- Dear Family and Friends,
-
- It was with a feeling of great sadness
to watch the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games this week and
not see Zimbabwe walk in with all the other countries. All our African
neighbours were there, smiling, colourful and bursting with patriotic pride.
Even though I knew that our President had withdrawn Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth,
still I watched, expectant, hopeful but at last sad and disappointed as
we were not present at the "friendly games."
-
- What a shame it is that our rising young
sportsmen and women have to suffer this isolation. It is things exactly
like these lost opportunities which push more and more Zimbabweans into
the agonising decision to leave the country. For six years we have been
going backwards in nearly every regard and now almost a whole generation
of youngsters have gone from home. It is hard to see what Zimbabwe has
to offer that would entice them, or their parents, to come back. There
is still no place like home but right now Zimbabwe feels like somewhere
else, nothing makes sense anymore and the overwhelming feeling is one of
exhaustion.
-
- A simple shopping trip to a supermarket
has become an exhausting and depressing event. You cannot take the price
of anything for granted as almost everything seems to go up every third
or fourth day. It doesn't take long to gather up the few things you can
afford and then you wait, twenty or thirty minutes to get to the tills.
A combination of exorbitant prices and ridiculously small denomination
bank notes makes for very long delays while tellers count great handfuls
of money.
-
- As I stood behind ten people, none of
who had more than six items to pay for, it was a long twenty minutes to
get to the front of the queue. The woman in front of me had a bag of flour,
it cost four hundred thousand dollars, she was paying in ten thousand dollars
notes and that meant forty notes for her to count and then forty notes
for the teller to count.
-
- As I stood waiting for my turn I looked
at the prices of things and it is like being in cuckoo land. A 500 gram
packet of "value" bacon costs more than I paid for my entire
house just five years ago ! A single egg now costs twenty five thousand
dollars and a friend told me that he had bought his two thousand acre farm
a few years ago for the price of two eggs and half an egg shell! Familiar
international brands of things like toothpaste have disappeared and been
replaced by complete unknowns. Products once made in Zimbabwe but now imported
because companies have relocated, are ludicrously expensive. You see a
familiar product, put your hand out and then gasp in despair when you realise
that just a bottle of shampoo costs 1.2 million dollars. Five years ago
I could have bought a prime luxury car for just over a million dollars.
-
- When you finally get to the till and
your goods are rung up, there is a scam going on but you have to know about
it to benefit. If your goods have cost more than three hundred thousand
dollars you can buy a bag of sugar - its on the floor under the tellers
feet. People being supported by families outside of the country are still
coping with Zimbabwe's nightmare days but the vast majority are struggling
desperately and everyone is so overwhelmingly tired of it all.
-
-
- Until next time,
-
- with love cathy.
-
- Copyright cathy buckle 18 March 2006
- http://africantears.netfirms.com
- My books "African Tears" and
"Beyond Tears" are available from:
- orders@africabookcentre.com
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