Dear Family and Friends,
These hot, humid and rainy February days are ones that will never be forgotten in the years ahead. We can still hardly even dare to hope that this unity government is going to work and trust is very thin on the ground. It still sticks in our throats that the losers of the March 2008 elections have simply refused to leave power for the last ten months and have got away it. How crazy is this! Suddenly we are seeing the very people who persecuted a population, looted the country's assets and bought starvation and disease to the land appearing on television saying: "we must be tolerant of our differences and work together."

Hello! you find yourself shouting at the TV, are we seeing people turning their coats inside out and so soon? Do they really think that a few utterances now will undo everything they have done, and been seen doing?

Each day we tiptoe forward politically by a fraction of a millimetre and yet each miniscule gain appears as a gigantic leap because we have sunk so terribly low in the last decade. We now have the 19th amendment to our constitution which will enable the formation of a unity government and allow for the winner of the March 2008 election to be sworn in as Prime Minister. We also now have the news that a Magistrate has thrown out treason charges against MDC Secretary General Tendai Biti.

In the next few days, for the first time in three decades we will have someone other than Zanu PF looking into civil service books and you can only imagine how worried some people must be. A friend said he imagined the paper shredders must be working overtime in some of those government offices. You can almost hear them now! You can almost see those little strips of paper mounting up on our roadsides alongside all the other stinking garbage. You can almost smell the smoke from bonfires of burning paper!

Meanwhile ordinary people are in wait and see mode and while we wait a last desperate orgy of pocket filling is well underway. In just two days the price of petrol, in US dollars of course, went from 65 cents to 95 cents a litre and is still going up as I write. All other prices, in US dollars, are soaring as a result.

Twelve zeroes were removed from our currency this week and we went from being trillionaires to paupers overnight. This is the third time this has happened. First it was 3 zeroes, then 10, now 12. Another worthless set of bank notes is being introduced and thanks to a friend who can get her head around all the "illions", 1 New dollar =10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 10 Septillion Old Old dollars!

I don't know how we'll ever explain any of this to our children in the years ahead, or if we'll ever even understand it ourselves.
Until next time, thanks for reading