A Lesson on Cellular Economics

It's Tuesday night. Laura has had a long day, and I'm tired too. Neither of us particularly feels like making anything for supper, so we call Mimmo's. Tuesday night is two-for-one pizza night.

And an hour later we receive a lesson on cellular economics in Africa.

My cell phone rings, but only once. I retrieve it from the office, punch in the code to unlock it, and a message appears to tell me that I have one missed call. An unknown number.

At home, I would have just stopped there. Probably someone dialled the wrong number, realized it, and hung up. But that's not how cellular economics works in Africa.

I suspected that this was the "Mozambican answering machine," so I hit redial. Sure enough, it was the pizza delivery man, lost. Five minutes later, we had our pizza, only slightly cold.

I wrote previously that cell phones are ubiquitous. That only tells half the story. Most people don't actually have any credit on their phones, so it is very common to receive a one-ring phone call. Call me back, please. On your credit.

In Mozambique, outbound calls are charged; inbound ones are not. That simple fact has a profound impact on cell phone usage here. Everyone with a cell phone is an amateur economist.

* * * * *

In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank's "telephone ladies" made popular a micro-enterprise of what amounted to a roving phone booth: a lady would receive a loan for a cellular phone and make her living by selling airtime to people in the community who didn't have telephone service but needed to make a phone call.

In Mozambique, a similar model is used by South Africa's OneCell. Even in the capital of Maputo, the streets are dotted with OneCell's bright orange umbrellas. Under these umbrellas, entrepreneurs sell phone calls over a cellular network.

These, like the phone booth back home, will soon be extinct.

* * * * *

Everyone has a cell phone, but few have credit. Sounds like prepaid credit is valuable, right? Right.

In fact, it is a convenient way for people to store and transfer wealth. By punching in a particular series of digits, followed by a recipient's phone number, users can transfer credits from one to another.

Imagine wanting to purchase a small bunch of bananas from the sidewalk vendor, but not having any money left. Rather than handing him cash, you can instantly "deposit" some of your wireless credit from your phone to his (that is, if you've conserved your prepaid credits!).

For the vendor, having less cash means that there is less risk of being robbed.

And I hear -- though I haven't seen it yet -- that there are even enterprising individuals who will purchase the street vendors' excess cell phone credit at a modest discount and resell it to people wanting to replenish their phones.

Cell phone credit, it turns out, functions as a second currency in Africa. Without, I would imagine, having to pay taxes to the government. Yet.

The Deafening Echoes of War

Flooding, drought, and cyclones have filled the news over the past three months in Mozambique. The southern capital of Maputo has -- for the most part -- been spared these destructive forces.

Until now.

Laura and I sat at home, writing a few emails to friends and family, when the distant rumble of a strange African thunderstorm started. It must have been far off in the distance, because we couldn't see a cloud in the sky. The storm must be just over the trees.

The thunder claps rolled in with a fury, getting louder and louder. The shockwaves were more intense than I had ever experienced. At several points, I looked outside, believing that a truck had hit our building. We decided to shut our curtains in case the windows shattered. As I was standing in the front window doing so, I noticed one dark cloud off in the distance. Then I noticed that it had a tail trailing down to the ground.

The thunderous booms grew in power.

Neighbours' windows were blown out, but I didn't realize that the experience was much more severe for others in the city until we made some phone calls. The country's largest armoury was on fire again, flinging old soviet projectiles in every direction. For more than four hours, munitions as small as bullets and as large as vehicles were sent flying kilometres away, killing, maiming and destroying houses.

Mario told me that the armoury was in Malhazine, right beside Zimpeto. Suddenly the tragedy was brought a frightening step closer to reality for us: we have a friend in Zimpeto, a Canadian visiting for two weeks, working at an orphanage there (more on that next week).

Our cell phone reception was lost briefly as we tried to make contact. The electricity was spotty, as well. We finally received word back from the orphanage: please pray. Projectiles were flying over their heads. Everyone was huddled together in a small building, volunteers comforting orphans, volunteers comforting volunteers. It was a frightening, albeit accidental, war zone in an otherwise-peaceful country.

A shell tore through the roof of the chapel where they were scheduled to be worshipping but thankfully were not.

Once again, by the grace of God, Laura and I were protected in our cocoon, but had no way of helping our friends as the danger unfolded.

I didn't fully grasp the magnitude of what was happening until the next morning when I drove to Zimpeto to get Julie and bring her to the airport for her scheduled departure. Malhazine is right in between our home and Zimpeto, forcing me to drive by the now-quieted armoury. Crowds were gathered around trying to learn what they could. Holes were punched in large buildings; small, simple houses were flattened. Military personnel were gathering large ordnance from people's yards, placing them on the backs of trucks and parading them down the street to the false safety of their storage facility. Back to where the explosions started.

Only a kilometre before arriving at the orphanage, I passed a psychiatric hospital that had been destroyed.

Once at the orphanage, the first person I encountered was a long-term volunteer whose children Laura teaches at school. She and her husband were visibly shaken, feeling the burden of caring for their own family and the hundreds of scared orphans under their watch. At that point, they still weren't sure where all the children were: frightful of war, Mozambicans' habit is to run aimlessly (recall Olga's frayed nerves last time this happened).

The government is reporting the death toll at 96. That's how many bodies are accounted for in the morgue, but everyone knows more will be found over the coming days. Hundreds of people crowd the hospitals maimed and wounded. The hospitals have run out of blood for transfusions.

I was relieved to hear that there were no injuries at the orphanage, and that Julie was fine, though shaken. We spent the morning at the airport, waiting for the uncertain hour of her departure as the airport's damaged runway was repaired.

By late morning, rumours were circulating that the explosions had resumed. Laura's school was closed early; Julie's orphanage was evacuated.

By early afternoon, the airplane that would take Julie home had arrived from Johannesburg, and the crew seemed more eager than normal to make a quick exit. As Julie boarded, I wondered if their haste was because the plane was so late already, or because of the black smoke visible on the horizon at the end of the runway.

Barely half an hour after landing, the plane had loaded its new passengers, refueled, and was again airborne. It was soon a speck in the sky, distancing itself from the chaos below, safely on its way to Johannesburg.

Don't Blink

Mozambique's flood waters are receding and the news cameras are shifting their focus to other crises elsewhere in the world. Blink.

As the water recedes, the full extent of the damage can be assessed. The government has estimated that cleaning up the mess will cost US$71 million, but that grossly underestimates the extent of the damage. More telling are the personal impact statistics: an estimated 494,000 people impacted, including 38 deaths.

Survival is assured only by the tenuous strength of a thread, as thousands depend upon the acts of selfless front-line volunteers like David Morrison and the countless people whose support allows them to fill their convoys of trucks with maize meal and supplies.

But for many in Mozambique, the real crisis is just beginning.

Over the coming months, hundreds of thousands of people will leave these temporary refugee camps and return to their homes to find little more than piles of mud. Their crops, which would have been harvested this month and stored to feed their families until the next harvest, have been washed away. There will be little to eat in the coming months, not to speak anything of excess to hawk at the market.

Those who do have excess to sell will have difficulty recovering their costs, having to compete against the tons of international food aid that will depress local market prices. The arrival of food is good news for the starving, but bad news for the small-scale merchants trying to make a living. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which coordinates food aid in such crises, has said that they will purchase as much food locally as possible, and is asking donor nations for cash to do so.

The WFP's challenge isn't restricted to feeding those families affected by the flooding. In the south of Mozambique, a short but intense heatwave this summer caused nearly three times as many hectares of crops to wilt as washed away in the floods. The heatwave didn't make the international news because, well, watching video footage of a heatwave is like watching video footage of paint drying. It's dull. Raging floodwaters, low-flying helicopters, washed-out bridges and dramatic rescues all help the newscasters to compete against other shows that feed our Hollywood-induced attention deficits.

Despite the action-packed video footage, floods are slow-motion disasters. Judging by the datestamps on the emails that we received, Mozambique was flooding for at least six weeks before it was severe enough to make the news back home.

And its people will be recovering long after the last news crews sign their bylines and file their stories.

Blink.

It's not realistic to think that the news could broadcast every emerging crisis around the world. That's not the point. But featuring these stories creates two opposing problems: first, that viewers assume that when there's not a story on the evening news, that there's not a problem. Far from the truth. Second, they paint these places as dens of permanent disaster, of places they would not like to visit.

Mozambicans that I've talked with are embarrassed that the floods make international headlines. They're embarrassed that the international community will think of Mozambique as a country that hobbles from one crisis to the next.

They want the news to focus on Africa's humanity, not its poverty. They want people to know that many great things happen in Mozambique in all the space between the punctuations of tragedy.

When we turn the channel, they continue to live. When we send our aid cheques to the next country, they continue to live. When our attention shifts, they continue to live.

Don't blink.