Cathy Buckle's Weekly Letter From Zimbabwe !

Tin of beans!

4th November 2007
Dear Family and friends,

I am writing this letter by candlelight and with battery power and do not know how long either will last. It has been a very harrowing week with electricity cuts of 16 hours every day in my home town and apparently in many other areas of the country too. The week has culminated in a marathon where we've had just 35 minutes of electricity in the past 38 hours.

Basic survival really has been uppermost in our minds and our activities this week and there is an air of exhaustion and a feeling of exasperation in the streets. Food in fridges and freezers has gone bad; precious dairy produce is ruined; geysers have gone cold, clothes are un-ironed and nutrition has been pushed to the limits. All our ingenious recipes for home made bread, vegetables stews and bulked up soups and porridge have either gone unmade or been tainted with smoke and debris from our outside cooking fires.

There seems no limit to the hardship and struggle of life in Zimbabwe. Just as we get through one crisis another great trial is waiting to test us and see if this one will be the straw the breaks the camels back. We've survived 4 months of shops without food and there is very little improvement to report. There is still no bread, flour, rice, pasta, biscuits, beans, cereals. oil, margarine, sugar or salt. This week strangely enough there were baked beans in one local supermarket but they were 1.2 million dollars a tin - five hundred times more than the cost of a four bedroomed house on an acre of land in 2001.

The latest product to disappear from sight is toilet paper and most daily toiletries are close behind. Going into a string of pharmacies this week I struggled to find a tube of locally made and well known antiseptic cream. Eventually I found some but it had been 'repackaged' - spoonfuls had been scooped into little plastic pill bottles and each was selling for almost half a million dollars.

I guess you have to see life on the streets of Zimbabwe to really get the feel for the struggle of everything, and for the irony and simplicity of it too. In a local bank I gave up counting when I got to 78 - that was the number of people queuing to withdraw money. A few blocks away four little poppets stood on the pavement with their newly checked out library books carefully wrapped in old plastic shopping bags. They gleefully showed each other their books: Doctor Seuss, Enid Blyton, The Wind in The Willows, The Hardy Boys. A man walked past carrying two bottles of milk and a small pink plastic cup. He was selling the milk by the cupful to people passing by - health and hygiene not a factor. Further along outside a big but empty supermarket was a smart, silver, double- cab Isuzu truck. Two brand new bicycles still wrapped in plastic lay in the back of the truck. Clothes from the dry cleaner, on a coat hanger and wrapped in plastic hung inside the car. The owner appeared in a smart dark suit and people looked, looked again and then looked away. Everyone knew who he was, this man who has made himself rich and famous by wearing a grass hat and invading commercial farms - chasing farmers and their workers out of their homes and off their land. You have to wonder, if he ever wonders if his activities on those farms had anything to do with the state of the country now, or if he too blames the world, the west and sanctions.

Until next week, thanks for reading,
love cathy.