Don’t Worry, I Always Take My Wife’s ARVs

Seated on a veranda at the teachers’ quarters, they call them ‘cottages’ down here in Sagonda village, I begin to feel the sweltering heat and realize I’m dripping with sweat.

Its 4.30 pm and I just finished eating my plate of boiled fish and sadza. Yes, you heard right, just boiled. With these daily cash withdrawal limits at banks, I can’t afford to spend on mundane things like cooking oil nowadays.  

After all, we hardly had any cooking oil at our house when I was growing up.

The mountain, just a kilometre away gleams and dances as if cursed by the scorching sun, but not even the punishing weather can stop me from joining my colleagues on our daily routine, a 7km walk for some opaque beer at the nearest drinking spot.

“Stuff it,” I say, as I painstakingly pull my lanky body off the stoop and trudge towards my room for a quick change of clothes, empty plate in hand. I cringe momentarily at the now familiar prickly sensation on my swollen feet. “This pain will never go away,” I reason to myself.

Dumping the plate into the makeshift mud kitchen sink, I think of the colour grey. Everything around me seems grey these days, the colour of my feet, my hair, my feelings, mood, life in general: dark, gloomy, colourless, monotonous.

I grab my cleanest pants, a pair of maroon looking trousers, they were a shiny black pair when I bought them in the city just 3 years back, but a combination of oily borehole water, dust and unforgiving weather conditions have inevitably turned them into this strange colour.

Dressed only in underwear, I muster all my energy to pull the tight belt off my other discarded pair of khakhis as I start to run out of breath. The whole of my body is shaking and I deliberately fall back on the mattress to complete the task. “I used to do these simple things while standing up not long ago,” I reflect.

Sitting on the mattress, I stare momentarily at the dark spots on my hands which now feel as soft as those of a new-born baby. A persistent dry couch sends a sharp pain through my lungs and I have to resort to bending over forward in a vain attempt to numb the pain.

“You are not in good shape these days Mr Bhebhe.” One of my colleague’s quips while holding a cigarette between his lips as he stands away to shake our last calabash of beer.

“You should visit the mobile clinic some time,” he says, while facing the opposite direction.

“You might not make it back to the school on foot, we will have hire you a donkey drawn scotch cart in the villages,” another colleague adds.

“Why bother,” I reply, “The mobile clinic only arrives 3 times a year in this part of the country, and most of the times, those nurses don’t have enough drugs to treat most of our common ailments. Moreover, our government has run out of forex to import essential drugs, I read it in the papers,” I add.

As I slip my dark, heavy feet into a pair of dusty sandals, I lean back on a greasy plastic chair to drink on the calabash, “Don’t worry too much about me dear fellas, I will be up and running in no time because I am already stealing my wife’s ARVs,” I note to myself with a naughty smile.

By Thabo Bhebhe