Two years ago, I was in Hwange, a small city in northern Zimbabwe. Most people only know the bad stuff about Zimbabwe - the ridiculous inflation rates, the people who have been kicked off their farms by President Robert Mugabe, and the repressive government policies. Unfortunately, those are all true. I remember going to a small food store in Hwange where the shelves were literally bare, with the exception of a few packs of cookies and a government run newspaper. Those cookies, by the way, cost $1 million. That’s not too much, considering the official exchange rate is 250,000 Zimbabwean dollars to 1 U.S. dollar.
Despite all the problems, people in Zimbabwe are incredibly warm and open. I met another Zimbabwean last night who fits that bill, Taona Shadreck Gwashavanhu, who runs a school in the capital, Harare. Taona is in Toronto with two students from his school. They are smart girls, he said, and have lots of big dreams. But Taona knows it will be heart for them to reach their dreams if they stay in Zimbabwe. It’s something he said he struggles with.
“If you develop someone, you take them into your heart,” he said.
Those are the moments that make it hard to go to places in Africa, and be at conferences like this. But I guess in another way, it’s those stories that give you a reason to have to keep coming back.

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