CATHY BUCKLE'S WEEKLY LETTER FROM ZIMBABWE

Ten trillion !

Saturday 24th January 2009

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Until next week, thanks for reading,

love cathy.