Zimbabwe's scattered marriages

Zimbabwe's scattered marriages

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By Norah Spie

WHEN I started this column, I promised to make you laugh. But with every passing week, a wall of depression seems to be building around our lives.

A lot of us appear to have either had our sense of humour surgically removed, or we are just not up to a laugh in a world torn apart by hate, conflict and individual suffering.

Have you noticed the number of times couples have broken up after moving abroad?

Usually it’s people who would have stayed together if they were still in Zimbabwe. From my very unscientific survey, I found out it is more prevalent when one spouse moves abroad to seek a new Eldorado and the other remains at home.

When they finally get united, things fall apart. In most cases, it is when the woman moves and gets established first in a foreign country.

So where does it all go wrong? I have to use scenarios so that we can all visualise the different situations.

Let’s take a couple from the urban area of Zimbabwe. They live a fairly average life. Husband is a bank teller and wife is a nurse. As things start to get tough, they talk of moving because they have heard of so and so who is doing quite well abroad.

Wife applies and gets a job in a foreign country. Because the husband has a general kind of profession, western countries are not necessarily looking for that. Wife is already a step ahead. Nevertheless, both parties are excited about a prospective life abroad. They decide that the wife moves first while husband stays to sort out things at home, perhaps children are involved.

Two years later, the man is still in Zimbabwe with his job at the bank while the woman is staying abroad, maybe visiting once in those two years. The economic situation hits rock bottom but since the wife is sending every penny home, the husband beats poverty.

He finally decides to join her, all is well. I shall not get into what they have been up to for the two years they have been separated. Let us assume they were both faithful because people cheat anyway, whether they are living in the same house or not.

The issue of the visa is easily resolved as wife has a work permit so the husband gets a spouse visa. That is the second upper hand the wife has. With much anticipation, husband starts to look for a job in his field but the stakes are high.

The days are going by and he is wondering why people told him it’s easy to get a job in the so called first world. Another week and two more weeks go by. Panic! A month goes by. He is getting desperate. She is trying to give him support. In desperation he gets a casual job like the other men have told him to do.

Two incomes are now coming into the household, it’s all good. Psychologically, the woman is ahead and we all know what that does to men. Could this be the beginning of the end? Then there is the issue of deciding what to do with the household's income. What portion of that is going back to Zimbabwe and to whose parents and so on? All these things are happening at once.

It is hard enough for the man to deal with the fact that he cannot get a proper job let alone with the usual domestic reality -- little things like the wife not being able to prepare dinner every night or telling the man to go down to the laundry mat.

Remember that two-year gap means the woman has already adjusted to the western way of living while the man feels like a child learning to walk. Don't touch this, don't go there, say this when asked and certainly do not spend that much! You can see it is all brewing inside the man, while the woman secretly wonders why he has changed so much and why he seems not to understand anything anymore. But who has really changed here?

The other scenario is when one spouse is left in Zimbabwe, indefinitely. Take a young couple, shot-gun marriage (this is when you marry because the woman gets pregnant), the guy gets a chance to go abroad and leaves the young woman at his parents. At first he phones every day after work because he is so lonely and cold. Then it’s a call every other day then weekly, and then the woman is soon told 'I'm very busy these days'.

The plan was that the man would go away and work for a year or so then come back home and buy a house of their own and they live happily ever after. But things are not going according to plan, so he has to stay for a longer period until he can raise the money plus he has to have a nice car when he comes back. The wife is patient, taking care of their baby and helping out the in-laws and the other kids from the extended family.

The man, true to his word, sends money every week but just enough to cover living expenses and here and there he sends the odd cell phone and clothes and all is well. Time goes by and before they know it, three years has passed. There is no more talk about the husband going back to Zimbabwe. He says he is trying to get her over to his foreign base. Nothing actually happens. The child grows up without knowing its father and the woman is an economic widow.

The third scenario is the one that breaks my heart -- when both parents, or single mothers, have to leave their children in Zimbabwe usually with grandparents. The thinking here is that they go over to whatever foreign destination and return in a few months. Months become years and more years. The children are growing up fast. The parents work very hard to provide them with all they need and extras to compensate their absence. But there are some things money cannot buy.

Now at break-time in schools, kids talk about where their parents are instead of what we did about what our parents do. Like we used to talk about how dad is a train driver and mum works in the big office but now they are like, 'my mum is in America and the other one says oh but my parents are in London. They sent me this and that and now I want another one of that’. Do you see how sad this is?

I know for a fact, given a choice all parents would want to be with their children but when it comes to putting food on the table then some feel they had to do what they had to do. It is the times we are living.

Remember just before the new millennium, all the talk about how computers would crash, well our world in Zimbabwe crashed. From the year 2000, we saw the collapse of families. This is especially hard because our society was such a tight-knit and bang! one day it was all lost. So whatever situation you are in, keep your head up and remember- the glass is half full.

Norah Spie's new weekly column appears here every Wednesday. You can e-mail her at n_spie@hotmail.com. Her new book, Parallel Lines, is available at many good bookshops and you can also order it online from AMAZON

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