Esther (not her real name) writes a regular diary for the BBC about her life in Harare. Her latest blog discusses Grace Mugabe, the fear of speaking out, dollarisation, Obama and that her “hope in politicians has gone”.

Yesterday I spoke to a woman who lives in Harare and earns a living as a domestic worker. She told me that if there is another election she won’t bother going to vote because when you vote you should get a result. Even though she and a lot of her friends have been staunch MDC supporters, she says that Morgan Tsvangirai is being criticised on the ground for “running away”. She views life through a relatively simple lens; in Botswana Tsvangirai can eat, here in Zimbabwe, millions of ordinary Zimbabweans can’t. She talked about too many people dying from either cholera, or hunger. And that people are responding to cholera like they once did, or still do, to AIDS, with fear and alarm, believing that someone who has died from cholera will make them sick too. So a body will remain where it falls until someone brave enough comes along to remove the corpse.

Instead of relying on inspirational quotes from famous people someone I know gets her friends and guests to give her their quotations sharing their view of the world. Then she puts them up on her fridge. She sent me a long list of quotes yesterday, together with this story she’d heard:

A friend visiting from Australia came to see me after Christmas. She told me how the family bought the Christmas hams; and this provides a brilliant example of just how creative we have become in Zimbabwe, and what constitutes ‘normal’ financial transactions. They transferred £ from a UK account to Mukuru.com, where it was used to purchase fuel coupons. The family collected these at an office in Harare and proceeded to Colcom, where the coupons were translated into ‘units of pig’. They bought their hams, and at the check out, the teller informed them of the amount and that Colcom owed them change. However, as there was a shortage of Zimbabwe notes and no small denomination US$ notes, the teller instead offered them two pork sausages! (In ‘normal’ countries, suggesting change in pork sausages would result in calls for men in white coats).

I’ve just come back from a visit to Dr Paul, my dentist. Thankfully this morning there was power so I didn’t have to worry about any drilling being interrupted. After my injection I lay back and gazed at a big tiger fish mounted on his wall, its teeth bared to the world. Unlike me the creature has (had) a fine set of pearlies. To make conversation (I like to get on the right side of a dentist) I asked Dr Paul how long it had taken to land the fish seeing as it looked like quite a big buggar. He snorted and and said 10 minutes. On my way back to the office I saw Zimbabweans waiting in queues in TM supermarket clutching US$1 notes. And I saw Zimbabwean bank notes, or bearer cheques, whatever you want to call them, floating in dirty puddles outside Barclays Bank. Too useless to use.

Whilst the MDC continue to dilly dally about What To Do, Geoff Nyarota has come up with a plan of action. And I reckon it’s not half bad:

Mugabe has neither respect nor faith in Tsvangirai. I suspect that feeling is mutual between the two. If Tsvangirai thinks he can return from self-imposed exile to sit down with the very man he fled from and negotiate genuine strategies to bring our nation back on track, then he may not be as astute a politician as his followers have assumed. He has the greatest error of the Late Dr Joshua Nkomo, the Unity Agreement, to draw salutary lessons from.

1. The MDC should, without qualm, opt out of the proposed GNU.
2. Zimbabweans, not just the MDC, should come up with a Plan B.
3. The cornerstone of Plan B would be a new initiative that seeks to unite the people of Zimbabwe as one progressive force fighting dictatorship.
4. The GNU should be replaced by a transitional arrangement with neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai as leader.
5. A transitional leader would be identified and appointed. There is certainly no shortage of patriotic Zimbabweans of good stature and excellent credentials. For example, the name of Wilson Sandura, recently lauded for his many good qualities, immediately comes to mind. If Mugabe could emerge from the bush to take over at State House, I personally don’t see why any other citizen with a reasonable academic background, an understanding of affairs of state and a heart in the right place cannot run Zimbabwe, especially if they have the ability to build a team of appropriately qualified and experienced people around them. There is an abundance of such people both in Zimbabwe and in the Diaspora.
6. Meanwhile the current crop of political leaders, particularly those whose political stature is now tainted by their recent performance will be prevailed upon to swallow their misplaced pride and throw in their lot with the rest.
7. The transitional arrangement would lead to new elections supervised by the United Nations and observed by who ever wishes to – the more the better. They will bring in much needed foreign currency, in any case.
8. These will be free and fair elections. Even Arthur Mutambara, if he still wishes and if he plays his cards well, can become the next President of ZImbabwe, not merely Deputy Prime Minister through the back door, as he is currently and impatiently trying to do.
9. Above all, Zimbabweans wherever they are, must declare a commitment to the transitional arrangement. Let us all join hands, whether we are Shona or Ndebele, white or black, Zanu-PF or MDC to work in unity to liberate ourselves from the yoke of colon..sorry… post colonial oppression, injustice and humiliation. Mugabe has partly survived by driving a wedge between Shona and Ndebele and another between white and black.
10. Once we have achieved our new independence let a referendum be held so that Zimbabweans can decide whether they want to pardon Mugabe for his many sins or to prosecute him.
11. The international community would support this whole process with clean hands as it were. Some African leaders believe the West has become part of the problem of Zimbabwe through their alleged tendency to prescribe the course of political events in Zimbabwe. By their very attitude and actions or lack thereof, the African leaders have themselves also become part of the problem of Zimbabwe.
12. We need the support of the outside world as we strive as a nation to polish our tarnished jewel, Zimbabwe.

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