Thanksgiving

I wanted to get this out sooner, but we lost power and internet like crazy. The internet just came back. Thanks to everybody who sent me birthday/Thanksgiving wishes (yes, they were the same day this year).

God has given me a lot of reason to be thankful this year. For example, here is everything that happened to me yesterday and the reasons I’m thankful.

• I’m thankful for waking up at 4:30 and driving to the market to buy more beans so we could eat lunch. The thirty minutes I sat in the car while Helder was inside buying beans were amazing as I got to watch the sun rise over Nampula.
• I’m thankful for returning home and taking an ice-cold shower with running water and a roof over my head. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for running water. Or the roof.
• I’m thankful for having a special birthday breakfast with Victor and Christina. Christina makes the best french toast this side of the Zambezi. Yes, my birthday was on thanksgiving this year.
• I’m thankful for having enjoyed the morning chatting with by new friends, Joe, Courtney, and Patricia, who all happen to be staying here while traveling through Mozambique.
• I’m thankful for exploring parts unknown with Joe (visitor) and Jeremias (kid at the orfonato) as we’re looking for my friend who has a barber shop “somewhere over there” according to everybody we asked.
• I’m thankful for sitting patiently for 2 hours as the barber tried to cut my massive head of thick hair (which is still falling out and receding, I swear) while 20 little kids looked on in amazement because not only was it the first time a white man has come to their neighborhood its also the first time they seen one getting his hair cut.
• I’m thankful for spending the last hour of the haircut telling the barber about the Gospel after he asked what the heck I’m doing in Nampula and why can’t I afford a car like all the others.
• I’m thankful for running into Gabriel (another kid at the orfonato) on the way home on the last chapa (bus) of the day and watching a fight ensue and the driver pull over halfway home and telling everybody to get off. Quality entertainment.
• I’m not quite as thankful for the 45-minute walk home after the bus left us in the middle of nowhere.
• I’m thankful for the visitors provided the money to give the kids and I an awesome Thanksgiving dinner that included for everybody: a huge plate of rice, a giant pile of french fries, ¼ of a chicken, a pop, ice cream, and home-made chocolate chip cookies.
• I’m thankful that everybody got to slap me on the back (a Mozambican birthday tradition, or so I’m told…)
• I’m thankful for all the laughing and joking going at dinner and everybody lying around with their belt unbuckled (just like home).
• I’m thankful for experiencing the Holy Spirit during the spontaneous time of worship and prayer after dessert that lasted for almost 2 hours.
• I’m thankful that our singing drowned out the noise of the witchcraft ceremony happening next door.
• I’m thankful that, even though I dearly miss my family and friends, Jesus has provided me with a fun and amazing group of family and friends here in Nampula to celebrate with.

Mozambique 101 - Economics Part 1

This is the next post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This one is all about the economy of Mozambique. Imagine this as a sort of brief and impersonal overview of just the facts. Its kind of like trying to read the license plate of a parked car when you’re going 60mph on the highway. 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.

Mozambique is one of the least developed countries on earth. There is really now way to soften that fact. Its about as third world as it gets, and Nampula is one of the most undeveloped parts of the country. In order to appreciate the gravity of just what it is like to be in one of the most undeveloped places in the world, you must first realize that much of the inability to develop is directly tied to the economic potential of the region. This frist post on economy is designed to tell you just what it looks like for most people in Nampula: where they live, what access they have, what they do for a living, what opportunites they have to spend their very hard earned dollars on, and just what the difficulties are from a purely economic standpoint.

To begin, I’m going to throw some slightly disjointed statistics at you. You may notice that this is the first time I’m directly stealing facts from Wikipedia (and even if I cited that Nampula is the Tatooine of the Empire it wouldn’t make a difference). The truth is for most of this I have a secret source. It is the “Strategic Plan for the development of the Province of of Mozambique”. Its an intra-governmental (emphasis on mental) memo that was circulated by the Provincial government here and was signed by the Governor himself. The only reason I have it is because I think one of the kids stole it from somewhere and gave it to me so they wouldn’t be caught with it. Consider that:

• Nampula is listed at 9th out of 11 provinces for Development. The two worse than us don’t have a city over 15,000 people.
• In our Province, 92% of people don’t have electricity, 78% don’t have a radio, 84% don’t have access to clean water.
• Six of the 18 districts of Nampula don’t have electricity at all.
• 85% of the Province practices agriculture for a living. Of these people, 2% are mechanized (tractors, combines, etc). The remaining 98% farm by hand without even the aid of animals.
• The Province declares that, “82% of roads and 88% of bridges are currently passable.”
• Half of cities don’t have a bank branch anywhere near them.
• There is one doctor for every 35,000.
• While unemployment it impossible to estimate, the Province does estimate than within Nampula City (pop. 1/2million) that 69% of people live in absolute poverty (less than $1 per day).
• The GDP (per capita) in our province is about $450USD per year. That number is an average weighted by the fact that there are a small amount of people that earn a ton of money. Still, it means that on average people earn about $1.25 per day.
• For the last 6 years, population growth has outpaced economic growth, and after accounting for inflation and population the economy of Nampula has been decreasing by about 2% per year.

Also, while the causality of the relationships between education and economics is very challenging to figure out, the problem is caused/exacerbated by the fact that the literacy rate is only 30% (85% and 55% of men don’t know how to read). To make matters worse, the university in our city is currently producing more lawyers than teachers.

Most people here are lucky if they can find a trade to practice or anyone to train them. People are reluctant to teach trades because once that person learns a skill (welding, mechanics, construction) they become a threat to take jobs from the person teaching them. Nobody has money to open a store and its impossible to get a loan for anything. Many people sell goods on the street (bread, fruit, coca-cola, counterfeit Chinese DVDs). The profit margin is so slim that a man selling ice cold coca-cola will earn only about $1.60 at the end of the day.

Many places (including the gov’t) pay people through direct deposit in order to eliminate corruption in the payment process. This results in every day lines being over 1hr long of people standing at the ATM to take out every last cent they have. It also results in most the ATMs in town running out of money frequently through the day.

I want people to appreciate that life here is tough, but there are regions exactly like Nampula all over the world. You can go to hundreds of towns in China, India, South Africa, middle-of-nowhere Mongolia and see that people live in the same or worse poverty that people in Nampula do. While places like the slums of India and a million people living in a garbage dump in Cairo and stone-age Aborigines in Australia get lots of attention, places like Mozambique are, on a regional scale (remember, twice the size of California), slightly unprecedented.

Next week we’ll look at how the government helps maintain the economy and put in places policies to promote growth and stability. And if you couldn’t tell, that last sentence was very sarcastic.

The Rainy Season Has Started

I've been waiting a long time to put this one up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NuA7AripfU

And I need another easy, short post because I've been busy.

Enjoy.

The one where I get right to the point

Talk about one step forward, two steps back. I don't have a roof right now on my house because its being replaced for a tin roof, but in the meantime, there is progress. Just this week I got running water to my house. On Tuesday, I got everything hooked up to the water tower and took my first non-bucket shower. It was glorious. Right after I finished, I stepped out of the shower and a huge gust of wind came and dumped a truckload of dust and dirt right on top of me while I was still soaking wet.

And that's when I got to take my second non-bucket shower. It too, was glorious.

Then the next day the water tank went dry and I've been back to taking bucket showers.

Shiny, Microwaved, DVD extras

I’m a little busy here and thus a little behind on writing the Moz 101 series. This week should have been about the economy, but it’s a little research intensive and it takes time I don’t have. So tune back next week to find out how exactly most people here make money (surprise! They don’t).

Until then, I’m just posting some stuff I edited out from the Government posts several weeks ago. Consider this the DVD extras of deleted scenes, or like your microwaved leftover meatloaf, or the good-looking produce on the top of the grocery aisle so you can’t see that the rest of the produce underneath is not super shiny and tasty, but just mediocre.

…But people don’t like the government just because it’s largely stupid. They don’t like it because Mozambique is the land of a billion rumors. I’ve heard that people don’t like president for these reasons: the president eats turkey every night for dinner, he sold Mozambique Island and kept all the money, he is outlawing cassava, he has a house in America and travels there once per week (presumably with the money he got from selling Mozambique Island), he’s secretly a muslim (he and Obama go to the same mosque) and he has two limousines which is crazy because he can only drive one at a time.

At the same time that they express their distaste for the government, they also revere their first president, Samora Machel, and place him slightly below God on the list of people they worship. I imagine it’s a little like all the hubbub surrounding George Washington back when America was starting up. Remember, that Mozambique has been independent for over 40 years and peaceful for about 20, so it’s a relatively new country. But while all the remains of George Washington today was he chopped down a cherry tree, said “I pity the fool that lie!” and carved wooden teeth out of the aforementioned cherry tree. I don’t have proof, but I think early Americans probably had stories about GW like he stood as tall as two men, he ripped a guys heart out with his teeth during the French Indian War, and spat in the face of Gen. Cornwallis.

But still, I find the level of rumors about the first president of Mozambique to be a little nauseating. Granted, the truth is a little blurred he by nature that rumors are much more interesting than fact. Which is fine, but people then MAKE the rumors fact. I’ve had three different people point out 4 different houses that the current President of Mozambique was raised in.

The two stories I hear all the time about President Machel both have to do with America (go figure). The first story is about how, despite not having more than a 5^th grade education, he was the smartest man in the world. He proved this by going to the United Nations after making himself the President of Mozambique. The kids tell me (and not 8 year old kids for bed time stories, but kids in high school) that when he was at the United Nations he was the only person able to communicate with all 450 countries there because he knew 450 different languages, whereas most the other Presidents can only talk with about 30-40. I don’t have the heart to tell them that the United Nations uses translators. I also don’t have the heart to tell them that there aren’t anywhere near 450 countries in the world.

The second story is about how the day after Samora Machel was made president he flew to America. The kids say he was going there to meet the first president of America (boy, was he out of luck). When he was there he was refused entry because he refused to surrender his sidearm. After he convinced the guards that he was an honorable gentleman (historically debatable) he came inside to meet the president of America. The American president was both extremely racist and scared of getting AIDS that he wore a glove to shake Samora Machel’s hand. Machel was so offended that he ripped the glove and, in President Machel’s own words, “Greeted him hand to hand, man to man.” And that’s the story of how in June 1975 the President of Mozambique became the first black man to enter the White House.