You want me to go where?

The joke with most GPS navigation systems, whether it is part of your car or your phone (or you car phone those of you stuck in 1993) is that at some point it is going to tell you to go somewhere that doesn't exist. It will tell you to turn into a building that should be a road, or you won't be paying attention and you will be headed toward an identical address but in another town. At the very least, you can find an alternate rout or type in a new address and it will get you where you want to go.

Or people with smart phones just type in "Starbucks" and you get instant directions to sate your latte habit. Type in "chinese food" and you see reviews for the nearest chinese food restaurants and then get directions to them.

That doesn't work here. Not by a long shot. You can't head down City Boulevard and then take a left on Maple Street. In theory there are street names, but only foreigners know them. These foreigners come from places where every street, no matter how small, has a name and there is a number for every brick and mortar address.

Here, there are maybe about two dozen streets that have names, with only about three of those being major roads that continue in any direction for more than 500 metres. They are mostly all named after persons. And when you've never heard of the people before it doesn't make much difference trying to remember the names because you just can't. I remember being in Hawaii once and we were confused as all get out. How were we going to remember that Kamehameha Boulevard is next to Wiame'a Avenue that crosses Melekelikimaka Street. It was all Greek (or in this case, Hawaiian) to me. We ended up just remembering to turn at the Long John Silvers and our hotel was a block past the McDonalds.

In Maputo, there is considerably more city planning, and more streets and names, although I don't know that means people actually use the street names or not. I do find it funny that emails from the American Embassy remind us that it is located on the corner of Ho Chi Min and Karl Marx.

In Nampula you can get around much easier telling people which bairro to go to just pointing out landmarks along the way. Once you get near where you want to go, you just ask people where it is you're trying to go if it is a place you are unfamiliar with.

However, this is all relatively easy compared to when you are trying to give a ride to somebody and they are the ones telling you where to go. Culturally, and I don't know if it is a universal trait or only limited to the people that I end up taking places, is is almost forbidden to ask where it is I have to take them. There is an absurd amount of errands that have to be done, and most them involve going to a certain store or picking up and dropping of a certain person in a certain neighborhood.

Most of the time there is a flat-out refusal to tell me where it is we need to go, be it from the other staff or the other Mozambican's I ferry around. The staff all know by know to tell me where to go. The others just point and say "Start going that way." Really inspires confidence when the person giving directions at least knows that, of the two ways I could go leaving the orphanage gate, one will go 100 metres and then stop being a road while the other direction goes to absolutely everything.

I have learned that you absolutely need to know where to you are going before you leave because not only are there multiple ways to get there, but the people I'm driving are horrible at giving directions. Their idea of giving directions is wait until the truck is going at 50mph and then point to the intersection as we pass it saying, "You needed to turn there." And this is EVERY SINGLE TIME I DRIVE SOMEBODY. Are you noticing the irritation here?

And then after the second time it happens you tell the person that a car does not stop on a dime like a person walking and you need to to give a lot of warning before we get to where we need to turn. And then he still does it three more times, forgetting to say anything about turning until you are directly even with where you needed to turn. And eventually, at some point he will tell you to turn down a certain path to get to house. At this point I try to remain gracious, but usually end up saying something like, "Do you see the car we are in? It is a 4ton pickup. The path you told me to drive down is so narrow that a bicyclist just dismounted because he can't navigate well enough. What's that? Oh, cars come down here all the time? I guess we can go then."

Granted, this is not to say that directions are perfect from your GPS, or that people in western nations know how to navigate properly. This last year I was in Detroit doing some traveling with my family (this despite the fact that the Detroit Police openly campaign against tourism to Detroit saying that the city is unsafe). We were on the highway in a strange city with no map and all we knew is we needed to take exit 14B. Having sufficiently gotten this point across well ahead of time, when the moment came my dad pulled car on to exit 14A and my dad proudly announced "14A, just like you said," or something to that effect. The rest of the car let out a big collective, "NO! We wanted 14B, not A. B-as-in backtrack, B-as-is botched, B-as-in bungled."

In that sense, directions here can be easier because you tell people to go the stoplight and take a right. That is a really easy direction because the stoplight is 5k from here. And the next one after that is two more kilometers. There is one more stoplight after that, but people don't consider it a stoplight because it hasn't worked in over two years. If you make it past that, you can go straight out of town without bumping into another stoplight.

And anybody that has ever been to Nampula and given a ride to a Mozambican knows that the one question you can never ask under any circumstance is, "How much farther?" This question does not have an answer. It is answered always with the reply of, "Almost, we're really close." It doesn't matter how far away you are, when it comes to this question you are always very close. I learned very early that you are never very close, no matter how close people say you are.

I have been in so many situations so many different times that people have said, "We're really close, just keep going," or even, "just maybe five or ten more minutes more." That is usually a red flag for we are nowhere near yet. If somebody actually points out a landmark and says it it at that mountain or that river or that intersection I will keep going, but often somebody saying "Just a little farther," is codeword for being nowhere close.

That being said, sorry for the sporadic posting the last week or so, but I'm really close to finishing another story and it'll be up any day now.

Total Request Live: Nampula

The variety of radio programming here is not very impressive. Nor is it even a little impressive. There is BBC news, which is so amazing and in-depth and I can't even start talking about them because it will end up with an article titled "439 reasons I love BBC radio". There are a variety of religious outlets but they do about a good of job as if you turned on Christian TV in the US. You'd start asking who the ladies with all the makeup are and why are they selling prayer towels to support Israel.

There are more radio stations today than there were several years ago, but many of them classify as "community radio". This means public radio. And yes, it is about exciting to listen to as public radio in the US. Several of them play music. The rest just talk. Several of them sell airtime to different churches or ministries that play gospel music during their allotted time-slots, but they are rarely listened to.

Hands down, the most interesting radio station is RTP Africa. It is a station from Portugal and broadcast for the Portuguese speaking African countries (which number a grand total of two if you don't count a handful of islands who, combined, don't have a million persons). What makes RTP so darn interesting is that there isn't a genre of music they won't play. During select evenings around 9pm or so the DJ comes on-air with a program that "will take a special look into the music of ______". It lasts an hour and is the widest, broadest, oddest look at music that exists anywhere on the planet.

Simply put, if there exists 60 playable minutes of a certain type of music, they will do a show on it, explaining the history and importance of the genre. I have heard, and this is no exaggeration, shows about: glam rock, the waltz, motown, korean pop, U2's "Rattle and Hum", french folk songs, Miles Davis, Queen, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, South African disco, Afro-Cuban, big band swing, Vietnam war protest songs (from Vietnam), feminism (which I was unaware was a genre of music), and music from blaxploitation films (slightly aware of this as a genre).

I've let the kids listen in a couple of times, if only because the DJ usually tries to explain the importance of Miles Davis (important for the birth of modern jazz), motown (important only so Michael Jackson could moonwalk at the Motown 25th Anniversary concert), glam rock (important for Ziggy Stardust, duh), french folk songs (umm...), Beethoven's 9th symphony (only everything, ever), and Shaft (only everything, ever). The kids usually lose interest because R. Kelly never wrote a symphony, or had a disco album, or covered Queen.

The kids (and often myself) would rather listen to the few radio stations that play what I refer to as "party music". This is the genre that serves as the background for your Friday or Saturday night. To me, the most interesting part is the listener request time. Because most people don't know the names to songs, or even the artists, in order to communicate their request they are often left to resort to sing the song they want the DJ to play.

Sometimes, because the phone network will just forward your call to a random absolute stranger rather than the intended target. The DJ will ask the name of the person who is calling while the stranger, usually confused, will ask the DJ his name. The DJ instead of answering instead asks what music the caller would like to hear. The caller will usually ask to speak to his friend, Joe. Just give the phone to Joe. No, I don't want music. Where's Joe? This is a radio station? Well, when does Joe get back? Can you just get him for me?

Usually at this point the call will suspiciously drop and the next caller pops on the line. Also, when the caller goes on too long or gets to vulgar or racy the calls will get cut off. There is a little bit more patience when the caller is drunk. The calls are funnier the drunker the caller is.

Some of the stations are nationwide shows and some are local here in our city. The local ones usually occupy their evening hours with people calling in to give a shout-out to their neighborhood, their girlfriend, their classmates, their coworkers (really?) or their children. But, contrary to what you might be thinking, this isn't done during breaks in the music. This is accomplished by just turning down the music a little while they talk over, shouting into the phone so that it is barely understandable.

Every now and then we'll hear our bairro given a shout-out. Often people will be listening in a bar or disco and give a shout out to the people standing nearby listening to the radio. The market near the orphanage was once featured in the single greatest radio call-in shout-out I have ever heard or will ever hear again.

DJ: Good evening caller. What's your name.

Caller: Armando.

DJ: Welcome Armando. Where are you calling from.

Caller: I'm calling from Muacomvela.

DJ: And who would you like to greet this evening.

Caller: I want to greet my uncle Fernando.

DJ: And what would you like to say to your uncle.

Caller: Uncle, police are in our house looking for you. Don't come back here—.

And the call "dropped". I have no idea is Fernando is still a fugitive from justice, if Armando was charged as an accomplice, or what the heck the police were even there for. The situation, for me, will remain one of life's great mysteries.