Z likes to keep his clothes and shoes until they wear out. I don’t mean, until they have a spot on them or a little pull in the material under the arm and end up in the Goodwill bag. He brings a whole new meaning to threadbare. Right now his favorite shirt in the whole world—after these three weeks of Eunice’s vigorous hand washing—will be lucky if the collar is still attached. It’s just a mass of strings at this point. When we first got together, he was sleeping in a holey T-shirt that was more hole than shirt.

I tell you this so you will understand how overjoyed I was that Z decided he was willing to take his main pair of “teaching shoes” to the cobbler while we are in Zimbabwe. He is already a man of few shoes, and his two other options involve a pair of off-white veldskoens (sort of like southern African Hushpuppies) that don’t agree with the Seattle weather and a pair of black lace-ups that I suspect he has had since college and that he has taken both Gorilla Glue and a Magic Marker to, and to which he always declares, “They’re fine!” when I suggest that perhaps it is time to retire them. Let’s just say that I knew it was true love–and a good case of dimples–that kept me from judging Z by his shoes when I first met him. I’m not a complete shoe snob, but I’ve judged other men for less than globs of glue and a toe box that has clearly been colored in with marker.  These shoes he reluctantly agreed to take to the cobbler are my favorite ones because they are the least tatty, and so I was pleased that they might be saved from some of his own cobbling handiwork.

When I’m in my hometown, I invent reasons to go to the Greek cobbler who has been in business since the dawn of time. His shop smells of polish and leather and always seems like a place where life happens. He’s friendly and studies a shoe carefully before agreeing to fix it, so I get a certain jolt of pride when he declares that a shoe I’ve brought in is well made and worth saving. I once made a tiny hole in a pair of slippers bigger so I’d feel justified in taking slippers to him, and once there, I beamed with pride when he complimented their German construction and said it would be a shame to throw them out because of such a small tear.  So I was looking forward to seeing the Zimbabwean version of Mr. Marinakes, seeing if his shop smelled the same, if the energy was similar. Not to mention, I can only imagine how busy a cobbler in Zimbabwe might be given how much people walk there (though a lot of the walking is barefoot, which probably does cut into the shoe-repair trade).

So day before yesterday, Z put his shoes In a plastic bag, and we drove to “the shops” in his hometown, which kind of looks like a American strip mall in shape only, but which ultimately seems random. As in, I’m not convinced that during the three weeks I was there some of the businesses didn’t change over night.  I’ve noticed in Zimbabwe that things often seem more temporary than what I am used to. What there is at the shops is a big TM supermarket, a smaller grocery run by friends of Z’s family (who have a cat with kittens mousing inside, which seems genius and cozy and makes them way better than the chain store by default), a bank, a post office, a fruit and veg stall, a medical testing center and copy shop (where Z got a million copies for about $8 for some research he is doing, and where, I feel certain, the women who work there might be running a detective agency on the side), and a mattress store. It reminds me a little of the Fisher Price village I had as a kid in that exactly what you need is there, but not much of anything else. On my first trip to Zimbabwe, the shops were decorated for Christmas—it was a single strand of colored bulbs and half of the bulbs were burned out or broken.

Also, the moment you park your car, someone—often a young man in a red vest—appears at your car window and tries to sell you airtime for your cell phone. At the bigger shops in Harare, the airtime salesman compete with people wandering around trying to sell produce, despite the fact that you are either growing some in your own garden or you just bought some at TM. But in Z’s hometown, it’s all about airtime. Z-ma seems to be a favorite of the airtime salemsen. They call her gogo (granny), and at the nearby petrol station, one guy yells Gogo, Gogo as soon as he sees her coming, and he has huge smile on his face, which kind of makes us want to buy more airtime than we need.

Also, in the parking lot, there is a man in a truck with a big wire cage who is selling chickens.

As we parked the car, I was looking around for the cobbler’s shop, to no avail.

Z confidently walked along a wall and then behind a wall, and then around a little half wall. And there, at the back of the shops where I was expecting to see, I don’t know, trash dumpsters, sat a man with a sort of card table and a few tools. On the ground beside him were maybe six shoes, some singles, some pairs. That’s it. No walls, no roof, no rows of unclaimed shoes, no excess leather or shoelaces, not even an “open” or “closed” sign. Just a guy with a table, a few tools, and apparently, if Z-ma is to be believed, some talent.

Z’s cobbler looked at the shoe in question and listened as Z explained that he only needed to have the rubber sole glued back on. The cobbler shook his head and demonstrated how he’d stitch it up so it would be stronger, and suggested that the other shoe should be stitched too since it would probably come unglued at some point. We weren’t sure what the timeframe was for Zimbabwean cobbling and we knew we had a plane to catch in less than a week, but we were assured that the shoes could be ready later in the afternoon.

Z told the man that he wouldn’t be back that afternoon but would pick them up in a couple of days. I’m anxious to see this guy’s handiwork to see how it compares to Mr. Marinakes’s. The cost: $3, which is way cheaper than the new pair of shoes I’ve been hounding Z to buy for the last six months.  I fear this is only going to strengthen his view that no piece of clothing or footwear is ever beyond salvageable.

For a week when we drive into Harare to visit the extended family, I’ve been puzzled by the graffiti painted on a bridge in Harare. It says SHOES, and it is only after meeting this cobbler that I realize the word is not the work of some hooligan with a can of spray paint slapping random nouns on concrete in the dark of the night, but is instead the open-for-business sign of the guy sitting next to the bridge with his crate and a few tools.

It is exactly this sort of thing that leaves me astounded here. There is this lack of the concrete that seems to surprise no one here but me. For instance, some of the streets have names, but no one seems to know or use those names. I listen to Z and Z-ma discuss driving routes, and they say things like, “You turn by the big tree” and then we get there to the turning place and there will be a load of trees, though one will be bigger than the others. I hadn’t noticed that it was a “big tree” at all. When I ask what the road is called that goes from Harare to Z’s hometown, he and his mother kind of look at me like it is an insane question. Why does a road need a name? It’s just the road that gets from one place to another. Before I came here, I never understood why, when I asked Z how big his hometown was, he could never give me a ballpark number. Now I understand because I can’t even tell where the town ends and the rural area begins. On our trip to Kariba, we were still in town even though to me it felt as if we were deep in the bush. It annoys but doesn’t rattle them that half the “traffic robots” (stoplights) don’t work. I think in the US, if there were regular stoplight outages, our whole society would break down. We need concrete markers so we know when to stop and when to go.

The best analogy I can come up for this thing I’m having trouble describing is this: in the U.S. it’s like everything has been drawn in a coloring book with bold outside lines, so you know what’s what and where to color and what the picture is and will be when you are done. In Zimbabwe—and maybe it is this way in Africa in general, I can’t say—it’s more like there are no outside lines; there are, instead, vague colors and shapes that form a different sort of tableau than the one I am used to. For instance, you don’t have to have walls to have a business and you don’t have to have a cobbler who has a front door.  These are things I would never have guessed.

Several years ago, Z was home in Zimbabwe when he got sick with a mysterious illness that wreaked havoc for months and no one could figure out what was wrong with him. We were just friends at the time, and I would get email reports from him about what the latest doctor he’d seen thought it might be. The symptoms were frightening and the possible (read: wrong) diagnoses ranged from just stress to that that Stephen Hawking disease. It was a scary time, and one of my frustrations was that I was (also wrongly) picturing him going to witch doctors without the training or knowledge that a good American doctor would have. Even as I thought it, I knew it was ethnocentric, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that if only he were in America, they’d figure out what was ailing him quickly and get him fixed up.

Eventually, after his GP in Zimbabwe had to cry uncle because she was at a loss, and after a host of specialists solved nothing, a very special specialist in South Africa ruled out all sorts of nasty things and then finally hit upon the problem: Back when Z was living in Indiana, a nice Hoosier doctor had prescribed for him a medicine for acid reflux but failed to mention he should take it for no longer than six months. In fact, the doctor kept prescribing it and subsequent doctors prescribed it as well. At the advice of the South African specialist, Z stopped taking the medicine and miraculously, he instantly felt better. I’m particularly fond of this story because the end result was a) a healthy Z and b) a Z who realized we needed to be together. (Win-win for both of us!)

So today we stopped by his GP’s office both to collect a prescription for muti he can’t get in the US (a good one—not one that poisons him) and to deliver a few treats to the doctor and her receptionist. I didn’t know what to expect when we arrived. I’d given up the notion of a witch doctor, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t expecting something substandard.

Instead, we pulled the car next to a gorgeous flower garden outside her office/home and two beautiful, barking Ridgebacks. We were greeted by the receptionist who offered hugs all around, seemed genuinely happy to see Z and to meet me, and who then offered us tea. Between patients, the doctor herself popped into the receptionist’s office, shook my hand, chatted about our recent trip to Kariba, asked after my health and what anti-malarials I was on, and then before dashing back to her real patients, hugged me.

I’m really not used to this in America. True, the doctor was a student of Z-ma’s and has taken care of Z’s family for a long time, but even so: tea? a hug? asking how I was “tolerating Zimbabwe”?

The water cooler at the Belltown clinic I go to is never going to seem quite so welcoming or refreshing.

So it’s Labor Day in America and the only way I realize this is that Z is supposed to go pick up his visa at the American embassy but he can’t because it’s closed. I’m imagining all the workers there, many of whom are Zimbabweans, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows in the embassy’s backyard to celebrate the workforce of the United States.

You know that look that fish have, with their mouths kind of gawping and their gills (or “ears” for illustrative purposes) flapping, as if to help them hear? Well, picture me looking like that whenever I’m in Zimbabwe, being spoken to by a Zimbabwean.

One of the great shames of my life is that though I love language, I’ve got no ear for it. I studied French for four years, but I never really got past C’est ne pas une pipe, and I learned that in art class. I’ve avoided problems with language by primarily traveling to English-speaking countries and Italy, where everyone seems to speak English anyhow, and even if they don’t, who cares: Italian is lovely and you can pretend it means all sorts of delicious things even if they’re just asking you to move away from the gelato counter because they’d like to place an order.

Zimbabwe should be no problem for me. Sure, there are three official languages here—English, Shona, and Ndebele—but mostly people speak English. Even so, I’m a disaster at a cash register at the grocery store. The clerk will tell me how much the bill is and then ask if I want Telecel phone credit for change (Zimbabwe is using the US dollar but for some reason didn’t import any coins, so you get change in store credit, air time credit, or sweets that they keep in the jar by the register). This is exactly when I have to look at Z or Z-ma with my gawping fish face and hope that they’ll translate for me.  I am being spoken to in my very own native language, but I just can’t decipher the individual words.

Z teaches intercultural communication and when I’m here, he is regularly gently instructing me, with reminders to stand closer to people in line because it isn’t America and personal distance is much closer here, or with suggestions that I tell the gardener that the new grass fence he put up for our arrival looks nice. I am a born observer, not an interactor. If given the choice between talking to someone I don’t know and hiding behind a drapery to watch them, I’ll pretty much always go with the latter if I think I can get away with it.

Eunice is Z-ma’s domestic worker. She’s lovely, friendly, and has to despair when she sees me coming because I can’t even keep my closet shelf orderly while I’m here.  Frankly, life back in Seattle would be a whole lot more tidy if we could clone Eunice. Every morning, Z whispers to me, “Greet Eunice” or “Tell Eunice ‘good morning’” and I do it because I know it is the right thing to do, but I am horrible at a) thinking up conversation beyond hello and b) understanding what her reply is. This is no failure of hers. Her English is good, but I just can’t decipher the accent. And when Z tried to teach me a few words in Shona to say to her last time we visited, I pretty much stopped with “mangwanani” (good morning) because all the other words blurred together in my mind and on my tongue.

Yesterday, I had an empty Coke bottle and I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for those. Do they return the bottles for deposits? Recycle them? Throw them out? I was alone in the kitchen with Eunice, so I asked her. She said something to me, and I  blinked at her,  cocked my head and said, “Pardon?” She repeated herself, and then took the bottle, did a little bow, and disappeared with it as if I’d given her a gift.

I still have no idea where the Coke bottles go, and my ears are still only as good as gills.

Yesterday we said goodbye to Tambonette. I was sad to disembark and say farewell to Nhamu and Aleck (who makes the best bacon ever), but I wasn’t disappointed to be heading back to the Wild Heritage lodge. Once there, we weren’t greeted by our own personal elephant or zebra, but there were buffalo lounging around on the flood plane. I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I should have been. Apparently, you don’t see these often, and it wasn’t until later that I realized these were the buffalo with the big curly horns that make them look like cranky English barristers.

The non Americanized Zimbabweans were shrieking that the water in the kidney-shaped pool was too cold and insisted the bathwater-like jacuzzi was perfection. This is the single area where I was able to prove myself on the trip. It was cold, but it wasn’t freezing. Z and I have waded in the ocean off Washington coast, so we know cold. We splashed around in the water, listening to the hippos do their weird snort-gargling in the distance. There was an ominous-looking pool brush floating around the bottom of the pool that gave me a bit of a fright, but on the whole, it was a body of water that didn’t cause hyperventilation.

As we left Wild Heritage, I started to work myself into a pout because it was the only day out of the five in which I hadn’t seen an elephant. Before I could get my lips properly pout-shaped, an elephant moved at the side of the road. We quickly saw three others, flapping their ears and chewing whatever the elephant version of cud is. Further down the road, my newly trained elephant-spotting skills were put to the test and I saw a few more elephants high on a hill. They were waving goodbye with their trunks.

And now, I can say it, I miss Kariba. It was hot and made me cry. I’ve probably got scars from mosquito bites that I’ll carry the rest of my life. My sister-in-law could have been trampled by an elephant. I nearly shat myself when Mistresses was interrupted by something that went crunch in the night.

But it was something special. I’d say it was a trip of a lifetime, but I’m married to Z, so whose to say?

Bats, it turns out, are great heroes at Kariba. Even the ones who live by day in the hollow tree between the Tambonette and the crocodile slide. When the mosquitos started biting us last night, a whole colony of bats took to the air and helped themselves to a smorgasbord. I wasn’t exactly cheering along with the rest of Z’s family, but it is the first time when they’ve ever seemed like a good idea (outside of Halloween decorations).

Though I warmed easily to the other spots we harbored for the night, I can’t say the same of Crocodile Creek. After the bat festival, Z and I retired to our doorless bedroom and sat in chairs on the three foot deck, watching Mistresses on my computer. (I realize there is probably a passage in a 21^st century Girl Scout handbook about how you should not take electronic entertainment on an outdoor expedition, but since I was a Girl Scout before such things existed, I’m grandfathering myself into the “movies okay for insomniacs” clause.) So we sat  side by side, sharing a single set of earphones, enjoying the tempestuous lives of the mistresses. The problem with sharing a set of earphones, however, is that your other ear is free to hear every wave, shriek, and crunch. About halfway through, I realized that not only were we blinding ourselves by staring at the computer screen, but we were also illuminating ourselves, like a couple of dinners under in a well-lit warming tray at Golden Corral. Z was oblivious, but then there was a particularly loud crack in the brush to the right of the boat, and I leapt up and begged Z to finish the show within the safety of the mosquito net, because mosquito nets keep one safe from big game. It’s a fact.

And yes, Xanax was taken. Don’t worry—it’s prescribed. I’m going to have to ration myself or find some plant in the bush that has a similar nerve-numbing quality though.