I'm reading "28 Stories of AIDS in Africa" by Stephanie Nolen that a neighbor, Denis, lent me.A very good book and very easy to read since it is broken down into 28 completely independent stories. And even though the content is obviously a little heavy it is quite readable and not written as a tear jerker.
Of course I started with the stories about Mozambique and South Africa. I would say that for me so far the interesting part has not been so far the AIDS part per say, sorry to say but this is just not a surprise. However peppered through the stories are a few pieces of information which are not that easy to come by otherwise.
Here is one about Mozambique that rings very true (well obviously it is true, but I mean to say that it is something shockingly obvious when you are there):
"660,000 of Mozambique's eighteen million people have formal jobs."
I want to add to this that the population of Mozambique is very young. Lots of kids, yes, but also no old people, or only very rare old folks. I have seen two old women and one old man during my stay there. The civil war, the land mines, malaria and AIDS took care of those. So I would guess that only 50% of the population is of what would be considered "working age" ...this is just a visual estimate coming from me so really it doesn't mean much, take it for what it is.
Also an interesting side effect of such a statistic is that young male Mozambicans are difficult to work with. At first they are super dedicated to their job but after a few rotations off and a few trips home, where they are now "elite" just because they have a job, they come back as arrogant as they can be.
We have had a few problems lately. It is an old communist system with unions out of the ying yang (downtown Maputo, the capital city, has street names like Karl Marx, Mao Tse-tung etc) there is not much really we can do about it but grim and bear it... The same union which forbid us to pay the workers more than the prescribed rate is now telling us that the rate has to go up, tells us by how much etc...So that I cannot get the better workers to officially get a better pay...of course what ever bonuses I want to get is my own deal...I give those out of my own pocket, the client company (never mention the name of the client company on a public blog) is unaware of it too. As far I can imagine they couldn't possibly care less as long as I don't bill them for it!I guess that all over the world it takes about four months for human nature to take for granted what ever they have.
