Is this camping trip worth getting sick for....YES!!

I'm currently recovering from Tick Bite Fever (as far as I know, the first tropical disease I've had) and which I most likely contracted from a tick bite in the Botswanan bush last weekend. Here's a photo-essay to show why it was still very much worth it! We went to the salt pans and stayed our second night by deserted, barren and beautiful Kubu Island in the middle of a pan the width of Portugal. The island featured on the Top Gear team's crazy adventures across Botswana, where they were the first vehicles to cross the surface of the pans. It really was breath-takingly beautiful.

Paternal visit

Great to welcome Dad to Zimbabwe for his first visit. He was here for 4 days last week and we packed a lot into that time.

We spent a morning at the music academy, which even has some links to the Guildhall school in London where Dad is a music professor.

Michael Buillivant the principal insisted on getting out a Steinway grand to demonstrate the main hall's acoustic!

On the stage and backstage at the Bulawayo Theatre: it was great to show dad around the theatre & talk ideas for it, given his own love of theatre and knowledge of performance spaces.

We had a wonderful afternoon in the Matopas National Park, only 30mins drive from my house and you are deep in the bush. These are some of the oldest rocks on the planet and it's a great place for solitude - you are unlikely to bump into anyone. We went to View of the World, an amazing vantage point over the Matopas (and also burial place of Cecil John Rhodes).

A first introduction (for both of us!) to the train museum in Bulawayo, at least 10 huge steam trains are on display and then an introduction to some of my friends and artists in Makokoba Township.

I also put dad to work, firstly on a visit to TCZ (the theological training college) to speak to students there and secondly as the percussion department for a puppet show I was doing for 90 kids!!

All in all a great visit and I'm always very grateful to know I have the backing and support of my family as I live and work in Zimbabwe!

Car

THANK YOU

Dad, Noel Tredinnick, with the car that the donations in lieu of 60th birthday gifts bought!

A huge thanks to everyone who has donated financially towards my work in general and in particular here to those who chipped in to help with the purchase of this car. It's now officially mine, largely due to everyone's generosity.

While maybe not the exact car of my dreams (!) it's awesome to have it and it certainly gets a great deal of use. I don't know what I'd do without a car and I've had a fair few stories & exploits in it already.

Not least when it gets used to cart large quantities of crazy PA equipment around, each month pre & post Lounge. I've lost count of the maximum number of people it's carried at one time, or what the most requested tune from the ipod is at the moment...

It's cool knowing that so many friends, family & family friends helped made it possible - and a special thanks to my old man for his decision to ask for donations towards my work instead of 60th birthday gifts - I was very touched by that.

Just a few snaps - don't worry I am not one of those people who gets precious about their car, although that said, you do see some impressive vintage classics around the place here - relics from a bygone era, in a wide range of conditions.

Maybe sometime I'll be sporting a(nother!) vintage classic...!

Love Skies Week

Bulawayo is known as The City of Kings and more colloquially as Blues and Skies. I gather these latter names refer to our prevailing weather conditions (fancy a visit?) The week before last was 'Love Skies week' organised by a small Zim-based NGO, Family Impact, as a week of community outreach with emphasis on fun and reaching out to those on the margins of society.

I was happy to get involved, especially as I'd heard conversations at the planning stage and was excited about the chance to hang out with all kinds of folk and demonstrate friendship and belief in the people and communities in my vicinity. Early on I had this (slightly bizarre) idea that I wanted to paint peoples nails. I'd done it before in Peckham and found it was such a lovely and easy way to bond, serve and chat to women. A bit of pampering one-to-one that expressed value and love in a tangible way.

So I went along with the intention of doing that and generally getting involved and reaching out. I found it was great.

These pictures are from two different projects I visited as part of Love Skies - a childrens' home, which was wonderfully warm and a homeless persons shelter which has around 70 residents and all live as part of a community.

To the left is a picture of Margaret, a resident at the shelter, who said it was an age since she'd had her nails done, and that it made for a great treat...

Interestingly, in a country where racial and tribal tensions are very deep, complex and real, although sometimes also very subtle, the homeless shelter was probably the most integrated community and example of co-habitation that I've seen in this country yet. Telling perhaps.

I found time spent at each was valuable. At both we ran activities like face-painting and games for the children and issues-based, interactive teaching for adults. This was as well as having time to hang out and chat.

Heartbreakingly, both centres said that they hardly ever receive visitors. In fact at the Home of Peace shelter the couple who run it asked me if I'd come back another time. It's a forgotton people in need of company and investment. I found listening to their stories fascinating and a little in terms of time and effort went a really long way. I have a feeling I'll visit that place again sometime...

Roses and Nail Polish

This week I visited 2 squatter camps on the outskirts of Bulawayo. Neither more than 15 minutes drive away, yet occupying the bottom rung of the ladder in terms of prosperity. In some respects these places embody the more stereotypical view of poverty-stricken "Africa". Life isn't easy here.

Accompanying a team implementing a cholera programme, I was there purely to reach out to people on the periphery. Not a cholera or healthcare expert, nor involved in the implementation of that or any other programme the NGO runs, I just wanted to spend time with people, especially women. I'd had this idea that I wanted to do people's nails! Something about it, the element of luxury over neccessity, the element of physical contact and the significance of hands and their importance, I had been thinking about. Although I know the value of development programmes, I wanted to demonstrate something beyond practicality, I wanted to communicate something of an extravagant love that values individuals beyond all wildest imagination. A day or two before I returned to Zimbabwe at the start of this year, I had a conversation with my 89 year old grandmother. Somehow we got onto the subject of what matters most in life and I remember she asked what my motivation is for anything. At a fundamental level, what single thing matters most to me? I knew the answer, it's that I want people, whoever they are, to know how precious they are. Of how much value and inherent worth. How loved. That's what it comes down to. I hope I don't sound too much like a Miss World contestent. So, that's how I found myself giving out roses and painting nails today. It was a small gesture to these ladies about their beauty, how it matters and is special. We wanted to do something for peoples dignity. I'd read about a shipment of bright lipstick arriving at a concentration camp in Germany and the dignity it restored in that place and it was really moving as more and more ladies came to have their nails done or said yes when I approached them. I heard later on, that many of the women I met that day are involved in prostitution. We chatted about shades of nail polish, about hands, about anything else too really. In the space of time it took to paint nails I got a chance to interceed and listen to each woman.