The 811 billion dollar school uniform
Updated on 21 July 2008
Buying a school uniform skirt is no simple matter in a country where inflation is sky-high, as our Zimbabwe blogger "Helen" discovers.
Every day for nine days I queued with hundreds of others at my local bank in order to withdraw the maximum daily limit of one hundred billion dollars.
I had promised an unemployed friend that I would buy her teenage daughter a new uniform skirt for school so that the other kids would stop teasing her about the tattered and painfully short one she was wearing.
Where once there had been six school outfitters in our town, the ravages of economic collapse have left us with only one shop where you can buy uniforms.
Without any competition the prices are very high but its a case of take it or leave it. The shop assistant told me the skirt was six hundred billion dollars but the price was going up every day.
She said she wouldn't take a cheque (no one will anymore) and that I should keep checking on price changes.
On the black market, or parallel market as it's called here, a hundred billion dollars is worth the equivalent of just twenty British pence and yet this is the maximum amount we're allowed to draw out every day.
After six working days when I'd drawn out the maximum allowable six hundred billion dollars, the price of the skirt had gone up to seven hundred and fifty billion dollars.
By the seventh day, the price of the skirt had gone up to 800 billion dollars and my patience was wearing transparently thin.
By the ninth day I had drawn out 900 billion dollars and at last I gained the upper hand because on that one day the price rises had faltered. The skirt cost 811 billion dollars and I finally had enough cash in my hand.
Who would have thought that something so simple as buying a plain, bottle green skirt would be such a nightmare? It seems so absurd that children are still required to wear school uniforms in a country where inflation is officially stated at two million, two hundred thousand percent.
When I gave my friend the precious parcel with a single bottle green school skirt, her eyes filled with tears of gratitude. Her daughter also needs a pale blue blouse, a pair of white socks and a pair of black shoes but for now the crisis is over and the taunting by classmates will stop.
I didn't tell my friend that while she is frantically struggling to keep food in her daughter's mouth and clothes on her back, an epidemic of teenage stabbings is occupying the news in the UK.
I didn't know how to explain why teenagers would be stabbing each other when there are no elections, no political struggles and no economic collapse.
