Continuing our short, impromptu series focused around the Zimbabwean elections I thought it might be timely to consider our own financial blessings, as a nation. While this clearly flies in the face of an economic downturn the blessings we experience are no less dramatic.
We are fickle creatures relying on a pretty finely tuned environment before we are satisfied. A few pounds more and we’d be content, a few less and misery closes in. I don’t want to belittle the genuine economic challenges many are facing but I do want to give some perspective to the overwhelming doom and gloom being peddled my the media.
In view of more thankful perspective
UK inflation - 2.5% (an item costing £1 today will cost approximately £1.3p in a year)
Zimbabwean inflation - 150,000% (Z$1 today Z$150,000 in a year)
Practically this means a number of things, when you are paid in Zimbabwe (if you are amongst the 1 in 5 that have a job) you need to spend your wages on that day or it becomes worthless. Items could cost 400 times more from one day to the next.
In order to buy anything Zimbabweans have to carry bags of cash - it’s not uncommon for people to have bundles of hundreds of millions of dollars packed into rucksacks when trying to buy the most simple commodities.
Friends of ours are eating rice, brought over the border from South Africa added to any vegetables they have managed to grow in their garden. They also, in what may be considered an irony, have to drinking the water from their swimming pool. The telephones have stopped working and there hasn’t been electricity for months. Occasionally a mobile phone will function, occasionally!!
For many life is comprised of rushing after the rumor of food, toilet paper or the vain hope of some other previously plentiful commodity.
Our taps work, we can buy bread for a few pence in a grotesquely overstocked supermarket and my mobile phone never stops ringing.
Even those in our society with ‘nothing’ have access to a world-class social services system that would render them multi-billionaires in Zimbabwe.
So while we batten down the hatches and seek to weather the economic storm please pray for our brothers and sisters who are having poverty redefined for them on a daily basis.
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