A mother's anguish:
. . . a mother’s anguish
IN THE hem of the rugged hills in Mutoko’s Chiuriri Village she walks barefoot across her home’s compound. It is early in the morning and the family should be preparing a hearty meal where breakfast is a sacred ritual. Yet at this home there is just but boiling water in an old donor availed USAID cooking oil tin sitting on the three earthen hearths that balance it albeit precariously. Here, old Juliet Tarwirana counts her days as she looks forward to almost nothing. Resigned to the fact that in her future perhaps until eternity she has nothing to look forward to and nothing good that may come her way. Life to her is just a clock that is counted down until you finally give up and breathe your last.
She has an anguish and agony that burns far much hotter than the lazy undecided fire on which she is boiling her water. She also has a tag that she carries around the community that makes her a perfect Pariah and social outcast. A social leper.
She is mother to the now infamous Enock Potani, who last year allegedly befriended, slyly conditioned into her trust, attacked, killed and posthumously raped much loved Catholic nun sister Ruvadiki “Ruva” Clare Plaxedes Kamundiya (49) at a Holy Shrine at Mother of Peace in Mutoko. So terrible was the much publicised crime that the gravity of killing a person with a sacred self-preservation of her body from sexual intrusion after committing it to her ultimate lover, her God, made Potani come out to be an even more heartless and beastly being. Yet the unearthing of his pre-existing state of mental instability meant this has taken a new twist. One of shining the spotlight on mental health awareness and issues in a country that has seen many mentally unstable people falling through the net of protection from themselves and for the protection of others until it is too late and they have either harmed themselves or God forbid hurt or killed others. Juliet Tarwirana sits with her old rugged clothes fluttering in the early morning wind as she looks to the horizon pondering; telling her tale of life without Enock and the sadness of being a pariah whilst cursing her womb for carrying the man that now has her also facing stigma as being the mother of the infamous murderer. “I see him often at the prison,” she says of her son. “I ask him why he did it but he always goes dead silent when I touch on that issue. He has never wanted to open up on why he did that,” she says. But even the most callous darkest murderer has hearts that melt at the mention of their name. A mother. A sister. A friend. Someone who knew them before the heinous crime. With Enock, because of his mental state, there is a lot of understanding. “He had already deteriorated and by the time he did that he was no longer living at home. He was living in the caves and mountains because we no longer could afford to pay for the $10 injection he got monthly to help with his mental illness,” says his mother. Her heart crackles and breaks and the sound is carried in the breeze. She is a woman in anguish no doubt. It is easy to see why $10 is a mammoth task. The poverty this widow lives in is almost tangible with the human hand.
Her two huts are tiny and made of twigs and lazy mud that unconvincingly embraces the sticks and poles with hardly assurance that tomorrow shall see this loose union continue.
Beside the hut sits her much older ailing mother while her daughter, Yeukai, hovers over the boiling tin of water. There seems no prospect of food.
Poverty has since abandoned the family and in its place came something that language has not yet christened which is twice as biting and cruel as poverty and bitterly punishing.
“We had to let him go wild and live in the hills because we could not afford that medical expense,” she says matter-of-factly.
In the absence of the lifetime drug, fluphenazine deconoate, administered as an injection once a month together with oral tablets (chlorpromazine) taken daily for management of the condition, Enock’s condition deteriorated.
She has become ostracised from a community that sees her as the belly that bred the beast.
Even the sun, which is barely warming our skin in the wintry wind, seems to be reluctant to shine upon her let alone warm her abandoned skin.
“He is my child and he has his lacks and needs. At the prison where he is being held he is complaining that he at least needs soap, sugar and salt to make his stay there a bit bearable,” she says. But she does not have money to buy those for the unblemished free in her family never mind Enock in his prison cell.
“We could tell that the situation was always going to be very bad because when we stopped getting him his medication he would get seizures, bite his tongue, contort his neck and legs and feet in attacks and have mood swings. His medication was not available at the hospital and we could not afford it. Eventually he went wild and started living in the forest and hills but there was nothing we could do.”
Already allocated as fate would have it a home at the very edge of Chiuriri village next to the hills and graves of the long deceased, the family has now been quietly cast away from the rest of the community getting little compassion and help from their greater society.
Leaving the compound the wind dies down and the warmth of the sun seems kind and loving outside of their fence than it does in their tiny enclosure. A pledge from a well-wisher sees them finally get sugar, salt and soap for Enock. Except the food pack comes in twos. One for Enock and the other for the family. Because with such poverty, or whatever it is that now lives here, only that solution can ensure Enock’s bit gets to him unmolested.
Yeukai is still hovering over the tin of water as if she is about to add something into it and finally make a meal for the family. And then. She adds. Nothing.
◆ (See also story on Page L4) Mental health has become a key topic in our nation with many young people taking their lives after failing to cope.
◆ If you or your organisation deal with matters of mental health for free or a nominal fee, contact the author so your services and details can be publicised on 0772888839 or Whatsapp 0732888839 or alternatively write to robertmukondiwa@ gmail.com or twitter handle @zimrobbie.