The other day a friend asked what I knew about the recent elections in Ghana.   Happens often, because I’ve lived in one African country, people think this translates into knowledge about the entire continent.   I told my friend I knew nothing about the elections in Ghana, but commented knowing nothing was potentially a good sign.  Means that the elections didn’t make major headlines.  Wasn’t like in Zimbabwe where CNN and BBC provided around the clock coverage including frequent conversations with Bright Matonga who always had something so outlandish to say that it became entertaining. And the New York Times had above the fold cover stories day after day. Not even knowing an election happened in Ghana probably means it went off peacefully, or at least not unpeacefully enough to make the news.

This got me thinking about how the news is oriented toward reporting on the ills of the world.  The crisis’s, violence, devastation, deaths, scandals, suffering, bombs, murders, angst, corruption, and on it goes.  This is what makes the headlines. The happy stuff is rarely in the headlines.  Zimbabwe is a good example.  All the average consumer of news sees are stories about what a mess things are in Zimbabwe.

I have a folder of 516 ZWNEWS’ dating from late 2006 to the present.  When I did a word search for violence, 324 of the ZWNEWS daily email newsletters had at least one article where the word violence was used.  With arrested the total was 348, death 243, and beaten 192.  A word search on celebration came out to 49. And likely that word was used to describe Mugabe’s lavish birthdays.  Hardly shocking that news out of Zimbabwe is harsh, not celebratory; and I’m not meaning to diminish the importance of covering these realities. Being a reader of harsh news, however, drums up a range of emotions, one of which is empathy for the real people in each of the stories and empathy about the broader context in which they live.

It’s curious the concept of empathy.  To feel it means you are a caring and compassionate person.  You recognize the brave ways people fight against insurmountable odds.  But I wonder too when feeling empathy dangerously limits the power to feel things which are peacefully pure and good.  I started thinking about people I admire.  As the list grew, I was having a hard time identifying admiration that didn’t also involve empathy.  Try it.  Make a list of who you admire and I bet at least half the people on the list you admire because you empathize with their struggle and what they are fighting for.  Can’t help but imagine a better world, one where admiration does not necessarily also involve empathy.

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

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.”

I was lying in bed this morning a bit bleary eyed from too many serial killer Dexter episodes when I heard what used to be a very familiar sound. The noise of waste removal trucks that used to ply the streets of Harare’s suburbs picking up bags of rubbish placed outside homes. No such luck these days. When I drove out of my gate this morning I saw one solitary bag on the side of the road. Talk about optimistic. But this all reminded me of Kubatana’s current electronic activism campaign called One House at a Time. With the complete breakdown of municipal services in Zimbabwe we’ve got to clean up after ourselves. And that includes removing the Mugabe regime as well.

A colleague phoned yesterday freaked out because there is a dead body of a vagabond lying a short distance from their offices somewhere close to the Grain Marketing Board in Eastlea. Today the body is still there and has apparently started to stink and bloat. The police have for some reason been stalling on collecting it. My friend thinks it’s a bad sign for starting the year.

Another phoned to complain that after struggling all of last year to raise enough money to go and pay lobola for his girl, she has suddenly decided she wants a little more time to achieve a few goals before she can commit herself. Another bad sign perhaps?

Having a positive mindset seems to be a crucial ingredient for survival this year. As long as some things remain unchanged, situations promise to get worse. I find that appreciating the little things in life is good place to start, speaking of which, one kind hearted lady, a work colleague’s mum – sent me a bottle of scented anti-bacterial hand cleanser all the way from DC. That little bottle has become one of the most treasured contents in my sports bag in these times of cholera.

This year I don’t know how others are doing it but I just can’t seem to get enough bus fare to take me to and from work by public transport. Everything simply doesn’t make sense and Zim dollar cash is getting more and more slippery. Frustrated, I’ve just taken to walking whichever routes I can and thankfully, my 5km work route is one of them. The walk is not all that pleasant but is made bearable and less lonely by my trusty Ipod mini coupled with the ability to tell myself this is critical exercise. My butt already feels a tad firmer. The only downside so far is that in unfriendly weather, your water-resistant watch succumbs to the rain.

However, listening to music while I walk is like having a conversation with the artists. Some I disagree with while others I believe should stick to the subject of love because they just don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Among some interesting conversations, Bob Marley talks about the ‘Guiltiness’ that characterizes the lives of politicians whom he refers to as the ‘big fish who always try to eat down the small fish.’ He says, ‘Guiltiness rests on their conscience. They live a life of false pretence everyday. Each and everyday. They would do anything to materialize their every wish.’

Almost suddenly, Celine Dion jumps in and screams ‘I’m alive!’ Which I think is the important thing left when there is nothing else much you can do about the situation around you. That is why I’m going to thank God each day I’m alive this year because it’s nothing short of a miracle under the circumstances. In Zimbabwe if you can still enjoy a few pleasures of life, it’s only decent to be thankful and enjoy them to the fullest.

I’ve been reading Padraig O’Malley’s Shades of Difference. It uses the life of Mac Maharaj, who according to Nelson Mandela, “ran the ANC’s underground in South Africa,” as a lens through which to discuss the anti-apartheid struggle. O’Malley introduces each chapter to set the historic or political context of that section of the narrative, and then Maharaj recounts a few years of his own autobiography. It’s clear, well written, and I’ve been so grateful for the insights that a story of that struggle can lend to Zimbabwe during ours.

I’m currently in the early 1980’s. Mac has served his 12 year sentence on Robben Island, after his conviction in the Little Rivonia Trial. And he’s escaped South Africa to rejoin the struggle outside the country. Meanwhile, the ANC’s progress has been slow. Frustrated by the pace of reform, and forced ever-deeper underground by the apartheid regime’s policies, the ANC is increasingly attracted to the strategy of armed struggle – despite its failures. In his introduction to Chapter 10, O’Malley credits the United Democratic Front (UDF)’s civil disobedience campaign with greater effectiveness than the armed struggle organised by Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) (Spear of the Nation). This despite the fact that it was 11 years from the formation of UDF to South Africa’s first democratic election.

Here are some excerpts:

The opposition to the tricameral parliament led to the creation in 1983 of the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front (UDF), a broad, non-racial grouping of about 650 affiliates with a total membership of more than 2.5 million who collectively put the emphasis on mass mobilisation and protest politics.

Meanwhile, the ANC had become addicted to the idea of armed struggle. The more it failed, the more the ANC pinned its hopes on guerrilla warfare and armed insurrection. The ANC’s armed struggle failed by almost every yardstick.

The post-1963 generation grew comfortable in exile. With no secure base from which to launch attacks on South Africa or to infiltrate operatives, getting MK cadres into the country was a disheartening process. There was no existing political underground in South Africa with which the exiled ANC could easily communicate. One estimate put the number of formal structures inside the country at fifty, the number of members at two hundred – hardly the makings of an adequate network.

As we start a new year – and thinking about Bev’s blog yesterday about the MDC’s need to rethink its strategy – I’ve been reflecting on O’Malley’s comments on the ANC in the 1980s – and what lessons we can learn for our situation today. If we replace the ANC with the MDC, South Africa with Zimbabwe and armed struggle with elections and negotiations, the paragraphs above sound eerily similar to what we are experiencing today.

The more elections and negotiations fail, the more the MDC wants to try them. The MDC’s structures are weak, and constantly under assault from the ruling party. Not exactly a recipe for success.

But discussing things with some colleagues yesterday, we realised – the objective of the MDC isn’t to oust the regime. The objective of the MDC, as a political party, is to win elections, get elected to power democratically, and to govern the country with the majority it has won. So, then, why are we surprised that they focus on elections and negotiations. I may think that’s a naively narrow strategy – since when is that small dicktator gonna share power equally just because we’ve politely requested that he play nice? – but it’s the strategy they’ve chosen. It’s even more naïve of me to expect otherwise from them.

Rather, thinking of Maharaj and O’Malley again, it’s time to take Natasha’s advice. Instead of looking for the MDC to restrategise, let’s look at how civil society can restrategise. The MDC wants to lead Zimbabwe’s democratic transition. But it’s not willing to lead the campaign to make the country ungovernable, so that the regime has no choice but to transition. If South Africa is anything to go by, it’s time for Zimbabwe’s UDF.