Meeting Mangezi

The VSO ethic is to send volunteers to work alongside local counterparts around the world, sharing skills in the process of 'development'. My counterpart was a jolly, larger than life character called Mangezi. There was little special about our first meeting in a dark corridor of the Ministry building. This was a man who, as a boy, had survived an attack on a rural village close to the Mozambique border during the early years of the Independence struggle. Hiding behind a bundle of logs he had witnessed the destruction of the village by government forces which sought to prevent Zimbawean 'kids' being trained across the border.

Mangezi had done well for himself, ending up in head office of the Ministry. Our first meeting was hospitable but lukewarm. I could not have foreseen that one of my final duties in Zimbabwe in the years ahead would be to pay last respects to this brother, throwing dirt on his coffin and offering a eulogy in the midst of the village mourners. He had survived many things through the years, but the virus that had sunk its teeth so deeply into this part of the world proved all too conquering.
My journey in Zimbabwe would not have been half as rich had this man not been part of it, and I would leave with a deep sense of loss which remains with me to this day.