I am 21years old. I come from Zaka, Masvingo province. I was attending Morgenster Teacher’s College where I was doing a three-year course to teach primary school. I have done two-and-a-half years and will finish in December 2006. I came here to get money to pay fees to finish. The fees went up. Last term cost Z$16 million [US$158] per term. This coming term will cost Z$50 million [US$495].122 There are around three hundred students. Most are going to drop out because of the fee escalation. My father passed away in 2002. My mother is not working. My father left cattle. We are sometimes selling cattle to get money. I came to South Africa on April 18. I border jumped. There are people there [at the Zimbabwe border] who do it as a business. They are Zimbabweans. They have three vans. Malatchas—it’s the name of the business. To go to Johannesburg, they charge about R800. We were about 14 in the van. Our uncle in Johannesburg paid when we got there. They phoned my uncle from Beitbridge [Zimbabwe]. He agreed to pay. It is common procedure. We went by foot at night from Beitbridge [Zimbabwe] to Musina, going through farms. We walked from about 11 p.m. Around six in the morning they picked us up in the van. [The driver of the van has documents to cross the border legally.] We arrived in Johannesburg at about eleven in the morning. We looked for work. I worked for two weeks. It was very unfortunate. When I was on my way from work to my uncle’s place, I was taken there. I was working at a construction company with a Zimbabwean friend with whom I’d crossed [the border]. We were not paid. They were to pay us in a fortnight. There were many Zimbabweans working at the construction company. They did have workers’ permits. The company comes to Beitbridge and finds one Zimbabwean person, who will search for others in Zimbabwe because these people here [South Africans] don’t want to work. I observe these people are more of thieves than to work on their own. Then we were transported by train to Musina. You feel uncomfortable [to be arrested and deported]. You’ve tried everything. You’ve used money from others, and you won’t have anything. —Human Rights Watch interview with an undocumented Zimbabwean migrant awaiting deportation, Musina police station, April 26, 2006 122 This is a conversion rate of Z$101,101 = US$1. Note that at the end of July 2006, the government of Zimbabwe announced that three zeros would be taken off every banknote to help consumers deal with inflation of almost 1,200 percent. The official exchange rate was also devalued. The new exchange rate is Z$250 = US$1. 33 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH VOLUME 18. NO. 6(A)