It is very early morning and we set out for the district of Gulati. Broad paved road has soon changed into dusty path full of holes. The city of Bulawayo with busy boulevards, our home for next a few days, has been substituted by rocky landscape, full of yellow, orange and red boulders. Sun has fired a metal roof of our car. „It is quite a hot for January,“ uttered Willard, our guide and director of local ACET branch. He and his staff make sure, that money from donors is used exactly for what it has been sent for.

We reached Gulati after a few hours of driving. First of all we are invited to come over to local clinic and registered to the local police station. We have been warned: No photographs!

Willard’s wife works as a physician in the clinic. She shows us around and talks about the situation of HIV/AIDS in her country. It is estimated, that a quarter of adult population in Zimbabwe is infected by HIV. 5 per cent of pregnant women, who comes to regular antenatal tests to this clinic, are registered as HIV positive.

After this visit, Frantisek and Roman has been introduced to staff members of local team. They have many questions about Czech Republic, about ACET work at schools, about Czech students. We learnt how to say „hello“ in their devele dialect („salivonami“) and teach our new friends, how people greet each other in the Czech Republic. If we were shocked to find out, that every fourth Zimbabwean adult is HIV positive, they were shocked when we told them, that divorce rate in our home land is about 50 percent (e.g. every second marriage is divorced).

Then we go to meet local orphans. First of all – we meet just one little girl, a seven-year old Pretty. She lives with her cousin and auntie in the mud cabin nearby and they are the only inhabitans of this settlement. Pretty’s parents died of AIDS. When we wanted to get into their home, auntie tried to talk of out it. She was ashamed. But finally she let us in. In the circular room there is a bed and on the wall are hung ordinary things for daily use. In front of the cabin there is a fire with little hand made chair and next to it another circular  shelter – a kitchen. Closest neighbours are a few kilometres from here.

Pretty walks to school every day three miles. Same distance back. Six miles five or six times a week, dressed in the uniform, with school bag on her back, in the heat or when tropical rain pours down. She perhaps thinks on her everyday journey about fairy tales heroes, that her teacher had narrated about in the lessons of reading, and thus overcomes tiredness, pain or fear. She told us, that she loves fairy tales and legends. As she walks, she looks forward to catch up with her school mates again and she got learnt something new. And perhaps she dreams of becoming a teacher, when she grows up, and she wil also use fairy tale stories to teach little kids to read in the same way, as she learns it at present time.

Greetings from Frantisek and Roman (Bulawayo, Zimbabwe), and Jirka (Plzen, Czech Republic)