TJ's Book Report

Happy birthday, America! Hopefully all of you are recovering from your hangover, patching the craters in you front lawn, or reading a reply from that strongly worded letter you sent to your town councilman in which you described your city’s ban on fireworks as some combination of lame, misguided, fascist, communist, totalitarian, King George-esque, and un-American.

These last couple of days I’ve been fighting on oncoming cold and trying to rest up. This has involved lots of reading, a pastime of mine. So you can think of this as my book report to all of you. Or Cliffs Notes. How about we go with Cliffs Notes. You know, like how Snowball is Trotsky, the Old Major is Karl Marx, the cows are the subjected working class, “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”… Sorry, that was from by book report on Animal Farm.

= = > UNICEF (something about the United Nation and Children) released a report of Mozambique this week. The “highlights” of the report include:
• 44% of children suffer from chronic malnutrition. This number can be as high as 59% in northern provinces where we are.
• 48% percent go through at least two life-threatening food disparities sometime during childhood.
• Over a third of deaths before the age 5 are caused by malaria.
• 11% of girls ages 11 to 15 years are infected with HIV
• 52% girls under the age of 18 are “married”. Being married is defined as being legitimately married, living with a guy, or being pregnant/having a child.

The official response by a government spokesman decried the UN as “apostles of doom”. As to the statistics, the spokesman said, “I don’t know the Mozambique they know. My Mozambique is strong and winning the fight against poverty.”

= = > Another report from here in our city lists that over 25,000 grade school students study outside, a majority of them under trees while sitting on the ground. Our city has a total of about 0.5m people, meaning that 5% of the total population are grade-schoolers studying outside because there’s not enough space in schools. The average class size across the whole country is over 68 children per class. That’s across all grades. Actual sizes can vary from 50 to 120. All our kids study with at least 70-80 other students.

= = > While I’m not sure how I come into possession of many things here (like my shower mat, which is really a rubber car floor mat that literally just showed up in my house one day) I recently got a Mozambican teachers handbook. The section on health awareness was particularly interesting.

The gov’t cites a 2009 survey of HIV/AIDS rates among pregnant females ages 18-49. In Niassa Province (the backwoods of Mozambique) the rate is about 8%. In our province it is reported as 11-14% depending on how rural or urban you are. In Maputo City, home to several million people, the rate of infection is 28-30%. Let that sink in. In the largest city in Mozambique, 30% of pregnant women are infected with HIV.

One thing the study does is show that much of the thinking done by the gov’t on combating HIV was wrong. For years the fear was that the rural areas would have huge rates because of lack of information/education whereas in the city, where everybody is well informed, rates would be low because people are always hearing the message to be safe, use protection, etc. What the data really shows is that in the sticks people just don’t get around that much while in the city people are apparently shacking up with everyone in sight.

= = > The municipal water company here announced that they have stopped expansion/development of the water grid. From now on they will only replace, rehabilitate, and repair the existing infrastructure. The reasons cited are that the city does not have enough water to expand the grid. As it is now, neighborhoods don’t all receive water at the same time, sometimes going days without. The utility company says further expansion will only worsen the problem.

= = > The city council in Tete has released a guidebook to police officers suggesting appropriate amounts of bribes to be collected from prostitutes in exchange for not fining them on prostitution.

= = > The Mozambique District Development Fund is a zero-interest loan program aimed at providing capital for rural economic development. Last week they lost $40,000 (yes, US dollars). In one district, the Fund gave monies to a group of farmers who apparently just drank away the money. When the Fund managers returned at the end of harvest, they discovered the farmers had not planted a single crop and were taking the year off living on all their free money.

The Fund possessed their land, I’m assuming, because that’s the penalty for defaulting (that, and the article referred to them as ex-farmers). Before you start thinking that these guys got taken advantage of, the story says they procured the loan to build a grain mill for their district. One of the (ex)farmers was quoted as saying, “After we received the money we were so happy, so we celebrated without stopping.” Apparently they did.

= = > The mayor of the second largest city in Mozambique, Beira, accused the president of rigging several recent foreign business investments by having them go to the capital city of Maputo. He claims the companies had had desired to go to Beira and the gov’t had forced them to go to Maputo or take nothing at all. The president responded in a press conference by saying he wished to remind the mayor that it’s a crime to defame the president.