June 21, 2004
The answer, of course, is that we are! We're in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. After independence from Portugal in 1975, the government was decidedly communist (though they are no longer), as is reflected by their choice of street names in Maputo. The intersection, by the way, is where our hostel is located. At the moment, we're actually at the American cultural center, which I find very amusing, but they have free internet for citizens, which is the only current advantage to holding an American passport.
Woooo!-was I wrong about Swaziland, which is what I get for presuming to write about a country after only being in it for 2 days. Swaziland is very much NOT the last absolute monarchy. There is a parliament and there are elections, though the king is still head of state and consequently has lots of power. It's rather like Morocco, in that sense. (It's terrible, really--for the rest of my life I'm going to compare everything to Morocco-sorry about that!) Also, our mini-bus ride into Mbabane was apparently an anomaly. Neither our bus ride back, nor, more importantly, our mini-bus ride to Maputo, had only one passenger per seat. In fact, for our 5 1/2 hour journey to Maputo, there were 14 of us crammed into space designed for 9 in a Toyota van. The driver, though, still got his own seat.
On our ride, which was actually quite pleasant, we met a nurse from Swaziland, who is now a lecturer at the University. Her specialty is HIV/AIDS and she was coming to Maputo to get a visa for France, where she's going for a week vacation after attending the international HIV/AIDS conference in Thailand next month. She has to come to Mozambique because Swaziland doesn't have a French embassy, which seems funny, especially since she had to get a visa to come here! She told us that several very interesting things about the state of the Ministry of Health (she is NOT pleased) and the HIV rate. The statistics they use are based on pregnant women (because they've obviously had unprotected sex, even if only accidentally) and according to those tests, fully 38% of the women tested are infected! Part of the reason for the infection rate being so high, she told us, is that Swaziland has fairly well developed infrastructure and with such a small, homogeneous population, it's easy to get around. This is especially a problem in a culture in which polygamy is acceptable, and, as she said, a man can live in Mbabane with his wife, but have a girlfriend in the south and sleep with them both in the same day. Cultural change has clearly been much slower than the improvement in infrastructure.
A happier story about Swaziland is that we saw some of their traditional dancing. David remarked that some of the men's dancing looked like they were an angry chorus line, but it was really neat to see. David may have wanted to retract his observation when he was pulled up to participate in some of the dancing, which to me looked a like aerobics. Unfortunately I was laughing too hard to take many pictures, though I did get a couple. (Lest you think me terribly mean for laughing, David freely admits he has absolutely no rhythm, though he prefers to call it a "rhythm all his own.")
After Swaziland, infrastructure in Mozambique is not so well developed. David seems very fond of using the word "rubble" to describe the state of the sidewalks here in Maputo, though they're not quite that bad. It would work as a description of several of the streets, though. After a decade of civil war (officially over in 1992), Mozambique has seen much investment, but they're still one of the poorest countries in the world. Everyone we've met has been very nice, though and we're looking forward to our trip up to Malawi.
From here we're going up to Vilankulo tomorrow, which is on the coast of the Indian ocean, as is Maputo. Wednesday we're planning to go inland to Chimoio, where we'll spend the night before going through Tete on our way to Blantyre in Malawi.
