Think you and your family could survive in Zimbabwe? Think its not so bad? Think again.

Cathy Buckle’s News from Zimbabwe:
“This week, for the first time in many months, I actually managed to find a petrol queue in which I felt confident of reaching the front before stocks ran out. At the pumphead there was a little piece of white paper stuck next to the cost per litre indicator. On the paper was written: X 100. In other words the price I paid last time I had queued here in May 2003 had to be multiplied by 100 and on the rare occasions when petrol stations have fuel it now costs one hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars to fill a standard sixty litre tank.”

“We have become a zero society and are struggling to keep up with all the digits these days. We all look at prices and say to ourselves, “is that a hundred thousand, or a million, or a billion?” My calculator has only got a 10 digit display so once I get to 9.9 billion I’m in trouble. My mind boggled when I sat listening to our 2004 budget which was all in billions or trillions of dollars and in desperation I turned to my dictionary to see just how many zeros there are in a “trillion” dollars. I wrote it down carefully and then counted digits. A trillion has 12 zeros after it !”