From Zimbabwe to the Kalahari.

I grew up in Zimbabwe, and when I was 11 years old we moved to Botswana in the Kalahari where my Dad was hired for a contract to work in the big diamond mine. Botswana had imported luxuries that provided a stark contrast to life in Zimbabwe, where constant shortages required recycling and re using everything. Teachers in Zimbabwe would encourage us to write on every single line of paper and not waste lines between paragraphs. Pop only came in recycled glass bottles that often had chips in the glass and Wimpy's, one of the few fast food restaurants in Zimbabwe, served fries and Burgers on re-usable plates.

Food shortages were a way of life in Zimbabwe and imported goods like electronics were almost non existent in the early 1980's. School Libraries were filled with dusty collections of antique books and the constant joke in Zimbabwe was that you had to have two cars, one to drive and the other for spare parts. For a middle class family like ours, life was good! We lived without the commodities of the early eighties, but there were fresh vegetables in the garden, fruit on the trees all year around and the clean and beautiful towns were filled with the excited bustle of a newly emerging Independent African nation. Our family was used to living life this way without imported luxuries, as not much had changed in Zimbabwe for decades. Violence erupted between the governing party and the minority Ndebele, who had moved from the South to Zimbabwe, a century before the white settlers arrived. My parents were concerned that the violence would continue and end the peaceful transition we had experienced since Independence in 1980.

In Zimbabwe, we could only buy the worst quality rice, which my brother and I had to sift through one grain at a time to remove tiny stones and particles. My Filipino Dad ate rice three times a day, which required a lot of rice sifting. Then one day even the bad rice was no longer available in Zimbabwe. My parent's would often joke that my Dad refused to leave Zimbabwe until the rice ran out and it was that one thing that finally motivated him. Also my Mom sold all the furniture in one day which meant sleeping on the floor for an entire month before we left for Botswana.

Botswana had luxuries that we had missed in Zimbabwe, like decent bread, fresh butter, canned fish and imported rice. The colourful assortment of South African imported candy and canned pop amazed us, it was like living in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Life in Zimbabwe meant lining up for bread and working around constant shortages of basic necessities like toilet paper and toothpaste. Arriving in Botswana and having access to luxuries filled our lives with wonder. My parents purchased our first dishwasher and microwave and we experienced air conditioning for the first time while visiting an American couple's house. Air conditioning in the hottest months of the Kalahari meant sleeping on the mosquito netted veranda to get out of the heat of our tin roofed house.

I remember that it was unbearably dry and hot in Kalahari and there was a severe drought all the time. Our family was only allowed a small amount of water to bathe in, wash dishes and water plants, it was really stressful as we had never faced such severe water rations before. My parents constantly lectured us on water use and I fought with my brother over who got to wash up first in the already used water!

As a kid I loved to explore and felt safe enough to roam around the dusty streets of Gaberone, alone on my bicycle. I spent many days trying cool off in our portable pool or nestled in the enormous tree that spread over our front yard providing the only coolness where I would read and daydream. Most of my day dreaming was about growing up and working in the movies.

We had no television or access to English speaking radio in Botswana and my parents would play their records from the seventies and rent a movie projector from the British High Commission. It was such a wonderful treat to eat cold ice cream and watch black and white movies like Where Eagle's Dare or For Whom the Bell Tolls. My mother could create the most wonderful deserts like home made ice cream, cold rice pudding or orange cake. I was raised by a Liverpudlian Mom on the Beatles who read books out loud to us for hours, Tolkien, Dickens, Hardy and every children's classic she could find. We both discovered an author by the name of Mazo de la Roche and had no idea that she was Canadian or how one day we would move to a house across from where she grew up in Canada.

There was a lot more crime in Botswana than we had experienced in Zimbabwe and our house was broken into on a few occasions. There was a thriving British expat community in Botswana, and my parents would often take my brother and I out to listen to classical music concerts or watch repertory theatre. We even accompanied them to the movies, as they were afraid to leave us alone at home in the evenings in case of a break in. I watched One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest for 50c at the only movie theatre in Gaberone, it was an awful film for an eleven year old. The theatre was filled with people drinking and at one point someone jumped off the second floor balcony area.

Our first experience with disposable fast food was fried chicken and I recall curiously looked down at the Styrofoam container marvelling that it was going straight to the garbage after we ate. A few months later, my Mom ended up in hospital briefly and my Dad bought fried chicken take out every night. The greasy fried chicken on the marvellous Styrofoam soon lost its dazzle.

Excited to experience the big city of Johannesburg, my parents would drive for five hours on pot hole dirt roads from Gaborone to neighbouring South Africa. My Mother would lead us in a Beatles sing along and we would take turns telling a long story to help keep the driver awake. Apparently I loved to make up stories and could keep them going for hours.

My Dad was trained to play classical music on the piano and would crank up Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which had the effect of turning the desert landscape into a movie. I remember laying on the back ledge of our car watching the magnificent sun set over the Kalahari scrub desert, its fiery reflection lighting up the endless metal snakes of pop cans that lined both sides of the dirt roads. It was a vision that was both beautiful and disturbing.

I was 17 when our family moved to Halifax in Canada, but that is another story.