How Many Zeros is that?

It looks like the only internet time I will get will be while I'm on the road. Today we are in Botswana buying supplies for the widows in the Tshelanyemba area, also stocking up on peanut butter for our project and buying hospital supplies. Francistown is a beautiful place. Botswana is a relatively stable prosperous place and compared to Zimbabwe it is booming.

I finished doing the school visits this past week, thats 35 schools in just over three weeks. That is a lot of gravel road, about 500 kms. I use the term 'road' pretty loosely here, many were just paths through the trees. I'm always amazed that people can find their way around in the bush. Our driver Reuben was amazing, he knew every short cut. The situation in all the schools is absolutely desperate. In many of the schools, there was one teacher looking after all the children, sometimes two or three hundred. Teachers would go to town and get stranded with no transportation back, many have left for South Africa and some just don't show up for work, because they don't get paid enough to live. Their wages are pretty meager, they make less than $40 US a month, just to give you some idea of the cost of thing, I bought a bunch of carrots in Bulawayo a few weeks ago and they were $2 US . Needless to say it is impossible to live on $40 a month. There are people that make a lot less than that, some of the general hands at the hospital make about $2 US a month.

Our process when going to schools... we would meet with the Headmaster when they were available (which was rare), then we would go over the school fees for this term, which was always in the billions. We had a set amount for primary schools and a different amount for secondary schools, when they were writing receipts for us, without fail,,, all would say, "Two trillion! How many zeros are there?".

When we were in Victoria Falls last week, we checked out the price of a cheese burger at the Wimpy, it was 1,300,000,000,000, thats trillions. We didn't have a burger......

The Zimbabwe Government has decided to chop ten zeros off their currency, so what was one trillion will now be 100 Zim dollars. This is to be done in the next three days, can you imagine changing your currency in less than a week. Technically they aren't changing their currency, even though they will come out with all new bills, people will have just a few days to get their old money in the bank.

Never a dull moment.