Ideas about how Zimbabwe can have sustainable socio-economic development

I made an unbiased assessment of the economic landscape in Zimbabwe and came up with my own ideas about what I think is the best way forward for Zimbabwe to achieve sustainable socio-economic development without relying too much on donor funding. Sustainable growth will arrive by way of debt destruction rather than credit creation and we don't get out of the debt dependency trap by creating more debt, we do so by learning to be self reliant. Let us not forget that the underlying problem is that we don't have enough government savings to support sound lending. A balanced economy needs a savings pool commensurate with its debt pool. Any solution that deviates from that equilibrium will lower the standard of living for our children. It took years to deplete our collective fortunes and it will take years of saving, coupled with painful debt destruction, to establish a stable foundation for economic growth.

The Zimbabwe coalition government inherited a collapsed economy that was just starting to show signs of recuperating, thanks to the introduction of the US dollar and the Rand as a form of currency. After many years of corruption, reckless spending as well as conspicuous consumption and mismanaged ineffective policies in the Zanu PF government as well as sanctions the country needs a lot of money for it to be rebuilt. The treasury doesn't have the money needed to fund the rebuilding projects and since most international donors seem to be reluctant to help, the country is left with not much option but to be self-reliant. We as Zimbabweans are at a societal inflection point, one where each of us must be accountable for what each one of us will do to rebuild our nation and how we do it. While many of us weren't responsible for the hole in which we find ourselves, pointing fingers and placing blame will do little to dig us out of it. We, the people of Zimbabwe, must offer a collective "mea culpa" if we hope to regain respectability on a global stage. There aren't any magic pills mind you, but humility, diplomacy and cooperative intelligence are intuitive starting points on the road to redemption.

Zimbabwe is blessed with abudant resources but their value has been squandered not through natural disasters but through human error, greed and corruption. If all those abudant resources that the country has were to be harnessed and utilised towards the development of the country, there is no good reason why Zimbabwe would not be able to be self-reliant and generate wealth. Our greatest opportunity lies in maximising our resources, both human and natural and making sure that they work at both an individual and community level. The success of Zimbabwe in becoming self-reliant depends on the full utilisation of its resources as well as the building of business relationships and partnerships of value that are equitable and sustainable not only locally but also continentally as well as in the global village.

One of Zimbabwe's greatest challenges remains corruption and individualistic attitudes. Investors crave legal certainty and to provide it Zimbabwe needs to crack down on corruption and improve Zimbabwe's justice system. The individualistic attitudes that I am talking about are that sense of selfishness which some call a sense of self-preservation that makes it immpossible to build effective teams that put aside individual interests so as to work together torwards the common goal of the team. Such individualistic attitudes can work against the aim to be a self reliant country. For Zimbabwe to be able to be self-reliant all its stakeholders need to work together harmoniously as a team like bees. Therefore there is need for Zimbabweans to get rid of real or imagined jealous around who develops and who does well, supporting instead those that do well and sharing lessons learnt. As one big Zimbabwean team working towards being self-reliant, let us fight against negative competition and jealousy so that we don't work against each other and instead work together. However the greatest of all challenges that Zimbabwe faces is Mugabe and his Zanu PF party's reluctance to embrace democratic principles. China gets away with practising communism and not being alienated internationally for doing that because it has become a formidable force to reckon with in terms of economic advancement such that powerful countries like the USA depend on borrowing money from it to sustain their American lavish lifestyles. Who would dare bite the hand that feeds the self? Communist practices in Zimbabwe of repressing the opposition through the arms of an unfair police force and an unfair justice system will never be tolerated by the world because Zimbabwe is not as powerful as China is. Mugabe and his Zanu PF party need to realise that to the rest of the world Zimbabwe is just one insignificant drop in a global ocean that needs to comply to a decent political ideology for it to be accepted and helped to grow in the global village. If Mugabe and his Zanu PF party were to allow the full democratisation of Zimbabwe, international donors would definately be very willing to bail out Zimbabwe from its financial woes. Could somebody please hammer the goodness of democracy into the heads of Mugabe and his Zanu PF party so that they appreciate it as a better political ideology to adopt than communism.

Science and technology presents another challenge as this backbone is essential for the development of infrastructure and so needs be a focus area. Universities should play a big role in addressing this challenge just as they should be integral in fostering home-grown industries. Zimbabwe needs more small, medium and micro enterprises(SMMEs) for it to be able to address its development issues and move away from the dependency trap. SMMEs are important for the survival of a self-reliant population and the creation of opportunities for employment and innovation in Zimbabwe. Empirical research demonstrates that well conceived SMMEs have a chance of making significant contributions to the development of countries. Even though their business operations might be small, SMMEs are often the largest employment creators in the economy. Amongst the challenges facing Zimbabwe is job creation and business innovation and if SMMEs are properly conceived, funded and supported, they can make a significant contribution in addressing these two issues. SMMEs can address the development challenges facing Zimbabwe if they are taught effective and efficient ways of running their businesses. That is were academic institutions and universities come in, they should be utilised to develop the skills and knowledge of those individuals who run SMMEs. Universities should be encouraged to develop special programs to support SMMEs. It is imperative that Universities in the country should play a major role in educating effective business methods relevant to the development challenges facing Zimbabwe if SMMEs are to be made relavant to economic growth. In line with that point Universities should study SMMEs and share their research outputs with the SMMEs. The Universities should conduct experiments that lead to the establishments of small enterprises that are successful from a product point of view, so that consumers out there can be encouraged to support SMMEs. The challenges that face SMMEs include the knowledge, skills and information that can lead to them becoming innovative and effective in their daily business. If these issues can be systematically addressed by Universities, it will assist SMMEs to evolve from being small to becoming major contributors to local, continental and global markets. SMMEs have an important role to play in contributing to advancing economic development in Zimbabwe and the onus is on the coalition government to give them all the support that they need to grow. SMMEs are the key to the country growing economically to the extent that it becomes self-reliant.

Zimbabwe's challenges are unique and as such international models can not just be imposed on to the local environment like what the IMF usually insists on doing when they offer an African country some loan. We need to apply international best practices, but look internally for solutions. A definite need exists to nurture indigenous knowledge and then develop it and support it with international constructs. In Zimbabwe there is need to use knowledge to address the nation's development challenges by tapping into what is known and modifying it to provide solutions that fit the unique Zimbabwe situation. Both MDC parties that joined Zanu PF to form a coalition government are devoid of effective ideas and strategies that can address Zimbabwe's developmental challenges with minimum if not zero international donor funding and we would be great fools if we rely on Zanu PF whose government brought us this far in the doldrums. So the answer to our developmental challenges lies in the Zimbabwe coalition government setting up a knowledge management organisation which provides an opportunity to intergrate and manage better what knowledge exists in the country and where lacking, to develop new knowledge. The establishment of a knowledge mobilisation initiative whose aim is to address Zimbabwe's development challenges such as lack of access to basic services, inability to feed its populations and a poor governance record is the answer to the country's problems. This knowledge management organisation will serve as a platform for knowledge dissemination and exchange amongst Zimbabwean stakeholders, including policy makers, researchers, donors, academics, sector professionals in the public and private sector as well as not for profit organisations. This initiative should consist primarily of knowledge networks, research and co-operation in the focus areas of accountability and public participation in governance, water and energy service delivery, technology and indigenous knowledge systems and agricultural food security, land and agrarian reform. Internationally, it is well recognised that corporate society is on the verge of a new horizon in which intellectual capital is rapidly becoming the new currency. In this context, the question of implementing a knowledgement management way of doing things in Zimbabwe becomes one of paramount importance to enable the country to align more closely to global trends. The knowledge management organisation has got to aim to serve as a leading change agent for sustainable socio-economic development in Zimbabwe. Its strategic vision should not only be knowledge management but should also include the creation of smart partnerships, innovation and entreprenuership, black economic empowerment and the broadening and deepening of the development impact in Zimbabwe. It should be able to align strategy, structure, culture and processes for it to be able to achieve a Zimbabwe free of poverty and inequity, a Zimbabwe whose citizens are all mobilised and empowered to cause an economic turnaround based on self-reliance and not on donor funding. Success in the economic development of Zimbabwe largely depends on such a knowledge management organisation being set up by the coalition government, so that principles and tools to increase efficiency and productivity can be formulated and disseminated amongst relevant stakeholders. The fact that the knowledge management organisation has to incorporate academics and development practitioners that have to come up with solutions on the ground will ensure that Zimbabwe mitigates its major weakness of coming up with very intelligent solutions in theory which it then fails to implement. The success of this knowledge management initiative largely depends on how willing the participants are to share their knowledge with each other and how sensitised they are to the role they have to play in getting it out to others in a form that is understandable to all. Those who are reluctant to share knowledge and information should understand that knowledge is different from other consumables that get used up when shared. By sharing knowledge it multiplies, it doesn't diminish, so Zimbabewans need to stop seeing knowledge as their own personal asset that needs to be protected, they need to see the immense benefit of a communal knowledge base, through this knowledge management organisation that I am proposing for the Zimbabwean coalition government to set up. It should be noted that money alone is not going to solve Zimbabwe's problems, the money would need to be spent effectively and knowledge management will provide Zimbabweans with the capacity to absorb and disburse any funding it gets to create sustainable socio-economic growth. Knowledge management will support funding with knowledge.

Lastly I want to point out that while saving is an intuitive individual solution, it's the death knell of an economic ecosystem measured by the sum of its parts and reliant on the velocity of money. So the Zimbabwean coalition government should encourage people to save money while rewarding productivity in the private sector. This includes allowing interest rates to rise to reward savers, drastically reducing government spending, investing tax dollars in education and passing tax cuts that rebuild the socioeconomic system from the inside out. While this approach is a bitter pill to swallow, most medicine is, it is the only sustainable path. Remember, we're at a critical crossroads, one that will leave an indelible impression on world history. It's not often you get a second chance at making a good impression. Given how high the stakes are, the onus is on us to stand together as citizens of Zimbabwe in social partnerships, in a knowledge management organisation , as SMMEs and simply at our different work places to affect that positive change, one step at a time until we get there.

Zimbabwe: It's time to learn to be self reliant

It's been a few months since the Zimbabwean coalition government was conceived for the main reason of rebuilding the country and easing, if not outright eliminating the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans. Most ordinary Zimbabweans are indeed no longer suffering as much as they were doing prior to the formation of the coalition government (although the coalition government has got nothing to do with that fact) and that is largely because they now have their salaries paid in US dollars and so can afford to pay their rent, buy medication, pay fees and buy food, priced in US dollars which is something they were failing to do with Zim dollar salaries before the coalition government came into place. I am not saying that Tsvangirai and the MDC made this possible, the paying of salaries in US dollars is something that made sense in a dollarised economy and was taking too long a time to happen but had to happen anyway irrespective of who was in power. The dollarisation of the economy has impacted positively on the improvement of the welfare of ordinary Zimbabweans. Of course there are some ordinary Zimbabweans who are suffering now after the dollarisation of the economy but most of those suffering were into unprofessional black marketeering and illegal illicit deals which are all deals that died a natural death with the introduction of the dollarised economy. It was obvious that once the economy becomes normal the black marketers and the illicit dealers were going to suffer and as much as I can never rejoice at the suffering of another human being, I refuse to sympathise with them because they are the culprits that played havoc with the economy and are largely to blame for the abnormaly high prices that made inflation skyrocket at the speed of light. Now prices have stabilised and Zimbabweans can afford to budget their money as little as it is and are a little bit happy but not fully happy because they are still living with water supply and electricity cuts and the hospitals are not yet fully functional. The rebuilding of the country that the coalition government wants to implement is being hampered by lack of funds to finance the rebuilding projects. Most international donors are unwilling to bail us out because of three main reasons:
1.) most of the international donors have their own domestic recession problems that they have to deal with and that makes them unable to be generous with loans.
2.)the Zimbabwean coalition government's economic policy is not very clear about how the money will be used not only to rebuild the decayed infrastructure but to create sustainable projects that cause an economic growth that will generate money to enable the repayment of the loans.
3.) the imprisonment of Roy Bennet over allegedly trumped up charges, the refusal of Mugabe to fire the incompetent Gono, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor which smells of efforts to hide transactions of capital flight and the misuse of public funds by Mugabe and his Zanu PF cronies , the deadly accident of Tsvangirai and his wife which is veiled in suspicion, the refusal of Mugabe to fire the partisan Attorney General which makes the independence of the justice system an unreachable illusion. So long as there is a question mark over democracratic principles in the country some international donors and investors will hold back their money.
So now that our out-stretched hand begging for donor funding has been snubbed or ignored what is the way forward.

The way forward is for Zimbabwe as a nation to learn to be self-reliant by not depending on international donor funding and instead relying on domestic funding to rebuild the nation. Yes, I know that most companies in the country have just started to rescuscitate themselves, trying to get back on their feet, and are in the process of strategising and formulating new policies which are in line with the new dollarised business environment. It will be for the country's best interest if in their business strategies they incorporate the channelling of some of their profits towards projects aimed at rebuilding the country's infrastructure as a form of corporate social responsibility. Such projects will benefit those very companies in the long run when Zimbabwe's economy booms and becomes vibrant. Reliance on domestic funding is possible if the coalition government enters into social dialogue with the country's corporations, the country's trade unions and all stakeholders whose cooperation is needed for this initiative to be successful. I strongly believe that social partnerships like this one can be succesful if both stakeholders are convinced of the advantages of the partnership and are willing to help in rebuilding the country. Like all partnerships, the social partnership should be structured in such a way that it benefits both partners. A critical component of the social partnership would be the lucrative cutting of corporate and capital-gains taxes for every company that donates money torwards the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure as well as low personal income tax rates to encourage domestic growth. The coalition government could in turn curb the government spending bill and introduce low interest rates to stimulate the economy.

The way forward for business and economic growth is if SADC and the AU decide to bail us out of our economic predicament with subsidies that can boost our economic growth. A lot of hope lies in our joining the Rand market area which has the potential to boost our exports if we utilise it with good business sense. In order for the country to experience an FDI boom Zimbabwe has got to become a low cost country and introduce low corporate tax rates to foreign investors so as to lure investors. The country's enterprise strategy should argue not only for more emphasis on high value-added sectors and scientific research but also for greater efforts in marketing and promotion in the global village which are areas that the country is weak in. Zimbabwe also needs the spur of more competition if its domestic
industry is to prosper.

Studying time has arrived so let me stop here for now, to be continued.

That writ large, is what the country now has to do so that it is able to sustain itself without too much dependence on donor funding.

Someone is blocking my blog

Someone is blocking my blog and I am posting this article merely to show that person that I can
go around the blocking and still be able to access my blog and actually post whatever I want on it.
I have no idea why my blog is being blocked and whatever the reason is it has made me even more determined to post more controversial or provocative articles. I refuse to be censored or cowered
into silence by anyone because I know my human right of freedom of expression and am determined to
exercise it to the full.


WILL BE BACK ON MY BLOG WITH A CONTROVERSIAL ARTICLE ONCE I FINISH WRITING MY ASSIGNMENTS.

The effect of death on the living

The sudden death of Mrs Susan Nyaradzo Tsvangirai, the wife of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe had me pondering about death and dying and its painful effects on the living. One minute she was alive in the car talking to her husband and the next she was dead, in the blink of an eye an accident had occurred and took her life. My sincere condolences to the Tsvangirai family. What makes death so painful to the living is how it visits stealthily without prior warning, without giving us a chance to ceremoniously say goodbye to all our loved ones, without giving us a chance to finish off that unfinished business and without giving us a chance to for the last time declare our until death do us part love to the one we love and tell him/her for the last time how we appreciate the joy and peace he/she brought into our lives. No matter how many times we experience the death of our loved ones we never get used to death and dying, we never become immune to the pain it causes, it never ceases to hurt us everytime someone dies and the idea of dying never ceases to frighten us. Thoughts of death makes us wonder about heaven, the
after life, reincarnation, hell, ghosts and ancestral spirits which are all topics that have no proof and so are veiled in uncertainity and so depend on our faith or beliefs. It is this uncertainty about what is beyond death that makes death such an enigma, that makes us stigmatise death despite the fact that it has been with us since the beginning of life.

I am one person who has had an unfair share of death in my family, just when I would be almost healed from the last death another would happen and pierce the same wound in my heart that the previous death had caused and that happened eight times in a space of two decades. Grief became my middle name and had I let it mess with my mind by now I would have died from the stress and depression caused by the grief but I was determined to survive it all. One day I sat down and wondered what then is the meaning of life when at the end of it all you die and leave all you worked for throughout your life? I decided to find out what is essential in life and concentrate on that. I decided to concentrate on the here and now and not waste my time on the tommorrows because tommorrow might never come , tommorrow is too nebulous. I also decided not to waste my time on yesterdays because yesterday is already past and can not pass by again, there is nothing I can do about yesterday, it isn't real anymore. Death taught me to prioritise love, happiness and peace in my life above everything else, it taught me not to procrastinate showing love to all whom I love, it taught me not to procrastinate finishing off projects I start and it taught me to approach each day with the special man I love as a Valentine's day to shower him with love not only in words but also in deeds. These days people whose lives I touch get overwhelmed with the woman of substance I have turned out to be, there is some positive aura about me that they can't put their finger on. The humanity I exude is a result of how the deaths in my family over the years made me appreciate and celebrate myself and humanity each single day that I am alive.

Over the years I learnt that it is not my house, my car, my clothes, my education, my money, my face or my body that is essential about me. What is essential is the inner person I am and how I live and embrace my life right now, wherever I am. I grab my ife and humanity in my hands and hug it tightly but gently. I approach life with a paint brush and some erasable colours and paint my idea of paradise as I go through life and this paradise will not be for me alone, it will be for all humanity. I share my paradise with everyone who touches my life because I believe
that a paradise ceases to be a paradise if it is not shared. Where I see the mixture of colours not blending in perfectly in my paradise I erase them and paint a new one that portray the peace, love and happiness that paradise is known for. In my paradise I take my life in my hands and kiss it and then go on from there with a smile, an open objective mind without any prejudices and a very big loving heart. All this came about because I learnt to accept death. The only way you can appreciate life is if you accept death as something that limits our lives and which
happens to humanity whether we like it or not. The whole idea of life is to live it meaningfully and to the full before death decides to make you return to dust. Most people don't know how to handle death and carry that albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives, always on the verge of tears. Such people need to accept that death is just another aspect of life and then liberate themselves so that they enjoy life inspite of it. I believe that liberty is not a battle that requires the conversion of others in order to win. Liberty is won when you accept the idea that you are the sole master of your life, when your life is subordinate to none, and no other life is subordinate to yours. No one owes you a living so none but yourself is responsible for your living years and its up to you how you
live those living years.

Zimbabwe: Minister of Communications and Technology pull up your socks.

I have been reliably informed that Telone, the communications backbone of Zimbabwe might be cut off from the rest of the world if Nelson Chamisa, the Minister of Communications and Technology does not act fast. Annual subscription fees to AfriNIC, the internet governing body responsible for allocating IP addresses in Africa still haven't been paid. Annual subscription fees to Intelsat, Teleglobe, Equant and SAIX which provide Zimbabwe with uplinks for their internet traffic to and from other countries haven't been paid. As we speak Intelsat, Teleglobe and Equant have disconnected Zimbabwe for non-payment and the only internet link left to connect Telone to the outside world is the unreliable terrestial link SAIX that goes through South Africa but its annual subscription fee also hasn't been paid so it can be disconnected anytime if the fees are not paid up soon. This SAIX link is unreliable because it is always going down due to physical layer problems on the optical fibre, or transmission problems or no diesel to run generators that feed some of the transmission repeaters along the link. So now Zimbabwe is depending on this one unreliable link SAIX whose annual subscription fee is not paid to push all its internet traffic and the bandwidth of this link is not enough to carry such a large volume of traffic so it is bound to be overloaded and significantly slow down the internet speed in the country. If SAIX authorities decide to disconnect us for non-payment there will be no internet in Zimbabwe, we will be disconnected from the rest of the world. Not only have the internet subscription fees not been paid up but the payment of the voice network interconnection fees are in arrears. If not paid soon and those countries involved in the voice interconnection decide to disconnect us there will be no voice traffic between Zimbabwe and those countries. With internet and voice communication to and from Zimbabwe disconnected, Zimbabwe, will then become an inaccessible island in terms of telecommunications. Telone management if asked by customers are saying that they have now paid up and I don't know how far true that is because surely if they have now paid those three internet uplinks that are disconnected would have been connected by now. So it probably is a cover-up statement.

My reliable source said I am not supposed to write about these problems or tell Telone customers this truth, those are the orders from Telone bosses, but I am doing it because I refuse to be part to hiding the mismanagement of an essential service and besides God doesn't want me to lie and keeping quiet while something is going wrong is just as good as lying. I am making all this come out in the open because I think doing so will make the responsible authorities act quickly as well as prevent similar issues from happenning again.

It has been almost a month since Nelson Chamisa was sworn in as the Minister of Communications and Technology and by now we expect him to have made in-roads torwards the improvement of the telecommunications industry or at least made a tour of all the Telone telecommunications exchange control rooms so that he familiarises himself with how the company operates but he hasn't done that. If he had done that he would have been informed that Telone has bills that are red in arrears and by now he would have sorted that problem. The word that is out among Zimbabweans at the
moment is that Nelson Chamisa is very good at talking as an opposition member and very weak when it comes to walking the talk. Residents of Kuwadzana which is the area were he contested in the parliamentary elections and won, testify that they only see him running around trying to win votes when it is during election campaigning and after that he disappears from the Kuwadzana map and doesn't do anything to improve the life of Kuwadzana residents. If this inaction attitude is the one he is going to employ in running the Minstry that he is in charge of then the telecommunications industry is going to further decay. Please don't get me wrong, I have got nothing against Nelson Chamisa and I prefer to have him running the Communications and Technology ministry than having Shamu do it, am only
stating this because I want him to change his inaction attitude and be seen to be working torwards the rebuilding of the telecommunications industry instead of staying in the shadows doing nothing significant. Gone are the days when I will keep quiet when I see a Minister acting incompetently, it is that keeping quiet that has brought Zimbabwe this far in the doldrums, we kept quiet while Zanu PF Ministers did whatever they wanted with our country and I don't intend to repeat the same mistake again.

The fact that he was wrangling with Shamhu, the Minister of Information, over the running of the communications companies is no excuse for him to sit on his laurels yet the handover and takeover of these communications companies was done to him by the previous Minister. Telone and Netone all prefer to have Chamisa as their Minister instead of a Minister who is a member of Zanu PF because they are afraid that if they have a Minister who is a member of Zanu PF, money from the companies will be siphoned into Zanu PF projects or embezzeled into the Zanu PF Ministers pockets or the companies will simply be mismanaged such that instead of developing they will actually sink to oblivion. Zimbabweans have seen how Zanu PF Ministers ran down the country with corruption and incompetence for the past 28years and are hoping that MDC Ministers will be different.

Let me conclude this article by advising Nelson Chamisa to pull up his socks and start acting competently torwards the rebuilding and development of the Telecommunications sector. He could start by dissolving the Telone and Netone
boards which are full of Zanu PF political appointees who are not business minded at all. He can then appoint new board members who know how to run these companies profitably, professionally and ethically. Last but not least he should ensure that the employees of these telecommunications companies are all paid market salaries so that they become motivated to increase their work output and make Zimbabwe's telecommunications system conducive to foreign direct investments. Zimbabweans expect every Ministry that is headed by an MDC member to generally improve
drastically in terms of development and employee satisfaction, please Chamisa become active in your Ministry and don't let the people down.

My philosophical ramblings: Humanity flourishes when it has no limitations.

1. I will express myself spontaneously, will not limit myself.
Its about time people the world over return to being human again and to liking the human state. Returning to being human would mean returning to being spontaneous, loving and having concern for humanity. A loving individual is spontaneous and it will be marvellous if people were to return to their initial spontaneity, the spontaneity of a kid who says what he/she feels, thinks and can easily express his/her feelings or thoughts without holding back as well as be able to empathise and adjust to what other people are thinking or feeling. Getting back to being concerned about other people and spontaneously reaching out to them with a smile, a touch, a word, an ear or simply a look that speaks volumes. Adults now have so many self-imposed or society-imposed limitations that hinder them from being spontaneous and expressing their humanity.
Yes society is the one which limits our spontaneity, limits our show of love or any show of feeling and limits our concern for others. Society says, "A lady does not cry in public." Well I cry whenever I feel like crying and I always find it soothing. I always cry when movies touch my heart and I remember the last time I went to a movie, I went alone and set next to a couple. When a touching scene was being viewed tears started to stream down my cheeks. The woman who was sitting next to me poked her husband and said, " Look honey, that lady is crying." And I quietly thought, "Let me stop limiting myself by just letting tears fall down quietly and actually cry out loud like I want to and give this couple something to really go home and tell their friends about." So I took out my handkerchief and really started to wail and it felt good because I spontaneously expressed what I felt without regard of the limits imposed on me by society. Then there was the time I went to a formal ladies' only cheese and wine party and the hostess was at the door meeting every guest with, "Oh, So & So, how nice of you to come," no welcome handshake, no welcome hug, and that was way back before cholera happened in our nation and made us hesitate making contact with each other. As I stood in line waiting for my turn to get to the door, I wondered what had happened to making human contact through handshaking or hugging. So when I got to the door and she said, "Oh, Eusebia, how nice of you to come," I smiled at her and hugged her and she being the kind of lady that believes that being a lady means not publicly showing affection she was taken aback. I on the other hand felt good because I think a hug is a very good way of expressing our humanity. What's happening to humans, why are they suppressing that spontaneous loving way of expressing humanity. If you want to see how alienated from each other human beings have become, watch when the door of an elevator opens. Everyone is standing like zombies, facing the elevator door and no one dares to make contact with anyone, no conversation, no smiling at each other. Everyone in the elevator stands at attention, the door opens and one gets out and another one gets in and turns round immediately and faces the door. Whoever told people that they have to face the door when they enter an elevator. So this other day I was in one of my daring moods and I walked into an uptown elevator and stood there with my back to the elevator door and looked at everybody and said, "Hi everybody! Wouldn't it be marvelous if the elevator got stuck and we could get to talking to each other." No one said a word in response, they all looked at me with eyes that said, "This woman wants to know people in an elevator, she must be crazy." I on the other hand felt good, I had tried to make human contact however without success, I had tried to show the people in the elevator that I was concerned about them as my fellow humans. Whatever happened to the human need to connect & relate to other human beings, why did we allow it to be buried in sophistication, indifference, self-love, pride, society's limitations and self-imposed limitations due to fear of rejection. Let us start expressing our humanity spontaneously without limits.

2. I free myself from being limited by words used as labels
We created words so that we could be able to communicate. Words are supposed to make us understand each other but sometimes they become boxes and bags in which we become trapped, they limit us. Words are the freezing of reality. We teach children the meaning of words before they are able to truly understand them and rebel. And in words we teach fear, we teach prejudice, we teach love, we teach respect, we teach all kinds of things. Words label people and in so doing prevents us from finding for ourselves what that person is about. All you have to do is hear a label and you think you know everything about the person being labelled. You then don't bother to find out what the labelled person thinks, what the labelled person feels, what the labelled person understands and what his/her hopes and fears are. Such is the limiting effect of words used to label people.
I believe in not allowing words to rule me, I rule words by finding out for myself if the word being used to label the person fits his/her behaviour, demeanour or character, I free myself from basing my perception of a person from the label he/she is given. Words can have a distancing phenomena and I refuse to be limited by labels from getting to know another human being better and from reaching out to another human being and expressing humanity. I believe that every human being has this beautiful uniqueness from which I can learn a thing or two and I will not learn anything from that person by labelling him/her, by calling him/her names. If you want to know about someone, you've got to get into his/her heart and mind, only then will you understand that person and the minute you label someone you create a wall that makes it impossible to get into that someone's heart and mind. You all know labels that if spoken immediately make you expect a certain type of behaviour from that labelled person, for example, "She is a Jew" , "She is Black" , "She is a Moslem" , "She is fat" , "She is a single mother". Why can't they just say she is Mary Mollen, I mean simply say her name without labelling her because she is just a person who is obviously much more than the label she is being given. Let us stop using labelling words, they hinder people from expressing their humanity.