To

ParadiseinLive

A Memoir of Dreams Found and Dreams Lost in the Heart of Africa

Cindi McVeyHomeboundpublicationsIndependent Publisher of Contemplative Titles

To

ParadiseinLive

A Memoir of Dreams Found and Dreams Lost in the Heart of Africa

published by homebound publications

Copyright © 2014 by Cindi McVey. All Rights Reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or intro-duced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and publisher except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is based on actual events. Some names have been changed for privacy purposes.

For bulk ordering information or permissions write: Homebound Publications, PO Box 1442

Pawcatuck, Connecticut 06379 United States of AmericaVisit us at: www.homeboundpublications.com

first edition ISBN: 978-1-938846-25-0 (pbk)

book designFront Cover Images

© Crossed Giraffes with Elephants by Pearl Media (shutterstock.com) © Cheetah by Richard Whinston (shutterstock.com)

© African Bush Viper by Willie Davis (shutterstock.com)© An African sunset in Hwange National Park by Villiers Steyn (shutterstock.com)

© Close up African Elephant by Donovan van Staden (shutterstock.com) © Interior Map by Rainer Lesniewski (shutterstock.com)

Cover and Interior Design: Leslie M. Browning

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McVey, Cindi. To live in paradise / by Cindi McVey. —First edition. pages cm ISBN 978-1-938846-25-0 (paperback) 1. McVey, Cindi. 2. McVey, Cindi—Travel—Zimbabwe. 3. Americans—Zimbabwe--Bi-ography. 4. Businesswomen—Zimbabwe—Biography. 5. Young women—Zimbabwe—Bi-ography. 6. Zimbabwe—History—1980- 7. Social conflict—Zimbabwe—History--20th century. 8. Social change—Zimbabwe—History—20th century. 9. Zimbabwe—Social conditions—1980- 10. Zimbabwe--Description and travel. I. Title. DT2999.M35A3 2014 968.9105’1—dc23 [B] 2013049414

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For My Mother

Part One

1

Chapter One

With bags packed, I made my way to the airport for a midnight flight out of Anchorage. I felt an eerie ex-citement as I drove in pitch-black darkness along deserted lanes. The streetlights stood muted behind

a veil of falling snow, giving a surreal quality to the hushed night. I still carried my guilt and felt like a thief sneaking away from the responsible path, slipping off for adventure.

As I sat back in my plane seat and felt the jet pulling away from Earth, my mind was calmer than I could ever remember. I had done it. I had blasted out of the orbit I was stuck in, and jetting off into a boundless unknown. I looked out the window down into the vast darkness, filled with satisfaction at flying over that chasm which had held me back.

* * * * *

Surely I must be crazy. Really I could say I had it all, and here I wanted to leave. I was blessed with a terrific job, the perfect apart-ment, my family nearby and a close circle of friends. And for someone whose passion was nature, how could anything be more spectacular than a home in the Last Frontier. As a private pilot, I took flight over Alaska’s sprawl of wilderness, soaring above rugged mountains, feeling lighter than air as I cruised amongst the clouds. In awe, I gazed down into the splintered depths of ice-blue glaciers,

2 To Live in Paradise

feeding rivers like molten steel that rolled out to shimmering inlets. With my mother or a friend next to me, we’d eagerly peer into the deep green below for glimpses of wide-antlered moose, or scan the inlet’s waters for the pearly humps of beluga whales. All the while, noble bald eagles glided with easy freedom off the plane’s wingtips.

So why then exactly, did I have such an urge to flee? Actually, I felt guilty about it. I should be more appreciative, I told myself, for the good fortune of being born in one of the most inspiring places on Earth. After all, I had been raised by parents who celebrated Alaska as their Shangri La.

Certainly I’d run out of patience with the never-ending trial of being snowed under for six months of the year. Now at thirty, I wryly calculated I’d spent half my life trudging through winter’s icy clutches. It seemed a cruelty of nature to have so few months when a cushion of grass lay under foot, and windows could be thrown open to fresh air.

And that was a big part of it. I hated spending so much time closeted indoors. I envied other accountants who thrived in their desk jobs, wishing it could be me. Meanwhile, sitting at my desk, I longed to feel the brush of a warm breeze against my cheek, and to hear the lilting echoes of songbirds. One consolation was that my office had a large window, letting in a sprinkle of sunlight, and through which I looked upon a lushly leafed tree growing from a square in the pavement. This tree had been brought from another place where the climate was different, and when the more Spartan native trees all turned yellow and lost their leaves in autumn, it car-ried on being lush and green. When winter’s flurries arrived, the snow clung heavily to its leaves, while next to it the austere branches of the native trees rested unburdened. Gazing out my office win-dow, with the Arctic afternoon already drowsy in winter twilight, I often thought how I, too, seemed out of sync.

But more than just feeling as though planted in the wrong spot, something in the back of my mind needled me. I couldn’t stop thinking I’d tumbled into a rut that wasn’t my groove, and felt a growing panic that I needed to find a way out. As time passed, with both excitement and a little apprehension, I realized my only cure

Cindi McVey 3

would be to set sail for distant parts, and leave behind the place where I’d spent every year of my life.

* * * * *

Like an oilskin chart to a pirate’s treasure, sprawled on the wall above my desk hung a colorful map of the world. Glinting in a dapple of light, during stolen hours at work my friend Mary and I would study it and amuse ourselves by discussing the endless places for adventure. Certainly the vastness of the United States itself held intrigue, with its own grand fusion of pined mountains, sunbaked deserts, whispered forests and beckoning plains. Yet something pulled me farther away. The wandering blood that had spurred my ancestors over the ocean to America also pulsed in my veins like an urge that couldn’t be subdued. Only in a foreign land could I find my cure.

As the months went by, with Mary’s help I narrowed the op-tions. Having had my fill of wintry weather, I flatly ruled out north-ern destinations. And not wanting to make things too difficult, I decided to set out for somewhere that spoke English. I’d once spent a few weeks hiking the evergreen hills of New Zealand, and found myself enchanted. Or instead, what about the wide plains of sunny Australia? But no, I knew this voyage must take me to a place with unusual possibilities, even perhaps some measure of risk. It should be a place where people’s lives were lived differently from anything I’d ever known.

One enticing option was southern Africa, which I’d already vis-ited twice, the first time six years earlier. On this trip I’d been sub-tly captivated by the friendly country of Zimbabwe, drawn to her rich landscape of bold African bush, breezy woodlands, and fields of wild grass where buck browsed untroubled. Although her charm was blemished by the towns’ ramshackle colonial buildings, their faded paint peeling and fronted by littered sidewalks, she was still an alluring prospect and I began to be swayed.

As a wildlife enthusiast, Mary also awarded Zimbabwe high marks on our list. She too had visited this Eden-like country with its enviable climate, easygoing folk and low crime, which made an ap-

4 To Live in Paradise

pealing spot for adventure. So after months of entertaining debates, we reached the conclusion of our game and all that was left was for me to put the plan into action.

* * * * *

Actually, Zimbabwe was an ironic choice. Because while I’d been thrilled by my first trek into southern Africa in 1992, during the few weeks I’d spent in Zimbabwe she didn’t strike me as a place to call home. To begin with, even though a decade had passed since the end of her civil war, in this land of opportunity I found a country still hobbled and suppressed. Catching my attention the most were all the ready-for-the-junkyard cars and old buses clattering about, unbelievably not a new one to be seen. This circumstance was the natural outcome of a bizarre law that banned the importation of vehicles, plus a lack of assembly plants in the country. Also puzzling to find were bare store shelves, kept empty in part by extortionate customs duties and surely an unnecessary deprivation. Zimbabwe-ans struggled to buy such basics as toothpaste and ink pens, not to mention the unavailable “luxuries” of magazines, spices, and any-thing other than rudimentary clothing.

On my first wanderings into this beautiful domain I was also as-tonished, in a tourist’s amused way, by Zim’s antiquated phones still used in 1992, which resembled those in the U.S. during the 1930s. A caller had to shout over crackling party lines, while his neighbors might be listening in. Television and radio amounted to a couple of mundane government stations. A washing machine was a rare find, with most laundry being laboriously scrubbed by hand. My Zimbabwean peers had their own eccentric style of dress, with men wearing shorts that barely covered their buttocks in 1970s style, along with rough-cut locally made shoes of brushed animal hide. Women’s wear was meager, especially footwear, the ladies’ battered heels looking like Depression Era dustbowl fashion. And while Co-ca-Cola had reached into this forgotten corner of the globe, it came only in recyclable glass bottles, the same as an early 1900s collect-ible.

Cindi McVey 5

It seemed I’d stumbled back several decades in time, landing in a place with a dose of dilapidation laid upon it, its people deprived of much outside news so their point of view could be skewed, then mixed with a measure of simplicity from having only the very ba-sics in life. Topped off with some odd laws such as taxing working wives at 90% in order to keep them at home, I confidently com-mented at the time, “I’d never live here!”

Four years passed before I next ventured to southern Africa in 1996, on this trip allotting The Country That Time Forgot only a few days. Once again I was astounded on my visit to Zimbabwe— yet this time in a completely opposite way. Wide-eyed and speech-less, I looked upon a bounty of shiny new vehicles whizzing about. Next to the old masonry buildings peeling in dirty pastels, soared modern highrises of glinting glass. In my friends’ homes were now computers and fax machines, satellite dishes and VCRs, CD play-ers and cell phones, plus just-out-of-the-box washing machines and microwaves. With amazement I looked upon magazine racks full of foreign newspapers, store shelves full of everything, photo shops, video stores, and even a trendy clothing outlet or two. I discovered Zimbabweans could now buy contact lenses and sunglasses, and they even had the Internet! Plus, as a mark of progressive thinking, I was told wives were now taxed the same as men. I could hardly believe that in only a few years, and as an outcome of an economic plan put in motion with encouragement from the International Monetary Fund, the country could change so drastically.

With this momentum of a revved up economic engine, one sec-tor to benefit was wildlife. A now thriving tourism industry meant a breeding herd of game had become a valuable asset, and particu-larly in arid parts of the country, private ranch land was turned into wildlife sanctuaries. Intrinsically, this also meant the protection of birds, reptiles, amphibians, rabbits and rodents, beetles and butter-flies. Zimbabwe was exactly my kind of paradise, this vigorous land abundant with the world’s most intriguing fauna.

And when I scouted the map for a destination to launch my-self, above all it had to be a place where nature dominated. There weren’t many spots on the globe that could outdo Zimbabwe on this

6 To Live in Paradise

account, and now combined with her economic renaissance, this flourishing country became the obvious choice.

* * * * *

Yet the next step of my plot took me into reality, and I suddenly found myself intimidated. Although my scheming with Mary had sounded practical enough, it now dawned on me that a real life-changing journey would mean quitting my comfortable job, giving up my hard-to-come-by apartment, selling my Bronco, packing my things, and jetting off to a land as far as I could go from home. A pesky whisper in the back of my mind said might it not be better to keep to the safe path, buying a nice little house and filling it with my favorite things. Certainly the idea of spending the years ahead in my secure little circle also had its appeal. Perhaps I wouldn’t like it in another place, or couldn’t get a job. What if I ended up lonely, and found myself unhappy on that far-off foreign soil.

Yet this intriguing thought of a faraway land was exactly what kept me yearning, and when another friend made an interesting—if not entirely practical—suggestion of simply trying it out for a few months, I was conspiring once more. Yes, that’s right, I thought to myself, if I could wrangle three months off from my good-natured boss, then I’d have my job and home waiting for me, if things didn’t work out on the other side of the world. While I wasn’t convinced I could make it happen, I still pressed myself to think of a way to persuade him to grant me several months of leave.

Unexpectedly, an opportunity soon appeared while he and I at-tended a Medicaid conference in Baltimore, put on jointly by the National Healthcare Lawyers Association and the American Asso-ciation of Healthcare Attorneys. No surprise, the conference was as exciting as the name suggests, a week of tedium spent in sterile rooms of subdued lighting and grey decor. The atmosphere could make adventurous pursuits appealing to anyone, and my plea for three months to traipse off to Africa seem downright reasonable.

As conference guests, one evening my boss and I were invited to a reception at the aquarium, where our hosts generously plied us

Cindi McVey 7

with alcohol. After snagging a couple of meatballs on toothpicks we went off on a stroll, casually looking at tanks filled with creatures from the deep, sipping our drinks all the while. At the indoor pool we relaxed on bleachers and sipped plenty more, watching the lively dolphins put on a show. After a few hours we walked back to the hotel, making our way along the waterfront in the mystic darkness of late evening. A tantalizing smell of sea air whispered round us, mixing with lapping waves that sparkled with moonlight, and when mingled with the pleasantness of the wine, drew us into talk of ad-venture and the freedom to pursue our dreams. Sensing my chance, I took a deep breath and asked for a few months off to head out to Africa. While I was prepared to beg, make concessions, or at least give a long justification, instead to my surprise he simply said yes.

Next week back in the reality of the office I fully expected him to renege. But he didn’t, so I wasted no time in making my plans before either he, or I, could change our minds. Mary helpfully gave me the name of a friend, Georgie, with whom I could stay in Zim-babwe, and I swiftly completed my plans. I’d leave Alaska’s winter at its coldest and darkest, and fly off into the southern hemisphere’s summer sunshine.

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