How does a poet like John Eppel survive in Zimbabwe? In a country with inflation of over 11,000,000 per cent and an unemployment rate of 80 per cent, he is lucky to be employed. As a schoolteacher, he earns about fifteen Australian dollars a month. Until recently he earned a further seventy dollars as a lecturer in creative writing at the world’s largest distance education university in South Africa. They haven’t paid him for over two years. It is only thanks to the kindness of his old friend Fred Simpson, a general practitioner now living in New Zealand, that he…