciated arms hung listlessly by her side. Flies buzzed near her, as though she were already dead. Jayne questioned the teenager who seemed to be the only one responsible for her in any way. The girl's parents were dead, and she had no relatives. She had eaten a little sadza that morning, but she lacked the strength to stand. Her name is Fatima, and she's about eight years old.

What could she be thinking? Perhaps she wonders what all these strange-looking people are doing standing over her, looking sad and taking pictures. Will their sadness turn into a solution? But Fatima would probably not be thinking about solutions, because since she has never been to school, how would she know that there are solutions to her problems? Even if she had been to school, she is now too weak to think.

I am not. I thought, why are we taking pictures? To inspire people back home to care about children like Fatima? You can look at a picture of her and think oh, that's sad, but you cannot possibly know what it's like to have an old tire be your only source of water. You cannot know what it's like to be a child with no one to love you, sitting on a blanket all day, waiting to die.

Cindy found a bottle of water to give to Fatima, but the little girl did not have the strength to open it, and none of the other children knew what it was. We realized that they had never seen bottled water before. I opened it and motioned for one of the boys to give her water, which he did.

As Jayne arranged to meet Fatima's caretaker to plan for her future, I looked at these children—their skin caked with dirt and mucus, their clothes torn in a dozen places—and I angrily understood that they were born with no future. They were born into a world designed to keep them in their state of nothingness. Good people believe that you can save the world one child at a time, and so the children at Matthew Rusike are being saved from a fate like Fatima's. As for Fatima, well...you can't save the whole world.

I know that Jayne will help improve Fatima's situation. But what about the children in the shantytown we did not visit? Even Jayne cannot help everyone.

After taking our leave of Fatima and extracting her caretaker's promise to meet Jayne tomorrow, we walked to the shack where Rachel, a twelve-year-old girl in our workshops, lives alone with her nine-year-old sister. Fortunately, today her aunt and uncle, a one-eyed man named Innocent, came to take care of the girls and make sure they had a safe place to stay. Jayne asked if Rachel can cook and the girl beamed from ear to ear, saying yes, she can cook sadza. She was so proud. I can pay for ingredients more expensive than the maize for sadza, yet I can cook nothing. I felt ashamed.

Our evening experiences might as well have taken place on another planet. We returned to Alo Alo for drinks with Solomon (I concluded that the South African beer Castle is the best on the planet) before going to the magnificent Italian restaurant Fontane di Trevi as guests of Roger Thompson, who works for Cummins Engine in Zimbabwe. Steve Chapman (Cindy's husband and Bekah's father) works for Cummins, so they enjoyed chatting.

The cavernous restaurant, tastefully decorated in the Italian style, makes a delicious ravioli, but, in a sad commentary on the economy, we were the only customers.

July 20. Today's lesson about music inspired by water began with a warm-up exercise in which a third of the students clapped a steady pattern of six eighth-notes, while another third made water noises and the other third sang a minor melody vaguely reminiscent of Smetana's Moldau. Then, we played it for them on Ryan's CD player. I gazed out at the sea of silent children, their thin faces enraptured by the music. Smetana's overplayed masterpiece has never sounded so beautiful to me as it did then.

We also drew pictures while listening to the shimmering colors of Ravel's Une barque sur l'Ocean, and then critiqued Debussy's La Mer by listening to it and raising our hands only when he did a "good job" of writing music that sounded like water. Then, in our pods, we wrote poems about water.

After repeating the same lesson plan at Alex Park, we went to the Alliance Francaise for the third day in a row with Dr. Guramatunhu. I admire him a lot: he practiced gynecology, anesthesiology, and general surgery and excelled at all of them before finding his true calling in ophthalmology. A connoisseur of fine food, wine, and music, fluent in numerous languages, generous and charming, he is the paragon of the self-made man.

Today, we visited Alo Alo so that a reporter from the Zimbabwe Herald could interview Sarah, Ryan, and me. We drove to the Herald newsroom so he could take a picture. It reminded me of how my dad's newsroom looked fifteen years ago—except my dad never had to worry about going to j ail for an article.

We performed at the Borrowdale Brook chapter of Rotary. As at every Rotary we've attended, Jayne spoke about our project and mentioned a collection box she would place at the club in case anyone wanted to donate clothes. Some high school students from a lower middle class school in Hatfield happened to be there, and they promised to do what they could.

July 21. Since Sarah and Ryan have been doing such a phenomenal job with the bulk of the teaching, I thought I'd try my hand at it today. I adapted Chris Gross' brilliant lesson plan about motives to teach the children about motives and melodies. We played games and sang and messed with pipe cleaners. By the end, I think they knew what makes a good motive, but I was less successful at teaching melodies, since I had to deviate from Chris' plan. Sarah and Ryan know better than I how to talk to kids at their level. However, the kids did enjoy the demonstration in which I sang the ingredients of a snack bar to the "Wade in the Water" tune in order to show how music and words should fit together.

 

In our pods today, we began setting our poems to music, though my pod at Matthew Rusike is considerably behind my Alex Park pod. The Alex Park kids have so many advantages: they've heard and performed more music, they understand English better, their creativity has always been encouraged by loving parents, and they received one more day of our workshops. While teachers are not supposed to play favorites, I can't help rooting for the kids at the orphanage to catch up, if only because they appreciate what we have to offer and don't approach us constantly asking to be excused for a chess match or netball game, like the Alex Park kids.

Tonight we visited the great sculptor Dominic Benhura. Despite his fame—he created the centerpiece sculpture for Mandela's headquarters—he is a wonderfully down-to-earth fellow. Slender and lanky, clad in artfully patchworked clothes, he smiles and laughs nearly all the time and springs about like a jack-in-the-box, but more easygoing. Tiny dreadlocks perch on top of his head as playfully as his whimsical stone sculptures of children defy gravity.

After looking at his magnificent creations at the house he shares with one of his two wives and their children, we drove in one of his cars to the house he shares with his other wife. The chaos of his older son's birthday party filled the house with young boys jumping and dancing to hip-hop or playing video games while his toddler son and another little tyke drove around the house in battery-powered cars. Dominic and I chatted before the Kuaba and MFTP folks sat down with him to enjoy a delicious dinner of succulent beef stew, shepherd's pie, and fried chicken.

Dominic's lifestyle would be impressive even in the U.S., but for a sculptor and someone living in Zimbabwe, it is particularly unusual. Yet, the most impressive thing about him is not his genius or the lifestyle it affords him, but the humanity that shines through his art and the charitable work he undertakes and supports.