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April 24, 2005
Whirled Music
Many friends have asked me about the music of Mozambique. While much of what I heard imitated the music of neighboring cultures and Western R&B and rap, this show delves into musical traditions native to the country. The show's approach is pretty anthropological and thus the host has a tendency to exoticize what she's seeing and hearing, but the music itself is pretty interesting.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 12:56 AM | Comments (1)
April 19, 2005
'Watch Out For the Tete 40 Degrees'
These were the last words from the director of Medicins Sans Frontieres' office here in the city of Tete before sending me out into the heat. It is hot, and the sun is blinding. Unlike Maputo and Beira, it is a dry heat. Everyone at MSF gives the heat as the first reason they're not planning to renew their contracts for a second year here. On my 10-hour bus ride here, the crops along the road were withered and most of the trees looked like they were dying, too.
Which brings me to my 10-hour bus ride. This is no better than anyone else's African bus ride story, but I hope it is no worse. I promised it so here it is. The setup, in brief: It is impossible to fly from Beira to Tete. (It is also impossible to fly from Chimoio to Nampula, but that's a different story.) I decided to come to Tete and, after the warm welcome from MSF, I'm glad I did. But it involved a minibus ride ($10, or $1 an hour) across three provinces.
The bus leaves from Beira at 4:30 in the morning. At 4 a.m., you don't want to be wandering the streets of Beira by yourself, so I take a taxi the few blocks from my hotel. A disproportionate number of taxis here have smashed windshields, but this one is an extreme case. The guy's windshied has a conspicuously head-shaped dent in the upper left corner, spiderwebbing the glass and bending it inward to the point that it looked like it could collapse at the lightest touch.
I knew I needed to avoid a repeat of my ride to Chimoio, in which my unwilligness to part with my bags overruled my common sense and I spent the ride with my soft-sided suitcase in my lap. In the 80+ degree heat. This time I stuff the suitcase under my seat. As we set off, a woman with a baby tells the guy who had the window seat in my row that he was in her spot. He pretends he did not speak her language -- Portuguese. I'm just trying not to bruise my banana. After a few tries at this he gives up and relinquishes the spot, leaving me in the aisle, this woman in the window and a spot in between.
At first I'm glad to be rid of the guy, who seemed drunk and whose feet were sporting a particular kind of B.O. Then she starts nursing away next to me. I noticed that of five or more babies on our trip (the bus, which holds 50 people, was full most of the way) not one cried for more than a few seconds. Judging by the woman next to me, that's because at the least cry the infants were offered a boob.
When the engine starts just after 4:30, the whole bus shakes. It´s a rattling old thing of indeterminate make, age and origin. There´s less leg and shoulder room than on your average domestic airline. The bus makes a spitting noise like an ATM dispensing cash every few hundred feet and seems to struggle up to 60 kilometers per hour. A chappa named Bugle Boy passes us as I notice a smell of burning electronics. The bus lights flicker ominously. We roll through the lamplit streets of Beira -- Oh Beira! City of dream and disillusionment! I forsake thee. So far I am lucky. No one in the middle spot.
The extra shanty (beer + sprite) last night was a bad idea, me winking at the wendies coyly. Not because I feel hung over, but because I realize any bowel situation will not resolve itself well on this trip. I don´t eat or drink for the first few hours just in case it primes my system for action.
Around five we stop to kick someone off the bus who doesn't belong or didn't pay. Shortly after that we hit the part of the road from Beira to Chimoio that's never been repaired since the 2001 floods washed it away. The road goes to dusty, potholed gravel. The sun's not up and that's a good thing. We'd cook if we drove with windows closed. Someone's luggage falls during this stretch of road but I'm too close to sleep to figure out what happened.
At 6:45 it's raining and we take our first bathroom break; everyone heads for the field as we get mobbed by kids selling fruit, nuts and drinks. Back on the bus, the kid in front of me stands up and it smells like he crapped his pants.
The bus, which lacks windshield wipers, is steaming up. Fog. Rain. Pedestrians on the road. The baby next to me is burbling happily away but the mom seems disconnected and hauls out her boob again. So far, so good, though my banana was ruined when I fell asleep on it.
In Chimoio, at 7:40 a.m., we really get mobbed by vendors. They crowd the bus, shoving wares up and into the windows even as we pull away. I buy a yogurt through the window but then I realize it's warm and the bottom is all sucked in botulism-style, so I don't eat it. The hawkers get the worse deal, as banana peels and egg and nut shells fly out of the bus at them. Littering of any kind off this bus is accepted and encouraged.
We hit the main road to Tete around 8:15. It's a good road, two lanes, painted yellow and white. The bus smells like citrus after everyone lights into their unripe oranges from Chimoio.
At 8:45 we pick up more people, which leaves me in the middle seat between two nursing mothers. The new woman has a smaller child who is kicking me, while the other one just barely lacks the dexterity to grab my pen. Noticing this, her mother whips out the boob.
Around 9:10 the good road disappears and we stop again for a bathroom break. All the small towns we pass inevitably have a Frelimo flag, often in tatters, along the road. There's also an oil tanker, upright but quite clearly very stuck, on the side of the road. On the next bathroom stop I venture into a public toilet and regret that move very quickly.
The woman to my left mixes up some instant cereal and water and feeds it to her kid. Much of it gets tossed up almost immediately into her hand. But then he starts putting it away. She looks much younger than the other mother, and she's dressed more poorly, or at least more like someone from the rural areas. Her hair is dirtier, too, but she buys something at nearly every stop. (Most everyone buys huge bunches of bananas early in the trip, I presume to sell later at slightly higher prices elsewhere.) I wonder if she's not breastfeeding because of AIDS. Breastfeeding is a cultural necessity here, and if she's forgoing it on a bus it may be a very public statement of her HIV status. That would be unusual, given the stigma attached to the disease.
More people, more women with babies get on. The guy in front of me has four toes on his left foot. It's getting rockier, less flat, hotter. No real sign of people, even off away from the road. The settlements along the road are more dense than in the lower provinces. Withering among the scrub are the first baobab trees I see in Mozambique. About 100 students stand in front of an open-air corrugated metal shack. A Jehovah's Witness church bakes in the sun, one of the few concrete buildings in the towns we pass. A whirlwind of dirt and dust spins 10 thin meters in the air in a public square. Kids draw water from scummy pools, and the river beds we cross are mostly dry.
The kid to my left is coughing up some Super Maheu "energy food" drink. I hope it's not because he's sick of me making faces at him. The other baby, who has a rash all across her back, is trying to drink from the teat with no success, so her mom switches to water.
At 2:25, we're barreling down hill, heading into Tete proper. The city lies on the Zambezi River, still full of water. Just a minute ago each baby had a hold of me: The one on the right, my pen, and on the left, my notebook. There are big -- bigger than big-box -- warehouses going up outside town. Boys carry calves with all four feet bound together upside down and lay them out for sale. Every dog in sight is lying in the shade, and I wonder if each is alive. A huge suspension bridge spans the Zambezi, and that is where we turn away from the river, into downtown and the end of the journey.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 05:03 PM | Comments (7)
April 11, 2005
The Cost of Corruption
What would you pay to remodel a youth center in the middle of nowhere? When I showed up in Buzi, off the beaten path on the way from the ocean to Zimbabwe, it was a rainy afternoon and no one was on the streets or in the town's new-looking sports complex. Inside the barn-like youth center, however, about 25 high school-aged kids were getting a lecture on reproductive anatomy. A debate broke out about the meaning of virginity in this context and the teacher had to step in to settle the issue - I'm not quite sure what it was. These kids were supposed to take these lessons back to their peers in the district.
The training and the half-completed remodeling, designed to provide areas for peer counseling on sex and, eventually, disease testing, are funded by a large, international group working on dozens of these sites in Mozambique. If the group finds a contractor to do the work, it may cost $3,000 or $4,000. When the government does the work, the group gets a bill for $7,000, $10,000, once even $25,000. "I respect all cultural issues, but corruption, no," the group's director tells me in the library of its Maputo office. "It's a question of human rights. People are dying."
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 02:09 AM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2005
Less is More
Mozambique is hard at work on reducing its number of blood banks by 75 percent. "It's not a better system but it's one in our condition that is feasible," says Joel Samo Gudo, the head of the country's blood system. Twenty-seven local hospitals now have blood banks, but rather than creating a stable stock of blood, this decentralized system means that blood for transfusions gets provided on an ad hoc basis, often by patients' family members.
Unlike some countries in the region, Mozambique screens its blood for HIV, which it has done since 1988. Transfusion is the most efficient way to transmit the virus, so accurate screening is crucial. But getting test kits to rural hospitals is not always easy, particularly during the rainy season when roads disappear. Twenty-seven blood banks means 27 sets of staff to train on testing procedures, and 27 places things could go awry. "Can you meet with hundreds of guys each time?" Gudo asks. "It's difficult." He has a staff of four to do training. A more centralized system, like neighboring Zimbabwe's, should cut down on the potential for errors.
Ironically, U.S. funding exists for this project for exactly the reason America's approach is often criticized. Rather than pool money and let the Mozambicans spend it according to their plans, the United States gives money directly to aid groups and other folks on the ground. "Probably blood transfusion would not be a priority" for the government, Gudo says. "The ministry would say 'no, I have something more important.'" In this case, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, along with the American Association of Blood Banks, is providing "technical support," which is a popular euphemism that can mean anything and everything.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)
April 09, 2005
Anything Done for the First Time Unleashes a Demon
Tomorrow I begin my multi-day journey back to the United States. When I arrive, I'll still have plenty of notes to type up and, I hope, many stories to tell. I plan to keep posting those stories here, so keep checking back, and keep sending your comments. Thanks for reading.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 04:08 AM | Comments (0)
Panic in the Park
By day, the park across the street from where I'm staying hosts strolling couples and friendly neighborhood soccer games. At night it's a different world. Groups of women line up to approach the cars that flash their lights from a block away. The women seem to have made peace with the people who live here; the one group avoids the other.
Tonight I walked by a pack of women, ready to ignore their hisses and calls. But then I figured: Why not talk to them, find out about their lives and how the protect themselves? They just saw me come out of the house. Clearly I'm not a customer.
"Hello," said one woman. "Hello," I said. "Do you speak English? I want only to talk." From one woman in front of me suddenly there were five. One began to grind against my leg and I felt hands all over me. I pulled back. "Faaahck and saaahck." "Goood blowjob. Goood blowjob." The women smiled up at me like clowns.
I stepped away and turned toward the nearest big street. A woman grabbed each arm and walked with me. When we passed a dark space between houses they tried to pull me in. "Please." "You fuck me." "Good blowjob." They pressed themselves against me with laughing enthusiasm and twisted my arm and I was almost afraid I they were stronger than me. "I want only to talk," I said again. "Let me go." Slowly, they did.
I hailed a cab and headed to Mambo's, one of two large, Western-style clubs in Maputo. It was only a few blocks away that I realized I should be worried for the women and not myself. How many men had they been with that night? How many times had they used protection? I could smell their sweat. How did they arrive at a place where they could project such joy into such ignominy?
I walked into the back room to a DJ in a Terps hat playing some sort of Afro-Euro techno. Everyone was doing an elaborate line dance. A man, Torobinesque, clung to a woman in a leopard-print alligator dress as she stared blankly at the SMS on her cell phone. I didn't recognize it at first, but yes, it's a dance even my mother knows. The Electric Slide.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 03:47 AM | Comments (2)
April 08, 2005
Another Long Travel Story
I may be paraphrasing myself here, but you can't get from Tete to Nampula. The fastest way, if you can believe it, is to fly from Tete to Maputo and then Maputo to Nampula. These are not frequent flights. If I don't get out of Tete on Friday night, I'm stuck until Sunday or Monday. The flight is full, but I buy a ticket anyway and go to the airport two hours early. (The way involves walking down a dirt path that's too narrow to accomodate a car.)
The woman who opens the LAM desk tells me I don't have a seat on the plane. I tell her I know, but.... Either she senses I don't speak much Portuguese and doesn't want to have a drawn-out non-conversation or she deeply respects the efforts I've gone to and my profound need to get the hell out of Tete and just hands me a boarding pass. I spend the next few hours next to some local bishop drinking Fanta.
The following morning I am back at the Maputo airport getting on the plane to Nampula. They open the gates and the crowd surges across the runway, but when we get to the plane it's not ready. We trudge back and I end up close to the door, so when they need to bump a few people into first class I'm right there. So far, so good.
Ilha de Mocambique is about two hours east of Nampula. My ride takes three and a half. The going rate remains about a dollar an hour. It's a bus not much bigger than a standard van, though at several points I count 38 people inside. I should have taken a minivan, which loads up and leave faster and stops less often. But how would I have seen so much of the countryside that way?
Nampula is one of the most densely populated parts of Mozambique, but you wouldn't know it looking out from the paved roads. In the distance are Yosemite-style rock faces that look like they'd be perfect for climbing. Otherwise, it's flat, dotted with old churches and new mosques. Nampula is another culture from the rest of Mozambqiue, about 50 percent Muslim. Boys and men at the bus station want their photo taken and are very persistent, goofing off, making faces, and taking off their shirts until a large crowd has grown in front of my lens. I realize I won’t have enough money to pay them all, as they expect, but so do they, and call it off.
Our driver wears a Nike hat and a t-shirt from Michael Jackson's Dangerous tour. At our first stop, about 200 meters down the road from the bus/rail station, we load an immense quantity of beer on top of the van. Suddenly there is a commotion and the crowd outside radiates out from a nucleus of attention. I have to stand up to see, but there is a thin, three-foot green snake slithering through the dust. The men take turns throwing rocks at it and whipping it with long sticks. "Cobra," they shout. Eventually it subdues. The driver slips a stick below its inert body and lifts it to show to the crowd. Behind him, kids walk out of the fields chewing sugar cane.
Sitting and waiting to begin again, I notice that the bus is crawling with inch-long roaches. They slither across the seats and the bare interior, disappearing into holes in the metal. The man who works the sliding door, packing people in and taking money, slaps the side of the bus twice -- whang whang -- and we are off again.
At our frequent stops in small towns we're greeted by the usual coterie of food vendors selling wet peanuts, eggs and sodas. I also see a boy selling fresh chicken wings, and shrimp fried with the head and shell on, and kids selling squashes, starfruit and melon. From big coolers men hawk plastic bags of water and milk, which buyers bite, suck and discard. There are empty plastic bags everywhere. At one stop a man boards carrying a small chicken in a wicket basket. Snot bubbles from the nose of the kid behind me, who stares fascinated at the bird. A man crawls up to the bus on four stumps and begs silently.
The bus seems to be in decent shape. On the downhills, when we get up a head of steam, the engine lets out a continual groan as if it has no choice about keeping up the pace, but isn't happy about it. Once we get close to the ocean, the driver seems to sense the salt air and speeds up, veering around other cars on tight curves.
When we get to the end of the land, we pile into an open-backed pickup that takes us across the one-lane bridge to Ilha. This two-kilometer island was the colonial capital until 1898 and a port whose European use dates back to the 15th century. It's now a UNESCO cultural heritage site and is home to the oldest European building in the southern hemisphere. The streets are narrow and empty. There are many rows of orderly trees and streets that threaten to close off, then open into green plazas. There are also many, many ruined buildings of unknown but decrepit age. The island has one ATM, one disco and one Internet cafe.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2005
Wish You Were Here
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 05:14 PM | Comments (0)
Only Connect
One interview.
"You see the problem and you feel like you want to help but you can't because it's not up to you to decide. It's hard to work in that environment."
Mozambique's five-year plan to fight AIDS is optimistic. It has planks for nearly every ministry, from drug treatment and care for AIDS patients to program for prevention, education and orphan work. It's all coordinated through the Ministry of Health and a National AIDS Council established just a few years ago to manage the response. It's optimistic, but it's not pie-in-the-sky optimistic.
"The education and health department must work together. New schools, new teachers, help people see what's wrong and what's correct. We have to have more prevention, communication and treatment with the health department."
All the ministries must be firing on all cylinders in order for this plan to work. But it's not so easy. The ministry of health, which was doing all of this work before the establishment of the AIDS council, is territorial. The council itself is a new bureaucracy, centered in Maputo, where the money flows in and, some say, doesn't flow out again to the provinces and ministries.
"They send money for our function but that money's not enough. Many times we are working here without light, without power, without telephone. The budget isn't enough to pay."
Part of the reason the council is so slow to work is that it's supposed to be a secretariat, not a full-fledged ministry. With its provincial arms, it has become a massive grant management system. They can hire people to push paper but not to do program activities, such as training groups how to apply for money. As a result, it receives substandard proposals that Maputo reluctantly concludes it cannot approve.
"As conceived, we don't have to train people, only to give them instructions and information, not to train. What is needed is giving people more school, more opportunities to learn, to have information, different information about how to avoid [AIDS]."
Take the education ministry. The new head says the department must hire thousands of new teachers to fill all the vacancies in the country, and in some provinces, teachers have yet to be paid this year. But without the teachers, fewer people see prevention information, which already faced an uphill battle to dissemination.
"They don't believe in HIV. Since they are not literate it is very hard for them to accept our messages. We have to tell them again and again and they think what we are telling them is not true. All of us we are trying to introduce new manners of thinking."
Classrooms stand vacant. People work without power. Hospitals re-use gloves and needles because they have no other options. It's well and good to pump in money for a narrow purpose. But with AIDS, one little purpose always turns out to be very broad.
"Many times, I think I am going. Then I think people will suffer so much more."
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 03:00 AM | Comments (0)
Suspension
This is the bridge from the city of Tete across the Zambezi River. One lane each way, one heavy vehicle at a time. Most people drive slowly because it's high enough off the ground you might actually get a breeze.
A few weeks ago a doctor was driving across the bridge when the driver of his car demanded he roll up the windows immediately. Ahead of him, cars had stopped and some people, panicked, ran out. Inside, the doctor watched as swarms of killer bees descended on the cars around him. Outside, the pedestrians on the bridge had nowhere to go. A child, eight or 10, ran back and forth, covered with bees, stung and stung, and at last jumped off.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 02:24 AM | Comments (0)
The September of My Years
The man across from me in Sinatra Bar wants me to believe that everything I know about Renamo is not true. He is mixing beer with Sprite. The bar is small, clean, well-lit and windowless. The tables are black and shiny; there are neon and fake records on the walls. Frank Sinatra songs are indeed warbling over the sound system, but behind the bar the tiny wall-mounted TV is blasting rap videos. Later, a guy plays what sounds like midi versions of Sinatra tunes on a cheap synthesizer, which according to local tastes is an improvement over the real, recorded thing.
Renamo was the good guy of the country's civil war, he says. He likens them to Hezbollah. If you went to a town during the day, no one would say that Renamo was there. But Renamo was there, he says. Renamo blended in with the people because it was the people's army. Why else would people vote so strongly for this party in the peaceful elections since the end of the war?
No, this is not the Renamo that sacked towns, burning them to the ground and carting off everything else, that William Finnegan described in A Complicated War. Not an army funded and armed and fed by the apartheid South African government. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the economy and apartheid, drought - these things did not drive Renamo to the peace table. It was Frelimo who could not defeat them after 17 years and had to relent.
If Renamo is Hezbollah, the incumbent Frelimo party is Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Mugabe was running the bread-basket of southern Africa before his edict evicting white farmers and their technical expertise. No one in the West objected to the corruption as long as they could point to Zimbabwe's promising growth. Once he stepped in and messed with the whites, then, from the Western view, things got ugly. But who could blame him, my friend says, he had to do it to win the election.
It is the same thing in Mozambique, he says. The richest men in town are the generals. The president got the money to buy up so much property here by selling ducks. He controls the courts. The nice thing about electing Renamo would be that their leader, Afonso Dhlakama, has been fighting for 30 years. He wouldn't want any of the spoils he's so long been denied; he's learned to live without all that. And besides, he is old now, without ego of the young Frelimo Turks who grabbed power hard in 1994.
Just because it keeps winning elections, Frelimo is getting this reputation for legitimacy. But Frelimo, my friend says, is not the brains of the country. Though he worked in government, my friend had to speak up - he felt like he had a split personality. His anger is born of the opportunistic frustration with the current government, not bad, old blood. He lost his job, but he still works as a consultant. And, after managing Dhlakama's campaign, he has a Renamo seat in parliament. He's now at an Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in the Philippines. Soon he hopes to start publishing a newspaper, an incubator of opposition, perhaps, yes, in South Africa.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at 02:08 AM | Comments (0)