VIM to ZIM

According to an article in the June 4, 2008 issue of the New York Times, while Mugabe is in Rome at a United Nations conference on food, his henchmen at home are apparently telling international aid groups — CARE, Save the Children, and World Vision are mentioned in the article — to close up shop […]

An article in today’s New York Times about how teachers and relief workers are apparently being targeted for questioning by police and in some cases are being charged with election fraud or even assaulted by thugs.
Violence in Zimbabwe Disrupts Schools and Aid - New York Times
…Teachers, who served as nonpartisan supervisors at polling […]

Quoting The Herald, even the New York Times has now mentioned (online in its 11 April 2008 issue) Shadreck Mufute’s arrest as an example of how “severe” the state’s move against election officials has been. To me, it also shows how petty it all is — 10 votes here or there for one candidate […]

From The Herald (www.herald.co.zw)
“…Shadreck Mufute (47) who is the Hartzell Central Primary School headmaster appeared in a Mutare court […]
Mufute was arrested this week on allegations of depriving President Mugabe of 10 votes, which he allegedly gave to Morgan Tsvangirai in the presidential race.
When he first appeared in court on Tuesday, Mufute had applied […]

From a blog called This is Zimbabwe (which looks like a very good source of information on pro-democratic organizations in Zimbabwe):
On an as yet unconfirmed date one Shadreck Mufute, a ZEC elections officer who was stationed at Ward 25 in Mutasa South was arrested in Mutare and charged with fraud under section 136(a) of the […]

In Crisis Zimbabwe Asks: Could Mugabe Lose?
“…A presidential election is scheduled here for March 29, and [mother of three] Gladys Sithole said she hoped this time Mr. Mugabe would finally lose. Now 84, he is a former guerrilla fighter who has led the nation since independence in 1980. ‘Mugabe was a hero of the liberation […]

Just a quick post to let everyone know the whole team is now in London at Heathrow Airport waiting for our flight to Detroit — BA 203 arriving at 12:50 pm (as a reminder: if you’re picking someone up, meet us at the airport, not at the Romulus church).Yesterday we had a good (long) flight from Harare to London. For the most part the weather was clear all the way, giving us spectacular views of the Congo rainforest, the endless sands of the Sahara, clusters of villages and cities along the southern Mediterranean in Tunisia, the French Alps, sunset over Paris, and then the bright lights of London as we circled Heathrow waiting to land.

I’ve started to upload a few photos of the team members in action.

A few days ago last week I updated the team events calendar/schedule using a simple text file. The original format wasn’t very effective in a low-bandwidth environment. I just thought I’d let everyone know in case you’re interested in finding out what we’re up to each day.
One unexpected change in the schedule […]

Just another really quick message to let everyone know that we’re all still here and doing well. Really well.
This past weekend was so packed with activities that I didn’t have time to come into AU to connect to the Internet and upload and download messages. But I’ve downloaded all the comments and will […]

Yesterday evening at the hotel we again shared the events of the day for each of us at our various assignments.
-Marsha Dorgan is having great — and surprisingly speedy — success in her efforts to plan for expanding AU’s “Dream Dairy” into a full working farm, and to begin to build a piggery at […]

Yesterday afternoon and evening the team gathered at the hotel and shared our various experiences at our assignments for the day. The stories were so wonderful I’m sure we’ll find a way to share at least some of them here in this forum. Even something as simple as installing pencil sharpeners […]

In my message on Sunday I should have said that others *may* be able to write something soon. As it turns out, although Africa University does have wireless connections throughout the campus, and although the library does have several up-to-date computers, Internet bandwidth is extremely slow, making it very difficult to […]

Everyone arrived safe and sound in Zimbabwe earlier today (though a couple suitcases are coming later).
Right now we’re at the hotel in Mutare, where we just finished a very nice dinner. The hotel has only one dial-up connection, so I’m writing for everyone.
Tomorrow we’ll tour Africa University, so I expect others will be able […]

Just a quick post to let everyone know we all arrived safely at Heathrow in London. And now we’re just waiting until our flight to Harare leaves later on. Everyone seems to be getting really excited about soon actually being in Zimbabwe.

This will allow anyone who will have access to their home email account while they are in Zimbabwe (or now, too, for that matter) to easily post a message to the blog on the main page of this site just by sending an email message. You will just need to send the email (I’ll let everyone know the address for it) from the email address you entered in when you registered for the site (see http://vimtozim.org/wp-admin/profile.php if you’re not sure what it was).

VIMtoZIM.org is now officially up and ready to go!
We’ll probably continue to make tweaks and improvements to the site over the next few weeks, but for now team members are all invited to take a look at the site, to sign up for access to the discussion forum and for information about how to post […]