the pc x-mas x-stitch of 2008

I had planned to write a long blog post about this cross stitch that I've been working on during December. Right now I'm just to tired to do it, but still wanted to get it out there before next year.

So the short version is this: during 2008 the situation in Zimbabwe has gone from bad to... well, catastrophic. I've been following the reports from Zim before, during & after the election in March this year & it feels like the whole country is turning into a black hole, like it's slowly imploding. Zimbabwe was once a prosperous country but years of bad government & raging inflation has left it devastated & unable to care for it's own people. The people who actually tried to do something about the situation by electing a new president, but got robbed of their democratic rights by Robert Mugabe & the ZANU-PF party. Today there is no sufficient health care, hunger & cholera is killing the people, those who dare to speak up are getting arrested & are "disappearing", Mugabe still holds his office & the talks between him & MDC about sharing government have collapsed. The money situation is bizarre, the inflation has reached heights that are pretty hard to grasp. In august 2008 it passed 11 200 000 %. As Anna Tibblin puts it:

In english it's called a quadrillion. In swedish there's not even a word for it.

So, with that in mind I've spent december working on an advent calendar. I used a pattern made from an old ANC poster (which unfortunately didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped) & a quote from the anthem of neo-colonialism as I know it: the Christmas song Do they know it's Christmas? by the 80's Band Aid project.