In Letter from Zimbabwe author Cathy Buckle writes: “We’ve had an electricity crisis of major proportions this past week which has bought the routines of everyday life to a standstill. Small businesses are complaining that they’ve been losing about five hundred dollars a day. Bigger businesses estimate lost income of around five thousand dollars a day, not to mention employees sitting around doing nothing who will all have to be paid at the end of the month. And the knock on effects of these extended power cuts is having a devastating impact on the environment.”

 

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In this week’s, Letter from Zimbabwe, author Cathy Buckle writes; “A friend asked me this week what I would do if I was given a pouch of dirty little stones from Marange. I didn’t hesitate, a brief glance at pages 34 -38 of the Human Rights Watch report said it all for me.  Called, ‘Diamonds in the Rough,’ the report described military helicopters with mounted automatic weapons; indiscriminate firing of live ammunition and tear gas; mass graves and piles of decomposing bodies.”

 

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In Letter from Zimbabwe author Cathy Buckle writes; “As Zimbabwe commemorates Heroes Day, the official remembrance is again dominated by Zanu PF individuals. We hear nothing of ordinary Zimbabweans who are the real heroes in 2010. The heroes are people in rural villages who have borne the brunt of political intimidation, harassment and violence. Knowing their every move is watched and recorded. Knowing that if their name is not on the “good” list of the village leaders they will not get food, seed, fertilizer.”

 

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In Letter from Zimbabwe author Cathy Buckle writes; “Companies, families and individuals are all in the same position as we start August 2010. We are living from hand to mouth, hoping and praying that we don’t have an accident or get sick, that nothing gets broken or stolen and that we can just make it to the end of the month”.

 

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In Letter from Zimbabwe author Cathy Buckle writes about the constitutional outreach program and says; “We hear of public meetings turning into shouting matches, of people being abducted, assaulted, kidnapped and of villagers being frog marched, intimidated and commandeered”.

 

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In Letter from Zimbabwe, author Cathy Buckle writes; “The real question is, whether the sudden rash of charges against Temba Mliswa is a serious case of police investigation into the looting of farms or if dirty politics is really behind this matter. Temba Mliswa is the tip of a gigantic antheap. An antheap that is festering underground, hot and humid and crammed with a seething mass of criminals, small, big and very big. Is their day finally coming?”

 

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In Letter from Zimbabwe, author Cathy Buckle writes; “Amnesty International say that they consider Mr Maguwu to be a ‘prisoner of conscience’ and it is with a sense of despair and helplessness that we watch and wait to see what happens next to the man who dared expose what’s been happening in the dirty scramble for diamonds. Diamonds, would I wear one knowing people have died for it – not a chance.”

 

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In Letter from Zimbabwe, author Cathy Buckle writes: “Zimbabweans have become very adept at ‘making a plan’ to cope with nonexistent municipal services and then living in the safety-bubble created around their own homes – thereby absolving the municipalities from doing the jobs we pay them to do”.

 

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In Cathy Buckles Letter From Zimbabwe she writes; “Outside a supermarket a street kid approached with a little square of cardboard in his hand on which was written the price of the medicine he had been prescribed for a chest infection. ‘Highly vulnerable’ is the phrase that we were hearing three days into the two month long constitutional outreach programme. Highly vulnerable is a phrase equally applicable to everyday life here”.

 

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In Cathy Buckles Letter From Zimbabwe she writes about the constitutional outreach process and says: “For those of us who have managed to stay in the country during the eleven years since we last tried to rewrite our constitution, there is a distinct feeling of exhaustion in the air. There is hope too, but it is tempered with scepticism and fears of interference”.

 

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