Dear Family and Friends,

In the main supermarket in my home town this weekend there were too many empty shelves to count. In the fortnight since Mr Mugabe was sworn in as President for his sixth term, everyday life has gone from struggle to complete crisis. No one is coping now and in the last two weeks virtually all foodstuffs, toiletries and household goods have completely disappeared from stores. On what should have been a busy weekend morning in our once thriving town, the car park was virtually empty and the only things to buy in the cavernous supermarket were cabbages, butternut squash, lemons, fizzy drinks and a few packets of meat.

Dear Family and Friends,

It is now clear that the will of the Zimbabwean people as expressed in the March 29th elections has been ignored and, as a result we find ourselves in the deepest crisis. Hundreds of people: men, women and children have started arriving at foreign embassies in Harare, begging for temporary refuge and humanitarian assistance. First it was the South African embassy, then the American embassy: crowds of people who are cold, tired, homeless, hungry and frightened and who have nowhere else to go and no one to turn to. They don't shout, scream, protest and demand, instead they simply sit down on the roadside and wait patiently for someone to help them.

Dear Family and Friends,

We woke to the sound of shouting on the 27th of June as four young men, wearing Zanu pf scarves, stretched out across the width of the road and roused the neighbourhood. It was ten past six in the morning, the sun was hardly up and a cold sheet of  frost lay across gardens and along roadsides.

"Hey, hurry up, hurry up," the Zanu PF youths shouted; "time for voting! Let's go, let's go to vote," they yelled.

Dear Family and Friends,

A blanket of fear has descended over Zimbabwe as we count down the last few days before the second Presidential election. Our streets and towns are seething with police, army and youth brigade members. Our shops are empty of all basic foodstuffs; filling stations still have no diesel or petrol; water and electricity supplies are scarce; queues at banks and cash machines are immense and prices increase at least once every day. The trauma of living like this has been compounded a hundred fold as now each day brings news of terror, torture, kidnapping, burning and murder. The reports are of barbaric behaviour and extreme cruelty and they are coming from all over the country. The perpetrators move in groups; sometimes they come in the day but more often it is at night.

Dear Family and Friends,

Every time the man insulted and complained in his ugly, raised voice, I could feel droplets of his spit on my neck. He was standing so close behind me that I felt distinctly uncomfortable. There must have been about twenty of us waiting in the queue at the supermarket but no one commented or said a word about the abusive tirade. The owners of this sort of behaviour are well known to us all and to stay safe we stay quiet. "Hey Manager," he shouted, "someone send for the manager. Why must I wait like this? I don't expect to have to wait." The more the man ranted the quieter it got in the shop. Two security guards standing at the exit doors did not come forward, instead they retreated out of sight and the shower of spit on my neck increased. "Hey, bring more tellers! Come on, I'm tired of waiting. Hey, you, how much is that chocolate? No, not the local one, the imported one. What about the newspaper, the imported one? How much? Hey, hurry up."

Dear Family and Friends,

A new schedule of minimum wages for some categories of employment was released by a government department last week. One of the lowest in the schedule is a yard or garden worker whose minimum wage has been set at 3.2 billion dollars a month. To outsiders this may sound like a massive amount of money but in reality it is a death sentence. As I write this letter a 1 kg packet of plain hard biscuits is 9.2 billion dollars, a 2 kg packet of potatoes is 3.6 billion dollars, a 400 gram tin of baked beans is 1.8 billion dollars. By the time you read this letter all of these prices will have increased; it is likely they will have doubled within a week. On a full month's pay a yard or garden worker cannot even feed himself for a few days; worse still, he cannot provide any food for his family, he cannot buy any clothes or shoes and cannot pay his children's school fees. God help him if he gets sick. Perhaps the saddest fact of all is that this government stipulated minimum wage is currently worth just ten US cents  a day.