By Prince Gora
Note: This story is completely fictional. Any relations to real life events, places and or people are purely coincidental.
“Gogo, will it ever stop raining?” I posed the question to grandma as if I wasn’t interested about the rain at all. I wasn`t even looking at her. Instead, I was staring outside through the slightly open door of her kitchen hut.
It had been raining non-stop for more than 24 hours and the truth is that I was beginning to get worried.
I had initially dismissed the rains as just some light showers but after a full day of ‘non-stop light showers,’ my stance on that had since changed; the impact of the rain was now there for all to see, anyways.
The roads were now flowing like a flooded Zambezi river and our front yard had literally turned into a replica of the famous Kariba dam.
“Yes, it will stop raining in a few hours now,” grandma replied in an equally disinterested but chilled voice while putting a log of wood into the fire.
It was just grandma and I gathered around the fire in her kitchen hut. Grandpa had put on a raincoat and braved the rain so that the cattle could graze for a few hours.
Sekuru was, in fact, standing in for me. Herding the cattle was supposed to be my job, my father had specifically sent me to our rural home during the university vacation to do just that. He had also strategically sent the guy who minded the cattle for my grandparents on a three-months long leave just to be absolutely sure that I would be herding the cattle.
It was his rather smart way of killing two, or should I say three, birds with one stone. The herder’s leave had been long overdue and according to my dad, I needed some rural experience so that I could appreciate our family roots better and get serious with school rather than wasting my time in college doing student activism which tainted the family's name and hampered my future employment prospects.
Dad strongly believed that the comrades I hanged around with were a bad influence on my behavior and it was pertinent for me to cut ties with them before I got myself suspended from school or arrested by the police - I did both barely three months later.
But Dad's perfect plan, like many of mine, was not perfect; it had loopholes.
In all his scheming, he either forgot that there was electricity and a fairly stable internet connection at the local shopping center or never dared to think that I was willing to dedicate up to 5 hours of each and every day to walk a combined 10km to and from the shops so that I could stay connected to the struggle. He probably also forgot that Gogo and Sekuru so adoringly loved me that they wouldn`t possibly have let me do all the hard work of the village homestead alone, even with their frail bodies of old age.
The rain had however also just jeopardized my plan and I was getting restless. I so desperately wanted to go back to the shops and get an update of the happenings of the struggle.
But if Gogo was right, I was just about to get back in business in a few hours.
I sat in silence with gogo for close to half an hour. The silence was only broke when Mr. Kandiyero, another villager who was a church mate of my grandparents, came by the house to check in on grandma.
After the usual pleasantries, he announced the big news; the river was flooded and the bridge had just collapsed.
The rain had been a crack on my ship but this, this was like 20 cracks on it and I had no plan on how to deal with the cracks. My ship was surely about to sink.
Just to make sure that my panic wasn`t premature though, I asked Gogo another question; categorically on behalf of a friend.
“So Gogo, how will people go to the shops if there is no bridge?” I tried to musk my true feelings and made the question sound as innocent and general as it could possibly have been.
“Oh that? They don`t go. At least not until the level of the water in the river has significantly subsided.” Now it was time to really panic but grandma didn`t know that and so she went on to explain, without that much worry nor concern, that their makeshift bridge always collapsed every three or so years and people wouldn`t go to the shops until a new bridge was installed or until the level of water in the river had significantly decreased to safer levels which sometimes took up to three months.
She had to remind me that life in the village was so much different from that in the city when I inquired about how people would survive without access to fresh supplies from the shops or a grinding mill for that long.
“We have enough mealie meal to last us for the next three or so months and you brought all those groceries we need from the city to add to my already significant stock. And here in the village we have livestock, chickens, a garden and fields which provide us with literally everything else we need.”
“You know,” she briefly paused and then continued, “this is our life during the rainy season here. Even when the bridge is there, it is difficult to go to the shops after heavy rains because all the roads will be so muddy that one cannot possibly walk on them.”
With my little hope now completely extinguished, I decided to change the direction of the conversation and started to explain to my grandma that heavy rains like the ones the country had been experiencing over the last few years were a result of global warming and climate change.
She didn`t quite understand much, or care to, about the burning of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases causing global warming but she did agree with me that deforestation was a cause for concern and that the seasons seem to have changed for the worse over the last few decades.
“Yeah, I think I agree with you that the summers seem to be much longer and warmer now than when I was growing up while the rains are now much more erratic than when we were kids. You never know when to plant maize seeds these days, we always have to guess.” Grandma was talking slowly and seemed to be recalling scenes and memories from a long time in the past.
“Deforestation is what worries me the most muzukuru, when I was about your age, there were trees all over the this place surrounding the whole village. If you compare that to the trees that are left in now, it feels like we are now living in a desert.” Whenever grandma called you muzukuru (grandson/ granddaughter), you just knew that whatever she was saying was be very important.
“All that is contributing to climate change Gogo, and we need to take action.” I echoed her sentiments feeling rather proud that my granny wasn't a climate change denier.
“I don`t know about this climate thing you are talking about muzukuru but if the learned guys like your father are saying that we risk losing our home, then you, young people should do something to prevent possible catastrophe. The future belongs to you after all.”
One of the reasons why grandma is so fond of me is because she has always been proud of my father, her civil engineer son who lifted the family out of poverty. Whenever one talked about the ‘learned guys’, no matter the field, she always imagines her son.
The conversation has unexpectedly but pleasantry started getting deep and it illuminated even deeper thoughts in my mind. It suddenly dawned on me that the clinic as well as the primary and secondary schools were situated just next to the shopping center.
Always a believer of the greater good, l found it very hard to come to terms with how complicated life was for my grandparents and the other villagers during times like these when they didn`t have access to a health facility. It was even harder for me to think about the hundreds of students who obviously had to miss school during such times.
Having grown up in the city, I had never quite understood why schools from my rural home had always recorded very low pass rates. My father and his siblings had been lucky because they had attended a mission school where my great-grandpa worked.
What it was, I don`t know but something from deep inside me was restless and telling me to do something about this situation so I asked grandma one more question.
“Gogo, I am wondering; if this is a perennial problem, why doesn`t the councilor and the MP (Member of Parliament) address it?”
The people’s representatives to the rural district council and the national parliament were loved and adored by the villagers mainly because of their timely donations of food and farming inputs which, for some unknown reason, were often done just before an election.
“Oh you think the councilor and MP haven`t tried to address the issue of the roads? They have. The DDF people have even brought their construction equipment here a couple of times, maybe twice or thrice but they only squander money and never do their job.”
My follow up question on the years that this had been done quickly confirmed my suspicions. Maybe the people`s representatives had really tried to address this issue but it was very curious for me to discover that the DDF (District Development Fund) people had come at periods corresponding to election campaigns.
I was deeply troubled by the stories I was hearing from grandma and knew that I should really, really do something.
But then I was just a young second year university student without the resources nor the connections of neither an MP nor a Councilor.
And that was when I remembered that the pen is mightier than the sword. I knew that I simply needed to tell this story to the world and the world would do the rest for me.
With electricity and stable mobile network connectivity now out of the equation, I had to improvise. The only other power source available was a small 50 watts solar panel meant for charging the battery of the radio. There was also a car charger which can be easily connected to a power source like a battery with a few cable extensions.
The challenge was that I couldn`t charge my phone for more than three hours without risking the reprimand of my grandpa who would most likely miss out on the 2000hrs main news bulletin on the radio. Staying informed and updated has been an important principle of my family for generations. It probably started with great-grandpa who had passed it to my grandfather and he had passed it on to his son who in turn had also passed it to me.
“It is important that you always know what is going on in this country and the world around you. It is very important for you to watch the news my son,” my dad used to say when I was younger and seemingly disinterested with the news. Now that I was a student activist, he didn`t have to worry about that anymore. I was now the one to bring all the breaking news home and, dare I say, even made the news myself at times.
My second challenge was network connectivity. It was almost never available and definitely never stable during the day. All the same I charged my phone for the 3 hours, set an alarm for 01:00am and switched the cellphone off to save power.
I still got the reprimand though because grandpa didn`t get to listen to the main news bulletin that night as the battery had ran out of power just after 6pm. He almost lost his temper and warned me to never use the battery for charging my phone again.
What that meant is that I now had only one chance to shoot my shot, just one.
Fortunately, when I woke up at 01:00am the network was better and more stable, as I had hoped and so I set to work. I wrote a 500-word article on the situation of the road and the bridge in my rural home and sent it through to the guy who published our student stories in one of the smaller local papers. I also posted the article on Facebook and even did a mini-thread on twitter (now X).
I then ran out of power before I had had a chance to see if my efforts had born any fruits.
I expected a quick reaction and even result but days and then weeks passed. Even the very long month of January came to pass and still there was nothing. I also didn`t know what was happening out there because my dad`s plan had finally succeeded and I was completely off the grid now.
The primary and secondary school students also didn`t get to go to school that January and even February. But in March, the students started going to school again and to this day, they have never stopped going to school as long as it is open.
The villagers also started accessing the clinic and shopping center at will and during any season of the year because by the time I left to go back to university in mid February, some people from the city had come with their construction vehicles to mend the main road. Their vehicles had the same shape and the same yellowish color of those of DDF but they had a different name which I cannot quite remember anymore. These guys did the job. They put gravel on the main road and also constructed a proper modern bridge across Mavhura river.
* * *
When I arrived back in the city, I found my social media inboxes buzzing with messages. Some people had made enquires about the situation in the village a month back while others had accused me of being a liar who was just trying to taint the good name of politicians who were sacrificing for their people and issued me with threats of all kinds. Some had suggested to do a go fund me to pay for the bridge construction. The Councilor and the MP had also been summoned by the social media people (social media users) and they had professed their dedication to addressing the road challenge. They had offered to and were now even taking the lead in the road construction program.
By then, the momentum and controversy around the village story had also died down and I wondered if anyone still remembered the kid who had brought it all to light. I also never quite figured out who had paid for the construction of the road and the main bridge.
But, it doesn`t matter. The road and the bridge were constructed, kids started to go to school all year round and the primary and secondary school pass rates have been slowly going up over the past few years. For me, that`s all that matters!
About The Author
Prince Gora is blogger and fiction writer who writes for the love and power of writing. The goal is to tell the stories of my life: the stories I have lived, the stories I have seen others live and the stories I have read and heard; both fact and fiction. Prince holds a B.Tech Honours Degree in Chemical and Process Systems Engineering (HIT) and is currently studying towards a Master's Degree in Environmental Engineering at the University of Stavanger, Norway. His writing experience include reporting for University World News (Africa Edition) between 2020 and 2023 and being an assistant editor of YETT`s bi-monthly SAFRAP Newsletter between 2021 and 2023.
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