Dear Family and Friends,
Arriving at the international bank on another sweltering November morning in Zimbabwe, I was pleasantly surprised not to see hundreds of people camped out on the surrounding pavements. It could only mean one thing, the bank didn’t have any money. Sitting behind the wheel in a parked car nearby a man yawned and lifted his hand in greeting; he’d clearly been waiting there for some time and I soon found out why.
Emerging from the double security box doors into the bank, the place was completely full of people but nobody was moving and the customers stood crammed up against each other in a stationery queue. There was no buzz of conversation, no angry mutterings, just a hundred or so people standing silently, patiently, waiting for a depositor. One person depositing one hundred dollars would enable two people in the queue to be served, allowed to withdraw a maximum of fifty dollars each.
You could hear a pin drop when I asked at Enquiries for a deposit slip and I could feel a hundred pairs of eyes boring into my back as I filled the slip in. I didn’t want to be depositing precious bank notes but needed to make a payment requiring a bank transfer. The slip filled in and bank notes in my hand, I turned and could almost hear the sigh of relief from people in the stationery queue.
“Go straight to the front,” someone in the queue said; “you’re welcome,” another said, smiling.