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I read an article in the L.A. Times about Zimbabwe which used to be a prosperous country in Africa.  Now their rate of inflation is 1730 per cent!!  The age of death for women there went from 60 in 1990 to 34 in 2007.  The hospitals have no supplies....the families of patients are told to go out and buy even the surgical gloves and medicine.  Because the families cannot afford to buy anything, the patients just die by the multitudes.   An accident victim is lucky if they just get a tetanus shot.  The doctors are sorry they cannot do any more to save the patients.  They also bike or walk to work.

Funerals cost half a year salary!!  Because people cannot afford to rent a pickup truck, bodies of loved ones lay at the morgues for many weeks.  People cannot afford coffins ($15).

To give an idea of salaries....a man working at a factory (walks 2 and 1/2 hours to get there, too) earns $4 or $5 U.S. dollars a month!!  As soon as they get paid, they try to buy food (usually cornmeal) before the prices go up again!

700,000 people were made homeless when the corrupt government there made them move out in an effort to "cleanse the filth" from a suburban area.  Also, people who were formerly farmers were forced to leave their land and the land was given to politicians (who do not farm it).

My heart goes out to these people.  The article did say a church was trying to give people there some food.  I wonder if Christian Aid has some missions in Zimbabwe?  I think I'll check on it.

This is a sad situation. It is a result of the communistic regime of Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe used to be considered the "bread basket of Africa" up until the take over by this regime in 1980. Even the poorest of families had three meals a day with little to no problems getting them and food exports were a mainstay of the country. Now most families have a difficult time obtaining two meals a day if even that. Zimbabwe's economy has been declining every since Robert Mugabe took office, with it really getting bad in the last couple of years. There is major torture and killing of the people daily by the government all in an attempt to keep Mugabe in power.

It is indeed an horrendous situation. There is a request by a group of Christian refugees from Zimbabwe that are currently in England to join them in a prayer vigil on April 20th.

Here is from another country, debp.
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Haiti faces high cost of dying

By STEVENSON JACOBS, Associated Press Writer Sun Apr 8, 11:34 AM ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Life has always been a struggle for Haiti's poor. These days, death isn't much easier.

The city morgue is under-refrigerated, jammed to capacity with unclaimed corpses and so short of funds that workers don't have paper masks to ward off the stench.

Deforestation has inflated the price of coffin wood, and hundreds — possibly thousands — of deaths in street violence are pushing up the price of funerals. Robbers plunder graves for coffins to resell, and families try to thwart them by smashing the coffin before it is covered with earth.

Some bereaved families are taking out high-interest "funeral loans," falling deep into debt to send off relatives with the dignity many were deprived of in life. Others have to abandon their dead on a dusty field known as Titanyen, a Creole word meaning "less than nothing," on the edge of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

A funeral now costs around $540 — more than most Haitians earn in a year. Cremation is only for the wealthy.

Haiti's largest public morgue, built to hold 390 cadavers, often has nearly 500, many strewn on the cement floor for lack of space. The dead include shooting victims,
AIDS victims and babies who never saw their first birthday.

It costs a relative $27 just to pick up a body if it was dropped off at the morgue, and $47 if the morgue had to collect it off the street. As a result, few bodies are ever claimed by relatives. They end up in a common grave outside the capital, along with those dumped at the Titanyen field.

"If the families don't have money to claim the bodies, they simply never show up," said morgue director Sergo Castor.

Marie Nicola's son was found dead in the street, his skull bashed in by unknown assailants in the taxi he was driving. The 62-year-old unemployed mother said she does not know if she will be able to afford a decent burial.

"After you pay the morgue, you have to buy clothes for the body, a coffin and pay the church and the cemetery. We don't have anything so it's very hard," Nicola said outside the morgue as relatives consoled her.

Outside the morgue, freelance undertakers with beaten-up old hearses stand ready to haggle over a funeral price. It's an entirely uncontrolled market.

"Sometimes you can see the economic situation of the person and you can negotiate a lower price. I'm human too so it affects me when people want to bury a relative but can't pay," said Carl Fanfan, an undertaker.

The Rev. Rick Frechette is a Catholic priest with the Illinois-based charity Friends of the Orphans, which runs an orphanage and a children's hospital in Haiti.

Trying "to do something a little more human for those that have died," the group makes coffins from papier-mache instead of wood and provides free burials for about 40 people a month, Frechette said.

Nicola said she'll ask relatives to chip in for her son's burial.

"If it's not enough then we will sell what we can," she said softly. "I will give him a good funeral if I'm able to."

Haiti faces high cost of dying (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070408/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/haiti_high_cost_of_dying;_ylt=An7vEyqjQhkGBV9buIlyzgdeW7oF)