It's SteeTime!

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...

Ch enai Hove* (28), mother of one,  was just over 26 weeks pregnant when she went into pre-term labour and delivered a premature baby. Doctors struggled to resuscitate the tiny baby who weighed only 1.2kg. Her baby lived for a day before succumbing. This was Chenai’s second premature baby. The previous one had been a year ago and the early labour occurred at the same time in her pregnancy. It was found that Chenai had an incompetent cervix due to injuries that occurred in her very first pregnancy and would need a cervical stitch to be put in place for subsequent pregnancies. In our society, pregnancy and delivering a baby is the very definition of womanhood.  What happens when that seemingly straight-forward process goes wrong? How do you know if your pregnancy is high-risk? Is there anything you can do to prevent complications? What are the top signs women can look out for in their pregnancy? Although the majority of pregnancies are uneventful, sometimes complications do...

Stay positive! Look up, love, laugh and live! Don’t worry, be happy! Sometimes you smile because you are happy, and sometimes you can become happy because you smiled. Sound familiar? I am sure you have seen these type of status posts with motivational messages on friends’ social media pages. You know those pictures with the inspirational messages. But sometimes it’s just not sinking into your core. You can’t smile. You can’t be positive. All the tricks are not working. You just feel sad. How can we tell when depression is just a natural phase of life or a serious clinical illness which requires more than just a friend’s shoulder? Feeling sad is natural, especially after a stressful life situation or when your expectations have not been met. Disappointment is a normal part of life, granted. For example, it is normal to feel down after a major disappointment, or to have trouble sleeping or eating after a difficult relationship break-up. Usually, within a few days, perhaps after talk...