Service Delivery, Mozambican Style

Last week we had team meetings in Beira. As usual, we took the bus to Beira, enduring the 15-hour drive north. Joel left early on Sunday morning and Nadia and I left early Monday morning. He had meetings to go to before we needed to be there and the bus company we use doesn't go on Tuesdays, the day I wanted to go. Thus, Nadia and I went on Monday. Our trips were relatively uneventful. Monday, we came back to Maputo, all three of us together.


We left the station ahead of schedule on a relatively empty bus at 3:45 AM. They announced our estimated arrival in Maputo to be 8:30 PM. We quickly fell asleep, lulled by the hum of the motor and the motion. We woke up about an hour and half later to the repetative beep of an emergency alarm going off. The driver pulled over and looked at what was wrong, couldn't figure it out, and kept driving. 50 km (28 miles) down the road, the same thing. The trip continued thus. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep...keep driving slower and slower until we pull to the side the road, the two drivers and in-bus service attendant (usually titled "flight attendant" in our family), under the bus looking at whatever was wrong. They finally figured out something was wrong with the air pressure system because whenever they worked on it we always heard air escaping.


The whole trip was like this, every 50 km, stopping to plug up the leak and pump the air back into the system. It wouldn't have been too bad, if the trip from Beira to Maputo was the distance from Beira to Chimoio (=200 km). It's not. Mozambique in it's entirety is twice the length of the state of California. It's 1200 km from Beira (midpoint) to Maputo (far south). What should have taken us 6 hours to get to Vilanculos (halfway point) took us 10. We had "lunch" at 5:30 because that's how long it took us to get to the town where our meals had been pre-ordered.


This continued all night until at 4:00 AM, I woke up once again to a stopped bus and the constant beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep of the alarm. I pondered the thought of what purgatory could be like: pre-dawn darkness in an unknown town with few street lights, longing for sleep but awakened by the incessant beep of the alarm and two fellow passengers talking loudly, my neck with a crick in it from sleeping upright, while my almost-2 year old whines because she, too, is tired of sleeping upright in her car seat and wants a cracker, but adamantly refuses when I give her one, the bus becoming stuffier from the lack of air conditioning.


We finally made it to Maputo at 6:00 AM. Twenty-six hours after we had left. Not once did we get an explanation of what was wrong. Never did we hear an apology for the delay escept to say, "This has never happened before". A person is left wondering, can you say that with integrity? We were not offered a refund or a free trip voucher with the company again. We did not receive any free drinks or snacks because of the long wait until lunch. I've come to understand that in this culture, one rarely apologizes for mistakes and almost never for delays.

It seems so counter-intuitive for those of us coming from the US, where airlines (the mode of public transportation that I have used the most to get from one city to another) explain the reasons for delays and if there are major issues offer compensation. At the least the captain of a plane when welcoming passengers to the flight, apologizes for the delay and asks them to consider the airline in the future. This is Mozambique. Things like this happen without explanation or apology.