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111 14 There Is No Cholera in Zimbabwe arare is sitting on a cholera time bomb, as the deadly disease, which has claimed the lives of more than 20 people in the capital’s satellite town of Chitungwiza recently, is spreading fast” Stanley Gama, The Saturday Star, 4 October 2008. This is the title paragraph of a story I had read in October 2008. I had dismissed it then as another of those scare stories that newspaper journalist like to be the first ones to broach, but will later on fizzle into nothing much. But I should have known better, especially after the last year’s episode. This was the last year’s episode. “I start feeling a little fun and like shit after our Sunday Mass at around ten mid-mornings. It is early November, in 2007. When I return home from the church I sleep a little bit, thinking that it is just a small ailment. When I wake up, in the early afternoons, I am feeling a little bit better. At about one o clock in the afternoon I accompany Tambudzai, a church mate, to the Church for the afternoon youthgroup activities. I am still feeling a little bit groggy. Sometimes, I would feel some cold sizzling shivers trembling through my spine. Sometimes I have this funny headache, but I shrug these things off. When I arrive home from the afternoon church I am really cold, shivering and feeling like vomiting. My stomach is an upheaval of some sort and by about eight at night it is full blown vomiting, and a running stomach. Instantly I become ‘Toilet Express’. Mostly it is blood that I am letting loose from my bowels. This also means I have an infection in my stomach. The next day, I don’t simply go to work, neither to the passport offices where I was processing my passport. The only strength I have is for me to make it to the toilet. I am like every 5 minutes or so I have to run to the toilet. Later, the same day, I take a couple of Cotri tablets which I got from my sister, Stella; who the previous week was infected but it hadn’t been so bad with her. The pills don’t improve my situation. Going to the hospital is a “H 112 waste of time because other people have gone there and returned back without not even a painkiller. But, of course, with the salt and sugar solution as the suggested remedy. The hospitals and clinics don’t have any pills or medicine for cholera. This situation has been caused by the water we have been drinking, which is from ZINWA treatment works. Treatment of water had been removed from Harare city council authority by the government and ZINWA (Zimbabwe National Water Authority) had been formed by the government. It had been entrusted with the mandate to treat water and sell it directly to the customers. The government did this just to spite the opposition party, which won all the urban municipalities in the 2005 election. This organisation had failed miserably to provide clean water and the water we were getting was smelly greenish syrup. If you leave it in a glass, for a couple of minutes, half bottom of the glass will be filled up by some muddy, smudgy, darkish substance. It was obvious the water had too many E-coli bacteria, more than was normal for human consumption. There is nowhere else we could get better water so we have to drink this water. The alternative was to fetch it straight from the river Hunyani, where this dirty water was coming from, or to dig wells in waterways around the city. These wells would, of course, be made up of water coming from the spewing sewage rivers all over the city, which were emptying into these waterways. The next day Kudzanai, my sister’s little kid, enters the fray. It is now the two of us. The morrow day Kudzanai’s mother, Judith, enters the race to the toilet and it becomes a three-some horse race. I can’t eat anything without vomiting it afterwards, but on Thursday I get a couple of tablets from my next-door neighbour, Mai Agnes. I don’t even know the name of those tablets. That day, Kudzanai becomes fine, but my other two brothers, Lucky and George, also enter the race. It is minor with these two guys such that...

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