A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss

During the past week I was in my rural home carrying out running repairs to the homestead and I met with one of my younger brother who has made a name for himself in the nearby town of Nyazura

A Rolling STONE Gathers No Moss

Fortunately,by the weekend I had had enough of the building operations I was carrying out on the the main house,I just needed a break from it all.I gave my brother a call to confirm that he was at home ,prepared and hit the road. I managed to bump into him as he was driving to the main supermarket  where he was going to look for bread.We then proceeded to his plot and after a sumptuous breakfast prepared by his wife ,we swapped stories .I told them that I had heard a lot of  nice things mentioned about how they used to supply quite a bit of the chickens in Bulawayo and asked why they had just left abruptly, my younger brother chuckled and regaled me with some of their exploits in the city of kings but told me that they had not left of their own volition as they used to rent a full house from one pensioner in Bulawayo.He told me that they used to keep about a 1000 broilers chickens in cages at this rented accommodation and whenever the land lord came to get his rent he would increase the rent until he told them that he wanted to be part of the business.

As soon as he left they slaughtered all the chickens which were in the cages and sold off all the day old chicks that they had bought, packed only those essentials they could not do without and the rest sold at a garage sale at depressed prices .They then put most of the other stuff on a courier and then packed their blankets into their land rover ,asked a mechanic friend of theirs to accompany them on the 400 kilometer plus journey to their plot in Nyazura ,which fortunately they had bought but never developed.He told that there was no infrustracture at all and the mechanic friend asked where they were going to live and they told him in the vehicle. While they cleared out the place where they planned to later build their house they would sleep in the land rover and wake up at 4 am and fold and put their blankets away so that when visitors came they would not be embarrassed was made to understand at this time very few people would visit them.Now they have  built a beautiful brick under thatch house which is has ceramic tiles throughout. They had to trade their Land rover for bags of cement and other building materials and a $1000 in cash.That was the money which funded their first crops. The  inspiration part of their story is the fact that they are both professionals who quit their jobs at the height of Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation and they decided to work for themselves.The bricks which they used to build the house, they molded the two of them, they started a vegetable garden and planted maize and beans and after two seasons were able to start rearing boiler chickens again.As I WRITE they are the proud owners of their plot ,a completely built electrified house with a borehole ,over 1000 chickens at various stages of growth,17 goats and more than 20 sheep.

I later told them of my own problems with land lords in Lesotho, when I started a school and the owners of these vacant school buildings would offer them to me ,little did I know that all they wanted was for me to revive the schools and the they would come in and squeeze med out after a year of operations. One of the biggest takeaways was the fact that one cannot start an enterprise on a rented premise and not expect trouble from envious owner.