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feet.
For the ordinary person, the community is shrouded in myth and mystery as are the two superimposing mountains and both forces, have remained religiously the fabric that holds the seams of society together.
This is a characteristic Saturday morning.
Young girls fold hems of their skirts into their panties and play games, chatting and arguing among themselves about the rules of the game, yet the mountains watch in defiant silence.
Ear-splitting whistles echo from the mountains as boys call their several dogs for a hunting escapade, within the confines of the community’s boundary. It is through echoes that the mountains speak back.
Other boys prefer to play soccer using a paper ball.
These are stages of life which every rural child goes through, even in the year of our Lord 2011.
Elsewhere in the buildings, toddlers of all ages shriek, cry and play, their foster mothers keeping a close eye on them, something their own mothers and fathers failed to do – changing nappies, feeding and watching them play.
Outside this community, their lives were condemned, doomed and shattered.
A huge elderly, motherly figure comes out of one of the buildings slowly, tentatively casting eyes on the playground. Everything stops! Both girls and boys abandon their games and scamper for her attention.
“Gogo! Gogo, Gogo, Gogo Jean!” shout the children for attention.
One by one, she pats them on the back, intermittently lifting some, hugging, kissing and chatting and they all love her. She is their mother and father. She is life itself. She is everything
These are the orphaned and dumped children at Mother of Peace Community in Mtoko, mostly HIV positive and abandoned by their own parents.
Heart-rending stories abound!
Kuda now aged 12, was picked from a dustbin at Mbare Msika, where his mother dumped him one wintry evening. James now eight was found abandoned and tied to a security fence when he was only three days old.
Memory was found dumped in a bush, almost at the mess of jackals. Julie was left for dead by her mother, just after birth. Then there is Joice and John, whose parents died of an Aids-related illness and had no one to look after them.
In short, the 140 children at Mother of Peace Community, run on Catholic principles, know only their foster parents and the Queen Mother, Gogo Jean.
Some of the children were named by Gogo Jean, others by a social welfare officer who brought them there, and yet others by well-wishers and so forth.
Chaired by Parks and Wildlife Management Authority director general Vitalis Chadenga, the Mother of Peace Community has been able to transform these children into normal family life.
The community, which has been operational for almost two decades now, has 27 grandchildren, fathered or mothered by boys and girls raised there.
Is this not a cruel mirror of our own misdeeds?
It is a complete community trying to be self-sufficient through agriculture production and accepts handouts too.
The community has put 20 hactares under maize production but for the shortage of inputs and implements, they could have done more.
Two battered tractors, one of them a 1968 Fordson Major model, are used on the farm, allocated to them by the Government of Zimbabwe years back when Cde Kumbirai Kangai was the Minister of Lands and Agriculture.
These children who mirror the evil that our community has done and the disaster that would have befallen the children outside the ambience of this institution, must make Zimbabweans in their broad totality assist in cash and kind. This is a product of our vice and here is an institution correcting our social ill.
Is it not important for us to reflect on our misdeeds?
When village wisdom beckons
Back in the village where the cottonwool-like heads reside in the peaceful idyll and serenity of the land of our ancestors, we are never short of wisdom.
And consequently, the eye is trained on both this priceless and invaluable ideal, as well as its antithesis called folly.
You can recognise a wizened face if you see one and the face of the fool when you see one.
And does it take a second glance to do so? Of course, not. The sparse grey hairs on a weather-beaten small head suspended on a sinewy body tell a story of wisdom.
Or if that doesn’t, which unfortunately might be the case, it is the word of mouth that speaks of the wisdom of age, of experience and even of intuition.
Thus when someone opens their mouth to speak, you can judge by the quality of the orature whether they are indeed wise or not; being old and otherwise.
Is there not a saying that you may never recognise a fool until he opens his mouth to speak?
This is the kind of people that our elders usually send off to skin the goat for roast relish in between serious deliberations.
The remaining elders speak matters of State, policy and society with the deliberate exudation of wisdom delivered in so well measured speeches; in both tone and substance.
Then one of the elders might relate thus: “Once upon a time there was a man who worked for another. He stayed in a little hut where all his belongings, inclu-ding ancestral bequests, were kept. His master lived in a plush mansion a few yards off.
“Then one day, there was a fire that engulfed the compound. The fire was licking at everything and anything. The man darted out of his burning house and rushed to save his master’s.
“When he returned after heroically saving the master’s house, his own house had been reduced to ashes. And gone with the smoke, were the ancestral bequests and all his little precious possessions.”
Is this not the time to save Zimbabwe through the anti-sanctions campaign?
The village soothsayer says the end of sanctions is nigh! Desire, greedy and lust for our natural resources will break the back of EU, sooner than later.
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