Mozambique 101 - Geography

This is the next post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This one is all about the geography of Mozambique. Find out how many people are, where they are, and what they don’t have. This series is my attempt to answer many of the questions that I’ve been asked about Mozambique, other than the always popular “where’s THAT?” These articles should help you understand what things are like in Mozambique and just how they came to be that way.

As a premise, geography usually includes a broader look at thinks more than just population, mountains and rivers. Geopgraphy is also a look at how environment affects all aspects of life, such as jobs, education, and health (hint: its not pretty). Much of that information, I think, is more relevant when expanded on, such as talking about agriculture, or family life. For this segment, we’re only going to look at the big picture aspect. And that picture starts with, well, a picture.

Click to see it bigger

Population

Mozambique is about 310 thousand sq miles (800 thousand sq km) making it about twice the size of California. A better analogy is to imagine for a moment that Mozambique is about the same size and layout of California, Oregon, and Washington put together. Now, aside from it being very big, it is home to about 28 million people. The capital city of Maputo (or San Diego, in our analogy) is home to over 3 million people. It is the largest city and the seat of power for the rest of the country. It is also the southernmost point of the country. This often creates regional tensions for people that live up north where we do. The next biggest city is Beira (like Sacramento, but on the coast). Beira is home to about 1.5m people and is the country’s largest trade port (like Mos Isley, if you’re still stuck on the Star Wars analogy from a couple weeks back). While the port in Maputo handles goods for just the city, Beira handles goods that are then sent inland to the other countries in Southern Africa.

North of Beira is the Zambezi river. This is the same Zambezi that Dr. Livingstone used when he ventured into Africa, so it has got some history. Unfortunately, all of that history occurs in Malawi and than further inland in Zimbabwe and Lake Victoria, so Mozambique generates zero tourism revenue from this. Also, the river cuts the country almost in half (imagine it’s a little north of Sacremento) and until about 8 months ago there was not even a bridge that went across it. The next major city we get to is the one where I live, Nampula (about where Eugene, OR would be). It’s the third largest city in the country ringing in at just over 0.5m people.

Maputo is the capitol, and Beira is the port. So what then is Nampula, you ask?

Nampula City

While I have not yet met anyone that officially classifies it as such, the city of Nampula is in many ways a refugee center. The economy here has zero manufacturing, near zero industry, and the service sector is so severely underdeveloped because of the fact that people don’t have money to spend. About ten years ago, the population of Nampula was about half of what it is today. In the years since, the regions experienced the worst flooding in a lifetime which was followed by several years of drought (there’s no middle ground here). The drought brought the hungry (even though everybody already here was hungry to begin with) and the floods brought the displaced (who were also very hungry).

Nampula Province

If you can add, you’ll notice that Maputo, Beira, and Nampula make up only about 5 of the estimated 28 million people in Mozambiqe. Well, that number is an estimate because the people in charge of this country figure that almost 60% of people live out in the country. I’m not talking in the country like the spend most of their time riding tractors, judging 4H fairs, and attending high school football games on Friday nights. When I say out in the country, I mean out in the country as in people that literally have nothing. Except for the clothes they are wearing and on rare occasions a motorbike, people live with nothing they can’t get themselves. Mud and bamboo huts, wooden handled tools, and homemade beer. No electricity, no water faucets, no tin roofing, not even mechanized farming. 98% of the farmers in our province perform all their work with hand tools, not even using animals.

In my province, an estimated 85% of people live out in the country, concentrated near villages of anywhere from 5 families, to 50 families. They live several days of walking from clinics or hospitals, often times even farther from schools or churches. Of the 18 districts our province, 6 don’t have electricity. 16% of the province has access to clean water.

Water

The government claims that it has ample supply, but no infrastructure to deliver clean water to everybody that needs it. I will vouch that indeed they do not have the infrastructure to do so because they can’t even do it here in the city. The government estimates that here in the city anywhere between 24-35% of people don’t have water. The estimate is such a broad range because the city knows how many people have water because they’re charging them, they just don’t know how many people are in the city. Here, people borrow water from their neighbors, or walk to community boreholes (deep drilled, hand pumped wells), or as a last case scenario go down to the river (its nasty, trust me).

As to the claim that the government has ample supply, that is blatantly false. For the last three months our city water has been shut off completely. It only returned about two weeks ago and won’t flow for more than 2 hours a day. It is only the grace of God that we have a well here instead of walking several km to get water.

Climate

Its pretty darn hot. Enough said. It has been over 95F since I arrived in September. It continues to get hotter (over 100F) will only cool down when it starts raining in December. Then it cools until April when everybody will be in sweaters when it’s a frigid 80F.

There is much more to cover for Geography, but it will get rolled into upcoming posts dealing with Health, Transportation, and how many species of fire ants are here (my count is at 6).

High School Musical

A little over a week ago the high school in our neighborhood held a dance to celebrate the end of the year school year (yes, it’s the end of the school year here). I have no way of knowing what exactly happens at the dance because I didn’t attend and it was only for 12th graders. I also have nobody to ask because we have three kids in 12th grade here and none of them went. I also can’t ask any neighborhood kids that went because they don’t even remember going to the dance because they were already blacked out from drinking .

I first figured something was different that day when driving home that night there was an unmistakable thump-thump-thump of the dance floor. When I arrived at the orphanage the music was just as loud. There must have been a lot of speakers because the school is about a kilometer away from us. I asked the kids what was happening and they told me it the end of the year dance. I asked them the theme and they didn’t know so I’m going to assume it was the enchantment under the sea dance.

After several hours of the constant thumping of very non-African techno music, the tone suddenly changed at about 8pm. All of a sudden, the smooth, dulcet tones of Celine Dion came soaring over the neighborhood. The ears of everybody in the orphanage perked up as for the next three hours we were treated to wave after wave of romantic soundscapes from Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, and about 5 other singers whose names I don’t know. What I can tell you is that if it was a power ballad from the 80’s, then they played it.

What was perhaps most perplexing about the whole thing was what the kids said when the music changed. I don’t know if there’s a way to fully describe the oddity and humor of the situation unless you experienced it, but then again I wouldn’t be doing my job if I weren’t trying. As soon as the music changed to the sappy romantic songs, all the kids said, “Ahhh, the dance is starting” I was thinking that it meant like when you’re at the awkward high school dance and nobody is on the floor until Aerosmith booms over the gym (Cause I don’t want to miss a thing). I asked them if they meant that people don’t dance to the other three hours of music we’d just been listening to. They said that it literally meant that they don’t open the doors until the romantic music starts playing and all the other stuff was just a prelude to let people know there was a dance going to take place.

I think that there is really no way to describe just how funny this was to me. Especially since the whole mood of the orphanage changed when the music changed. They had more or less ignored the first three hours of the thumping techno. But as soon as the romantic, power ballad-esque genre started up all ears were instantly glued to the tunes flowing over the night sky.

The one about Vampires

The vampire craze has officially hit Mozambique. Nobody here is quite sure why vampires are all of a sudden popular, but then again I’m not quite sure why they are popular in America either. The other day I witnessed several kids using cut out paper in their mouths to represent Vampire teeth. To understand why the kids are suddenly into vampires, we need to backtrack a little bit.

The kids used to have a TV in the cafeteria. I think it is because somebody took it from Victors house when he was away in America, but nevertheless it was there. The TV serves three main purposes that I’ve order them from least important to most important.

-Least Important: News. Many Mozambicans (and Africans in general) live in a bubble. Seventy percent of the population here can’t read, and my top-secret internal governmental statistics say that 75% of the people in our Province don’t even have a radio. When people hear of things it is because of word of mouth. Unfortunately most of the news people here is completely trivial. I consider major news to be scientists discovering that the species of mosquito responsible for carrying malaria is now genetically classified as two distinct species, creating a whole new set of difficulties for treatment and eradication. People in Nampula consider major news to be that, due to weird marriage laws in France or Asia or somewhere, some lonely single girl married a pillow while another gal married a photo of a celebrity. Anyways, we feel its important for the kids to know about what is really going in their country, the rest of Africa, and the world.

-Semi-Important: Tom & Jerry. Every day at 7:50am (why an odd time, I don’t know) until 8:40am is a full 50 minutes of commercial-free Tom & Jerry cartoons. Everything the kids are doing stops so they can sit around and watch cartoons. I too and glued to the TV for this part of the day. Why is it so great? Its great because Tom and Jerry can’t talk so the kids understand it and its always slapstick humor that the kids really enjoy.

-Most Important: Soccer. At least two to three times a week there’s a soccer game on TV. Sometimes it’s a Mozambique league, but often there’s a bootleg broadcast of Portugal, Champions League, or even a UEFA game if we’re lucky. This is the highlight of the day, but nobody can every predict when they’re going to be on.

With the TV came one rule. That rule was no watching soap operas (tela novellas). These are kids, and as many of the programs come from Brazil they are way to over-sexualized for kids (or even adults in the super-conservative culture we have here). Well, after repeated warnings Victor caught all the kids sitting around watching a program called “Os Mutantes” and took the TV away. It’s hard to figure out, because the plot was a little thin in places, but I think “Os Mutantes” a show about Vampires that work in a hospital. I'm not sure exactly, because I may be confusing it with the other two vampire related programs I've seen so far here.

Mutants: Ways of the Heart

Well, as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, it wasn’t long after discovering the program that some of the younger kids started making fake vampire teeth and running around pretending to bite each other, or in the case of Jose they were actually biting each other. Rumor is we can get the TV back sometime around the New Years (yes, in January). I’m going to look into if there are any big soccer games coming up as an excuse to to see if we can get it back earlier. Its not because I miss soccer, but because I miss Tom & Jerry.

On a related note, I asked the kids if they were on team Jacob or team Edward and they said that both Edward and Jacob were stupid.

Pictured: How Twilight should have ended.

Mozambique 101 - Government Part Two

This is the next post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This post explains what happens when the government makes a decision nobody likes. This series is my attempt to answer many of the questions that I’ve been asked about Mozambique, other than the ever-popular “where’s THAT?” These articles should help you understand what things are like in Mozambique and just how they came to be that way.

Previously in this series we covered that Mozambique used to communist until about the time that the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet Union collapsed. Around that time, the President of Mozambique announced that he was making an enlightened decision and moving the country in the direction of capitalism and economic freedom. People would have appreciated this, if it had actually offered any change for the masses.

Because the country has such tight restrictions on foreign investment it means that foreigners don’t invest (they kind of do, but if you look at your syllabus you’ll see we don’t cover that until Economics Part 2). What foreign investment there is goes straight to the salaries for the government. About six months ago, France announced that it would be cutting portions of its foreign aid and was eliminating about $150million in aid to Mozambique. The response of Mozambique was to cry foul to the European Union and complain that if France pulled their support it would mean a 10% cut to their federal budget. That’s basically because there’s nothing in Mozambique that generates money except for European aid.

The threatened reduction of foreign aid can often lead to confusing policies. If you follow world commodities you’ll know that grain prices surged in August because Russia accidentally lit all their wheat fields on fire or something. As a result, world grain prices surged and suddenly bread costs more. Well, here in our nice, peaceful (read: walking on eggshells) corner of the world the government sets bread prices because it subsidizes the grain coming into the country. So when they announced there would be a 30% increase in the price of a loaf of bread the people responded with 4 days of riots.

Now, since news out of the country was mostly silent, I’ve managed to piece together that the bread riots were made up of one part European Football Game Riot (people lighting flares, turning over cars, setting garbage on fire) and two parts L.A. Race Riot (looting, tire fires, people hurling rocks at police, and the police firing rubber bullets into the crowd to disperse it). Its was nothing like the Seattle World Trade Organization Riots in 2000 because those weren’t people from Seattle, they were all hippies from Colorado and Canadians.

Back to the story. So, day three into the riots, the (formerly) communist government finds out that people have been organizing the riots using their cell phones. To find out why everybody in one of the ten poorest countries in the world has a cell phone you’ll need wait for the week on Urbanization. So the Government decides to shut down the phone networks in the entire country. They then later demanded that the cell companies (both of them) turn over all text messages in the last week. They then correlated numbers they knew with people who happen to be known members of the opposition party and threw them all in jail.

The problem is now that most cell phone users are anonymous. People buy a phone, a SIM card, and buy credit that you can find on pretty much any street corner. So the government is now demanding that these millions of anonymous users register their SIM card with the government. And this is how you have to register. Everybody in my city of 500k people is going to the only two stores in town that sells phones, paying for a piece of paper that they fill in their name, phone number, and national ID number. They then take that to a photocopy shot and have it photocopied with their national ID card and turn that in to the government. In an odd coincidence the price of a photocopy has tripled since two weeks ago when this started. But I’m sure that can be explained by the government reducing the subsidy for toner and size A4 paper. I think Christina said it best when she said, “For a country that can’t do a single thing right they’re putting bureaucracy in the one place they don’t need it.”

Back to those riots, the government was threatening to raise the price of bread by 30%. In the four days of riots (which took place in only two cities) a confirmed ten people died. This is because, supposedly, the police were using live ammunition to quell the rioters. I’m not saying that in the sense that countless people dies, but they found 10 people dead. And I bet only three of you reading this knew that any of this even happened. Meanwhile, France was in the top of the headlines because people are on strike because they are raising the retirement age by two years. In a country where people can’t afford bread and work till they die at the ripe old age of 45, France’s protest look pretty petty from where I'm sitting.

Next time on Mozambique 101 we’ll be discussing Geography. And for those of you that don’t like Geopgraphy, you probably still won’t so I’ll try to keep it short.

Misleading Lyrics

Once in a while we get some traditional, home grown Mozambican music on the radio. Not hip-hop covers by Mozambicans, but more traditional African music. I used to love when it came on the radio because its happy and fun to listen. I used to because now I can fully understand the lyrics of these songs. They range from just absolutely bizarre to slightly disturbing.

One such music the other day was a full choir of people singing the happiest song I ever heard. After asking three different kids to verify the lyrics I discovered they went something like this:

Don’t beat your mother. I said don’t beat your mother.

Don’t beat your mother because then you father will have nobody to hit.

Very tragic, but not really uncommon in the culture here. While abuse is not permissible the assumption is she probably did something to deserve it. The next day there was another song that caught my ear. It was a man singing with a choir to back him up. I don’t remember word for word, but it was something along the lines of a man talking to his wife saying “You'd better cook food. If you don’t I’m going to take you back to your father and ask for your sister in exchange”.

Trust me, that second sounds a lot more uplifting when you hear it.