Dear Family and Friends,

It was a rare occasion this week when the electricity happened to come back on at the same time as the main  8 pm evening news on ZBC TV. Normally at this time of the evening the power still hasn't come back on and we are grinding into the 15th or 16th hour of the day without electricity. The headline story and accompanying film clip on the local news was of President Mugabe and his wife at Harare airport preparing to depart for the EU Africa Summit in Portugal.

Dear Family and Friends,

On Friday morning in small town Zimbabwe the big ten-tonne trucks were visible soon after nine in the morning and they were filled to overflowing with weary "cheer leaders." Men, women and youths who looked dusty, wind tossed and tired and theirs was certainly not a position to be envied. It was hard to know where all these people had come from but they weren't familiar faces so they must have been collected from somewhere in the surrounding rural areas. Crammed into two open topped trucks, there were perhaps 50 people in each, sitting on the floor , squashed up against each other like livestock going to slaughter: without dignity or individuality - just faces, numbers to swell the crowd.

Dear Family and Friends,

When I saw people running down the pavement I knew that some precious basic commodity must have arrived and that this rush was the start of the queue. I stepped out of the way so as not to get knocked down and carried on walking. I was amazed to see people pushing and jostling to get a place in line to buy the State controlled daily newspaper. This sudden enthusiasm for a dose of the latest propaganda has apparently got nothing to do with the government pronouncements but is related to the chronic national shortage of toilet paper.

Dear Family and Friends,

Inflation in Zimbabwe doesn't go up by fractions, units or even hundreds anymore, instead it increases by multiple thousands of percentage points from one month to the next. The latest official figures have just been announced and in October 2007 the inflation rate was 14,840% - a staggering increase, almost doubling from eight thousand percent in September. If you sit down and try and work out a standard family budget  with basic food needs, unavoidable service bills, transport costs and essential medical needs, and then factor in almost fifteen thousand percent inflation, you will get a glimpse of our life here. In a word, its a nightmare.

Dear Family and Friends,

Tragedy came to my home area this week and I write this letter for a family represented by three generations who have worked to save an endangered species for Zimbabwe. More specifically I write this letter for D.J., Amber, and Gomo who were shot and killed one night this week.

These three Black Rhino were saved from rampant poaching that was ravaging Zimbabwe in the mid 1980's. Seven young Black Rhino calves, three males and four females were sent to Imire Game Park where they were hand reared. Standing chest high they were bottle fed on a carefully worked out milk formula from five litre plastic bottles fitted with calf teats. You have to see this to really appreciate it, the pushing and shoving, the loud schlurping noises and contented glugging, the vast streams of silver dribble and the look of contentment and pure delight in the eyes of the young animals.

Dear Family and friends,

I am writing this letter by candlelight and with battery power and do not know how long either will last. It has been a very harrowing week with electricity cuts of 16 hours every day in my home town and apparently in many other areas of the country too. The week has culminated in a marathon where we've had just 35 minutes of electricity in the past 38 hours.