On our travels through Zambia, we’ve met several people from Zimbabwe. One was in exile, fearing for his life as he’d been accused of ‘committing journalism’, others are here to find food which is very hard to come by in Zimbabwe. Even if supplies are available, the economy in in such a state that any currency the people have is more-or-less worthless. We’ve come across a 50 billion dollar note, and are aware that Mugabe has just started printing 100 billion dollar notes. On the day they were printed, the latter could buy two loaves of bread. At the current rate of inflation at two million percent, a few days later it will be worth a lot less. As an indicator of this, the bills have a use-by date. After this they are actually worth nothing. Currently, the time between printing the note and expiry is about 6 months. As well as the big notes, we have a 20 dollar bill printed in 2006. Such an amount is laughable now.

A few days ago we experienced the sadness of the situation in Zimbabwe for ourselves. Livingstone is very close to the Zim border, and as we were walking around the town we were apporached by Martin, an old Zimbabwean guy, wanting to talk to us, and we presumed, sell us something. He showed us his birth certificate and stamped piece of paper, a substitute for a passport — I’m sure Mugabe won’t issue passports. He’d come into Zambia for the day to try and buy food for his family of five (luckily, Zambia are tolerant of such coming and going as they sympathise with the situation in Zim). Of course, we were sceptical at first and politely turned down the hand-crafted jewellery he gently tried to sell us. But as we walked with him and talked, our heart really went out to him. He showed us a pile of 50 000 000 dollar notes which together wouldn’t even buy him a drink. Our scepticism melting, we took him to a local store where we bought him a 25kg sack of mealie meal (the staple food here) which he told us would last his family 3 months if they were careful. For the price of one meal in a restaurant here we were able to buy him and his family enough for several weeks at least.

He thanked us and said he would pray for us. He insisted that I take one of the wooden necklaces that he’d made. I put it on and he nodded happliy, ‘It looks lovely’ he said. I had to turn away as tears were welling in my eyes. Here was an old guy, I don’t know what his profession was in the past, but now to survive he had to make wooden jewellery and try to sell them to the indifferent tourists, in an attempt to buy sacks of food that he could carry on his head back to his family in another country. On his arm we noticed he’d written ‘so long life’. How can Mugabe live with himself?