Fr. David Barry reports that since Morgan Tsvangirai joined the Government, many schools have reopened, teachers are paid (a little) but there has been little movement on human rights.  Just enough progress to make people believe there is some hope, but painfully slow progress.  He recently reviewed the parish accounts, which set out the conversion rate for the Zimbabwe dollar.  At the time of independence in 1980, US$1 = ZW$1. On 16-11-08, US$1 cost ZW$800,000. The US$ was 100 million on 14-12-08, 3 billion on 28-12-08, 1.2 trillion on 18-01-09 and 6 trillion on 28-02-09!  He talks about daily life:

 ”One day recently at 7.00 on a fresh May morning I met two men already sweating – one stripped to the waist, pushing a wheelbarrow and a hand cart both filled with firewood for sale at the local cement factory. They had already walked 14 km from the forests. After greeting them he asked about what they were doing. “We sell this firewood. What else can we do? There is hunger. We have to live.”  On 1 May there was a report that the International Monetary Fund estimates it will cost US$45 billion just to get Zimbabwe to where it was in 1995. We have lived through 14 years of deterioration and ruin of the economy and it has reduced people to pushing wheel barrows loaded with logs 14kms in the middle of the night just to stay alive.”      Return to J&P Group