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gems of wisdom from our cotton-heads, we hold dearly.
“It is the soil that knows that the baby mouse is sick.”
I hear nowadays our youngsters have broadened the phenomenon to their everyday experiences and are usually heard saying, “It is the shoe that knows that the stocking inside, or ‘sox’ is torn.”
Quite some lingua franca for this generation!

The essence of the well-worn wisdom from the village expounded above both underlines our people’s harmony with nature, whence they draw wisdom, and how they live in accordance with the natural – and more intelligent – scheme of things.
The gist of the truism is that people are better placed to know their problems and how to deal with them.
Just as the soil – which is Mother Nature herself – knows the afflictions of, and how to mysteriously cure the young mouse, people in the village and this country should know their problems and how to solve them.
It’s none but ourselves!

This villager was reminded by the visit to Guruve by a team of six local (and black doctors) to three weeks ago who gave free medical attention and free medicines at Mudhindo and Ruyamuro clinics.
Under a local non-governmental organisation that specialises in relief and medical service to communities called health Volunteers for Africa, the team led by Cliff Chafausipo and national director Dr Mike Mamire and co-ordinated by local businessman Peter Mutematsaka, it was a day villagers will live to remember.
Villagers with a multifarious array of health problems – from the old to the babies, thronged the two health centres for free treatment and hey, it was a spectacle. The elderly hobbled, with the aid of walking sticks even, women came with babies clad on their backs, others came on wheelchairs, others in wheelbarrows, others on ox-drawn carts, for the messiahs had come.

Really, people have health problems in the village but they prolong their illness due to poverty. They even die before their time, yet there are many of us who can make a difference in life.
A stitch in time serves nine, so they say.
“Besides treating people, we also donate medical equipment. We are overwhelmed by the response, because we want to assist communities in our small way.
“This is part of our community outreach programme and we try by all means to assist disadvantaged people. We come as a group of doctors and do consultation and treatment in situ.”

With those, words, Dr Mamire seemed to summarise the agenda but little did he know that, the organisation really made a difference. Not only a difference but, a big one.
Normally, many people think they are making small contributions yet they are really serving life. It is the villagers who know the value of the service.
The doctors, never from foreign land but our own children, our own sons of the soil, should be congratulated for taking their skills back to their own mothers and fathers, to their own brothers and sisters and indeed to their own communities.

In the village, the dollar is very elusive and many people are dying because they cannot afford their medication, so when doctors embark on such community outreach programmes, even the foregone ancestors turn and twist in their graves in a happy dance. For these are the children they have always wanted to usher into this world to serve and save the nation.
Actually they fell short of climbing out of their graves to praise the doctors: “Yes, these are our real children. Long live!”
In the village, people are selling their belongings cheaply to meet health cost and some of them have become so impoverished that they no longer have anything to sell.

A spitting distance away in Chiweshe, Howard Hospital is charging maize where a villager has no cash and in such scenarios, the stomach competes with health needs.
Villagers being what they are, only go for treatment at death point, for, it is a very difficult decision to make when it come to trading maize for health treatment.
At Howard Hospital for instance, a patient pays a gallon of maize to buy the card and might also pay buckets or bags to get medication and if one imagines the number of children and grandchildren in one family, the future is bleak.

This villager was filled with the feeling that we have turned a corner. We have become shapers and master of our own destiny. We have turned the clock of history full circle and are now able to do what we know most.
The descendants of our black empire, remembering where they came from and showing that they love their people!
We had grown so used to having medical doctors from other countries such as Cuba and China, and, God forbid, others who have imposed sanctions on us coming to administer health to us.
Now that these sons of the soil – just like the omniscient soil that heals the baby mouse – have come to the rescue.

It is true that Zimbabwe has many doctors, home and abroad, who have had that opportunity presented by them by Government and whose own efforts and dedication make them natural saviours of their people.
Most of them are considerably well-off and have their own private practice ventures, singly or in concert, which helps them keep healthy bank balances.
Well, for a long, long time we have waited for other people to come from afar to help our own even when we have something to help each other, however trifle?

Do monkeys not share a single maize cob they come across? Again, baboons do not laugh at each other’s buttocks, for, they are the same, scarred by long years of sitting on the stones and other hard places.
The point is that there are a number of Zimbabweans in different professions and areas and endeavours that can afford to spare a little for the less privileged.
All that is needed is the initiative, and the motivation. We usually hear of corporate responsibility, for example.

The impression is that it is big companies that have to partake of this “responsibility” that flows from the realisation that the companies cannot exist without the people.
Yet even one individual can make a difference.
If there could be two or more of such committed individuals could be a world of difference in the little we do progressively.

At least one is assured not only of the growing self-belief and confidence of our people – us people – but also the attendant diminishing role of, and dependence on foreigners some of whom believe they are the messiahs of Africans.

These self-proclaimed messiahs are also known to steal our resources just when we get very comfortable with them.
Some of the men and women sent here on missionary roles are plain state agents of the countries that commission them.
In the village we call them “vasori” and they are up to no good. Only sometimes these wolves will be dressed in sheepskins.

The sooner we realise this the better.
As businesspeople, and doctors and even teachers among other professionals, we owe it to our communities that we heal our people of their afflictions and infirmities rather than wait for outsiders.
It would really be a sad day were the Soil to give Water to take a baby mouse onto its bossom.

It certainly would be death for the poor little mouse.
We know of course that Water is kind to its own, which would not exactly have a nice time on Land.

So back in the village there is serious need for genuine NGOS to bring such life saving projects as deed the doctors. Every contribution to such a cause is very welcome.
There are many people who have died in rural areas when their lives could have easily been saved and equally there many people living on borrowed time because they are monied.

This villager wishes to urge anyone who can afford to spare a thought for villagers to do so and help them. You will not realise how important your contribution can be until someone tells you how you saved his or her life.

We do not necessarily need someone foreign to help us do the job, what we might require are resources. But going forward, the little we have is enough to change the world. Let us all contribute to the world we live in, the poor are part of us.