Recently I have had conversations with two young girls who have been rendered "orphans" because of the debilitating economic meltdown which Zimbabwe has been experiencing for the past decade or more.
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| Innocent Victims Of The Economic Meltdown |
The first is a sixteen year old girl who is studying towards her Ordinary Level examinations in October this year.I discovered that her mother passed away when she was three months old and her father ended up going to the Republic of South Africa to seek greener pastures.She was left in her father's older brother and his wife to care for her.The painful part of the story is the fact that she has not had the pleasure of knowing her father at all since she became aware of her paternity.For a girl child this can be very painful since girl children normally form very close bonds with their fathers.She went on to disclose the fact that she was told that her father had remarried. Whilst her Uncle had tried to reach out to his younger brother so that he could take responsibility for his daughter, the phone always goes unanswered.At the time of writing she still has not heard from her father.The saving grace is the fact that the Uncle is doing a splendid job of raising her.
The other case is a thirteen year old girl who has just started her secondary education and she broke down in the clasroom.After calming her down and asking her what the problem was ,she intimated that she missed her mother.She said that her mother was had gone to RSA four years ago and has never come back nor has she called. The mother has not bothered to check on about her welfare at all.At the moment she is being looked after by her father's sister.The father is a subsistence farmer more than two hundred kilometres away.In someways this girl seems to feel that she has been abandoned twice.
Whilst I understand that things are difficult here but please lets try and be responsible for the lives we created.
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