Two armloads of money to pay our bill

During our family's first term in Zaire (now Congo), we took a vacation at the beach at Moanda.  The guest house charged us $165 for the week--not bad, for a family of six.   What I remember is that when my husband John counted out the money, it amounted to two huge stacks of bills.  We thought that was inflation.  We hadn't seen anything yet.

John paying for our family vacation in 1982.  Total in his arms:  $165

The government owed more than it could pay, so it felt it could solve the problem by simply having more money printed.  Of course, this caused the money itself to be worth less and less.  When the Zaire note first came out, it was worth $2 US.  In our latter days in Zaire, a One Million Zaire note was worth just cents.  I can't tell you how many because that decreased almost hourly toward the end.  Our calculators could not handle the number of zeroes, so we used a shortcut method.  3,500,000 Zaires became 3.5, etc. 

The government felt the solution was to change the money.  At least twice that I remember, they declared the old money valueless and issued new money with fewer zeroes on the end of each note.
Some limited time was allowed for the people to cash in their old currency and receive new.  However, the time allotted did not take into account that a lot of the population lived far away from banks, transportation was difficult to find and too expensive for most people, and the roads were in disrepair.  Many people did not make it to the bank by the deadline and lost what currency they had.

In other cases they made it to the banks only to find that the banks were not adequately prepared for the changeover and had run out of currency.

In one changeover, they decided that coins, called Makutas, would no longer be accepted.  What did people do with all their coins?  They put them in the church offerings!  Soon the churches found themselves with bags full of coins that they could do nothing with.

We bought the coins from the churches at a low price, which at least gave them something they could use, and we brought them home to sell as souvenirs.  That was about the only time I can remember anyone winning as far as the devalued, overprinted currency was concerned.

During our second term the inflation became much worse.  The currency was losing value almost hourly.  It was at best a three day trip to Kinshasa to exchange money.  If we brought the currency we received back to the interior, it had lost a major part of its value in those days of travel.   This was at the same time that every government agency was looking for new ways to tax the few expatriates and business people who remained in the country. 

We made it through in those days, often by the skin of our teeth, by never letting much currency rest in our hands.  As soon as we received some currency, we would immediately invest it in things we knew we could resell locally--school notebooks and pens, salt, salted dried fish called makayabu, etc.  We never made any profit on those exchanges, but we minimized our loss, which would have quickly sunk the ship otherwise. 

We used to wonder why the Zaireans never saved anything.  After living through this kind of skyrocketing inflation, it was very easy to see.

Sometimes we see political jokes about currency being like Monopoly money.  I can understand that more than most.  My husband tells the joke he heard someplace that you know inflation is bad when paper is worth more for toilet paper than it is for money.  It is spoken out of experience.