It's SteeTime!

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...

Every Mother’s Day, instead of feeling celebratory and blessed, I often feel something quieter. A kind of sorrow. A tenderness. A deep compassion for women and the complicated terrain of motherhood. Motherhood was complicated for me long before I ever held a child in my arms. It began with longing. With infertility. With years of trying to understand what was wrong with my body, as though womanhood itself had become a puzzle I was failing to solve. That kind of longing is brutal. It rearranges you. I remember feeling wounded by the sight of pregnant women and babies. Irrationally offended by their existence. I thought they were conspiring to humiliate me. Or worse, avoiding me because they could see the failure stamped across my forehead. There were months of hope... the trembling anticipation of double lines that became single lines. The grief of miscarriages. Plural. There is a particular loneliness to miscarriage because the grief often has nowhere to go. It is grief without photogr...

Every morning, before Harare has woken up, there is already a line forming. Not a short or orderly queue that moves with predictable rhythm. No, a long, patient, aching line of people who have nowhere else to go. I drop off my relative there each weekday at the Radiotherapy Centre at Parirenyatwa Hospital. He is battling a brain tumor. That alone is a heavy sentence to carry. But it is not the only burden he carries. Because before treatment comes waiting. And before waiting comes arriving early enough to have a chance. The Queue That Starts at Midnight There are two queues. One for those who can pay or who have been marked as priority. And one for everyone else. Both queues are unpredictable. You can wait for hours on any unsuspecting day. By midnight, people are already gathering. They sit or lie down holding their place in a tent outside the centre. Names are written down and some have made a business of queueing for others. Many have travelled from outside the capital city. Fro...

  “I’m just feeling numb, I can’t even respond to this email,” thinks Sekai [1] , as she slowly leaves the Microsoft Teams meeting. She had presented a report which raised a lot of discussion. She opens her Outlook inbox to find mail from her supervisor with a new assignment required at close of business. That is in 45 minutes! Sekai (42) is a coordinator of one of the districts in a new HIV project. She has always been high-performing, task oriented and an effective leader. But recently she has noticed that she has been losing energy and motivation. She thinks maybe she is not getting enough sleep, but she can never seem to get renewed after a night’s sleep. She is also starting to feel that nothing she does makes any difference or is appreciated. Could Sekai be experiencing burnout? If so, what steps can she take to manage it and prevent it from happening again? Is a happy, productive work-life possible for the typical worker in the development industry? I can tell you now, that ...

  On the evening of 14 August 2021, we received the news that our boss was gone forever. Dr Christopher Zishiri, affectionately known as CZ, had died in his residence after a short week of COVID-19-related complications. What we didn’t know, was that we were not going to go through normal grief. It would be a grief confused with figuring out that work family is actually family. That emails and zoom meetings could continually trigger tears for weeks to come. It would be a grief that left you unmotivated to touch your work because who then would revert with “Well done Chiremba!” It was going to leave us scattered and sober and sad.   My interest in TB work began the day CZ stepped into my master’s in public health lecture room to tell us all about the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. It was a long title but when shortened to ‘The Union’ it became catchy, somewhat elite. I remember asking him a lot of questions in that class and he, as he did, respon...