Lost in Harare
Approaching Harare on [what used to be] Second Street. This was a guided "tour" back to the airport, so I didn't have to worry about getting lost yet. I would be lost on the Monday I used a Kombi for the first time, from Borrowdale West to Copacabana. Some fellow Zimbabweans in Sacramento had warned me that I would be lost in Zimbabwe because I had lived out of the country for too long, but I had told them that I would not be lost; in fact, I had taken offense to the implication that I could be lost in a country I grew up in, and especially in Harare, a city I had known inside out. And as for Mototi, down or up there in Mazvihwa, there was no way I would be lost in a village I lived in for the first seventeen years of my life. Villages don't change fast. In the city I would just follow the streets, look for familiar landscapes. There was no way I would be lost in Zimbabwe. But even as I got on the plane to Amstedam at San Francisco,...