All because of last night's lottery...

Woke too early and sat, my futon couch propped at one end, chaise lounge style, bolstered with pillows, staring out the window. For hours. At noon I meditated, clearing my mind, and lay flat and came to around 2pm, forced myself up and into a shower. I just accidentally broke a 4-cup Pyrex measurer, hundreds of pieces of thick glass on the tile floor, it seems to be almost a safety glass, which was when I realized I was having a bad day.

It's all because of last night's lottery. It was a 22 million jackpot. I was out shopping on one of my 3 hour walks, my grocery cart heavy, when I gave in and stopped at a small convenience store and bought a ticket. I scratched the numbers without reading glasses so I couldn't see what I was doing. On the radio in the store was a play about a woman being informed by the police that her husband died of a heart attack, and I heard the actress gasp, and start talking about how he always took his pills.

From the moment of the purchase of the ticket, my mind went on one of its jaunts. That's a lot of money. What would I do with it? It's well beyond my need for a house or some stable income. Okay, I'd buy a house, set up some funds for myself and my kids, give some to family and a couple of hard up artists, and then what. What charity would I give to? Or would I set up my own charity? Knowing me, it'd be the latter. And what?

The children of Zimbabwe. I'd set up a charity to feed the children of Zimbabwe.

That decided, I began planning it. Picking up the cheque at Lottery Canada, dealing with the publicity, which would be most difficult. We'd have to move that day. Hide. Go undercover. I might have to close all my websites. We'd be looking for a house; we'd take a vacation (I haven't had one of those since 1989, not an official one with no cooking or cleaning, meaning I'm not counting my cottage when I still had one). Then the work would begin, interviewing investment firms, seeking out the best, most honest lawyer and accountant, researching the setting up of a charitable foundation, talking to many people, including government, and then picking an investment route, incorporating a name, setting up an office perhaps in my new house. Meanwhile, contacts with any organizations who attempt to bring aid to Zimbabwe would be ongoing as I learnt all I could about going below the radar of sanctions to deliver aid to those who most need it.

Since the country is bankrupt, corruption would be high on my list of problems to deal with. Corruption, and distribution - it's become a police state. Feeding the children means feeding their families. Feeding the children means making lifesaving drugs available with trained medical personnel. Feeding the children means bringing in teachers to teach school, and farming methods, and other sustenance-producing ventures. Instead of tobacco farming, which was Zimbabwe's mainstay before Mugabe kicked out the largely white farmers, I'd encourage perhaps cotton and hemp farming and the production of textiles - the traditional patterns of the fabrics amazing enough surely to sustain an economy, but they could be major producers of fabric for the fashions of the Western world; why not? A much healthier alternative to tobacco, which will cause an estimated billion deaths worldwide by 2050.

But I'd have to deal with a paranoid, arrogant and utterly corrupt man, probably at his multimillion dollar retirement hotel outside of Harare, a man who was originally Marxist, who was probably brilliant, and who has sent his country into ruin: Mugabe. I've been imagining myself talking to him, how the relationship would be. How I'd tell him I didn't give a damn about the politics of the situation, or sanctions, or the European Union, or the United Nations, that there's a crisis and the children are going hungry. That he must let me in to feed the children, and their families, and bring in teachers, and create a new African economy that is self-sustaining. And then I start designing the bulletproof vest that I'd have to wear at all times; even as I ask for assurances of safety, I know that every time I leave for a trip 'back home' - I was born in Zimbabwe, even if my family left when I was two, it doesn't matter, some things run very deep - my own children might not see me again. And of course, I was thinking about publicity, projections on how I'd deal with that. And how I'd have to find someone to run this charity who was not only a good person with their heart in the right place, lots of experience in international charity organizations, but who would have extraordinary mediation skills, something I lack.

Perhaps I should rip up the lottery ticket for its senseless and false dreams of hope without checking the numbers. Every time I buy a ticket, I feel like the matchstick girl in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. For the day or so before the draw, I get to see a world a little better, in a different light, but then the flame goes out.


tags: Zimbabwe, charitable organizations, Feed the Children, lottery, having a bad day, Hans Christian Anderson's Matchstick Girl.