In Which We Break Things

Things break in Nampula and they break a frequently. Sometimes spectacularly. Rains come and houses get destroyed, trees get uprooted and roads washed out. The electricity surges and light bulbs pop and electronics start smoking. Cars drive---or I should say people drive the cars---and hit other cars.

Most consumer goods sold here in Mozambique are third rate goods meant for the third world. When a factory is Malaysia spins cotton, the low-grade stuff gets sent here for clothes and fabric. When Vietnam exports rice, the rice full of chaff gets sent to Africa. Do you buy rice? When was the last time you had to sift through your food before cooking it. When I buy Chinese light bulbs, it's customary to plug them in at the store before making the purchase because, by a rough count, about one-in-five don't work right out of the box.

Victor bought plastic lawn chairs for his house last week. Brand new. The very first evening I was sitting right next to him when all of a sudden a chair leg broke and gave way right from under him. He fell hard to the ground. The chair just plain sucked (ed. note: removed comment about Victor's expanding waistline).

Take the street lights here for example. It's pretty well known that a street light should come on at night and go off during the day. Not here. It's very normal to see street lights on for days at a time and then decide to go off during the middle of the night. It's also not uncommon for the street lights to stay off for days at a time. It's just one of the quirks. If there was an easy fix to it (maybe putting all the lights on master switch and have a guy turn them on and off) I'm sure they'd have done it by now.

Another thing is traffic lights. There are only about 15 traffic lights in the whole city. One of them I've never seen work. Others don't quite work all the time. There's one stoplight we pass going in to town. For the longest time it would only change after about 3.5 minutes. I timed it. (Sometimes there is NOTHING to do here.)

Recently, it's been sped up so much that only about three cars can get through before it changes. Oh, and also the yellow stopped working. It goes red the same time the other one turns green and there are no yellows. Motorists have learned to pretty much ignore the stoplight altogether.

Maybe my favorite example of things breaking recently was a radio station last week. The entire station got stuck on a commercial break playing the same 7 straight commercials for THREE WHOLE DAYS. It just looped all seven over and over. There was one day that a whole bunch a kids wanted to hear it because they heard, “it was going change soon and start playing new advertisements.” I compulsively tuned past it about every 15 minutes just to see when it would change.

Sometime Monday evening it finally started playing music. And not just any music. It was playing late 80's British rock. Specifically, it was playing what I later learned was “Shine On” by The House of Love, a British indie rock band from the last. While I not expecting that song (the station usually plays pop/dance music), I was definitely not expecting for the station to play the rest of their self-titled 1989 album.

Since that day, going on almost another week at last check, not only has the station started playing music, it's been dubbing itself. This means that either there is another station playing on the same frequency and the radio picks up both songs, or the single station has figured out how to play two songs at the same time. It's unlistenable.