Barbara Langridge posted the following comments on her Facebook page:

 

“The most used expression in the bible is ‘it shall come to pass’. To each and everything there is a season. A season of goodness, difficulty, challenge and suffering. A season of joy, celebration. Upheaval, transformation and change. Zimbabwe has a troubled history and has been a political pawn of global politics since early colonial settlement. The people have been subjected to the oppression and violence of colonialism, and since 1980 thirty seven years of oppression of the Mugabe regime.

 

We had our own journey, and also came to a place of un-belonging and the realisation that being white and thinking you are ‘African’ can never be said in the same sentence. Who are we? This lost band of the left overs of colonialism, the unwanted and unaddressed who suffered the ignorance of our own kith and kin.

 

My healing of disconnect has been a slow ache to fix, the call of the morning dove still elicits a wave of deep grief, but time has deadened the pain of loss of my home and country.

 

As the situation unravels in Zimbabwe, we only hope for a better outcome and that a new era is ushered in.

 

The greatest pain is the loss of your community.

It just seemed yesterday that I walked on a bare piece of earth and I was a young person with all my dreams. The dreams that everybody has for their life.

I remember when that piece of earth [that was to become our home] was bare and laying out the strings. They were the strings of hope and for that which you aspire to. Moving in there, and it was not finished when we moved in because we did not have the money but we always made the best of everything and we used our ingenuity to make it a beautiful place that was ours. Everything we did, we did with our own hands and that was part of the satisfaction of it. It was something we did together.... 

Losing my home, country and community and sense of belonging has been the greatest influence on my life. No matter how successful we are, without community we will experience a deep emptiness and dislocation from the world around us.” - Barbara Langridge.

 

PLEASE NOTE: This video is 17 minutes in length. It can be shown as long as there is no commercial aspect involved. Please credit: Vic Sarin, Sepia Films, edited by Austin Andrews. Barbara Langridge assisted with content and compilation of story.

 

To download:  http://www.flickertheory.com/zim_2303_h264.mov