Yesterday I mentioned Essy’s Mum and how Essy had got her an appointment with a private doctor. Well, today she saw him in Harare and the bad news is she’s been admitted to hospital. They have taken blood for testing and more explorations are to come. I’m quite worried about it but it is worse for Essy.

When I spoke to Essy yesterday evening at 22:00 UK time (midnight in Zim) to wish them all a Happy New Year she told me they were without electricity. I’ve just called again, nearly 24 hours later, and there’s still no electricity. She also mentioned tonight that they haven’t had water for over 24 hours either. They always keep pots and pans filled for these regular outages but this time they’ve used up what was saved. Thankfully it’s the rainy season and has been raining all day so they’ve been collecting rain water.

The good news is that somehow she’s managed to get her mother a private doctors appointment tomorrow in Harare. They can’t get fuel for the car so they’re going there by combi. A combi is what the Turks call a Dolmus, in Turkish dolmus means ‘stuffed’ which is a much better word for it than combi. It’s usually a Toyota Hiace which carries round 25 passengers! I got on one once and though I’ve never suffered from claustrophobia before I had to get off. I’d sooner walk 50 miles than get in a combi.

I once saw a Stagecoach liveried Mercedes Benz minibus on the Harare to Mutare road which looked like it was being used as a 49 seater :-( A grinning black Zimbabwean was at the wheel which made me think of Norman (a Zimbabwean Winchester driver) and wonder how he’d got so far off route running a number 2 to Olivers Battery :-)

Essy, my missus, flew home to Zimbabwe for 2 weeks on Thursday evening landing in Harare on Friday morning. I’ve spoken to her a couple of times on the ‘phone and she’s telling me that things are even worse there than she expected. In order to get the fuel to drive to the airport to collect Essy her brother had to spend the entire night in a queue at the filling station! Neither she, nor any of the family, have any cash ……. not one cent :-( Everyday her family start queing at the bank at 05:00 to try and get some cash, if they’re lucky they can get Zim$ 5 million but on Saturday they weren’t able to get even that. There is plenty (relatively) of money in their bank account it’s just that the bank don’t have the physical currency to hand out.

In the UK if we pay a money transfer agent in US$ they exchange it at 3 million Zim$ to 1 US$ and transfer the money to the recipient’s bank account – but what’s the point if it can’t then be withdrawn in cash? Essy took US$ dollar notes with her hoping to exchange then for Zim$ cash there – the best offer she got was 140,000 Zim$ per 1 US$ in cash, instead of the 3 million offered for transfer to a bank account. At that exchange rate it must be the most expensive place on earth. The place has gone stark raving mad!!!

Debit cards, as we know and use them, don’t exist in Zimbabwe, nor do cheques. What they call a cheque would be a Banker’s Draft, you go to the bank and join the general queue and then ask them to make out the cheque to a named party for a named amount, this money is guaranteed as it would be with a UK Banker’s Draft. It’s an OK method for paying sums of money which are known in advance like school fees etc. but useless for day to day shopping. Essy says the shops are totally bare, the day is spent moving form one to another to see if something has arrived. Her sister had great success yesterday and actually managed to get 1 loaf of bread.

Essy’s baggage allowance was 30 kg in the hold plus 8 kg hand luggage. She took two pairs of trousers and some tops (it’s summer there) so that she could take as many things as possible for the family. I think she had 5 kgs of corned beef in her case plus lots of other food items and some clothes for the family.

Before she went her mother had not been well but said that she was better, when Essy arrived she found that her Mum was still not well. She wants to take her to a private Doctor because there are no drugs and diagnostics available to medical aid claimants. The private Doctors want cash only because they too can’t get it from the banks and so the vicious circle goes round :-(

I saw Nik of the www.twistedkites.co.uk blog in London today and he referred to the hyper inflation in Zimbabwe. So here is a picture for Nik – one bottle of beer and the four stacks of 500 Zim$ notes required to buy the one bottle! The beer cost 1 million Zim$ (about 17 pence) each stack of 500 Zim$ dollar notes is a quarter of a million dollars! However, all this was last week so you’d probably need a fifth stack of notes if you wanted the same beer today.

One bottle of beer is not normally enough for me and I suspect the effort of carrying enough money around to buy a few bottles would make me more thirsty. However, unless I saved up I couldn’t buy more than 5 bottles a day because 5 million Zim$ is the limit the banks put on cash withdrawls per day – they are printing the money like there’s no tomorrow (there probably wont be!) but can’t print it fast enough so there is a shortage of banknotes. Forget debit/credit cards, to all intents and purposes, they don’t exist in any meaningful way.

Saturday 8th December 2007

Dear Family and Friends,
It was a rare occasion this week when the electricity happened to come back on at the same time as the main 8 pm evening news on ZBC TV. Normally at this time of the evening the power still hasn’t come back on and we are grinding into the 15th or 16th hour of the day without electricity. The headline story and accompanying film clip on the local news was of President Mugabe and his wife at Harare airport preparing to depart for the EU Africa Summit in Portugal. Ministers, security personnel and VIP’s were lined up on the tarmac and formed a corridor of smiles and hand shakes and inaudible little comments.

In the same week as our leader and his wife and the official delegation were heading for Europe, Air Zimbabwe announced that one return air fare from Harare to London had increased to 804 million Zimbabwe dollars. To put that price into context is the recently publicised information by the Teachers Union saying that government school teachers presently earn an average salary of just 17 million Zimbabwe dollars a month.

The same week that our President flew to Lisbon, a couple of South African visitors invited me to tea at a local restaurant. I queued at my local bank but was again limited to how much of my own money I could withdraw and was allowed to take just five million dollars. Immediately I spent three million dollars buying one light bulb and one jar of peanut butter and so with just two million dollars left, I hoped I wasn’t paying for tea. At the restaurant three cups of tea, one waffle and one toasted sandwich were ordered. The bill came to 7.2 million dollars.

Back in Portugal President Mugabe and his wife didn’t have any waiting around when they landed. They were ringed by security men and hurried out of sight to their hotel. Meanwhile at home in Zimbabwe at least three hundred people stood patiently in a winding line to buy milk from a bulk tanker. Outside the banks the queues went into multiple hundreds and outside a virtually empty supermarket an enormous crowd, uncountable in size, pushed and jostled for a chance to buy a bag of maize meal. The day before a similar desperate queue had resulted in riot police, baton sticks to control the crowd and injuries.

This week as our President and his wife dine with 80 other world leaders in Portugal there are still no staple foods to buy in Zimbabwe’s shops. Our schools have just broken up for the Christmas holidays and the search for food and lines to withdraw pathetically small amounts of our own money from the banks are getting longer and more desperate by the day. Roadside vendors are selling pockets of potatoes for 11 million dollars; if you can afford them, it means a gruelling three days of queuing at the bank just to put potatoes on the dinner plate. If you are a government school teacher, they will cost three quarters of your entire monthly salary.

To put these figures into perspective, or perhaps not, this week the Minister of Finance presented a 7,8 quadrillion dollar budget for the coming year. None of us have worked out how many zeroes this is yet and calculators can’t help either.

Zimbabweans are facing an extremely hard Christmas this year but as always we look for hope. Many events are drawing closer and all hold the opportunity to bring relief to a battered and beaten country. The summit in Portugal will be followed soon after by the Zanu PF Annual Congress, then the result of talks in South Africa, then the MDC Annual Congress and then, in March next year, Parliamentary and Presidential elections.

I will be taking a short break to draw strength and calculate the quadrillions but wish all Zimbabweans, friends and supporters of the country a peaceful and Happy Christmas. I saw the first crimson Flame Lily of the season in the grass on the roadside this week and it heralds the end of another year and the start of what must surely be a better time for us all.
Until my next letter in the New Year, with love, cathy.

Dear Family and Friends,
On Friday morning in small town Zimbabwe the big ten-tonne trucks were visible soon after nine in the morning and they were filled to overflowing with weary “cheer leaders.” Men, women and youths who looked dusty, wind tossed and tired and theirs was certainly not a position to be envied. It was hard to know where all these people had come from but they weren’t familiar faces so they must have been collected from somewhere in the surrounding rural areas. Crammed into two open topped trucks, there were perhaps 50 people in each, sitting on the floor , squashed up against each other like livestock going to slaughter: without dignity or individuality – just faces, numbers to swell the crowd.

It only took a few seconds to work out what was going on when the vehicles turned into the local ruling party offices in the town. The trucks were from a well known parastatal and had the Zimbabwe flag wrapped around and tied onto bumpers and roll bars. These vehicles aren’t buses and undoubtedly don’t have permits to transport people but they have become very familiar to us in the past eight years, disgorging great crowds of people at ruling party rallies and meetings. When the worst of the farm invasions were going on, the big white vehicles with the red and blue stripes on the doors bought fear, dread and a feeling of finality to farmers and their workers. They trucks came carrying masses of people who would swarm over fields, camp outside gates, barricade roads and sing, drum and shout, throwing stones at walls, windows and roofs until the
occupants were beaten into submission and left.

Some of the people in the trucks on this last day of November 2007 were wearing clothes and head scarves adorned with the President’s face and that gave the game away. They were here on a brief stop over but were on their way to Harare for what had been advertised as the “Million Man March” – a show of support of President Mugabe’s candidature in the 2008 elections.

As I passed the loaded trucks, for a brief moment I tried to catch someone’s eye to see if I could spot political fervour, a dedicated zealot, even a believer in the cause but it wasn’t there. I saw weary images, lean faces, pronounced cheek bones – tired people, the same as the rest of us. Like everyone else they are also surviving with the bare minimum of food and money; their children are malnourished and many are no longer in school ; their hospitals and clinics have few staff and even fewer drugs and they are scratching out a living in hard, primitive conditions. So why then, after seven years of chronic decline would anyone willingly support a party which cannot even ensure basic food in the shops. Undoubtedly those big trucks would be empty if the ruling party had not taken such pains to ensure that as we went into the next election they had complete control over the supply, price and availability of food, seed, fertilizer, fuel, water, electricity and now even of bank notes. Until next week, thanks for reading, love cathy.