Monopoly Money

To we Americans who are used to our uniformly green paper currency, most money in the world seems like a joke. I've traded in my trusted Benjamins for....Kwacha? You mean to tell me that this rainbow confetti will actually buy things?

I have not in my time here actually seen a one Kwacha note. It's currently valued at....1/450th of a cent. I don't know if they even print them any longer, to be honest. Money is referred toin 1000 kwacha (ZKw) increments, known as "pin." They call it a pin because inflation hit so hard in the '90s that they didn't have bills any larger than 100 Zkw so they had to pin together ten of them to make 1000 Zkw. Money was being carried around in plastic sacks. $100 weighed too much to carry alone.

Now we're dealing with larger bills. I currently have over a million ZKw in my front pocket, and my MEAGER monthly paycheck is more than enough to allow me to retain my millionaire status. A beer costs about 4000, a used t-shirt is 3000, and I've dropped as much as 30,000 for a good meal (though fast food is only around 7000). When you're dealing with sums that large it can be a slippery slope to the land without relative value. I have an automatic mechanism in my head that tells me that $3 is too much to pay for a hamburger, but that reflex doesn't exist when I do the math and realize I've spend 50,000 ZKw on beer in a night.

What's 50,000 again? $11? I guess I don't have too much to worry about.