Two sticks of gum: Z$1,000
When Gideon Gono, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, recently removed 10 zeroes from Zimbabwe’s currency, it’s led to a country-wide treasure hunt for old silver coins that had once become so devalued where it would cost one thousand Zimbabwe dollars to buy a couple of sticks of gum.
With this change in currency, the coins are now worth 10 billion times their face value. You can read more about it here, in a front page article from the August 3 edition of Zimbabwe’s Sunday Independent newspaper.
Among the personal stories shared in the newspaper is that of Jennifer Jones, who realized she’d given a bag of coins (the Z$1,000 referred to above) to her nephews to buy some gum…and her realization of what that bag of coins would buy now for those nephews.
It’s a fascinating, hopeful (and also heartbreaking) story about how Zimbabweans have struggled to survive in an economy where Z$500 billion has, at times, been simply considered pocket change.