A Long, Hard Slog in Zimbabwe

The only thing that can slow him down is rain, he says. The shoes he wears most days look as though they have sloshed through a hundred storms. The brown leather is softened, largely detached from the rubber soles. The laces are gone.

But this morning is dry and clear, with a fat crescent moon and a spray of stars twinkling overhead.

After nearly half an hour of walking, as the faintest light begins to warm the eastern horizon, Chitau steps past Sophia Manjiva, 45, a single mother clutching a closed umbrella who says she is pleased to have company. She has heard many tales of robberies along this dark road.

Manjiva says her monthly pay as a maid in a private home is 20 million Zimbabwean dollars -- less than $4 in U.S. currency. With that she feeds, clothes and schools her two youngest children, ages 10 and 13.

As hyperinflation erodes her pay, making even staples like cooking oil and cornmeal difficult to buy, Zimbabwe's deteriorating infrastructure complicates her work. Chronic power blackouts and water shortages mean that several times a day she must fetch water from a well near the house she cleans, then carry full buckets back upstairs, she says. That's after walking 2 1/2 hours to work and before walking 2 1/2 hours back home.

"I get tired, but there is nothing to do," Manjiva says as Chitau begins to open up the distance between them.

At 5, the sky turns a soft blue, streaked by pinkish clouds, as a diffuse pre-dawn glow lights the faces of rows of sunflowers gazing east. White-robed members of Zimbabwe's popular Apostolic churches kneel in prayer on the dewy grass. Birds begin chirping tunes that, under the circumstances, sound improbably upbeat.

Yet the growing light reveals unmistakable signs of frustration with Zimbabwe's decay.

Epworth's most singular natural feature -- stacks of rounded, beige boulders -- bear snatches of spray-painted graffiti: "Vote MDC." The initials refer to the Movement for Democratic Change, the fractured opposition party that in March will seek, for the fourth time, to defeat Mugabe's ruling party after 28 years of unbroken control.

But Chitau doesn't want to talk about politics when the feared Central Intelligence Organization remains a well-funded marvel of efficiency amid collapsing government services. Arrests, beatings and humiliating sting operations are common tactics against those who complain too loudly.

"It's my country, but I'm afraid" to talk about Zimbabwe, he says.

Shortly before 6, Chitau reaches Harare's outskirts, where the names of the suburbs -- Chadcombe, Cranborne, Queensdale -- echo the country's British colonial past. Sand gives way to dark soil, shacks to large, tile-roofed homes.