Dear Family and Friends, This month’s municipal accounts are the first printed bills we’ve had from the local council for eight months. The accounts were hand delivered, door to door, post box to post box in residential suburbs. This, believe it or not, is cause for comment!

When a neighbour told me to look in my post box, I laughed and said that was a waste of time because nothing has gone into my home post box for nearly a year. The Post Office don’t deliver any letters anymore – who knows why. The bank’s have long since given up sending out statements to their customers and other street delivered items like electricity, telephone and municipal accounts have fallen by the wayside in Zimbabwe’s collapse. It’s been so long since anything’s gone into my post box that I had to use a stick to clear a way through the spiders webs and had to manoeuvre my hand carefully underneath a hanging hornets’ nest. There, lying in the dust and rust was my municipal bill. A couple of hornets flew out and the nest shivered in warning and alarm as I carefully lifted out the piece of paper. No envelope, not stapled closed, not even folded discreetly, the municipal bill may as well as have stayed where it was for the information it contained.

“All charges are in US Dollars and you are expected to pay on time to avoid inconveniences,” it said. The bill itemized municipal charges and included a Fire Levy. This was cause for much heated conversation in the street. “A Fire Levy,” people said, “for what?”. The last time a house burned down in our neighbourhood the fire engine didn’t come, apparently because it was picking up sick people.
Another item on the bill causing rage is that of Public Street Lighting. For three years the street lights in our neighbourhood haven’t worked so you can cross that charge off, everyone is saying. Then there’s the one that makes us all furious: Refuse Removal. It’s been over a year since our garbage has been collected. We burn what we can, because we have no choice, we bury what we can and we accumulate what’s left. Piles of trash lie under trees, on roadsides and dumped on any vacant piece of land.

Water charges on the municipal account are cause for disgust and contempt by residents. As I write this letter we are going into our fourth day without water – not a drop anywhere in the whole town and none are spared, not schools, hospitals, old age homes, industry or residences. The absence of water for days at a time is just one of our nightmares and does not address the issue of raw sewage flowing into the dam our water is being drawn from. Not to mention the levy for the pipeline from the new dam that we’ve been paying for years and yet not a drop does it deliver, in fact the pipe is not yet even laid in the trench dug for it.

Needless to say, no one is paying the ludicrous amounts being charged by the municipality. Charges so high that they amount to three quarters of a civil servants entire monthly wage. Everyone is paying something but only a small token. We have been paying in US dollars for electricity, telephones and municipal services for three months and now its time to receive service.

The new sentiment sweeping over Zimbabwe, at all levels, is: You deliver, we pay. You fix, we pay. You maintain, we pay. Until next time, thanks for reading, love cathy

In 2008 Mike Campbell, 74 years old – one of the few remaining white farmers to have so far held-out against Mugabe�s brutal land seizure programme – took the unprecedented step of challenging President Mugabe before the SADC (South African Development Community) international court – to defend his property and to charge Mugabe and his government with racial discrimination and of violations of Human Rights. This film, much of it shot covertly, documents the astonishing bravery and dignity of a white African family who risked everything they have and everything they are in defence of what is right. (From the film�s website.)

The film is due for release in the Summer, in the meantime here’s a trailer.

That’s the latest official Zimbabwean dollar inflation rate. 231 million % isn’t a number I can make sense of or begin to understand, mathematically, but it can be visualised in seeing the misery and starvation throughout the Country.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has revised up the number of people it says need food aid. It now says seven million Zimbabweans are in need of food aid, up from 5.1 million in June. Put into perspective this is eight out of every ten Zimbabweans who need food aid! I’ve taken the current population as less than 9 million from a recent article by Eddie Cross (click on the 24 Jan 2009 article) who is the MP for Bullawayo South. Eddie’s site is well worth reading.

I’m writing this because of the news yesterday, on the BBC, that Zimbabwe abandons its currency. If you watch the video embeded in the article please don’t be misled by how the supermarket in which it’s filmed appears – the shelves are full and everything is normal. That’s not reality for Zimbabweans who haven’t got access to foreign currency.

How do people get access to foreign currency? Salaries are still paid in Zimbabwe dollars and buying foreign currency with your earned Zim dollars wont work – a teacher’s monthly salary would buy 1 US$ at the current exchange rate (with 231m% inflation it probably fell as I typed those words). The US$ prices in the supermarket are about the same as the US$ dollar price would be in a supermarket in Florida, Ohio etc. So you see how useless 1 US$ dollar a month is.

The foreign currency comes from those who have abandoned Zimbabwe in an attempt to live ‘normally’ and are sending money home to relatives. As a generalisation this leaves a large percentage of the population without much possibility of having someone outside Zimbabwe support them – the 25 to 40 year olds who probably have young children. They don’t have children old enough to have left Zimbabwe and be sending money home and their parents (possibly, but unlikely to still be alive) too old to have left Zimbabwe. They may have brother or sisters outside Zimbabwe but there’s only so much money someone living abroad has after paying for their own needs.

Dear Family and Friends,
The ticking of�Zimbabwe’s time bomb�is getting louder and faster by the day. Power sharing talks have again collapsed;�cholera is�spreading and the death toll rising; teachers, nurses and doctors are demanding payment in US dollars in order to report for duty�and the poverty of most families is growing worse by the day.
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There is now�nothing you can buy in Zimbabwe dollars as even roadside vegetable vendors have resorted to selling their wares in US dollars or South African Rand. A handful of tomatoes, a�bunch of onions,�half a� dozen bananas or even a�single, sweet, sticky�mango� – all are�priced in American dollars.�If you don’t have foreign currency you go hungry, it’s�as simple as that. You also go sick,�can’t get a bed in a private hospital,�can’t have a baby, can’t get on a bus, can’t get a passport, can’t�even buy a packet of headache pills.
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The only thing you can do with Zimbabwe dollars,��if you can�get them out of the bank, is�pay your telephone, water, and electricity bills. The authorities running�Zimbabwe continue to refuse to allow the utilities�companies to charge in US dollars and so the services they�provide have deteriorated to the point of almost complete collapse. Stick thin employees at parastatals wearing threadbare suits continue to report for work�while everything around them falls apart. They have no stationery to invoice customers, no receipt books, no ink for computers.�They�have no answers to the increasingly angry�queries�from their customers such as why have�dustbins�not been collected for eight months; when are blocked sewer pipes going to be cleared, when are cavernous pot holes on the roads going to be filled. These civil servants have little�reason to go to work anymore and it seems only a matter of time before they�just don’t bother anymore.���
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For people without foreign currency life has become a living hell. A government teacher I met showed me her December pay slip. Her monthly salary was 10 trillion dollars. The exchange rate on the day� meant that in a month she had earned just one US dollar. I asked her if she would be returning to the classroom when schools re-open and she said no. She said the bus fare to get to her school on the first day alone would cost her�one US dollar, and then how would she get home, what would she have to eat, how would she get to school the next day.�
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Zimbabweans are looking to SADC and the African Union in the days ahead. Surely soon they will have to say: enough suffering, enough death, enough?

Last week Zimbabwe’s central bank began circulating Z$10, Z$20 and Z$50 billion notes – but they are no longer sufficient. They are now going to print 100 Trillion Zim$ bank notes, equal to about �20 today but devalueing fast. Inflation is currently said to be 231,000,000% but many believe it to be greater than this! In a couple of weeks time I expect to read that 100 Billion Trillion Zim$ notes are to introduced.

Zim$ bank notes have a picture of balancing rocks on them; balancing rocks are a feature of the Zimbabwean landscape. Here are a couple of pictures of balancing rocks I took in Zimbabwe. The first picture bears a striking similarity to the rocks on the bank note.

This is Cathy Buckle’s letter of last weekend. In it she writes “From all over the country there are first hand reports of people barely surviving by eating roots, wild berries, beetles and insects”. Sadly, I can confirm this. Essy’s Mum has had to resort to pounding her planting seeds in a pestle and mortar to try and make whatever porridge she could of it. I wrote on Monday about the problems of trying to get US$ to her. Well, I managed it by paying someone in Harare to deliver them to her directly. It was expensive but at least she’ll eat.

Dear Family and Friends,
Within half a kilometre of a main army barracks and in view of a steady stream of traffic and hundreds of people, a man lay next to a main road leading to the Harare airport this week. Barefoot, painfully thin and with thick, unkempt hair the man lay unmoving on the verge, his feet protruding into the busy road. Standing on the opposite side of the road four men in army camouflage stood hitch- hiking, choosing not to see the man lying a few steps away from them. Is this what Zimbabwean authorities did not want the former UN Secretary General and former US President to see on a planned 2 day humanitarian assessment visit? Is this why these two respected Elders were denied visas to enter Zimbabwe?

Outside banks, building societies and post offices the crowds of people trying to withdraw their own money have grown to multiple thousands. Many people have resorted to sleeping outside the banks in order to be near the front of the queues where they can only withdraw five hundred thousand dollars a day – enough to buy one mouthful of a single cornish pasty being sold at a local bakery this week. Two and a half million dollars was the price tag for this simple take away snack – five days of queuing at the bank to buy one meal for one person. Is this what the authorities in Zimbabwe did not want Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter to see? Is this why they were denied visas to enter Zimbabwe?

On a seventy kilometre stretch of road through what used to be prime agricultural land on the way to the capital city, there is silence and desolation as roadside farms lie unploughed and unplanted while the country remains barren of seed and fertilizer. Even as the rains fall on the land and the ground turns springy underfoot, the weeds are sprouting but not the food. The lushest crop I saw in 70 kilometres was grass being carefully manicured on a golf course. Is this what the authorities did not want Mr Annan and Mr Carter to see and why they were denied visas?

In supermarkets, the majority of which are not allowed to trade in US dollars, the shelves are empty. There are no staple goods, no dairy products, no confectionary, no fast foods, no tinned or bottled products, nothing to eat at all. From all over the country there are first hand reports of people barely surviving by eating roots, wild berries, beetles and insects. Is this what the world’s respected Elders were not supposed to see and why they were denied visas to come into Zimbabwe?

Hospitals without disposable gloves, medicines, drips, bandages or disinfectant. Nurses who cannot afford to come to work. Toilets and taps without water. A growing cholera outbreak in all areas of the country with 300 people already dead. Raw sewage flowing in the streets of high density areas. Dustbins which have not been collected in urban residential suburbs since July in my home town. Men, women and children collecting water in bowls and buckets from swampy streams and murky pools. No soap to buy in the shops so no chance of preventing the spread of cholera by washing your hands with soap and water. Is this what Mr Annan, Mr Carter and Mrs Machel might have seen had they been granted visas to see for themselves the humanitarian catastrophe now engulfing Zimbabwe?

We hope that the Elders will not give up on Zimbabwe, even though there is no welcome mat at our doorstep.
Until next time, thanks for reading, love cathy