Zimbabwe News Update
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Getting yourTrinity Audioplayer ready…Writes Nixon NyikadzinoAs the alarm rings at 4 am, Elizabeth (not her real name) wakes up, and she goes straight to the community restrooms to wash her face and brush her teeth. The next thing, she has to wake up her two sons, who are between the ages of 10 and 14, and a sweltering day begins.Elizabeth is a mother of two sons who was left to take care of her two sons after her husband passed on, 7 years ago. She says she tried every trick in the book to make a living. From being a bus conductor during the COVID-19 crisis, a housemaid, a green vegetables vendor, you name it.
It was only until she failed to pay her monthly rentals for more than three months and got evicted that her ice opened, but it was through sheer luck.“I was left homeless with my two boys and had five dollars only on me. I had hit a brick wall in life, and the only option I had in my mind was either to sell my body as a prostitute or take my life, says Elizabeth with a frowning face.”After enduring two nights sleeping in a shed with her two sons at one of the shopping centers in Kambuzuma, she bumped into a young man who was in his thirties, who looked unkempt, fetid, but unmoved.She says what the young man told him was something she had never thought about. Going around residential areas picking plastic waste at dumpsites?“Yes, that is what I do to my sister.
As you can see, I am surviving,” the young man told her with a straight face and unapologetic.For Elizabeth, it was a clarion call to sober up and heed the advice. He would wake up her two sons every morning, move around the Rugare suburbs, Kambuzuma, and then Warren Park, before cashing out the plastic waste to a Chinese Company that specializes in solid waste recycling and reuse.The young Samaritan had to lend Eliza his other waste collection trolley for her to enter the business. From there, she says, though with minimum hiccups, she persevered, and she is now a master of her own destiny.The mother of two says the Chinese company pays thirty cents per Kilogram. On a good day, Elizabeth and her two sons can collect at least 90 kgs, which translates to US$9 per day.
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