The Most Wonderful Time of the Year?

Christmas, from my perspective, is generally not the most wonderful time of the year in Mozambique. The most wonderful time of the year might have to be April when the temperature is nice and cool and there is a soccer/football game on the TV every night. Christmas is hot, as in 100F hot. It is also humid, as in all of the humidity. It is also filled with a greater than normal amount of public drunkeness and general levels of crazy that are rivaled only by New Years. It is a level of crazy that is only matched when the national soccer team qualifies for the African Cup (only happened three times ever).

The craziness starts in the stores where the black in "black Friday" stands for black market. And doorbuster deals at Walmart are replaced by wallet buster deals here as prices climbs upwards each day it gets closer to Christmas. The law of supply and demand is in full effect, and demand is at the highest it will be the whole year.

Public workers are also facing the crunch. Not so much on their wallet (although that true for everybody) but on whether or not they should actually show up to work. In the private sector there is a little more leverage given to bosses to fire people for not showing up to work. If a shopkeeper the day before Christmas or New Years (his busiest of the year) is only half-staffed, he will be in big trouble. If the water utility only has half the workers show up, they just put out half the water.

The water situation this time of the year is grave. The rains have started, but it takes a little while to fill up the dams. Most people have to walk to communal water spigots because there just isn't enough supply or pressure to get to the taps in their homes. There is currently a huge project in the city funded by the Millenium Challenge Act to upgrade the infrastructure, but that is making only a statistical improvement in terms of quantities of water that CAN be pumped into homes. People still bust open pipes and flood streets all in the name of finding “free” water. I guy that I know that works for the water utility says that the improvements are nice and the funding is great, but it really isn't going to change anything expect for folks in the city in rich homes (surprise!).

The trouble that most people have this time of year is demand for electricity. Hundreds of people will rent speakers for the week with the objective of just playing music as loud as they can during the holidays. We play music too, except we own our speakers. All these people using their ghetto-blasters creates a surge on an already frail electricity grid. The night of the 24th I was in one bairro about 50 metres away from a transformer that exploded and left the area without electricity till who-knows-when.

Two years ago around Christmas, the transformer in our neighborhood exploded. Four days later we got electricity back and since then there has been a vast improvement in quality of electricity. During the day, it's possible to not know that you haven't had electricity for a matter of hours (as long as you aren't using the internet or running the pump on our well). During the evening, it's much more obvious. When the electricity goes out, it usually comes back within a matter of several hours.

This Christmas season, with the increased demand on electricity, I realized that consistency (to use the word loosely) of the electricity grid is due entirely to the army of technicians that are employed around the clock to keep the system in working order. In short, from December 20th to the 23rd, I can count the number of hours we had electricity during daylight hours on my hand. Hand, as in the singular, not hands plural. From Christmas all the way until new years the electricity came and went. The night of the 31st there was almost as much time without electricity as the city experienced was is known as brown-outs. Parts of the city are dimmed when demand is too high and after a few moments the lights come back on as another part of the city is shut off.

The 1st of January was slightly better, if only because demand for electricity was low. And since the 2nd when the technicians all reported to work hangover free, the electricity has been back to normal.

As for the internet, that has also been plagued by problems the last months, one of the reasons for my sporatic posting. I'm not sure how that works or why there are outages. The last time there was a major outage/slog in the internet was two years ago when an illegal fishing boat snagged with its anchor the only underwater cable connecting Mozambique with the rest of the world. I think in that case the government actually called the US to say, "Come fix your internet," until they finally paid some Indian company to repair it.

Basically, all of the public utility workers staying home for the holidays answered the age-old questions, "What would happen if Superman took the day off?" The idea is that without Superman patroling the streets, criminals would run amok and chaos would envelop whatever fictional city Superman lives in. (Tampa? I'm really not sure. Or is that where Spiderman lives?")

Here, when all the utility workers stayed home, people suffered from water (although that is a problem that dominates about 6 calendar months here in the city and 12 months outside the city) and were inconvenienced with electrical outages, surges, and explosions. Save us, Superman!