Bad news day

Through the night I was concerned about having contracted malaria whilst in the field in the north. It’s much more prevalent there than in the Maputo area. I had a weird headache all day but haven’t yet succumbed to the trademark backache. I do have a strange rash behind my ear that may be a type of insect bite or may be from when I got over-zealous with a can of household bug repellent and sprayed it onto my skin at close range. Although it was labelled hazardous and irritant, the tsetse flies were a menace.

I have been tracking events in Beira, the coastal city in central Mozambique, which was smashed by Cyclone Idai during the night. People around the country were expecting the worst. Phone and power outages have affected delivery of news, so now at bedtime I’m not really any better informed than at dawn.

I needed reliable internet for some work calls, and the access has become so patchy that I had to request the use of a colleague’s apartment. Realising this is far from ideal and needing connectivity and structure in the working day, I organised two key things: a WiFi connection setup for my apartment, and a desk in a co-working office starting next week. This avoids the tramping between locations where I can get online, although some places are pleasingly elevated and provide decent bird’s eye views.

I was on calls into the evening, whilst I perched in a corner of an upmarket hotel, using their WiFi for hours for only the cost of a Fanta. I really wanted to finish off more critical tasks but was distracted and moved to tears by the terrible news from New Zealand about the mosque attack.

Negative ill-informed rhetoric about Muslims is unjustly endemic in many societies I’ve encountered. Anyone who has engaged in it is responsible in some part for the collective build-up of anger, that has culminated in the slaying of dozens of people in their place of worship. If there are people who are vulnerable to radicalisation to perpetrate such an act, as there are, it’s everyone’s responsibility to avoid seeding those people with extreme ideas born out of plain ignorance.

A Muslim newsreader from Australia said it well today in the aftermath:

‘Everything we say to try to tear people apart, demonise particular groups, set them against each other; that all has consequences. Even if we’re not the ones with our fingers on the trigger.’