decline and absurdities that would be comical if they weren't so tragic

From The Los Angeles Times, 21 December: Grim tales from Zimbabwe

By Robyn Dixon

Everywhere you travel in the country there is evidence of decline and absurdities that would be comical if they weren't so tragic.... Nothing is simple in Zimbabwe. I'd planned to leave by 8. Problems getting diesel (and Max's elastic idea of punctuality) meant it was lunchtime before we got on the road. But once the car has rested awhile, Max starts it up and decides we can limp along after all. The music of the cicadas almost drowns out the tinny vibrations of the tape player. Zimbabwean artist Oliver Mtukudzi is singing a ballad in Shona called "Bvuma": "Accept that you are old. Accept that you are worn out. . . . Don't deny it, you are finished." It could have been written for Max's car. Or is it about the country's all-powerful, 83-year-old president, Robert Mugabe? The roads of Zimbabwe sing their own haunting lament for a people and their suffering.... Life here is full of Catch-22 dilemmas that would strain credulity if they were fiction: It costs more to go to work than you can possibly earn, for example. There is no economy to speak of, either, just the black market, where even the government gets its dollars..... Reporting is difficult here. Because the government rarely issues journalist visas to foreigners, most of us work undercover, risking jail.

So when I had asked some church activists who knew where people were most hungry to take me to Nkayi, they told me, horrified, that it would be impossible. Everyone would ask who the white woman was. I'd be watched. The authorities would be summoned.... Everywhere you go in Zimbabwe, there are snapshots of decline. On the dusty roadsides, elderly women struggle along with huge branches on their heads, hewn from the bush. A pickup heads out of town, hazard lights blinking, a makeshift coffin in the back and mourning, threadbare relatives cramped around it in the cold wind. Along the road from South Africa, SUVs tow trailers swollen with loads as large as elephants: consumer goods unavailable in Zimbabwe's bare shops. The stores are so empty that the government statistician says it's impossible to work out the inflation rate. (Independent economists estimate that it is between 40,000% and 90,000%.) Given the depth of the economic crisis, it's difficult to see how anything works.

The answer is in a Zimbabwean turn of phrase, "We'll make a plan," which can mean growing your own vegetables, going to the black market, bartering, bribing an official, stealing from your workplace and selling the goods, buying what you need in South Africa or Botswana, or holding down several jobs to make ends meet. A journalist more than doubles his salary by making candles on weekends. A Reserve Bank employee buys and slaughters cows on the side. A sign writer sells sandwiches cobbled out of difficult-to-come-by bread. Teachers, who can go to South Africa with no visa, bring back cooking oil, the staple called maize meal, flour and sugar to sell. In Harare, the capital's thin veneer of normality and air of placid self-satisfaction have been scraped away over the last few years. Often the elevators in its few modest skyscrapers don't work. I wait in the rain in a gasoline queue with Mtukudzi singing a song about a fractious old man who has lost everyone's respect. A little girl with an orange umbrella dances in the downpour.