By Farayi Mungoshi

“THINGS are so hard here, it’s not like when you were here,” chats an old friend of mine over the WhatsApp social network.
I ask her what is going on.
She tells me of a Zimbabwean man, a friend of her cousin who has been living on the streets in the UK.
I find it hard to swallow, but because I know how hard it is to accommodate someone who is unemployed in the UK, I do not ask why somebody from home (Zimbabwe) has not helped him.
“He has even contacted Home Office requesting that they send him back home, but they told him to wait till next year when his papers will be processed.”
By then he would have frozen to death I thought.
During the period I was there, the Home Office would have quickly assisted this man by booking a flight back home for him.
I got thinking.
She then asked me how it was in Zimbabwe since she has not been around for over 10 years.
I tell her the truth that things are tough, we are still trying to get back to our feet in the aftermath of the crush of the Zimbabwean dollar, but those that are focused and headstrong are making headway.
She does respond immediately, my guess is she is debating in her mind.
Apparently she is also illegal and is hesitant on coming back home with nothing to show for her many years abroad.
Her mother is late, and her father is now married to another woman so there is no home to come back to.
She even failed to attend her mother’s funeral for fear she would not be able to go back into the UK.
She also told me then that the UK Home Office will soon be rounding up illegal immigrants and sending them back home.
“Why don’t they just deport the other guy who asked to be returned home?” I asked her to which she replied that she did not know why they are refusing to consider him.
“Maybe they want him to freeze to death.”
It’s been three weeks since our conversation and the man’s eagerness to return got me thinking because I too was once faced with such a situation.
I was working part-time as a forklift driver at Nisberts in Bristol when I asked myself whether this was what I wanted in life.
I was adamant I would eventually get the job I wanted in filmmaking after college.
I didn’t want to get into nursing like everybody else, and I didn’t want to do social work despite being advised by most of my relatives.
“You can always change later once you have secured your stay and made a life for yourself, you don’t want to go back to Zimbabwe, things are hard there,” they said but I was not budging.
Although most people I know in those fields are making a living, I often wonder how many are happy.
Instead of extending my stay in the UK, I dropped out of the college and I returned home.
Nine years on, I found myself discussing the same issue with a few friends and relatives who at some point were also in the UK, but decided to return home from the UK.
I wanted to know why they returned or whether they had regrets about coming back.
The most interesting response I got was from a couple who happened to be my relatives.
The husband felt he had no option, but to return to run the family business.
Everything else was partly because of his wife.
“We shouldn’t have come back. There was no pressure like here. There are lots of prying relatives and in-laws here. I can’t even walk down First Street smoking a cigarette. Hanzi a woman shouldn’t smoke,” she scoffs and goes on to complain about not being able to pass through Copacabana dressed in a mini skirt.
One guy cuts in bragging about how tobacco has been paying him well, “I could have never done tobacco there, but now I only go there to visit and shop.”
He reveals that his mother got him a piece of land during the land reform programme.
“Besides that place is too cold for my liking,” he says.
There were lots of reasons about our decisions to come back and all I could say in the end was that despite the hardships, I was not prepared to live someone else’s life, lying to myself.
Had I gone to work in an old people’s home or become a nurse in some hospital, what would have become of my dream to write and make movies?
It’s not just in Zimbabwe where employment is an issue, even in the UK many are not living the life they wanted despite having gone to school.
Doctors are truck-drivers treated the same as the driver who did not go to school much.