Going "Postal"

There is not a governmental bureaucracy as oft-maligned the world over as the postal service. Particularly in the heady days of electronic communication, people often wondered aloud not only when, but if, their "snail mail" parcels would ever arrive.

Oh, how we love to make sport of berating the postal service!

In Mozambique, there exists no such luxury as door-to-door mail delivery. In our apartment, we have an often rain-soaked pile downstairs at the common entrance that serves as our "mail box." Some companies that want to deliver to us personally, such as our Internet service provider, hire their own courier staff to deliver bills. Others, such as the telephone utility, just throw the lot of bills on top of the heap on the ground floor.

And they don't use envelopes. Oh, to hear the laments of Canada's Privacy Commissioner if she were to find a stack of papers itemizing everyone's personal telephone calls sitting in that pile for all to see!

I needed to mail some letters recently, so I asked the natural question: where can I buy stamps around here? A litany of supplemental questions flooded into my head: Where can I drop my mail? Where's the post office? Will this work?

The post office, I was informed, is at the airport. That's good. My letter will be as close as possible to the airplane that will take it to Canada.

It also made sense: locals don't seem to use the postal service. There's no door-to-door delivery, and they wouldn't want to spend their little bit of money mailing a letter to their neighbour anyway, when they could just as well walk over and visit in person. The post office is located at the airport because, quite frankly, most of the mail is sent by foreigners shipping packages out of the country.

Once I located the small counter at the airport that serves as the correios, I wandered inside to find a woman sleeping behind the counter. One post office in town, and it doesn't appear to get much business. I gently whistled a couple of times until the woman awoke.

I asked her if I could send a letter to Canada, and she quickly calculated the cost. About $5 to go half way around the world. Not bad. Then she pulled a scrap of paper off a pile and ran it through an old postage machine that printed a stamp onto it. My letter was almost ready to mail. She found some scissors, cut the imprint out of the scrap of paper, smeared glue onto it out of a sticky jar using an oozing popsicle stick, and stuck it on the upper right hand corner of my envelope.

As she wiped the excess glue from my envelope, I paid her with a bill that was too large. She reached down and picked a plastic sack up off the floor by her feet, put my bill inside, and fished out the proper change. The plastic sack strained under the weight of the coins it held.

She was a lovely, friendly lady who apologized for having been sleeping. I may have been her first and last customer of the day.

The whole experience was fun and relaxed. It seemed more like a social visit than a business transaction, which is a good thing. And the best news is that my packages arrived in less than two weeks. Chalk one up for the Mozambique postal service.

* * * * *

Since my first encounter with the post office, I have since come to learn that Mozambique does, in fact, issue its own postage stamps, including this set of three that I purchased this week.

Yes, they feature the three pillars of African culture: a speed skater, a bobsledder and a downhill skier.

Maybe the lady behind the counter could tell that I am from Canada.