Every day, along the road I live on in Harare, there are groups of people waiting outside houses that have bore holes. They wait, sitting and standing, next to different shapes and sizes of containers. They wait for water. People carry the containers of water on their heads. They roll drums of water down the road. They use shopping trolley’s from the nearby TM Supermarket to push the water home.

In Greendale we haven’t had a consistent supply of municipal water for over two years.

I drove past a sign on Enterprise Road recently. It caught my eye because in big red letters the word BEWARE jumped out at me. The sign advised that most bore hole water in Harare, and the rest of Zimbabwe, isn’t as clean as we need it to be.

So while reading the December issue of The New York Times Magazine recently, a story on a man called Ron Rivera, by writer Sara Corbett, caught my eye. His story is about getting clean water to people.

Have a read.

Early on, Ron Rivera was a left-leaning, power-to-the-people sort of young man, full of vague ideas about social justice and eradicating poverty. Fresh out of college in Puerto Rico, he joined the Peace Corps and spent six years moving between the poorest parts of Ecuador and Panama, engaged in noble but sometimes futile-seeming community-development work. But then, during a stay in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1972, he met an older male potter who took him in as an apprentice. And as if by magic, the vagueness and futility dissipated, replaced by possibility. Why? Because Ron Rivera was now a left-leaning, power-to-the-people potter.

Pottery became Rivera’s way of laying his hands on the world’s problems. He moved to Nicaragua during the Contra war and worked to start a program to help injured veterans make ceramic insulators for electrical lines. He later joined the staff of a small organization called Potters for Peace, seeking out indigenous potters across Latin America and helping them refine the way they mixed glazes and built kilns in order to increase their profits and therefore their power.

Working with rural women who made clay piggy banks and sold them to exploitative middle-men, Rivera encouraged them to create something similar but new-ceramic armadillos, say – and then triple the price. When the middlemen grew indignant, demanding to know why this nearly identical type of ware cost more, he counseled the women to respond with a whiff of their own indignation, “Because it is an armadillo and not a pig.”

Then one day in October 1998, Hurricane Mitch hit Central America, flooding roads and triggering mudslides, killing an estimated 11,000 people. At home in Managua, knowing how readily bacterial disease follows on the heels of disaster, Rivera remembered an object he encountered years earlier in Ecuador, a simple terra cotta pot that looked like the sort of thing in which the rest of us-the earth’s less vulnerable-might plant our springtime geraniums. Made of clay mixed with some grist-usually sawdust or ground rice husk that would burn off later in the kiln-and then shaped carefully, this pot had thousands of micropores. And those pores, along with a coating of antibacterial silver solution, allowed it to perform a small but significant miracle: removing 98 to 100 percent of the bacteria from contaminated water, making it safe to drink.

Convinced that he could help indigenous potters mass-produce clay-pot water filters for their own communities if the process for making them could be standardized, Rivera began to experiment, calculating the optimal size and clay composition. He then designed a mold for the filter and a special clay press that was operated with a tire jack, which he figured was one of earth’s more universally available bits of technology. Rather than applying for a patent, Rivera posted his work, in painstaking detail, on the Internet. The filter, which costs roughly $15 to make, rests inside a lidded five-gallon plastic bucket with a spigot. It purifies enough daily water for a family of six.

Collaborating with health organizations and relief groups, Rivera helped native potters build filter factories in Colombia, Honduras and El Salvador. He did it in Kenya, Cambodia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Darfur. He often traveled in the wake of water-related disasters-following floods in Ghana or a Tsunami Sri Lanka-capitalizing on the rush of aid money to establish a locally owned enterprise that would sustain itself long after he left.

According to the United Nations, more than five million people die each year from diseases related to unclean drinking water. Most live in developing countries and, overwhelmingly, they are children under the age of 5. Rivera liked to say that he wouldn’t rest until he “put a dent” in the problem, which by his calculation meant setting up 100 water-filter factories, creating enough pottery to provide safe water to at least four million people. His friends nicknamed him “Ron Rapido” for his velocity and vigor and for the impatient way he suffered through meetings.

In August, standing in a village in rural Nigeria, having just finished his 30th filter factory, Rivera expressed a larger impatience. “How is it”, he mused to an engineering student with whom he was traveling, “that scientists can work so hard on improving TVs and cell phones when so many people don’t even have clean water to drink?”

He didn’t yet know that a mosquito, presumably bred in a nearby swamp, would infect him with a particularly virulent form of malaria, nor that he would die-back in Managua, his wife at his side-only two weeks later. But surely he knew by then that solutions, like problems, are capable of crossing borders, of pollinating like seeds on the wind. Since his death, Rivera’s protégés at Potters for Peace have fanned out to continue the work. There are filter factories planned for Bolivia, Rwanda, Somaliland and Mozambique-a global legion of local potters, as Rivera would have it, poised to lay their hands on the problem.

Ron Rivera born 1948, died 2008

A couple of things.

I was rather amused to get an email from Sunset Tours this morning with the subject title: Air Zimbabwe Specials and Extra Baggage Allowances. The departure hall at Harare International Airport is a scary sight on the night that Air Zimbabwe flies to London. You can hardly swing a bag for the masses fleeing our sinking ship. Now with Extra Baggage Allowances one wonders if the plane will even get off the ground. By the sound of it (low and loud) it would seem that ScareZim clears my roof – I’m in the flight path – by barely a few feet as it is.

Then I laughed at a headline just seen: Zimbabwe Places Military On Alert: Says Opposition Planning A Coup. Hmmm. The Movement for Democratic can plan an election at best, and interminable board meetings at worst. But a coup is certainly outside of their capabilities. A headline like this is just another example of the type of propaganda that’s churned out by the state.

Meanwhile Tendai Dumbutshena writing for the Zimbabwe Times seems to have his head screwed on right going by his article Time for MDC to make big decision. OK, we got that, awhile back. Besides the fact that they are way over the deadline on making a decision, the fact is that they need to make a decision. Scary thought, I know. But Tendai puts things quite clearly . . .

Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC meets on Sunday 18 January to decide whether to join the proposed inclusive government. It is imperative for the MDC to arrive at a clear decision that leaves no room for uncertainty or ambiguity. It is now four months since the Global Political Agreement (GPA) was signed on 15 September 2008. A lot has transpired in that time. The MDC should be in a position to make a firm decision based on concrete facts and not unrealistic hopes.

This is no time to dilly-dally. The party is either joining the government or opting out. There are no more SADC summits that will help the situation. All parties including SADC have made their positions crystal clear. It is decision time for the MDC.

A coalition or unity government only works if parties in it have a common purpose. In Zimbabwe this is clearly not the case. Mugabe sees the inclusive government as a tactical ploy to ultimately outmaneuvre the MDC.  He does not see it as a vehicle through which the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe can be genuinely tackled. His main objective is not to bring prosperity to the people of Zimbabwe but to rule them until he drops dead. He only signed the agreement to secure legitimacy for his presidency which he could not obtain through the ballot box. He detests the idea of having the MDC in government even as junior partners.

He has no intention of allowing the inclusive government to serve a full five – year term. His intention is to call for an early election when he believes the MDC is sufficiently weakened. Mugabe is shrewd enough to know that the MDC’s presence as junior partners in a largely ineffectual government will have serious political consequences for it. With no improvement in the lives of Zimbabweans the MDC’s political fortunes will rapidly nosedive. At the same time the MDC’s foot soldiers – the backbone of the party – will continue to be killed, arrested, tortured and displaced. With its organizers battered and demoralized and its structures crippled, the MDC will be ripe for easy pickings in an early snap election.

We should however debate one of the observations Tendai makes . . .

The argument is often presented by some analysts that the MDC will be cast into the political wilderness if it declines to join the inclusive government. This is a false argument bereft of any merit. The MDC’s raison d’etre is to seek democratic change in Zimbabwe. That is supposed to be its mission. It is not to seek political accommodation with a regime hell bent on preserving its own tyrannical rule.

As Amanda raised in her recent blog, perhaps the MDC is in fact seeking some sort of political accommodation rather than the ousting of Mugabe. Clearly the MDC has struggled to get rid of Mugabe democratically, and if they are unable to pull off a coup (and who wants one anyway), then politicians (rather than freedom fighters) opt for political accommodation.

On the 18th January Tsvangirai will have a hard time persuading his colleagues and MPs to walk away from a negotiated settlement. They will want to keep the dollars and perks that Mugabe has been dangling in front of them.

I wonder how easily dreams come out to be true in this world?

It had been my childhood dream that one day I would like to go to the American state and upgrade my and our family status in society. My mother in having known what my aspirations were thought in her lifetime she could live to be an honoured person, having a son abroad and everyone admiring the beautiful house she had thought of in her mind. Those were the days, and gone are they no more to return. My mother and father have since passed away with their son’s dream not yet realised, not because the son chose not to have it true, but because it seems the USA is already in Zimbabwe and therefore there is no need to go there physically.

The issue behind this is pretty obvious of course. There is now no need for one to go outside since the little money that one gets from outside is worth nothing when you come back home. I laughed at one of my friends who is an economist and works for the Zimbabwe treasury when he kind of gave a prophecy last year that with the way things are going in Zimbabwe it will soon have a dual currency. I could not figure out what exactly he meant at the time but I am coming to realize what he was trying to express.

Can you imagine how it is when you become an alien with your country’s money? Segregation is now dominant in the economy because if one does not have the Greenback or the Rand, you are an outcast.

Just imagine that long back it used to be a fearsome thing to be in possession of foreign currency but now even a toddler knows and has handled certain amounts. The US$ is no longer sacred as every little commodity is now ranging from a dollar upwards.

Can you imagine buying 10 tomatoes for US$1?

In as much as we might like the dollarisation of the economy the way it is occurring is harming us. Consider that public hospitals are now demanding that you pay US$70 for a night of admission without any medication being provided to you. It leaves me to wonder whether it is for service delivery that we are being charged in forex or it is just greed and speculation?

The truth is that there are only a few people who are benefiting with using the US dollar while the majority are languishing in abject poverty.

It therefore sums it up that going outside the country to work is now for prestige purposes only as the money that one acquires out there has little value when you come back to enjoy the fruit of your labour. I am already in the USA though not physically waiting until Obama changes his currency or something.

I’ve just been preparing information on cholera – causes, symptoms and prevention – for our next Kubatana email newsletter. In countless publications its stated that good sanitation and waste management is vital to preventing the spread of cholera.

Take a drive or a walk around Harare these days and you’ll find over flowing rubbish bins in every shopping centre. In the Avenues, home to thousands of flat dwellers, rubbish is strewn on the street. At Kamfinsa Shopping Centre, the mound of rubbish dumped near where people queue for their daily or weekly allowance from Gono, is growing daily. Street cleaners have stopped cleaning. Public toilets have been closed because there isn’t any water to service them. The toilets in my office block, and no doubt countless others, seldom have water. With this degree of failure of public services, people cannot achieve the high standards of cleanliness required to stop cholera in its tracks.

Foreign governments and international development agencies are engaged in trying to stop the spread of cholera. Whilst these efforts are helping Zimbabweans on the ground I wonder how the aid agencies are reconciling the fact that the Mugabe regime has been the chief architect of the collapse of vital infrastructure in Zimbabwe, and that if we want to actually stop cholera, then Mugabe, the larger problem, has to go. Until then we’ll be running around trying to extinguish countless humanitarian crises.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) chief executive officer Frank Donaghue, believes that the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe is a “symptom of the collapse of the entire health system” and PHR is calling for Zimbabwe’s health care system to be placed under international receivership.

Millions of Zimbabweans couldn’t agree more and our lives depend on it.

In Zimbabwe, a good newspaper is hard to find. Luckily one of my Christmas gifts was a copy of The New York Times together with The New York Times Magazine. The magazine feature, called The Lives They Lived, took note of the lives of 24 very different people that ended in the past 12 months. Below Susan Dominus writes about the colour of love; about a marriage that broke the law – and then fixed it. Mildred Loving was born in 1940 and died in 2008 – this is part of her story.

In the June 1963, Mildred Loving, the 22-year-old wife of Richard Loving, a bricklayer, sat down with a piece of lined loose-leaf paper and wrote a letter in neat script to the Washington branch of the A.C.L.U. “My husband is White,” she wrote, “I am part negro, & part indian”. Five years earlier, they married in Washington, she explained, but did not know that there was a law in Virginia, where they lived, against mixed marriages. Upon arriving back home, the two were jailed, tried and told to leave the state, which is how she ended up back in Washington. Her requests to the A.C.L.U. was heartbreakingly humble: “We know we can’t leave there, but we would like to go back once and awhile to visit our families and friends.” A judge had told them that if they set foot, together, in the state again, they would be jailed for one year. She hoped to hear from the lawyer there “real soon”.

The letter didn’t mention the details of the arrest: the three local authorities, who let themselves into her mother’s home one hot June night, invaded the bedroom where Mildred and Richard slept and woke them with the blinding glare of a flashlight. She didn’t express the humiliation of spending five nights in a rat-infested jail (her husband, because he was white, spent only one night behind bars). She didn’t try to convey just how homesick she was for the small, rural speck of a town in Virginia where she had lived with her family all her life, just down the road from Richard, who started courting her when she was just 11 and he was 17.

Their relationship was, by all accounts, an uncomplicated love affair in Central Point, Va., an area in which racial divisions were far from straightforward. She and Richard grew up attending segregated churches and schools, but outside of those formal arenas, blacks and whites, many of whom also had Cherokee blood, freely socialized, worked side by side (Richard’s father worked for a black landowner) and occasionally fell in love. Richard first met Mildred when he went to hear her brothers play music at her home down the road.

Two young civil rights lawyers took up the case, and in 1967 the ruling came down from the Supreme Court, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren: Declaring that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” Warren argued that the Virginia statute violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. An unforgettable picture captures the Lovings at a news conference in their lawyer’s office the day of the ruling: Richard and Mildred, their heads leaning close, his arm draped possessively around her neck, Richard looking gruff, Mildred looking girlishly delighted. More than triumph, more than justice, the picture captured, at a glimpse, a couple in love.

In the years following the ruling, the Lovings turned down countless requests for interviews, public appearances and honors. Mildred Loving had no affiliations beyond her church and her family and never considered herself a hero. “It wasn’t my doing,” she said a year before her death. “It was God’s work.”

She resolutely lived out a private, ordinary life with its ordinary pleasures – a happy marriage, three kids, a home near family – and its sadly ordinary tragedies. One day when Mildred was 35, she and Richard were driving on a highway when another car crashed into theirs. Richard was killed instantly. Mildred, who lost her left eye in the accident, never remarried or considered it. She spent the second half of her life attending church, cooking for children and grandchildren, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, drinking cup after cup of instant coffee with the neighbors and looking out from her back porch to a peaceful view of the fields.

Civil rights historians had pretty much accepted that they wouldn’t hear again from Mildred Loving. But last year, the 40th Anniversary of the ruling, three colleagues working on behalf of Faith in America, a gay rights group, visited Loving at the small ranch house that Richard built after they moved back to Virginia. The organization was hoping to persuade her to make a statement in favor of gay marriage at a celebration of her own court ruling that the group planned to hold in Washington. “I just don’t know,” Loving told them. She hadn’t given it much thought. She listened sympathetically, a worn bible on her end table, as the group’s founder, the furniture entrepreneur Mitchell Gold, told her of his own struggles as a teenager to accept that society would never let him marry someone he loved. She was undecided when the group left a few hours later, but told Ashley Etienne, a young woman who consulted for the group, that they could continue to chat about the subject over the phone.

Etienne, who said Loving reminded her of her own grandmother, started calling every few days. She asked Loving about how she and her husband endured their setbacks; Loving told her that she didn’t understand why two people who loved each other could not be married and express their love publicly. She talked, as she always did, about how much she loved Richard and what a kind, gentle man he was. On her own, she talked to her neighbors about the request; she talked to her children about it. And in the end, Loving told Etienne, yes, she would allow the group to read a statement in her name supporting gay marriage at the commemoration. “Are you sure you understand what you are saying?’ Etienne asked. “You understand that you are putting your name behind the idea that two men or two women should have the right to marry each other?”

“I understand it,” Loving said, “and I believe it.”

A pitiable sight of a young girl aged around six to seven years, seated by the roadside, with a huge black bungle lying on her thighs caught my attention. The young girl was seated in an awkward area, in the middle of nowhere, a place not meant for anyone to rest as it was bare with not even a tree for shade. I saw her as I drove from Bulawayo to Harare on Christmas day.

I stopped. I got out of the car and called to the child who then told me that lying on her knees was her mother who was resting and they were going to proceed home once her mother had rested enough. I moved closer to them only to realise that her mother was already dead. I looked at the child who looked hungry and emaciated yet convinced and hopeful that they were going to proceed with their journey back home. What was not known to her was that her mother was dead. Dead by the roadside.

Tears streamed down my eyes as I pitied the child whose fate no one knew. I could not tell her that her mother was dead. I simply left and phoned the Bulawayo Central Police Station and reported the case. The response from the police officer I spoke to, Constable Phiri, shocked me. He told me that the station had no fuel to go and collect the body and suggested that I find a private funeral home to assist the child.

I was so upset and decided to leave the issue hoping that someone from close by would assist the child. This decision I made never put my heart to rest. The thoughts and picture of the little girl still haunt me. The scene reflected the level of the socio-economic crisis bedeviling Zimbabwe with children left to their own devices to deal with issues they can hardly fathom.