Zimbabweans can't afford school.

 “Simudzai mureza wedu weZimbabwe.”  The voices sing out across the school yard weak in number and strength, barely audible from Mrs Mawunga’s house. 

She takes short sharp drags from her mug of sweet tea, the metal hot against her lip, sadness threatening to overcome her.

A year ago 400 bright students would have stood every morning to sing the national anthem, their voices filling the dust-red school yard  and floating out into the sparse bush beyond.  They were smartly dressed in what they had, their well-worn yellow shirts impossibly clean and jumpers well-darned.  Most clutched plastic bags behind their backs containing school books, mealies and part-chewed sugar cane.

Although she can’t see, today she knows that the group will number only 40, clothing tattered, their school books, plastic bags and pencils gone and food brought only as currency to pay school fees and settle debts.

“Kalibusisiwe ilizwe leZimbabwe.” The singing finishes and the headmaster speaks.   

She is glad his words can’t be heard from her house as she prepares to leave.  She can’t stand to listen to another regulation pro-government speech or be forced to swear allegiance to the president.

She knows the children will now be entering the only classroom still in use to be taught by the remaining teacher.

Not long back an impossible number of children would throng into her classroom, at first 2 to a desk, and then when they kept coming, three to a desk crammed leg to leg on the bench seats.  48 faces, wide eyed and ready.  She would begin taking the register for no other reason than to mark their presence.  

Now the register is a debt collection exercise, onions, potatoes, mealie-meal, all scarce but acceptable methods of payment for schooling.  It won’t get better either.  It hasn’t rained even a spot since last March.

Oh how she misses the rain: the damp smell, intense heat and humidity that is almost unbearably oppressive.  Your clothes go moldy – there is no way to get them dry.  Firewood is wet through, a pot of water taking an age to boil.  The borehole runs fast but cloudy.  Churned up by the influx. 

Even after the rain stops the marks of the downpours are still visible, a trench carved deep into the surface of the dirt road to the village, preventing even the headmaster from driving along it in his “Bee-Sixteun-Hunred” yellow and white Mazda bakkie.

Today the road is broken down, not by the rains but by poor maintenance.  It doesn’t matter.  Even the headmaster has swapped his bakkie for food.  

Bartering has become the way, hyperinflation rendering money valueless.  Looking around her house one last time, there is little left to see.  The sofa is gone.  Exchanged for food.  The comfy chairs were broken up and traded as fire wood.  The bed frame and table swapped as scrap metal.

With one hand she picks up a bundle.  She has wrapped everything she owns in an old blanket tied at the corners:  a metal mug, a heavy cooking pot, a bed sheet, a second blanket and two shoes. 

She sets off walking slowly up the long straight road to the village.  A small broken figure against the vast undulating landscape.