{"id":250,"date":"2008-11-24T20:22:16","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T19:22:16","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-08-14T16:23:56","modified_gmt":"2009-08-14T15:23:56","slug":"things-are-very-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/?p=250","title":{"rendered":"Things are very bad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We are begining to despair about how best to help Essy&#8217;s Mum and sister in Zimbabwe.  Absolutely NOTHING is available in the shops and they are literally starving to death eating only a few vegetables a day.  Previously we have been able to transfer money to them via Western Union with the specification that the proceeds are paid out in US$, until now this has worked and they have been able to exchange the US$ on the blackmarket or to buy goods in the single shop in their provincial town which has goods for sales in US$ only.  Today we sent money and the local Western Union says they now can&#8217;t payout in US$ &#8211; &#8220;you must go to Westertn Union in Harare for US$&#8221;.  Although Harare is 50 miles away that doesn&#8217;t sound insurmoutable until you realise that the bus fare (for a lethally overcrowded minibus) costs Zim$ 2 million and that the banks wont pay out more cash than Zim$ 500,000 per day.  In other words it means four days queing at the bank in order to accumulate enough for a 50 mile bus trip, and of course during this time there is no money available for even a grain of rice!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We are begining to despair about how best to help Essy&#8217;s Mum and sister in Zimbabwe. Absolutely NOTHING is available in the shops and they are literally starving to death eating only a few vegetables a day. Previously we have been able to transfer money to them via Western Union with the specification that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}