Mental Arithmetic is not dead

So I went to buy my lunch today and the change came to some odd amount of cents.
"Bother", I thought, "A credit note".

Let me explain.
For the past few years, Zimbabwe has been a "multicurrency economy". What this means is that you can officially use US$, sterling, South Africa rand, Botswana Pula, Euro or even Zim$.  Officially.  In practice, in Harare, you use US$.
But we have notes only, not coins.  What coins are in circulation are rand or occasionally pula.
So if I hand over US$5 for a $4.32 burger and chips, the normal 68c change is not going to happen.  The normal is that the store will issue a credit note for 68c and the next time I am in that particular store (and remember), I cash it in.

Not this time.

I was handed, without so much as a pause, R2.05 and one pula.
Mental arithmetic is not dead!  Who in a normal world can calculate that USc 68 = R2.05 + P1 and calculate it in less time than that?

I might spend my days working in the Payment Industry and helping people do clever things with electronic money.  This helps the coin dilemma.
But it comes no where near close to the cleverness of the Mental Arithmetic at the shop.

2009 - the coming of the Green Back. Officially

2009 - the coming of the Green Back.  Officially

Noone would have dreamed, in the last days of 2008 that the coming year would shape up so very differently.  Few men would have believed that in the silent realms of hyperinflationary economics, minds immeasurable different to ours were watching us.  And slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.

(With apologies to H G Wells' remarkable "War of the Worlds")

But early in the year, Zimbabwe suddenly staggered from a dollarised black-market into a legalised multi-currency environment which turned out to be predominantly USD in Harare and the north of the country, and ZAR in Bulawayo and regions closer to the Rand monetary area.

Suddenly, the few Zimbabweans with jobs and money became relatively rich and were briefly able to buy, buy, buy to their hearts' content.

But slowly, although the shops in the more affluent areas continue to be well stocked (certainly relative to the preceeding years of run-away zillions of Zim dollars), the available pool of green-backs has been sopped up.
It will be a hard Christmas again.  But, as various commentators have pointed, this is what Zimbabweans can cope with.  If we learned nothing else in the last few years, you now know how little we need to survive.

Inflation
Central Statistical Office says that, for the month of April 2003, Zimbabwe's inflation rate hit a new level.
269%.
We are into an arena of unimaginables. How does one plan for anything?
I remember growing up hearing of folk in (then) Israel going straight from the pay office to the shops to buy anything and everything. Making sure that all the pay was spent imeadiately. Stockpiling whatever they could find - from jam to Jaguars. Anything to get the capital as goods rather than cash.
It was a joke.
We pitied them in a distant, far off way.

Now I buy a month's supply of bread at a throw, and that twice a week.
It freezes, and it's going up.
It's no longer "them" - it's "us".

And ZCTU says that we need to stock up on food because the next strike will be the big one.
What food?
OK, I'm at the top of the food chain, but what proportion of the population feel in a position to stock up on anything?
What proportion can find the necesaries to stock up on?

Where will it end?

And still we know it is not as bad as it might have been. Do you remember that "one hit wonder" STEP team band "Voyce" who came through Zimbabwe in the late '80s? They had a song which included the words

If the Lord had not been on our side
We would have been the ones who died
That's easy to say. Many are dying anyway. It almost feels as if God has abandoned us. I don't believe He has. It's not His style!
It would be so much worse if He had.