Dear Family and Friends,

When a chicken plummeted over my wall flapping and squawking, all
hell broke loose. Kids crying on the other side of the wall, dogs
barking and quivering on my side and me frantically rushing around
trying to catch it. Locking the dogs inside I spent about 10 minutes
trying to corner the little black rooster but he was having none of
it. Running and weaving, ducking under bushes and changing direction
in an instant, this bird was not going to be caught.

Asking a friend to help, the question posed was: "Roadrunner or
broiler?"

This is the question that you ask when you're buying live chickens
here because it makes a lot of difference to the price you pay and the
kind of bird you get.

The uninvited guest in my garden certainly wasn't a fat, young bird
that had been stuck in a cage and fed as much as it could eat before
waiting to be slaughtered at 2 months old.

It was what's known as a 'roadrunner.' A little black bantam rooster
with fearsome claws; lean and scrawny, notorious for crowing on and
off all night and the fastest little runner you can find. Two of us
engaging in blocking and pincer movements, finally cornered the
roadrunner, picked it up and returned the very indignant and loudly
protesting bird to its owner.

Raising chickens is something that's being done in almost every
middle class suburban street. Its not being done as a past-time or
hobby but by teachers and nurses and other civil servants who are
doing all sorts of things out of hours in order to survive.

"Huku Pano," (chickens here) is the familiar sign on gates and walls.
If its not livestock then its green vegetables that are being sold in
bunches or tomatoes in enamel plates, avocadoes lined up side by side
on strips of cardboard outside the gates in middle class
neighbourhoods.

Zimbabwe's civil servants are struggling to get from one month to the
next as their salaries are a quarter of the official cost of living.
It is taking the most supreme effort for them to stay in their jobs
and continue going to work every day as their monthly salary is
exhausted almost as soon as they've paid their utilities bills and
bought the most basic of staple foods. Late in the afternoons and
until the sun goes down you see civil servants newly changed out of
their suits and smart shoes toiling over the last of their summer
harvest. Spreading and turning maize cobs on their verandas, shelling
mealies, digging sweet potatoes or chasing escaped chickens -
roadrunners and broilers!

Its all a world away from the political stalemate crippling the
country. From the constitutional outreach programme which still hasn't
started; from the news that four independent daily newspapers have
been given licenses to publish but without the repeal of laws
governing freedom of expression.

The toil of our civil servants is also a world away from the diamond
fields of Marange, from the soldiers and the smuggling and from the
vast fortune that could be saving our country but instead is enriching
a select few. Monitoring the sale of our diamonds is again about to be
the lead issue at at Kimberly Process meeting to be held in Israel.
Speaking to delegates at a conference this week, Mr Mugabe said that
some of the countries in the Kimberly Process are not friendly to
Zimbabawe. He said that Zimbabwe went into the Kimberly Process
voluntarily and could just as easily remove itself from the KP
voluntarily.

It doesn't make any sense at all that Zimbabwe has this newly
discovered diamond fortune and yet our survival depends on roadrunners
and broilers. Until next time, thanks for reading, love cathy
Copyright cathy buckle 29th May 2010. www.cathybuckle.com
a href="http://www.cathybuckle.com/">http://www.cathybuckle.com/>

For information or orders of my new book about Meryl Harrison's
animal rescues : "INNOCENT VICTIMS" or previous books "African Tears"
and "Beyond Tears," or to subscribe/unsubscribe to this newsletter,
please write to: cbuckle@mango.zw