A handful of sun and breeze drops over Beira. It tossles the trees and the countless sleeves of secondhand shirts sold on blankets in the downtown market area, where hundreds of people and schoolchildren mill about. Not a single corner or slab of sidewalk is left bare; business blossoms in every expedient site you can imagine. The back of an empty semi-trailer. A narrow alleyway. At the cracked windows of chapas stuck in traffic. Outside the bus station. Alongside the busy road, where cars can pull over in a sudden whirl of dust and drivers will quickly duck into a maze of stalls. All you need is cheap Chinese or Indian merchandise, foodstuffs you can sell on behalf of Lebanese grocery stores, or the produce you picked up earlier in the morning from farmers south of town. Brandish your goods on a blanket and then pray for a sale from the few shoppers with expendable income. If you’re an Adam Smith type, dreaming of your unfettered markets and free trade, this is where you’ll find it. Mozambicans have a knack for finding new ways to make money, even if half of this creative potential is illegal. In the ShopRite (the only major grocery store in the city) parking lot, men pay small children 50 METs – or about a dollar and change – to steal rearview mirrors from parked vehicles. Later that day, maybe even the next day, the men will sell the mirrors back to desperate drivers for 500 METs.
Hey, it puts food on the table.
So anyways. I’m sitting in an internet café, wasting time on slow-loading newssites when I should be collecting phone numbers and addresses for Sun Biofuels, Energem, and Maputo’s Ag ministry. Outside I see a disorganized mess of dusty buildings, some left over from the colonial days of Portuguese architects. Down the street, what used to be a hotel is brimming with squatters. But what a lively mess it is, full of beautiful people, laughing and eyeing each other. An emerging generation of youth, the first to be "globalized", strut around with brightly colored high-top sneakers, baggy t-shirts, baggy jean shorts, sun glasses, backwards caps, wristwatches, and cell phones. Virility rises like steam in their footsteps. Mixed into these crowds are the tarnished faces of mothers with their bright chapanis wrapped tightly around them, holding babies and balancing bowls of grain on their heads. The juxtaposition is almost dizzying.
But with this emerging connectivity and accessible internet on a tiny smartphone screen, axiomatic changes are well underway. It’s a buzz in the air, the kind you get from a few glasses of wine, or that tickles your fingertips and muscles and makes you want to enter a full sprint. It’s infectious. Give this country 10 years, and you’ll have another Tunisia. Or another Egypt. As the conditions align, like the symptoms of a repressive one-party government that loots every industry and gobbles the cash from aid and FDI, it will only be a matter of time.
And now, I’ve got to sign off again. So much for blogging frequently, but I’ve got to catch a double-decker bus to Maputo and need to grab some TP for the 18-hour non-stop ride. Wish me luck!
A few other tidbits: spent the first 1 and 1/2 weeks with Ken and Deb, two incredible people who own a cattlefarm about 80 km from Beira, near a town called Tikka. The African "bush" never yields a dull day; I'm so thankful for their hospitality. Now I'm off to the capital for interviews, market-wandering, and hopefully some late-night live jazz.
