Sunday-Thursday, 22-26 June 1986: Peter & Verity Mundy – Making a Difference in Zimbabwe

 Monday, August 4, 3:00PM, Hillcrest Community, Halfway House, South Africa

After a couple days with the Emissary Community in Harare, I was invited by Verity Mundy to stay with her and her family at Lake McIlwaine, about 20 miles south of Harare.  I met Verity at Emissary as reported in previous posts.  Her husband, Pete, is the Chief Ornithologist for the Zimbabwe National Park Service.  They have a large three bedroom government-provided home right on the lake.  It’s a beautiful piece of land except for the high chain-link fence which surrounds the property.  The fence was erected during the Rhodesian War to protect the staff from terrorist attacks.

    Pete & Verity:  A simple life with a spacious home provided by the government.

Pete and Verity seem to enjoy the simple life and their one-year-old son, Matthew.  And I’m not kidding about the “simple life”:  No TV, not VCR, no video games, no dishwasher, no clothes washer, no clothes drier, no trash compactor, no garbage disposal, no microwave, no electric can opener, no blender, no disposal nappies (diapers), no central heating, no air conditioner, no swimming pool, no hot tub, no second car, no RV, no gourmet food, no drugs, and no local mail delivery.  Yes, they do have electricity and running water.

The telephone only works part of the time and it’s a 12-party line.  Long-distance calls have to be booked through the operator and it usually takes 40 minutes to make a call, if the operator can get through at all.  One night while I was there, I got a call through to Lusaka, Zambia and Verity received a long-distance call from a friend.  This was a cause for celebration except that the phone then went dead and stayed that way for about 16 hours. 

Transportation?  Well, there’s their old VW Combi (bus) that regularly pops out of 4^th gear and burns a quart of oil every time they drive to Harare and back.  As a matter of fact, the big event while I was staying there was Pete’s trip with the old bus down to Johannesburg to get the engine rebuilt.  He had to get special permission from the government to have the work done as it entailed obtaining foreign currency to spend outside the country.  There was also an issue with the vehicle ID number on the engine because it was not the same as the number on the vehicle registration.  It was some bureaucratic fuck-up dating from when they first registered the Combi in Zimbabwe.  Problem was that if Pete didn’t get the paperwork corrected and the border agents decided to check the engine number, he’s be in a world of shit and probably have the vehicle confiscated.  I don’t believe he was ever able to straighten this out before he left and was going to wing it.  Another big question was whether the ol’ girl would make it over the Soutpansberg, a mountain range in the northern Transvaal.  A friend told Pete about a way around the mountains.  Hope he made it.  I haven’t heard.

Then there are Pete’s work challenges.  The poor bugger has one hell of a tough row to hoe.  I visited his lab.  The field equipment looked like World War II Army surplus gear.  When binoculars become damaged, it’s a real hassle.  New ones are out of the question (the ol’ foreign exchange problem again), and there is only one guy left in Harare who can fix them – hopefully without the need for foreign spare parts.

Pete’s desk lamp is broken.  It needs a new socket, and he never has time to go into Harare to get a new one and repair it.  Why can’t one of his employees fix it?  Are you kidding?  These poor bastards don’t even know how to drive a car.  Most aren’t even high school grads. 

What about a typewriter or a photocopy machine?  Surely you jest.  The only photocopy machine is at the parks headquarters in Harare, and it’s broken down about half the time. 

Pete seems to spend a disproportionate amount of time arranging to get vehicles running or pushing for long-overdue raises for his men.  What a pity that one of southern Africa’s leading ornithological experts has so little time to do important research on one of Africa’s great natural assets.  By the way, I’ve been amazed at the profusion of beautiful feathered friends I see here. 

The Lake McIlwaine facility also houses a fisheries station.  Between their building and the lake are a group of fish ponds.  Most of them don’t even have water let alone fish. 

I wondered why Pete wasn’t able to attract local qualified biologists to work at the facility.  With all the unemployment in Zimbabwe, certainly there must be University of Zimbabwe biology grads who would jump at the chance for an ornithology job with Pete.  Wrongo!  African college grads aren’t interested in working out in the bush according to Pete.  The bush is for poor people.  Once they get educated, they want high-paying management jobs in the city.  Pete isn’t the only person in Zimbabwe who told me this, by the way.

Peter Mundy’s employer.

 

I suggested that bird-lovers in American ought to set up scholarship programs for bright African students which committed them to work in field biology in Africa for at least a couple years after graduation.  But in the meantime, why didn’t more young American biologists come over here for a year or two and work for peanuts just to get the experience?  After all, college biology grads in the U.S. today are lucky if they can get a job driving a cab.  Pete said the only way he was interested in Americans or other foreigners coming to work for him anymore was if they were prepared to pay their own way for at least six months.  He has been burned too many times by students who come here expecting American working conditions and can’t adapt to the realities of Zimbabwe.  They get pissed off about one thing or another and take off after he’s spent time training them.  One woman even went back to the States and bad-mouthed him and the Zim Park Service in magazine articles. 

I noted that it’s too bad that more professional ornithologists don’t try to get funding to do bird studies in Africa.  In response, Pete chuckled about an article he had read in a leading bird magazine recently lamenting that most of the bird watchers are in the Northern Hemisphere while so many of the birds are in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Dr. Peter Mundy is the principal author of this gorgeous 460-page book which includes sketches, watercolors, and photographs.  It was published by Academic Press in 1993.

Pete and I discussed employee-employer relationships in Africa.  He said that we Americans approach these situations with an egalitarian attitude, whereas the British attitude is hierarchical.  He feels that Africans are also hierarchical, so the British and Africans understand each other.  Pete cited cases of Americans who had worked with him and tried to push social relationships with lower-level African employees.  And the Americans would insist on sharing in all the shit-work, like gathering firewood, when it was their job to perform professional functions.

Had I heard this from a white South African, I would have dismissed it as a justification for racism.  But Pete is an aging English hippie and former jazz musician who holds black jazz artists somewhere on a level with Albert Einstein and Jesus Christ.  His staff is all black, and I noted very positive interactions between them and Pete.  

Yes, life is challenging for Pete and Verity but they have many non-material rewards.  Like peace and quiet.  A ten-minute walk to work – Verity and Matthew often bring Pete coffee and crunchies at mid-morning.  Deserted dirt roads along the lake which I found wonderful for jogging.  A friendly, hard-working man-servant.  Verity’s little African friends who come by a couple days a week to be tutored in reading.  Some great trips for Pete like his recent flights around the huge Hwange Game Park near Victoria Falls to do bird counts.  Togetherness without many of the civilized pressures that seem to pull families apart in modern society (although Verity admitted that they seem to get along best after Pete goes off on an occasional trip!) 

They have some interesting neighbors, like the people we visited who run a game farm a couple miles away.  We went there so Pete could band a baby eagle that his neighbor, Mike, had picked up from an African along the road.  The eagle was starting to fly a little and would probably be gone in a week or two. 

I watched Pete and Mike put a band on this juvenile bateleur eagle.  They had to be very careful to avoid being badly scratched by its sharp talons.

Then there is Pete’s terrific jazz record collection.  He and I sat around one night drinking beer and digging Miles, Diz, Bird, Coltrane, and Stan Getz.

Most of all, Pete and Verity have (or I hope they have) the satisfaction of knowing that their lives are making a difference.  That’s something not many of us are able to experience, I’m afraid.  My mother used to say that we should each try to live our lives with the intention that the world will be just a little bit better for us having passed through.  By my standards, most people can’t say that, but Pete and Verity definitely can.  Not that I’d trade places with them.  I like my rural interludes interspersed with healthy doses of lusty urban adventure.  But I admire their dedication and the example they set.  And I’m very pleased to have met them.