Mennonite Weekly Review

GABORONE, Botswana — A friend’s project to build a home in a suburb of our town came to an awkward halt. The half-finished building had been occupied by a raft of strangers who took shelter there when no one was watching.

Well-to-do neighbors had seen the improvised life of the squatters: the nighttime candles, the bundles of firewood, the smoke of cooking fires, the motley coming and going. They called the owner to say they felt uneasy — and could she look into things?

She went to the site and had all her worst fears confirmed: As many as 20 strangers were camping in her property. Having glimpsed the scene, she fled out of fear for her own safety, not knowing what desperate people might do.

What was she to do now? I suggested we go together to seek some understanding with them. But we arrived the next day to find the local police had already taken a van load of the squatters to the precinct.

I began to wonder if any of them might be Anabaptist sisters and brothers.

My mind replayed glimpses of the heroic efforts in hospitality at the Mennonite World Conference assembly in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in 2003. There, amid threadbare circumstances, an army of women labored to cook and serve the multitude. An array of blackened cooking pots stood over the wood fires. Humble workers washed and cleaned and swept with zeal and dignity.

We arrived at the police station and found our squatters — men and women, even mothers with infants on their backs. Some were in handcuffs. All had the resigned, humiliated look of the wretched of the Earth. They are Zimbabweans. Border-jumpers, as they are called here. The children of President Robert Mugabe. A tiny eddy of a much larger tide of les miserables who have fled their homes as a matter of survival and been cast adrift in neighboring countries by the millions. Here in Botswana, it is estimated that nearly one in five people is in flight from Zimbabwe.

That once proud, educated and productive country has been drubbed to its skinned, wobbly knees as the effects of HIV, drought, corruption, inflation and political folly have left the people utterly prostrate.

I know a family outside Bulawayo whose able-bodied bread winners have been picked off one by one by AIDS. The surviving children of these workers have been left to the only surviving member of the family. Today she has 12 children under the age of 5 living under her shrinking roof and no means even of supporting herself.

Little wonder that a ragged band of these unfortunates should have found its way through the backcountry fences and crept under the eaves of an unfinished house seeking shelter from life’s blast.