Dear Family and Friends,
Five days before 91 year old President Mugabe gave his State of the Nation Address to Parliament this week, a nightmare was underway in a small rural village in Zimbabwe. It wasn’t the sort of event that makes headlines or gets referred to in a State of the Nation address but maybe it should be because this is the real state of affairs in our country in 2015.
The drama began when two young school boys threw a stone into a swarm of bees hanging from a tree branch. This is apparently a common ‘little boy’ thing to do: throw the stone into the hanging, quivering mass of bees and then run like crazy. What the school boys didn’t know was that two younger children, aged 5 and 7 were coming down the same path and walked straight into the swarm of bees as it fell off the branch. In a second thousands of bees were all over the little girl and boy: stinging them on their heads, faces, necks, arms, legs and even on their little bare feet.
The screams of the two children alerted a man going to round up his cows and bring them back to the kraal for the night. The cattle ran past him, eyes rolling wildly, tails straight out as if the devil were on their hooves. The screams led the man to the children. The grass was long and the bush scratchy and both children were lying on the ground, covered in bees. The man reached the screaming girl first, he scooped her up into his arms and ran, out of range of the angry bees. One child safe he turned and went back. Two other adults had come by then, a young man and an old woman but both had been unable to rescue the little boy as the bees mobbed them and they couldn’t get close to the child.
The little boy was on the ground, his screams had stopped and he was very still when the rescuer went back the second time. The man’s hat fell off as he bent to lift up the little boy and hundreds of bees attacked him on his head, face and arms. He was determined and didn’t give up, carrying the unconscious child in his arms, not sure if the boy was even still alive, to the safety of a nearby homestead. All five victims, three adults and two children, needed urgent medical attention: eyes were swollen closed, lips, ears, cheeks, necks, arms were covered in hundreds of stings: nowhere had been spared and still the little boy hadn’t regained consciousness.