Thanksgiving

I wanted to get this out sooner, but we lost power and internet like crazy. The internet just came back. Thanks to everybody who sent me birthday/Thanksgiving wishes (yes, they were the same day this year).

God has given me a lot of reason to be thankful this year. For example, here is everything that happened to me yesterday and the reasons I’m thankful.

• I’m thankful for waking up at 4:30 and driving to the market to buy more beans so we could eat lunch. The thirty minutes I sat in the car while Helder was inside buying beans were amazing as I got to watch the sun rise over Nampula.
• I’m thankful for returning home and taking an ice-cold shower with running water and a roof over my head. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for running water. Or the roof.
• I’m thankful for having a special birthday breakfast with Victor and Christina. Christina makes the best french toast this side of the Zambezi. Yes, my birthday was on thanksgiving this year.
• I’m thankful for having enjoyed the morning chatting with by new friends, Joe, Courtney, and Patricia, who all happen to be staying here while traveling through Mozambique.
• I’m thankful for exploring parts unknown with Joe (visitor) and Jeremias (kid at the orfonato) as we’re looking for my friend who has a barber shop “somewhere over there” according to everybody we asked.
• I’m thankful for sitting patiently for 2 hours as the barber tried to cut my massive head of thick hair (which is still falling out and receding, I swear) while 20 little kids looked on in amazement because not only was it the first time a white man has come to their neighborhood its also the first time they seen one getting his hair cut.
• I’m thankful for spending the last hour of the haircut telling the barber about the Gospel after he asked what the heck I’m doing in Nampula and why can’t I afford a car like all the others.
• I’m thankful for running into Gabriel (another kid at the orfonato) on the way home on the last chapa (bus) of the day and watching a fight ensue and the driver pull over halfway home and telling everybody to get off. Quality entertainment.
• I’m not quite as thankful for the 45-minute walk home after the bus left us in the middle of nowhere.
• I’m thankful for the visitors provided the money to give the kids and I an awesome Thanksgiving dinner that included for everybody: a huge plate of rice, a giant pile of french fries, ¼ of a chicken, a pop, ice cream, and home-made chocolate chip cookies.
• I’m thankful that everybody got to slap me on the back (a Mozambican birthday tradition, or so I’m told…)
• I’m thankful for all the laughing and joking going at dinner and everybody lying around with their belt unbuckled (just like home).
• I’m thankful for experiencing the Holy Spirit during the spontaneous time of worship and prayer after dessert that lasted for almost 2 hours.
• I’m thankful that our singing drowned out the noise of the witchcraft ceremony happening next door.
• I’m thankful that, even though I dearly miss my family and friends, Jesus has provided me with a fun and amazing group of family and friends here in Nampula to celebrate with.

Mozambique 101 - Economics Part 1

This is the next post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This one is all about the economy of Mozambique. Imagine this as a sort of brief and impersonal overview of just the facts. Its kind of like trying to read the license plate of a parked car when you’re going 60mph on the highway. This series is my attempt to answer many of the questions that I’ve been asked about Mozambique, other than the always popular “where’s THAT?” These articles should help you understand what things are like in Mozambique and just how they came to be that way.

Mozambique is one of the least developed countries on earth. There is really now way to soften that fact. Its about as third world as it gets, and Nampula is one of the most undeveloped parts of the country. In order to appreciate the gravity of just what it is like to be in one of the most undeveloped places in the world, you must first realize that much of the inability to develop is directly tied to the economic potential of the region. This frist post on economy is designed to tell you just what it looks like for most people in Nampula: where they live, what access they have, what they do for a living, what opportunites they have to spend their very hard earned dollars on, and just what the difficulties are from a purely economic standpoint.

To begin, I’m going to throw some slightly disjointed statistics at you. You may notice that this is the first time I’m directly stealing facts from Wikipedia (and even if I cited that Nampula is the Tatooine of the Empire it wouldn’t make a difference). The truth is for most of this I have a secret source. It is the “Strategic Plan for the development of the Province of of Mozambique”. Its an intra-governmental (emphasis on mental) memo that was circulated by the Provincial government here and was signed by the Governor himself. The only reason I have it is because I think one of the kids stole it from somewhere and gave it to me so they wouldn’t be caught with it. Consider that:

• Nampula is listed at 9th out of 11 provinces for Development. The two worse than us don’t have a city over 15,000 people.
• In our Province, 92% of people don’t have electricity, 78% don’t have a radio, 84% don’t have access to clean water.
• Six of the 18 districts of Nampula don’t have electricity at all.
• 85% of the Province practices agriculture for a living. Of these people, 2% are mechanized (tractors, combines, etc). The remaining 98% farm by hand without even the aid of animals.
• The Province declares that, “82% of roads and 88% of bridges are currently passable.”
• Half of cities don’t have a bank branch anywhere near them.
• There is one doctor for every 35,000.
• While unemployment it impossible to estimate, the Province does estimate than within Nampula City (pop. 1/2million) that 69% of people live in absolute poverty (less than $1 per day).
• The GDP (per capita) in our province is about $450USD per year. That number is an average weighted by the fact that there are a small amount of people that earn a ton of money. Still, it means that on average people earn about $1.25 per day.
• For the last 6 years, population growth has outpaced economic growth, and after accounting for inflation and population the economy of Nampula has been decreasing by about 2% per year.

Also, while the causality of the relationships between education and economics is very challenging to figure out, the problem is caused/exacerbated by the fact that the literacy rate is only 30% (85% and 55% of men don’t know how to read). To make matters worse, the university in our city is currently producing more lawyers than teachers.

Most people here are lucky if they can find a trade to practice or anyone to train them. People are reluctant to teach trades because once that person learns a skill (welding, mechanics, construction) they become a threat to take jobs from the person teaching them. Nobody has money to open a store and its impossible to get a loan for anything. Many people sell goods on the street (bread, fruit, coca-cola, counterfeit Chinese DVDs). The profit margin is so slim that a man selling ice cold coca-cola will earn only about $1.60 at the end of the day.

Many places (including the gov’t) pay people through direct deposit in order to eliminate corruption in the payment process. This results in every day lines being over 1hr long of people standing at the ATM to take out every last cent they have. It also results in most the ATMs in town running out of money frequently through the day.

I want people to appreciate that life here is tough, but there are regions exactly like Nampula all over the world. You can go to hundreds of towns in China, India, South Africa, middle-of-nowhere Mongolia and see that people live in the same or worse poverty that people in Nampula do. While places like the slums of India and a million people living in a garbage dump in Cairo and stone-age Aborigines in Australia get lots of attention, places like Mozambique are, on a regional scale (remember, twice the size of California), slightly unprecedented.

Next week we’ll look at how the government helps maintain the economy and put in places policies to promote growth and stability. And if you couldn’t tell, that last sentence was very sarcastic.

The Rainy Season Has Started

I've been waiting a long time to put this one up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NuA7AripfU

And I need another easy, short post because I've been busy.

Enjoy.

The one where I get right to the point

Talk about one step forward, two steps back. I don't have a roof right now on my house because its being replaced for a tin roof, but in the meantime, there is progress. Just this week I got running water to my house. On Tuesday, I got everything hooked up to the water tower and took my first non-bucket shower. It was glorious. Right after I finished, I stepped out of the shower and a huge gust of wind came and dumped a truckload of dust and dirt right on top of me while I was still soaking wet.

And that's when I got to take my second non-bucket shower. It too, was glorious.

Then the next day the water tank went dry and I've been back to taking bucket showers.

Shiny, Microwaved, DVD extras

I’m a little busy here and thus a little behind on writing the Moz 101 series. This week should have been about the economy, but it’s a little research intensive and it takes time I don’t have. So tune back next week to find out how exactly most people here make money (surprise! They don’t).

Until then, I’m just posting some stuff I edited out from the Government posts several weeks ago. Consider this the DVD extras of deleted scenes, or like your microwaved leftover meatloaf, or the good-looking produce on the top of the grocery aisle so you can’t see that the rest of the produce underneath is not super shiny and tasty, but just mediocre.

…But people don’t like the government just because it’s largely stupid. They don’t like it because Mozambique is the land of a billion rumors. I’ve heard that people don’t like president for these reasons: the president eats turkey every night for dinner, he sold Mozambique Island and kept all the money, he is outlawing cassava, he has a house in America and travels there once per week (presumably with the money he got from selling Mozambique Island), he’s secretly a muslim (he and Obama go to the same mosque) and he has two limousines which is crazy because he can only drive one at a time.

At the same time that they express their distaste for the government, they also revere their first president, Samora Machel, and place him slightly below God on the list of people they worship. I imagine it’s a little like all the hubbub surrounding George Washington back when America was starting up. Remember, that Mozambique has been independent for over 40 years and peaceful for about 20, so it’s a relatively new country. But while all the remains of George Washington today was he chopped down a cherry tree, said “I pity the fool that lie!” and carved wooden teeth out of the aforementioned cherry tree. I don’t have proof, but I think early Americans probably had stories about GW like he stood as tall as two men, he ripped a guys heart out with his teeth during the French Indian War, and spat in the face of Gen. Cornwallis.

But still, I find the level of rumors about the first president of Mozambique to be a little nauseating. Granted, the truth is a little blurred he by nature that rumors are much more interesting than fact. Which is fine, but people then MAKE the rumors fact. I’ve had three different people point out 4 different houses that the current President of Mozambique was raised in.

The two stories I hear all the time about President Machel both have to do with America (go figure). The first story is about how, despite not having more than a 5^th grade education, he was the smartest man in the world. He proved this by going to the United Nations after making himself the President of Mozambique. The kids tell me (and not 8 year old kids for bed time stories, but kids in high school) that when he was at the United Nations he was the only person able to communicate with all 450 countries there because he knew 450 different languages, whereas most the other Presidents can only talk with about 30-40. I don’t have the heart to tell them that the United Nations uses translators. I also don’t have the heart to tell them that there aren’t anywhere near 450 countries in the world.

The second story is about how the day after Samora Machel was made president he flew to America. The kids say he was going there to meet the first president of America (boy, was he out of luck). When he was there he was refused entry because he refused to surrender his sidearm. After he convinced the guards that he was an honorable gentleman (historically debatable) he came inside to meet the president of America. The American president was both extremely racist and scared of getting AIDS that he wore a glove to shake Samora Machel’s hand. Machel was so offended that he ripped the glove and, in President Machel’s own words, “Greeted him hand to hand, man to man.” And that’s the story of how in June 1975 the President of Mozambique became the first black man to enter the White House.

Rules of the Radio

I have observed that there is a very specific set of requirements for songs to get on the radio. I’ve attempted to compile these and create a sort of rulebook to determine if a particular song can be heard on the radio. Keep in mind that there are only about 6 stations here that actually play music, so it didn’t take years to compile, only weeks. Warning: this may not make sense unless you’ve spent any amount of time in Africa, in which case it will be painfully obvious to you

Rule 1. To be on the radio, the music must be from Africa.

1.a Music from Africa is strictly defined as all music originating in Mozambique or only reggae from South Africa.

1.b If not African, it must be Portuguese.

1.b All following rules are exception to Rule 1.

Rule 2. If not from Africa, the people must think they are from Africa. Common examples are Bob Marley, R. Kelly, and Usher, who everybody swears are all from “probably from Western Africa, because its easier to get to America from there”.

Rule 3. If people do not think they’re from Africa, they must at least be black. Common example are Akon and Michael Jackson (kind of) and especially that fake duet with Akon and Michael Jackson (see Rule 4).

Rule 4. If the people are not black, they must sound like a girl. Common examples are Justin Beiber and that fake duet with Akon and Michael Jackson.

Rule 5. If not a girl, they must be Canadian. This exception includes Bryan Adams and Justin Beiber (for people who insist he does not satisfy Rule 4).

Rule 6. Celine Dion is acceptable at all times. This rule is somewhat moot as Celine Dion already satifies Rules 4 and 5.

Rule 7. Techno music by default does not satisfy any of the rules, but it does not NOT satisfy any of the rules, and is therefore allowed.

A few comments: Music from Brazil is not awesome samba inspired music, it is sappy romantic covers of Celine Dion. I have no idea why techno is so popular here, but it drives me crazy. Rock is never allowed unless it is the one song by Bryan Adams that is on the radio (“Baby you’re all that I want”).

Michael Jackson was not popular here until he died last year and people were told he was richest most famous person in the world, and now everybody knows about him. R&B is fairly popular, but people think that there are only two singers. They are Usher and R. Kelly. EVERYBODY that sings R&B is either Usher or R. Kelly.

Nothing is censored here. People don’t speak English, so why bother. Hip-hop can be played freely without editing anything down. That being said, hip-hop is only popular if features a woman singing the hook. That woman is usually Rihana. This is for two reasons. First, nobody in America or here likes anything Rihana actually does other than sing the chorus for hip-hopsters/rappers. The second reason is because “we think she’s probably from Senegal or somewhere in Western Africa.

Mozambique 101 - Geography

This is the next post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This one is all about the geography of Mozambique. Find out how many people are, where they are, and what they don’t have. This series is my attempt to answer many of the questions that I’ve been asked about Mozambique, other than the always popular “where’s THAT?” These articles should help you understand what things are like in Mozambique and just how they came to be that way.

As a premise, geography usually includes a broader look at thinks more than just population, mountains and rivers. Geopgraphy is also a look at how environment affects all aspects of life, such as jobs, education, and health (hint: its not pretty). Much of that information, I think, is more relevant when expanded on, such as talking about agriculture, or family life. For this segment, we’re only going to look at the big picture aspect. And that picture starts with, well, a picture.

Click to see it bigger

Population

Mozambique is about 310 thousand sq miles (800 thousand sq km) making it about twice the size of California. A better analogy is to imagine for a moment that Mozambique is about the same size and layout of California, Oregon, and Washington put together. Now, aside from it being very big, it is home to about 28 million people. The capital city of Maputo (or San Diego, in our analogy) is home to over 3 million people. It is the largest city and the seat of power for the rest of the country. It is also the southernmost point of the country. This often creates regional tensions for people that live up north where we do. The next biggest city is Beira (like Sacramento, but on the coast). Beira is home to about 1.5m people and is the country’s largest trade port (like Mos Isley, if you’re still stuck on the Star Wars analogy from a couple weeks back). While the port in Maputo handles goods for just the city, Beira handles goods that are then sent inland to the other countries in Southern Africa.

North of Beira is the Zambezi river. This is the same Zambezi that Dr. Livingstone used when he ventured into Africa, so it has got some history. Unfortunately, all of that history occurs in Malawi and than further inland in Zimbabwe and Lake Victoria, so Mozambique generates zero tourism revenue from this. Also, the river cuts the country almost in half (imagine it’s a little north of Sacremento) and until about 8 months ago there was not even a bridge that went across it. The next major city we get to is the one where I live, Nampula (about where Eugene, OR would be). It’s the third largest city in the country ringing in at just over 0.5m people.

Maputo is the capitol, and Beira is the port. So what then is Nampula, you ask?

Nampula City

While I have not yet met anyone that officially classifies it as such, the city of Nampula is in many ways a refugee center. The economy here has zero manufacturing, near zero industry, and the service sector is so severely underdeveloped because of the fact that people don’t have money to spend. About ten years ago, the population of Nampula was about half of what it is today. In the years since, the regions experienced the worst flooding in a lifetime which was followed by several years of drought (there’s no middle ground here). The drought brought the hungry (even though everybody already here was hungry to begin with) and the floods brought the displaced (who were also very hungry).

Nampula Province

If you can add, you’ll notice that Maputo, Beira, and Nampula make up only about 5 of the estimated 28 million people in Mozambiqe. Well, that number is an estimate because the people in charge of this country figure that almost 60% of people live out in the country. I’m not talking in the country like the spend most of their time riding tractors, judging 4H fairs, and attending high school football games on Friday nights. When I say out in the country, I mean out in the country as in people that literally have nothing. Except for the clothes they are wearing and on rare occasions a motorbike, people live with nothing they can’t get themselves. Mud and bamboo huts, wooden handled tools, and homemade beer. No electricity, no water faucets, no tin roofing, not even mechanized farming. 98% of the farmers in our province perform all their work with hand tools, not even using animals.

In my province, an estimated 85% of people live out in the country, concentrated near villages of anywhere from 5 families, to 50 families. They live several days of walking from clinics or hospitals, often times even farther from schools or churches. Of the 18 districts our province, 6 don’t have electricity. 16% of the province has access to clean water.

Water

The government claims that it has ample supply, but no infrastructure to deliver clean water to everybody that needs it. I will vouch that indeed they do not have the infrastructure to do so because they can’t even do it here in the city. The government estimates that here in the city anywhere between 24-35% of people don’t have water. The estimate is such a broad range because the city knows how many people have water because they’re charging them, they just don’t know how many people are in the city. Here, people borrow water from their neighbors, or walk to community boreholes (deep drilled, hand pumped wells), or as a last case scenario go down to the river (its nasty, trust me).

As to the claim that the government has ample supply, that is blatantly false. For the last three months our city water has been shut off completely. It only returned about two weeks ago and won’t flow for more than 2 hours a day. It is only the grace of God that we have a well here instead of walking several km to get water.

Climate

Its pretty darn hot. Enough said. It has been over 95F since I arrived in September. It continues to get hotter (over 100F) will only cool down when it starts raining in December. Then it cools until April when everybody will be in sweaters when it’s a frigid 80F.

There is much more to cover for Geography, but it will get rolled into upcoming posts dealing with Health, Transportation, and how many species of fire ants are here (my count is at 6).

High School Musical

A little over a week ago the high school in our neighborhood held a dance to celebrate the end of the year school year (yes, it’s the end of the school year here). I have no way of knowing what exactly happens at the dance because I didn’t attend and it was only for 12th graders. I also have nobody to ask because we have three kids in 12th grade here and none of them went. I also can’t ask any neighborhood kids that went because they don’t even remember going to the dance because they were already blacked out from drinking .

I first figured something was different that day when driving home that night there was an unmistakable thump-thump-thump of the dance floor. When I arrived at the orphanage the music was just as loud. There must have been a lot of speakers because the school is about a kilometer away from us. I asked the kids what was happening and they told me it the end of the year dance. I asked them the theme and they didn’t know so I’m going to assume it was the enchantment under the sea dance.

After several hours of the constant thumping of very non-African techno music, the tone suddenly changed at about 8pm. All of a sudden, the smooth, dulcet tones of Celine Dion came soaring over the neighborhood. The ears of everybody in the orphanage perked up as for the next three hours we were treated to wave after wave of romantic soundscapes from Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, and about 5 other singers whose names I don’t know. What I can tell you is that if it was a power ballad from the 80’s, then they played it.

What was perhaps most perplexing about the whole thing was what the kids said when the music changed. I don’t know if there’s a way to fully describe the oddity and humor of the situation unless you experienced it, but then again I wouldn’t be doing my job if I weren’t trying. As soon as the music changed to the sappy romantic songs, all the kids said, “Ahhh, the dance is starting” I was thinking that it meant like when you’re at the awkward high school dance and nobody is on the floor until Aerosmith booms over the gym (Cause I don’t want to miss a thing). I asked them if they meant that people don’t dance to the other three hours of music we’d just been listening to. They said that it literally meant that they don’t open the doors until the romantic music starts playing and all the other stuff was just a prelude to let people know there was a dance going to take place.

I think that there is really no way to describe just how funny this was to me. Especially since the whole mood of the orphanage changed when the music changed. They had more or less ignored the first three hours of the thumping techno. But as soon as the romantic, power ballad-esque genre started up all ears were instantly glued to the tunes flowing over the night sky.

The one about Vampires

The vampire craze has officially hit Mozambique. Nobody here is quite sure why vampires are all of a sudden popular, but then again I’m not quite sure why they are popular in America either. The other day I witnessed several kids using cut out paper in their mouths to represent Vampire teeth. To understand why the kids are suddenly into vampires, we need to backtrack a little bit.

The kids used to have a TV in the cafeteria. I think it is because somebody took it from Victors house when he was away in America, but nevertheless it was there. The TV serves three main purposes that I’ve order them from least important to most important.

-Least Important: News. Many Mozambicans (and Africans in general) live in a bubble. Seventy percent of the population here can’t read, and my top-secret internal governmental statistics say that 75% of the people in our Province don’t even have a radio. When people hear of things it is because of word of mouth. Unfortunately most of the news people here is completely trivial. I consider major news to be scientists discovering that the species of mosquito responsible for carrying malaria is now genetically classified as two distinct species, creating a whole new set of difficulties for treatment and eradication. People in Nampula consider major news to be that, due to weird marriage laws in France or Asia or somewhere, some lonely single girl married a pillow while another gal married a photo of a celebrity. Anyways, we feel its important for the kids to know about what is really going in their country, the rest of Africa, and the world.

-Semi-Important: Tom & Jerry. Every day at 7:50am (why an odd time, I don’t know) until 8:40am is a full 50 minutes of commercial-free Tom & Jerry cartoons. Everything the kids are doing stops so they can sit around and watch cartoons. I too and glued to the TV for this part of the day. Why is it so great? Its great because Tom and Jerry can’t talk so the kids understand it and its always slapstick humor that the kids really enjoy.

-Most Important: Soccer. At least two to three times a week there’s a soccer game on TV. Sometimes it’s a Mozambique league, but often there’s a bootleg broadcast of Portugal, Champions League, or even a UEFA game if we’re lucky. This is the highlight of the day, but nobody can every predict when they’re going to be on.

With the TV came one rule. That rule was no watching soap operas (tela novellas). These are kids, and as many of the programs come from Brazil they are way to over-sexualized for kids (or even adults in the super-conservative culture we have here). Well, after repeated warnings Victor caught all the kids sitting around watching a program called “Os Mutantes” and took the TV away. It’s hard to figure out, because the plot was a little thin in places, but I think “Os Mutantes” a show about Vampires that work in a hospital. I'm not sure exactly, because I may be confusing it with the other two vampire related programs I've seen so far here.

Mutants: Ways of the Heart

Well, as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, it wasn’t long after discovering the program that some of the younger kids started making fake vampire teeth and running around pretending to bite each other, or in the case of Jose they were actually biting each other. Rumor is we can get the TV back sometime around the New Years (yes, in January). I’m going to look into if there are any big soccer games coming up as an excuse to to see if we can get it back earlier. Its not because I miss soccer, but because I miss Tom & Jerry.

On a related note, I asked the kids if they were on team Jacob or team Edward and they said that both Edward and Jacob were stupid.

Pictured: How Twilight should have ended.

Mozambique 101 - Government Part Two

This is the next post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This post explains what happens when the government makes a decision nobody likes. This series is my attempt to answer many of the questions that I’ve been asked about Mozambique, other than the ever-popular “where’s THAT?” These articles should help you understand what things are like in Mozambique and just how they came to be that way.

Previously in this series we covered that Mozambique used to communist until about the time that the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet Union collapsed. Around that time, the President of Mozambique announced that he was making an enlightened decision and moving the country in the direction of capitalism and economic freedom. People would have appreciated this, if it had actually offered any change for the masses.

Because the country has such tight restrictions on foreign investment it means that foreigners don’t invest (they kind of do, but if you look at your syllabus you’ll see we don’t cover that until Economics Part 2). What foreign investment there is goes straight to the salaries for the government. About six months ago, France announced that it would be cutting portions of its foreign aid and was eliminating about $150million in aid to Mozambique. The response of Mozambique was to cry foul to the European Union and complain that if France pulled their support it would mean a 10% cut to their federal budget. That’s basically because there’s nothing in Mozambique that generates money except for European aid.

The threatened reduction of foreign aid can often lead to confusing policies. If you follow world commodities you’ll know that grain prices surged in August because Russia accidentally lit all their wheat fields on fire or something. As a result, world grain prices surged and suddenly bread costs more. Well, here in our nice, peaceful (read: walking on eggshells) corner of the world the government sets bread prices because it subsidizes the grain coming into the country. So when they announced there would be a 30% increase in the price of a loaf of bread the people responded with 4 days of riots.

Now, since news out of the country was mostly silent, I’ve managed to piece together that the bread riots were made up of one part European Football Game Riot (people lighting flares, turning over cars, setting garbage on fire) and two parts L.A. Race Riot (looting, tire fires, people hurling rocks at police, and the police firing rubber bullets into the crowd to disperse it). Its was nothing like the Seattle World Trade Organization Riots in 2000 because those weren’t people from Seattle, they were all hippies from Colorado and Canadians.

Back to the story. So, day three into the riots, the (formerly) communist government finds out that people have been organizing the riots using their cell phones. To find out why everybody in one of the ten poorest countries in the world has a cell phone you’ll need wait for the week on Urbanization. So the Government decides to shut down the phone networks in the entire country. They then later demanded that the cell companies (both of them) turn over all text messages in the last week. They then correlated numbers they knew with people who happen to be known members of the opposition party and threw them all in jail.

The problem is now that most cell phone users are anonymous. People buy a phone, a SIM card, and buy credit that you can find on pretty much any street corner. So the government is now demanding that these millions of anonymous users register their SIM card with the government. And this is how you have to register. Everybody in my city of 500k people is going to the only two stores in town that sells phones, paying for a piece of paper that they fill in their name, phone number, and national ID number. They then take that to a photocopy shot and have it photocopied with their national ID card and turn that in to the government. In an odd coincidence the price of a photocopy has tripled since two weeks ago when this started. But I’m sure that can be explained by the government reducing the subsidy for toner and size A4 paper. I think Christina said it best when she said, “For a country that can’t do a single thing right they’re putting bureaucracy in the one place they don’t need it.”

Back to those riots, the government was threatening to raise the price of bread by 30%. In the four days of riots (which took place in only two cities) a confirmed ten people died. This is because, supposedly, the police were using live ammunition to quell the rioters. I’m not saying that in the sense that countless people dies, but they found 10 people dead. And I bet only three of you reading this knew that any of this even happened. Meanwhile, France was in the top of the headlines because people are on strike because they are raising the retirement age by two years. In a country where people can’t afford bread and work till they die at the ripe old age of 45, France’s protest look pretty petty from where I'm sitting.

Next time on Mozambique 101 we’ll be discussing Geography. And for those of you that don’t like Geopgraphy, you probably still won’t so I’ll try to keep it short.

Misleading Lyrics

Once in a while we get some traditional, home grown Mozambican music on the radio. Not hip-hop covers by Mozambicans, but more traditional African music. I used to love when it came on the radio because its happy and fun to listen. I used to because now I can fully understand the lyrics of these songs. They range from just absolutely bizarre to slightly disturbing.

One such music the other day was a full choir of people singing the happiest song I ever heard. After asking three different kids to verify the lyrics I discovered they went something like this:

Don’t beat your mother. I said don’t beat your mother.

Don’t beat your mother because then you father will have nobody to hit.

Very tragic, but not really uncommon in the culture here. While abuse is not permissible the assumption is she probably did something to deserve it. The next day there was another song that caught my ear. It was a man singing with a choir to back him up. I don’t remember word for word, but it was something along the lines of a man talking to his wife saying “You'd better cook food. If you don’t I’m going to take you back to your father and ask for your sister in exchange”.

Trust me, that second sounds a lot more uplifting when you hear it.