Corn Husk Maidens on sale at the Avondale Flea Market.

What will you be wearing the day your lover leaves you?
I will be wearing my mothers disappointed smile.

- The Door by Warsan Shire

Having spent a couple of days looking at Zimbabwe through a camera lens I’ve noticed that there are more people living in poverty than I originally thought, or perhaps it’s that I’ve been forced to take more notice. It’s easy to be distracted while a woman, or a child, weaves through waiting cars begging for some change, or to walk hurriedly past as an old grime-covered woman sits at a street corner rattling a metal bowl with coins. I’ve seen it so often it doesn’t even register anymore.

When I look through the lens, I am not distracted; I see them and feel the guilt of privilege and not knowing the appropriate action to take. I want to help, I just don’t know how. Should I write a strongly worded letter to my MP, whose name or address I don’t know? Should I take it up with Harare City Council and demand that they remove the homeless and beggars from the streets? Where would they go? After Operation Murambatsvina where the people became the ‘tsvina’, is that a humane plan of action?

I’ve had wild fantasies about opening a soup kitchen or a shelter. It would be a modest sort of dormitory large enough to sleep every homeless person I’ve seen, and more that I haven’t. It would be a safe, warm place with food to fill every hungry stomach. It would be so many things to so many people. .. my fantasies have remained just that.

They tell you not to give homeless people money, they don’t tell you what the alternative is. Young and seemingly unoccupied men have asked to be paid for their picture. They need money to buy ZED to dull their existence. I suppose they have a right to demand money, don’t celebrities demand payment for their pictures too? And in a way it does seem as though I’m taking advantage of their situations, their poverty to add to my portfolio of pictures. And again, I am wracked with guilt, how can I accuse others of profiting from suffering when I am doing the very same thing? I am paid to do what I do.

Often when I am allowed to take the photo I see the pain in someone who is barely holding on, and trying to make it through just one more day. But I also see quiet resolve, that resilience that Zimbabweans are so famous for. And I feel shame for all the times I was undignified in moments of what is comparatively mild discomfort.

www.ishr.org

Pictured above is a Lyons Maid ice-cream vendor plying the suburb of Avondale in Harare. This red and white livery is ubiquitous in Harare. The ice cream man with his bicycle cart has come to be quintessentially Zimbabwean.

The Harare International Festival of the Arts takes place every year in the last week of April. Come visit Zimbabwe. Check out www.hifa.co.zw

Some useful advice for international “experts” wanting to expand the use of new media in the pro-democracy movement in Zimbabwe:

Sarah Mendelson summarises the lesson of much of the experience of the 1990s and 2000s by saying that foreign experts and trainers were good architects in that they knew how to build structures, but poor interior designers because they lacked the local knowledge that would provide the content for the structures they had built. This is a profound lesson that many advocates of liberation technology show few signs of learning.

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