Following on from the previous blog post – https://friendsofpakati.com/2026/03/31/chris-looks-back-to-1989-part-1-getting-to-pakati/ – I continue reminiscing about my experiences of when I first arrived at Pakati Secondary school.
I was a 32-year old Newly Qualified Teacher, & this was my first teaching job!
I first met the Deputy Head at the Secondary school, Mr Nyamauya, having been dropped there by VSO staff, after dropping two other volunteers along the way.
I also met most of the rest of the staff as they returned from their Christmas & New Year school holidays. The Head himself returned on the day school reopened, & I set foot in a classroom as a teacher for the first time.
In the picture above, Mr Nyamauya is sitting next to me, holding a text book.
As you can see, the classrooms were fairly crowded, & teaching materials were in short supply. It was the enthusiasm of the students & their willingness to learn made the job worthwhile.
My memory of those early days as a teacher at Pakati, were about getting to know things – student names, accents, trying to explain things in a way they could understand. Also about getting used to there being no water supply unless you fetched it yourself from a borehole, and no electricity.
On to more personal, practical things.
On arrival, I was allocated two rooms in the house with the blue door, one as a bedroom, one as an office. VSO had provided some basic household goods to use, and I shared them and the house with two local teachers, both of whom are pictured below.
Most of the teachers lived alone at the school, even if they had families. One who had his family with him was Mr Nyamauya, the Deputy Head. He shared another of the three teachers houses with the Headmaster, Mr Samakomva.
The sharing of houses was something I was used to, having been a student in the UK for 4 years, until 6 months before I went to Zimbabwe. We shared cooking, cleaning, water collecting, and I learned a lot about life in the rural area.
In my first few days, I had a few issues which my new colleagues helped me with. For example, I had a bat in my bedroom, it flew around the room at night, making noise & kept me awake. It had nested in a gap in the eaves.
My colleagues managed to get a cloth over it to stop it flying, and released it outside. They also managed to plug the whole in the eaves. There were several creatures which became very common to see.
I had to get used to so many things, such as the weather, local culture, food, access to water, trasport, shopping locally, & learning what could be provided locally, as this is a farming area. I have to admit I was a little terrified, particularly as I had no idea what a mosquito looked or sounded like until then – but I knew they transmitted malaria!
Communicating with family and friends back in the UK was restricted to letters, predominantly via airmail. It is almost impossible to imagine now how I and my fellow volunteers coped, but the way I looked at it was that I had chosen to be there, so I had to deal with whatever came my way, getting on with life.
It is true that what made it possible was the people I dealt with every day – my Zimbabwean colleagues, the students, local store owners, and the community in general, all of whom made me feel so welcome.
What helped me in those early days was getting around, meeting people & learning the pathways in the area. I walked a lot in that first year, not least because of getting to the nearest store (walk for 40 minutes) and to the bus stop (25-30 minutes).
There are several interesting features in the area & I took the chance to investigate when I spent time at the school on weekends, rather than always going into Harare.
First 4 pictures are on the road from Musami to the Ngomoamowa hill, crossing over the Shavanhowe River which floods occasionally.
Next is the hill itself, which dominates the area, seen in different seasons
There us another hill nearby, called Gwangwadza. It overlooks the township of Chigwada, and has some rock paintings dating back around 1500 years ago.
Next, some images from in and around the school
And who doesn’t love a sunset…
…or even a sunrise?
What is hard to show through images is the feeling of life at Pakati. Being a subsistence farming area, there is a rythtym to life there. Generally, life revolves around the planting, growing & harvesting seasons. It relies on good & consistent rains between November & April.
Daily life also has its own flow. Up with the sun, ablutions, food, chores, working with crops & with animals, or teaching. Once the sun goes down, back in 1989-1991, it was usually radio for entertainment, sitting outside chatting with people, and from 1990, drinking at Taloo stores which opened that year. The pace of life is unhurried, always with time to greet, to chat, to relax, to read. My own recollection was of the preparations for daily lessons & extra-curriclar activities – sports are very popular – then at the end of the day, the gradual fading out of noise as the students walk home, leaving a peace I have not found anywhere else in the world.
These 2 blog posts give just a taste of what it was like for me back in 1989. What I do remember in particular about my first 3 months is this: when I first got to Pakati I could hardly wait to get back to the city on a weekend. By the end of my first term, I couldn’t wait to get back to the school. I felt completely at home by then, a feeling that has never left me to this day.
Thank you for reading this, if you have any comments or questions, please do not hesitate to contact me via email friendsofpakati@gmail.com or at http://x.com/friendsofpakati and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100085689750818
