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).
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