Mutoko Village

MUTOKO VILLAGE

Saturday we drove our gardener Leon home to his wife in the village of Mutoko. Mutoko is 4 hours drive form the centre of Harare, through beautiful, rocky landscapes, on roads with unbelievable potholes and flooded bridges. After some detours and getting a bit lost, we finally arrived in the village and was welcomed by Leons wife and other members of the family.                           
The village is small, with clay houses and fields of corn, ground nuts, bananas, greens and other basic fruits and vegetables that is needed for survival. Due to bad rainy season this year, the crops have not been  as productive as the village people were hoping for and US aid has been crucial resource in food supply and medications.

Picking ground nuts from the fields was a completely new experience to me. My favorite snack in its original shape and context, not only in a Polly peanut packet on a shelf in a supermarket. It actually really hit me how unaware I am of all the imported foods and where they are coming from and how and where they actually grow. After picking, peeling and boiling them, I totally had a new experience of the peanut: never again will anything taste so good.

Leon in his field.

In Mutoko, most of the people in the village has one hut for sleeping, one for cooking

 and one as a living room.

 Outside the chickens are running around alongside

skinny dogs, cows and goats. 

Animals are used either for food or as guards and are not a priority when it comes to being fed or given any social attention. This is naturally a result of not having enough food to feed oneself, and even though it pained me to see the state of some of the animals, I do understand how one can neglect an animal when oneself is living in constant lack of enough foods and hunger.