TV News

TV is a little different here. Where the orphanage sits we can pick up two channels with our rabbit ears. I should say rabbit ear, singular, because one of them snapped off a while ago. Both channels have pretty standard programming for a broadcast network. You've got your morning news, daytime programming, soap operas, news at the top the hour, nightly news and informational programs, and sports.

The difference can be the content. We only let the kids watch news and sports here because, let's face it, soap operas really aren't helping anybody. Sports are really straight forwards to watch. It only soccer and it's always English Premier League or UEFA Champions League. The commentary is English language and then the local station guys will translate the major points so the viewer knows what is happening. Usually they announce it after I've already translated it to the kids, so it's pointless.

We let the kids watch news usually about 3 or 4 nights a week because it's important for them to know what's going on. More importantly so it will dispel myths they hear all day long. And when I say myths, they are things like the first president of Mozambique rose from the grave to exact his revenge, the government sold Mozambique Island, 5000 Chinese mail-order brides showed up at Nacala Port, and how women are outlawed from driving (good idea, but not true).

The problem is we have to kind of control them watching the news too, because they are kids. I remember my parents having to change the channel and mute the TV when I was young and the newscast would reveal the latest bombshell in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Except here, things don't get muted because subject matter is too adult in nature. Channels get changed because there is no limit to what images they will show on TV.

Last week there was somewhat hilarious report we saw about a tornado that touched down in some rural market on the other end of the country and swept everything in the market away. Everybody's [food for sale, clothes for sale, pots and pans for sale] was lost and destroyed. That was not the funny part.

The funny part was when they showed a guy that used to sell corn claiming that for the last three weeks he had been stockpiling corn in an area no bigger than your sofa. He estimated that he lost probably $3,000 of product. (that amount of corn here would fill a semi-truck. The kids laughed at him for obviously lying because the government had announced they would send relief checks.

There was another lady they interviewed at the scene. She was standing in front of her destroyed mud brick house surrounded by her four kids. She was talking to the camera telling how all she had was swept away, her food, her roof, her pots, pans, bed was all gone. She also said the wind from the tornado was so strong that it tore the shirt right off of her. She was giving the interview without a shirt. And the interview went on for three minutes, saying how her kids are studying in school and now their notebooks and pencils are gone and she went to the school and it was destroyed. Really sad, tragic stuff. Luckily nobody died, but during her whole interview the boys were laughing hysterically and the girls were yelling at the television, “PUT ON A SHIRT! HAVE YOU NO SHAME?!?!”

Then, due to an error at the TV station, after the tornado story was finished, instead of playing to tape about expanding the railway to the south of the country, they repeated the story about the tornado. We got 11 more minutes of the same storm coverage we'd already seen. Including three minutes of our topless tornado victim and three minutes of boys rolling around in even more laughter and even more enraged girls shouting at the TV. Watching television is not a passive activity in Mozambique.

But it's not only funny stuff like having worry about a room full of teenage boys ogle topless tornado tits for minutes. The style of reporting can be considered so offensive. It's much more familiar to a Michael Moore type interview where you just storm people until they give you an answer. There is also no protection to privacy or anything of that matter. There was one story we saw where a guy was arrested for stealing a car. Usually, most news stations in the U.S. will not mention a name or show a face until the dude has been officially charged. Here, they were at the scene when he was led away in cuffs, had a long shot of his face while the reported did a monologue. But then the story got better.

And by better, I mean more ridiculous.

The camera crew then started talking about him, how old he was, what neighborhood he was from, and they took a camera to his house. Showed us just how to get there, and then started doing an interview with his wife. The wife then started introducing all the kids. I'm sure this was such a novelty that she felt obligated to show thousands of viewers at home lengthy close-ups of her family and give the names of her grade-school aged children.

The hardest part of the story to fathom was not that they showed the accused thief or basically did an expose on his family. The hardest part to imagine was them catching the car thief! Recall, for a moment, that I Iive in Nampula. While certainly not a lot of carjacking goes on, this is the same town where, rather infamously, a man robbed a police truck and took off with a load of heavily armed police in the back. They police were all scared, jumped out of the moving truck, and the bandit got away. That they they caught the bandit this time certainly ought to give them a well earned pat on the back.