Cathy Buckle's Weekly Letter From Zimbabwe !

Stumble and fall.

Saturday 17th November 2007
Dear Family and Friends,

Inflation in Zimbabwe doesn't go up by fractions, units or even hundreds anymore, instead it increases by multiple thousands of percentage points from one month to the next. The latest official figures have just been announced and in October 2007 the inflation rate was 14,840% - a staggering increase, almost doubling from eight thousand percent in September. If you sit down and try and work out a standard family budget with basic food needs, unavoidable service bills, transport costs and essential medical needs, and then factor in almost fifteen thousand percent inflation, you will get a glimpse of our life here. In a word, its a nightmare.

Every day people are being forced to juggle with priorities - what can they do without for another day, which bill can again be shuffled to the bottom of the pile and which packet of carefully saved food can be left in the cupboard for one more day. Wages need to go up by the week at the very least, by the day would be more realistic. Some employers are giving monthly increases, bonuses or allowances to their employees but many others are not - they have moved into self survival mode and find it useful to quote government regulations and do nothing as their workers struggle, stumble and fall. Now more than ever before life has been reduced to a primitive battle for existence and there is easily visible evidence of hunger, poor diet, and plain exhaustion. It is common to talk to people who are halving essential medications to make them last longer and very common to see people selling household items to raise money to get through one more month.

Those people that can are working harder, doing two jobs and trying to 'make a plan' that will get them through this. Some relief at least comes with nature and our ability to be less dependent on the rules, regulations and controls of The State The rainy season has now set in and everywhere green has replaced brown, mud has replaced dust and swarms of flies, gnats and mosquitoes have emerged. Our neighbourhoods are suddenly filled with men, women and children bent over and cultivating a few square metres of roadside. This year most people have resorted to planting seed saved from last year's crop - they know it will give greatly reduced yields but have no option. The usual piles of green and pink treated maize seed have not appeared in our shops this year and last week the shocking figures came out in a report by a Lands and Agriculture Committee. Of the fifty thousand tonnes of seed maize needed around the country this season, there is a deficit of 21 thousand tonnes - almost half. The government have proclaimed that this is to be: "The Mother Of All Seasons" - a phrase absurdly simplistic and totally unrealistic of the facts on the ground, not least of which include huge deficits of seed, fertilizer and fuel and an inflation rate of almost fifteen thousand percent. It's going to take much more than slogans and propaganda to get food growing this year. As impossible as it is to believe and to accept, it seems inevitable that still harder times lie ahead for Zimbabwe.

Until next week, thanks for reading,
love cathy.