Connor Donevan

On a recent Friday afternoon, 30-year-old Sidumiso Nyoni took the train from her home in rural Nyamandhlovu, Zimbabwe, to the industrial city of Bulawayo to visit family. It's a distance of only 25 miles, but she says the roads are in such bad shape that the train is the only option. The ride isn't long, but the schedule is completely unpredictable.

"The train doesn't have a specific time at which it comes," she says. Sometimes she says she'll arrive at the station for a 7 a.m. train and "it ends up spoiling the rest of your day, because the train comes in the afternoon."

On April 21, 2008, Florence Machinga lost everything. A mob of hundreds of people showed up at her house, demanded to see her — and, when she didn't materialize, burned it down.

"They destroyed everything," she says. "Cattle were slaughtered, the chickens were slaughtered."

For decades, people living in Zimbabwe have been taught that speaking their minds comes at a cost. Under former president Robert Mugabe, an authoritarian ruler who held power for more than 37 years, openly challenging the government meant risking arrest, beating or worse. There's still a law on the books that makes insulting the president a crime.
