It is probably the first question most people ask when given a thumbnail sketch of the nightmare in Zimbabwe (and, to be honest, in many other places not only in Africa but around the globe): How do people survive? In the case of Zimbabwe, with its inflation in the hundreds of millions (231 million or so, though any assertion of the actual right imposes precision without providing accuracy), its scarcity of food and other commodities, its nonexistent jobs, its health crisis, they scavenge. They make do. They hustle. They stretch the little they have, and then they stretch further. They show their fundamental resourcefulness. They wake up in the moring wondering how they will make do, then they get by for the day, and go to bed wondering how they’ll make do the next day.
[Zimbabwean children picked up corn that had spilled from a truck on a recent Sunday along a road south of the capital, Harare. Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi for the Associated Press via The New York Times.]
