Jaime lives in southern Mozambique with his wife. He is a Spanish lawyer working for the rights of small communities and their land and she is a doctor in a rural hospital. The country they have chosen to make their home is the third poorest in the world.
Mozambique also has one of the lowest human development indicators. Its main concerns are health and education. The country, off the coast of southeast Africa, is home to more than 25 million people, and 70 percent of them live in poverty. However, its democratic system is maturing and becoming more plural, it has huge gas and coal deposits, the infant mortality rate has reduced and its GDP is growing fast.
But how does its population actually live? This article is a description of what Jaime sees everyday in his life in Mozambique.
Jaime’s office is based in Maputo, the capital. The city is beside the sea. It still retains the beautiful but old and crumbling buildings from the Portuguese colonial era, most of them used as ministries. There are also wide streets with reverents houses, which are either embassies or belong to people from Maputo’s high society. From the center of Maputo, one can see the modern office buildings that are being constructed; one also sees the pavement cracked by the roots of trees, and trash all over the streets.
Jorge often visits friends who lives in the poor neighborhood, just outside central Maputo. In contrast, these areas have many small streets spread with litter. Sometimes the roads are so narrow that the garbage collection trucks cannot reach them. One positive result is that locals have as a consequence organised themselves in groups to collect the rubbish, to pick up water from the pump and to help each other.
Here, the houses are just halfway done because people build them by themselves little by little, and add new features when they can afford it. These houses are made by local materials like soil or cement, in the best cases. Inside, there is a big room and a small room. One of these rooms is used as the place where four or five people sleep. Sometimes it is posible to find a huge and very old televisión in the house, but in most cases they do not even have a sofa, the windows do not have panes and the houses are not painted. One of the main concerns is the sanitary infrastructure. Most people share latrines which are usually very dirty. This is the main focal point for infectious disease, which is one of the biggest problems in the country.
Jaime believes people live in better conditions in the rural areas. There is still poverty, but it is less extreme than in the city. More than 70 percent of the rural population works in agriculture. They also suffer from malnutrition, infectious disease and poor water supply, but it is less visible because the poverty in the city is more miserable. Even so, the needs of rural populations needs are not met. Inside the country, away from the coast, there are many infrastructure problems. The villages are far away from each other, so people live in very scattered communities and must walk long distances in order to go to the school, to the medical center or to get water. As one example, Jaime describes the province of Gaza. This is a very big rural area, 80 kilometres from the nearest town. In this province, some communities are extended in around fifteen thousand hectares (something like fifteen thousand football stadiums). Therefore, people are very isolated from each other and from the main services like water pumps, the school and the medical center. They share these services with a lot of people no matter how far away they live. Ocasionally, the entire population has only one or two water pumps, a school and a medical center with sometimes just one nurse. This way, it is usually difficult for children to get education or health treatment. Some children still die because the hospital is too far away or because there is not enough medication or even oxygen.
Jaime describes the rural culture focusing on the importance of women in the rural areas. They have great power, he says, and take care of everything; they look after their families and work the lands. The men do the talking, but the whole family is mainly based on the mother’s resources and capacity.
Everyday Jaime sees many children going to school; but the quality of their education is not good. The schools are generally very old, and do not have enough materials or space for everyone. There are not many schools and these are sometimes too far from the rural population. Children must walk a long way in order to reach their schools, and in some cases, they do not have space to sit during the class, or must take turns. In other cases, children must work in order to help their families, or to take care of the younger ones. Jaime sees very often girls of around 10 years old taking care of their smallest siblings.
Mozambique is very centralised and unequal. Along the main and only proper road, which crosses most of the country along the sea, Jorge has seen everything from the latest model of Rolls-Royce to minivans with people seated everywhere all over the car. This is the picture of Mozambique shown by Jorge. According to him, “it is an example of the crazy and strange growth in the nation that we fondly call the country of the chicken and the beers”.
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