Long Time Coming

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Sandisile Tshuma
I have been standing at Max’s Garage for almost three hours trying to hitch a ride to Beitbridge. I am not the only one here though; there must be at least fifty people, maybe even a hundred. Or more, I don’t know, whatever; it’s hot and I am tired. The point is there is a sizeable crowd of would-be travellers with things to do and places to be and we are all waiting. Desperately. So much about life here and now entails waiting. If you are serious about life, if you are a go-getter and you want to make things happen then you need to know how to wait. Seriously. You take a deep breath, put your ‘game face’ on, brace yourself and wait. I had to wait two hours to get money from the bank to pay for my journey and now here I am waiting. Again. It’s what we do. We wait for transport, for electricity, for rain, for slow-speed internet connections at dingy cyber-cafes in town where we check our mail to see if a nifty little website has found us a job in Dubai or a scholarship to an obscure foreign university, or anything really to get

the type of gritty raw honesty that does nothing for a person’s self esteem but makes one see the truth in all its cruelty