Dear Family and Friends,

A Zimbabwean in the Diaspora phoned me this week and told me how desperately she longs to come home. She misses everything so much: familiar faces and beautiful places, old friends and casual acquaintances, the overwhelming friendliness of people and of course the glorious climate and magnificent countryside. She asked me how things were now in Zimbabwe and I replied that they are very bad, and still getting worse. You cannot really describe what a hundred thousand percent inflation looks like, or shops without food or hospitals without medicine. My friend, like so many others that have been struggling to survive these years in exile in foreign countries, wonders when she will be able to come home. She says she meets Zimbabweans all the time and always the talk is of home and plans for the day when they can return. Everyone wonders if it will be soon, asks if March 2008 will finally see an end to the need for exile.

My friend asked if anything was as she remembered it at home and I looked out of the window. On the surface and for a few minutes nothing at all had changed. The sun is still bright and the sky blue; babblers and bulbuls splash in the birdbath; the Msasa trees are covered in new pods and the wild orange trees in hard, green, cricket-ball fruits. In the canopy of trees overhead the voice of an Oriole sings out again and again and a Paradise Flycatcher, still with its long orange breeding tail, flits backwards and forwards. Children still play on the streets with home made footballs and roll bicycle rims along dusty paths. On the roadside women still sit selling tomatoes and avocadoes that they've carefully arranged into pyramids. Some even have a few ground nuts for sale but like most things they are a luxury - an enamel cupful for two and a half million dollars tipped into a newspaper cone. The ordinary people are still the same too, friendly, courteous, smiling, welcoming and generous.

After the conversation with my friend, I felt so sad about this great extended family of Zimbabweans now living away from home. Such trauma we have all been through these past nine years - those of us who have stayed and those who have gone. But we still have one thing in common and that is that now, after nine years of struggle, we have all had enough. Now it is time for families to be reunited, communities to be rebuilt and for Zimbabwe to stand straight, tall and proud again. It is not too late.

I close with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: "When I despair I always remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall, always."

Until next time, thanks for reading, with love cathy.

Copyright cathy buckle 15th March 2008 www.cathybuckle.com

My books: "African Tears" and "Beyond Tears" are available in South Africa from: books@clarkesbooks.co.za  and in the UK from:  orders@africabookcentre.com