It's SteeTime!

My dear grandchildren, By the time you read this, you may know me in a completely different way. Perhaps you will know the older version of me. The woman who asks whether you have eaten. The woman who prays for you. The woman whose stories you have heard so many times that you can finish them yourselves. You may know me simply as Gogo. But before I was your grandmother, I had already been many people. And I want you to know her too. Not because every part of my life was extraordinary. Some of it was painful. Some was ridiculous. Some was unfinished. Some was beautiful. Some made absolutely no sense at the time. But it was mine. And when I look back across it all, I find myself increasingly saying: God, what an interesting life You gave me. I was the girl among the boys I was born Sithabiso Alice Dube, a Zimbabwean girl who grew up as the only girl with four brothers. Five children. Four boys. And me. That fact alone probably explains a few things, although I have promised myself that n...

 At the end of this month, I lose my job. There. That's the sentence. I have known it was coming for a while. The American humanitarian and health assistance that has sustained so much of the work I have been part of is wrapping up, and so, apparently, is this particular chapter of my career. I would love to tell you that I have responded like a deeply surrendered Christian woman. Prayerful. Serene. Hands open. “Jehovah Jireh.” Lol. Instead, my brain has been doing spreadsheets. What about school? What about the kids? What about the projects we have invested in as a family? What if those don't work? What if I don't find another stable job? What if the ministry doesn't become financially sustainable? What if this book I keep talking about never really becomes anything? Underneath all those very sensible adult questions is a simpler one: Will we be okay? And, if I am really honest, another one: Will I be okay? Because my job has not just been a job. It has been evidence. ...

Mandla found something oddly unsettling about her indifference. Not in a troubling way. It was not coldness, and it was not punishment. Chichi had tried both of those before. This was something else. It was the kind of peace which meant she didn’t need him. He had been married to Chichi for four years and she had never not needed his approval. She needed him to notice her hair. To tell her the dress looked good. To laugh at the story she had already told twice because the first time he had been scrolling through his phone. She needed him to say the food was good, that she was beautiful, that he was happy, that they were okay. Even when they were not okay, she needed him to say they were. Especially then. There had always been something almost desperate in the way she watched him. He had not noticed it at first. Or perhaps he had noticed it and liked it. That possibility made him uncomfortable. There was power in being needed. He had never said that aloud, of course. He was not some vil...

I am sitting in a meeting planning for the close-out of US Government-supported programmes in Zimbabwe. Even writing that sentence feels strange. For more than two decades, American funding has been woven into Zimbabwe's development and health response. HIV. TB. Malaria. Maternal and child health. Food security. Orphans and vulnerable children. Adolescents. Reproductive health. Humanitarian assistance. Education. An entire generation of development workers has grown up inside this ecosystem. And now, we are sitting in meetings discussing how to close parts of it down. I am not a political analyst. I cannot give you the sophisticated geopolitical analysis of how we arrived here. I cannot tell you who should have conceded what, or give you a technical model predicting exactly how many lives will be affected. But I am a witness. I have sat in the meetings. I have watched programmes move from PowerPoint presentations into communities. I have seen healthcare workers trained, medicines d...

I went into healthcare and mental health because I wanted to help people live fuller lives. I just never imagined that one day, some of that work would involve bricks, concrete and floor plans. My husband and I build houses. Cluster homes, to be specific. We are slightly obsessed with utilising minimum space in a maximum and beautiful way. People in this country urgently need accommodation, and as our cities grow, we have had to rethink what home can look like. Sometimes that means smaller spaces, shared developments and making much better use of the land we already have. The more we build, though, the more I realise that construction is not really just a construction business. It is a people business. It is about the relationships you have with service providers, approvers, partners and clients. It is about bringing all those individual pieces together to make something possible. We do not have the kind of capital the big construction companies enjoy, so for us, relationships, creativ...

For the last little while, one phrase has followed me everywhere. God keeps His promises. It came through devotions, the Bible, prayer...the same gentle reassurance over and over again. God keeps His word. The strange thing was, I didn't know which promise He was talking about. I've had so many Words in the last few years, I didn't know which one specifically was being referred to. Which breakthrough? Which outcome was being promised? So the words comforted me, but I couldn't quite place them. Then, slowly, something else began to emerge. Maybe it was not a promise about something happening. But a promise about a way. We usually think there are only two options. There is the life we have: It pays the bills. It is sensible. Stable. Responsible. Maybe we've been there for years because we need the money. Maybe because we don't yet have the qualifications to leave. Maybe because it is what everyone expected of us. Maybe because it is simply what we know. It isn...

This weekend we buried uNaTatji.  She was one of those women whose presence quietly held a family together. Gentle, yet strong. Cheerful. Curious. Loving. She felt like home. She was an anchor. As we gathered under the bright blue Thekwane sky and stood around her grave, it felt like more than one person was being buried. It was as though we were grieving all our parents... those who have already gone before us, and those who are still here but have reached the age we quietly fear. Something shifts when the generation above you begins to leave. You realise that the foundation you have always stood on will not always be there. You realise that you are becoming the adults. One of the hardest parts of the weekend was watching the mantle being passed. We, the children, suddenly found ourselves organising, coordinating, making decisions, carrying responsibilities that had always belonged to our parents and aunties and uncles. Thankfully, the older generation was still there, gent...

There was a day when suddenly my father became human. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just enough for me to realize that the man I had quietly placed on a pedestal was, in fact, a man. He let me down in a way I did not expect. I cannot even remember all the details now. What I do remember is how deeply it hurt. I spent most of that season pretending I wasn't disappointed. The rest of the time, I held on to bitterness. Denial and unforgiveness are a dangerous combination. One refuses to acknowledge the wound. The other refuses to release it. Together, they create a burden that becomes so familiar you forget you're carrying it. For years, I carried mine. The first step was simply realizing it was there. I had to admit that beneath my independence, beneath my competence, beneath my carefully curated "I'm fine," was a little girl who felt let down. But the deeper truth was this: I had expected my father to be more than human. I had held him to a standard no person ...

I got into mental health work because I was looking for answers. If I'm completely honest, it started with me wanting to feel better. Of course, I wanted others to benefit too. But first, I was searching for relief. For understanding. For a way back to myself. Like many people, I started where everyone tells you to start. "Get counselling." So I did. The first counsellor I saw was at Harare Hospital. I remember walking into the office after a ward round, on my way to a locum shift. I approached the consultation room almost as if I were enquiring about a patient. Then I had to admit that I was the patient. She took me through what was essentially a problem-solving intervention. We listed the problems and explored practical solutions. It was helpful in a way. Most people never actually sit down and systematically think through their challenges. It was comforting to be heard. I made one or two changes. Then I tried a psychologist at a reputable private practice. She kept cal...

Last term, I became burnt out from parenting. Not from loving my children...that part comes easily. I was burnt out from the school runs, timetables, WhatsApp groups, requests, competitions, forgotten costumes, sports fixtures, lunchboxes, reading logs, projects, and the invisible pressure to keep up with everybody else’s very full lives. And whilst I genuinely loved being part of my children’s world, somewhere in all of it...I lost myself. Not dramatically. Quietly. In ways that disturbed me. I noticed how much of my mental energy was being consumed by managing, anticipating, organizing, remembering, rushing, comparing, and performing motherhood instead of actually living it. So this term, I want to do things differently. Not perfectly. Just differently. I want less noise. Less pressure. Less performing. This year, I will not be swept up by the crowd enrolling children into every possible extra activity simply because everyone else is doing it. My children will do art because they gen...