Overcoming writer's block

Yes, it's been just as quiet on the email front this month, as several readers of this blog can testify. I was quite proud of keeping up my 600 words per day on the monster-in-progress (the novel) even in the face of provincial travel and painstaking massaging of the business registration process, on top of the usual daily round of keeping servers in line and taking up the slack of inadequate infrastructure. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the bank received a letter from the powers that be, to inform us that my work permit had expired. I was sent home for fear of government inspection. I laughed when it happened, but evidently some kind of quiet inner panic set in, and it's been very difficult to settle to any kind of complex task since.

Far and away the easiest thing for me to write, these days, is a task list. I get so much practice at it. So here is yesterday's.

Mozassist - original rent contract
(Mozassist is the local company which is handling my business registration. The rent contract is the ultimate source of many of my present problems. Mozambican law has not yet caught up with the new-fangled idea that a business may be just me, my laptop and an internet connection; I have to have a brick-and-mortar office. Nor will just one dedicated room in my three-bedroom flat meet the requirements; I'm not allowed to live there, if I'm also using it as an office. Six weeks ago, when I started the business registration process (which should have been plenty of time, for an individual company) I decided to use my present flat as the office - so that I could provide the rent contract quickly - and move in with my friend Minati while searching for a more permanent arrangement. I asked my dona da casa (landlady) for a new contract which showed the purpose of the flat as "residence or office" instead of just "residence", and she promptly started dithering as efficiently as she could. Weeks went by. I reassured her on the nature of the work, then on the tax arrangements, gritted my teeth on the requested rent hike, pulled in favours to obtain the dollars I had to hand over before she would sign the contract - then I had to travel to Tete for a week... but I finally got hold of it. Now the registration of Anseris Informática can finally crawl forward again.)

Office - hand in laptop
(Giving up my old work laptop. I've bought a new one, and took delivery of it on Wednesday. As an indication of how busy, or how scatty, I've been lately, I haven't had a chance to switch it on since I got it home.)

Office - letter re end of contract
(Obtaining some paperwork for the Gabinete de Migraines - sorry, Migração.)

Office - keys for apartment
(This refers to the dingy apartment around the corner from here, which the bank uses to store hardware. I have permission to store my books and other bits and pieces there, so I don't have to clutter up Minati's apartment with them.)

Branch - cash out
(Referring to the bank I work for - not the much larger bank mentioned below. The one I work for didn't keep me waiting longer than five minutes, even though it's the busy end-of-month time - and the teller never has to ask me for my passport before she'll let me transact, because she always scans my fingerprint to check who I am. I can't forget to bring my fingerprint.)

Branch - open account for business
(Oh, and my bank will pay interest on the the twenty thousand meticais which I have to deposit in an account as part of the business registration process. The big bank won't.)

Bank - transfer for B&P
(I have to transfer value to pay for the new laptop. I actually did this earlier this week, but when I collected the laptop on Wednesday the embarrassed supplier explained I'd been given the wrong account number. Hey, they let me take the laptop home! (And not only that, but when a taxi failed to become available after half an hour, one of the staff gave me a lift home. You get good service at B&P.) So, I went into the big bank. After waiting in three different queues, they told me I couldn't do the transfer that day and I should go back there on Monday.)

Drop off talão at B&P
(The talão being the proof of transfer. Moved this task to Monday.)

Cellphone
(I'm still using the bank's cellphone. Must arrange a new one.)

Fine at Aguas de Moçambique
(Back in October last year, I failed to pay a water bill on time because I had to extend a work trip to Chimoio. This means I can no longer pay the bill via the ATM, but have to go into the Aguas de Moçambique office and stand in their legendary queues. And ever since then, every time I've walked past that office and caught sight of those queues, dizziness has struck me and I've remembered all the urgent tasks I should clear off my plate before I go spend hours there. Let the fine pile up, month by month - my time is worth more... or, it was worth more. The difference is a lot slimmer now.)

$
(Alert readers shall have noticed the reference above to the difficulty of obtaining dollars to pay rent. It's a peculiarity of Mozambique that house rents - at least in the middle-class parts of cities - are denominated in American dollars, even though most of us receive our salaries in humble Mozambican meticais (currently around thirty to the dollar). So, there's a lot of competition for the handful of dollars changed by expats and tourists. Sure enough, when I called at my usual exchange bureaus yesterday, no dollars available.)

It wasn't on my task list, but I did manage to write about a hundred words on my monster-in-progress yesterday, after a week of nothing at all. Today I have to write two hundred words. This blog post doesn't count.

Sunday morning in Maputo

Awoken at 5.40am by some partygoer ramming his Audi into my neighbour's innocently parked Toyota in the street outside. The ensuing exchange of views precludes further sleep, so I get up and discover there's no water in the taps. No problem - I keep an emergency supply in 5-litre plastic bottles in the kitchen, for just such occasions. The wonderful thing about getting up so early is that I can brew myself a cup of coffee before the power goes off shortly after 6.00. I start the laptop and work on the masterpiece, cat curled on my lap, until the battery gives out. I breakfast off cornflakes and banana and yoghurt, then return to bed with a book.

Sometimes life just plays straight into your hands. After the last three weekends - one in Manica, one in Beira, one in Hlane - the summit of my desires is a quiet day at home.

(Power came back on between midday and one, water somewhat earlier.)

Rhino parade

No, they don't train the rhinos at Hlane to stand in neat chorus lines. These three were just equally worried when our safari guide jumped out of the truck to take a leak (a privilege permitted to none of the passengers). These are placid white rhino - the guide would never have left the truck had they been black rhino (smaller, but savage-tempered and quick). A more typical pose is displayed by the central group below.

Several people in the party asked different park staff on various occasions how many rhino lived in the park, but we were all told that such information couldn't be divulged for "security reasons". None of us could figure out what security issue might be at stake, though.

The police get thirsty

This post comes to you from Chimoio, where the lack of anything for a quiet lone female to do in the evenings means that I can at last write up the big story from the beginning of April.

I thought it was some nationalistic sub-editor's tasteless idea of an April Fool's Day joke when I first read about the police raid on Mundo's, one of Maputo's most popular restaurants. Then I noticed the detail that both locals and foreigners were obliged to leave their tables and show their national ID card or proof of residency. Yes - this was no civilised matter of placing a couple of officers at each door to catch dodgers while others go from table to table with a polite refrain of Good evening ladies and gentlemen, just a routine check, may we see your documents? The police entered carrying their AK47s, blocked off the exits, ordered all patrons to leave their tables and sent men to one side of the room, women to the other. ("You might as well throw your cellphone and car keys in the middle," as a friend of mine said when that was explained to him.) They then proceeded, in the words of one local newspaper, to "negociar soluções" with those caught without documents and "maltratar e humilhar as mulheres moçambicanas". (Mulheres are women, but the rest I'm obliged to leave discreetly untranslated. My Portuguese always deserts me when the police are involved - in much the same way, I suspect, as some locals caught in the raid had "ataques de nervos", according to another newspaper.)

I don't really eat at Mundo's any more; it's outgrown its service staff, so you wait an hour for your meal and another hour for your bill, and it tends to be full of South African consultants watching football on the widescreens. But it's also popular with locals, most of them out for a rare treat. The newspaper report quoted above features an interview with an aggrieved local lady (source of the line complaining of maltreatment and humiliation) whose birthday celebration had been spoiled.

Nonetheless, the night after the raid, I did get my own brush with the law - well, it wore grey uniforms and carried AK47s, so what else could it be? Three of them surrounded me as I walked home from my own dinner with friends. After the ritual examination of my residency permit, we had the following exchange. (This is an edited version; please imagine that everything the police said was repeated at least three times, as I failed to understand the first or second attempts.)

Police officer: Where is your house?
AB: [pointing] Over there.
Police officer: We want to go to your house for a cup of coffee.
AB: I have no coffee.
Police officer: We want to go to your house for a cold drink.
AB: I have no cold drinks.

I could have stood there all night, politely refusing, but fortunately the police recognised a skilled practicioner of stubbornness, and went in search of easier prey.

Residents of Mozambique reading this should note that the above exchange contains two mistakes on my part. The correct response to any police officer wanting a drink at your house is, "You need a warrant (mandato) for that."

Mocuba

Close examination of the photo will reveal that the road is being resurfaced. Is it normal for this operation to interrupt the water supply to the adjoining buildings, including the dingy pensão where I stayed? It was either that or the one up the street which doubles as a brothel at nights.

Another reason for the silence

(It’s something of a challenge to be smart and snippy without resorting to either exaggeration or exclusion of nine-tenths of the story. I apologise for including all the foregoing in what follows. It’s 21.45 on a Sunday night and I am still at the office preparing for the return trip to Zambézia tomorrow. I am just too tired to bother making the truth interesting.)

What I was doing in January which kept me too busy to update my blog.


Yes, it's another mobile bank, freshly deployed beneath the spreading mango trees in the placid town of Namacurra, which has plainly seen nothing like it. This mobile bank is based in my old stamping ground of Quelimane, which in January was every bit as hot, humid, potholed, mosquito-infested and bicycle-thronged as I remembered it.


Driving such a big truck through such a small town was hair-raising. The first mobile bank is based in Chimoio, a city straddling main highways linking Malawi and Zimbabwe with the port of Beira, where people are accustomed to heavy vehicles. Quelimane is a city on the way to a small, sleepy, silted-up port, and those cyclists in the above photo are generally the biggest vehicles on the streets - except when we go thundering by.

Quelimane also boasts far more (ahem) picturesque roads in the surrounding countryside than does Chimoio. A view of the main bridge across the Licungo on the road to Maganja - the river then wide with wet-season rains.


That was the good bridge. Here’s the reason why we decided against taking the mobile bank to Maganja every week, much as they need it there.

Small inconveniences

Note to self: change the dyspeptic little snipe that appears beneath my photo in the sidebar. This blog can hardly have been reassuring over the past few months. It's tempting fate to talk of obituaries, especially since November, which started with weird pains in my chest (since thoroughly checked out by a doctor in Australia, and pronounced musculo-skeletal in origin; they haven't recurred) and ended with an emergency landing courtesy of Kenya Airlines (those who haven't heard the story, don't worry: it was nowhere near as exciting as it sounds). I can only plead that I haven't been very assured of anything myself.

A happier contributor to the silence was my three weeks' leave in December, spent with my family in Australia, and including my first family Christmas since 2001 (just before I left for Mozambique). I'd hoped to catch up on blogging then, but found myself inexplicably avoiding computers.

You know you're back in Mozambique when your third-floor bedroom gets flooded. It had rained solidly for four days before my return home, and the drainage channel from a balcony became blocked. It's no great issue to sleep on sofa cushions for a week while the mattress slowly dries out in the humidity; what's truly annoying is the effect on my beautiful Portuguese parquetry floor.


These floors are found all over Mozambique, but their maintenance is quite a specialised art, and there's no word so far on when the artist will be available for repairs. I imagine he's pretty busy after those four days.

The cat is a reminder that I must not complain about the small inconveniences in my life. She belongs to an American friend who has lived in Mozambique for years, with a Mozambican boyfriend and their two small children, most recently in a flat with sunrise views over the Baia de Maputo, and whose extensive Mozambican experience had landed her a nice contract with a UN agency. Late last year the UN cancelled her contract due to funding cuts, her landlord informed her he would require the flat after Christmas, and the boyfriend - this is no place for details, but he's removed himself from the picture. So my friend has taken her two children for an indefinite stay with her family in the United States. The least I could to help smooth her hasty departure was to take the cat off her hands.

To those of my Maputo friends who read this blog - the cat is looking for another home. She's accustomed to a flat full of children and empregadas and visiting friends, and staying alone in my minimalist flat all day is making her neurotic.