Living on Pennies

Actually, many of the civil servants don't even go to work for much of the day; instead, they wait in bank lines, which are often even longer than bread lines. Why would anyone put their money in a bank when the Zimbabwean currency depreciates as much as 20 percent a day? No choice, is why. Those in the lines at Stanbic Bank and the Intermarket Building Society in downtown Bulawayo early this week were a mix of government employees, whose salaries go right into their bank accounts, and others who are receiving remittances from the Zimbabwean diaspora (it's illegal to withdraw hard currency). These lines are even more tragic than the bread lines; depositors are only allowed by law to withdraw 25 billion Zim dollars a day--and on Tuesday the exchange rate of 11 billion to one U.S. dollar made that worth about U.S. $2.27.

Do the math: an average laborer earns Z$ 15 billion a day. Buses or minibuses to work cost at least Z$3 billion each way, and often more if you're farther from town. A kilogram of chicken or beef at the T.M. Hyper store, Bulawayo's biggest supermarket, costs Z$ 22-23 billion--if they have any, and 90 percent of the Wal-Mart-sized store's shelves are empty. On the day I visited, scores of people were queued up at the registers and every one of them had the same purchase, a Z$ 2.8 billion dollar plastic bag of nondescript tea biscuits, about three-quarters of a pound of them. No one was buying meat.

The real travails, though, start outside of town, and not even very far outside. At Killarney, just east of Bulawayo, there are squatters' villages in the thornbush countryside, dwellings thrown together from pieces of rusted metal, scraps of fenders from cars, brush, whatever they could find. Around the huts are scrabbly vegetable gardens, and patches of corn fields, most of them picked clean. At Village 6, an old man named Weba Mumba, a welder out of work for many years, was welcoming to visitors, but explained that the women were all away--they had gone to Bulawayo to pick through trashcans in the search for food. Relief aid, he said, had stopped a couple months ago--around the time Mugabe banned all non-governmental relief organizations from operating, shutting down groups like World Vision and Care, which had feeding and health programs. Further along, in front of a mud hut, grandmother Rebecca Dube was making dinner--a pair of vegetables, and some greens boiling in a pot--for three grandchildren, all orphans (their parents, like her husband, had succumbed to AIDS). They too had seen no relief aid in months, and the children were perilously thin. Priscilla, 8, played with a rag doll that she had made herself; she'd named it Joseph, and was very proud of it. To supplement their income, Mrs. Dube and the children collect thatch, which grows in small patches among the thorntrees; it takes them a day to gather a bundle, which they'll sell on the market for Z$ 100 million--which is actually less than a U.S. penny at today's exchange rate, but then perhaps the value of thatch has changed without her realizing it--hyperinflation is like that.  Sometimes there are bargains to be had.

Quite late in the day, I realized I hadn't eaten, and went out seeking food myself. It was 8 p.m. and everything was closed, with the sole exception of the Pizza Inn, a Pizza Hut knockoff in an upscale part of town, where a medium pizza was about a day and a half's average wages, Z$ 25 billion. The shop had previously had an electronic sign that posted the changing prices, but it had long since run out of digits and read only, $###,###,###. The advertised special was the Banana Surprise, a pizza with bacon and banana on cheese and tomato, but I went for something less ethnic. While I waited for it, a well-dressed young man approached me and introduced himself as an MDC member of parliament, Arnold Solulu, and straight off offered to take me to MDC activists who had been beaten up by government party thugs. He seemed to think I was a journalist but I said, "Look, I'm just a hungry tourist." Then he told me he couldn't afford the price of a pizza himself. I took his number, but not the hint, and promised to call him tomorrow, went off to my hiding place to eat my pizza (somewhat guiltily), and then checked him out. There is no MP in Zimbabwe by the name of Arnold Solulu. I suppose I won't be frequenting the Pizza Inn anytime soon, and Arnold won't be getting whatever bounty it is they pay for foreign correspondents.

© 2008