Tandy came home for Christmas, but left again
January 13th, 2010
In December 2008 a close relative of a colleague of mine skipped the country – I’ll call her Tandy. She told her daughter she was going to town to do some shopping, but said nothing to her family members. They worried themselves senseless when they didn’t hear from her for days. Eventually they were told she had gone to South Africa to look for a job – this news only added to their worries: she didn’t have a passport so would be bribing her way across the border, and being a pretty young women, the thoughts of what could happen to her were especially frightening.
It was a few weeks before they received a sms message, sent via a borrowed phone, to say she had arrived and was well. Understandably, anger set in; her father was especially incensed at her actions.
It emerged some time later that Tandy had been pestering her husband for some years to leave Zimbabwe, for them to try and start a better life in South Africa. He had been refusing, and it seems she decided to take matters into her own hands. We can only speculate on why she didn’t say goodbye, but most assume that her father – a fierce individual – may well have gone nuts with anger and done all he could to stop her going. As for not saying goodbye to her daughter: I raised my eyebrows at this, but my colleague commented that lots and lots of people in Zimbabwe have been forced to leave their families behind so this in itself was ‘normal’ – saying goodbye might have been unbearably hard for her to do.
Phone calls from Tandy to her family through 2009 were rare, and most of the contact was restricted to sms messages. On one occasion she told her daughter that when she saw her next she’d be bringing her “lots of things” – toys and clothes – but she refused to give a contact telephone number saying her phone had been stolen. This was the first indication that all was probably not well.
After a full year of sporadic and minimal contact, Tandy returned to spend Christmas 2009 with her husband and daughter. She was empty handed, had no money, and was very underweight. There were no Christmas presents and no money to leave with the family. All the questions we’d had running through our minds would now be answered, I thought, but Tandy was tight-lipped, refusing to discuss her life in South Africa with anyone.
My colleague, still annoyed at her behaviour in 2008, has been venting her frustration. I asked what Tandy was doing for a living, because we all know life as a refugee is hard. My colleague said, “Well, she SAYS she is working as a cleaner”. There was a tone of disbelief in her voice so I dared to ask the unthinkable:
“Is it possible her loss of weight might be because she is sick – do you think she might be selling her body?”
My friend was careful in her reply, suggesting to me that the thought had occurred to her too, but she said, no, she didn’t think so, because Tandy was not that sort of girl. And also, she pointed out, Tandy didn’t have any money on her and women with sugar daddies often do! She then hesitated and said to me that Tandy’s brother, who still lives in Zimbabwe, had warned Tandy’s husband that both of them needed to be tested when Tandy eventually came back. So the element of doubt, and a misery of uncertainty, hangs in their minds.
And so Tandy came back for Christmas in 2009. It is important to note that life in Zimbabwe has changed dramatically since she left. In 2008, Christmas was bleak: there was no food in the shops and poverty still bit hard. People were risking police wrath by illicitly trading in forex and Zimbabwe dollar transactions involved figures too large for calculators to cope with. Today the shop shelves are full again, openly priced in $US and Rands and the Zim dollar banished – what would Tandy make of it?
My colleague came back to work today after leave and told me that Tandy had been subdued throughout her stay but that she had left again. During the time she was here she’d kept saying she planned to come back to Zimbabwe. But, as before, she had left the country once again without a word to anyone. And once again, Tandy left without money, and again braving an awful illegal journey across the border without a passport.
I was stunned: “Why?!”
My colleague replied that yes, the Zimbabwe shops are full, but the only money Tandy had to spare was five Rands, which she gave to her daughter for sweets just before she left. The shops are full again, “…but you need money to be able to buy the food” said my friend. She noted too that Tandy had lost her job in Zimbabwe, and that her family would now have to support her without even the paltry income she had before she left in 2008.
“But surely you’d have found a way” I said, shocked.
“Maybe, but it would have been very, very hard”, said my friend. “We’re struggling even now to be able to keep going. Things are very expensive. We would have helped her, but it would have been hard”. The difference between 2008 and 2009, she said, was that poverty and hardhsip is not as obviously in people’s minds (and the minds of media) as it was once before. “People think because the shops are full, that everyone can afford to buy: but it is EXPENSIVE!”, said my friend.
I asked then if Tandy had left because this had been explained to her. “No one said anything”, said my friend, “but Tandy can see with her own eyes”.
It was a raw reminder that shelves bulging with food are just a veneer of change for many, that poverty still bites hard, that the choices people make – in the name of survival – still make the mind boggle and the heart ache. A story so close to home makes me think of the thousands of other Zimbabweans, struggling just like Tandy. Many of them must feel they’ve been lost in the middle of ‘change’. This post is riddled with opportunities for people to judge Tandy, but I feel I must stress is she is a good person, a really nice girl. She is utterly ordinary, but because she is a Zimbabwean, her choices have been extraordinary.
My heart ached when my colleague told me that they all felt her main reason for leaving again, this time in 2010, when things are supposedly ‘better’, and again without goodbyes, was “because she is ashamed”.
“Why” I asked, immediately thinking the worst and thinking that they had discovered she DID have a sugar daddy. My friend’s answer revealed the intense pressure on parents to provide: “She is ashamed because she left thinking she would come back with money for us all, but instead she came back with nothing. I think she wants to try again. I think she still wants to return home, but with what we need to improve our lives.”
As before, no one has heard from Tandy since she left, and once again we are worrying that she is safely over the border and that she has made it to wherever she goes. Tandy told her family that the next time she came back, it would be for good; we are all hoping to see her home soon, but we don’t know when that will be.
