days in a police station after reporting the rape, because the police did not know where to
send her. She was then given the bus fare to go home by the churches.
Update: 2010
Nothing is known about the whereabouts of the girl. She is now 20 and could be anywhere.
Photo 34: June 2005 out of this family of four (situation 3)
only the little boy on the right is still alive in 2010. Mother, father and baby all died.
Situation five:
Rural district, Matabeleland North
2 women, a mother in her 70s and her daughter in her 50s, both widows
Originally from Killarney informal settlement
Interviews: May 2010
In October 2005, the older widow was in a state of deep mourning, having had to cope with
her dying daughter throughout the process of displacement and dumping. She had had to
nurse and then bury her daughter in this strange community. She was left raising two
grandchildren aged 8 and 13. Her daughter (interviewee two), also a widow, in her fifties and
supporting a child, had��been battling to establish a homestead in another part of the same
district, and had been offered two derelict huts.
By 2006, both widows were battling to survive in rural Matabeleland and had effectively
become cheap labour for their neighbours, not having the physical strength or resources to
plough, plant and fence fields for themselves. They were desperately poor – too poor to be
able to move anywhere else.
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