Prime Minister Socrates’ resignation yesterday further darkens Portugal’s financial predicament and almost certainly means that the IMF will put the company into receivership. Socrates was sent down because he had no real ideas. No one has any real ideas. The belt-tightening measures he proposed were no more than a blow upon a bruise to middle and working class Portuguese, sacrificing the public sector and raising taxes.
The Portuguese economy is a miserable, disabled slug and the mistakes of government so blatant that even as an outback-ratrace-refugee I experience this disgrace every day. 1. Trying to interest Portuguese businesses in a miniscule investment in the preternaturally healthy expatriot micro-economy is close to futile. 2. There is, not just widespread, but almost complete IVA tax avoidance. 3. The public sector is deep in a bog of bureaucracy, over-regulation, paperwork and delay. Sometimes I wonder if the “system” functions at all. For the expat this is a nuisance, but for the Portuguese it is a gross injustice.
The health department is what hurts me the most. Free health care is a beautiful thing and an endangered idea is this world of rationalisation. The quality of care here is above criticism. But accessing that care is nigh impossible. This is how it goes:
Ring doctor. In meeting. Ring doctor. Doctor overseas. Ring doctor and make appointment in a weeks’ time (this is going in the back door – the alternative might fill the page). Arrive at appointment a half hour early to beat the “queue”. (The first big mistake is this habit for calling everyone for an appointment at the same time: waiting rooms full of sick, humiliated sick and germ swapping sick getting angrier all the time. It costs nothing to give people specific times and to keep a schedule. Elementary. Ask the Germans.)
I wait two and a half hours to see my brilliant doctor who determines I need physiotherapy. Another hour while she works out where to send me, how to send me and to fill in the respective forms I need.
Back to those waiting times: Doctor’s appointment takes 3.5 hours for every person in the waiting room. That’s 35 hours of productive time wasted that I can see at a glance. People take whole days of work just to see a doctor. Huh?
The next day I go to the physiotherapy place and wait half an hour before excellent person explains how my form will be looked at and it will be determined whether or not I should receive services – by what is written on the form. Wait a week. Get a call for an appointment in a month. In a month go to appointment a half hour early and wait two hours before the secretary sees me and says that my form does not have the correct stamp. A fight breaks out between excellent person and new person about the stamp. It exists, but the stamp is in the wrong place on the form. This has to be rectified, but I still get to keep my appointment. Another fight between excellent and other. The form is fine. New person fills out 5 forms and does a little data entry. I am dispatched to another waiting room. I wait with the same people as before, for an hour. People discuss amongst themselves how long they have been waiting, what is the order of the queue, mobile phones ring as anxious spouses wonder when to put the stew on. Cousins, elsewhere in the queue, drop by to swap complaints and there are tears. Small kindnesses are past between us.
It’s my turn! Doctor is kind, tolerates my Portuguese, is attentive, earnest, squeezes my neck for 2 seconds and determines that I qualify for treatment. Unbelievably, we are all waiting to audition for physiotherapy, not to actually receive any. This queue was to sort out the malingerers from the crippled. I mistakenly thought that that was what our family doctor was for.
I’m assured I will be contacted briefly for an appointment time. I’m still waiting.
Did I tell you about the time I waited 18 months to determine whether a lump in my armpit was breast cancer or not? Compare the Australian free healthcare system. My sister is on her way to the post office. Between the house and destination there’s a mobile mammogram truck. She sticks her head in to ask what the drill is and they invite her to come right in and take off her shirt. In 15 minutes she’s back on the street knowing that she’s good to go for another two years.
Just how many Portuguese die while waiting for treatment? Who keeps a record of how much a patients’ illness, and the cost of treatment, escalates while they wait?
I don’t take pleasure in criticising a country in which I am a guest. But sometimes it takes a foreign perspective to see the problems in the wider context: of the damage already done at home or of battles already fought and won. No country is perfect. My point of view comes from love and respect for a Portugal which is not fullfilling its potential. Whose government is failing. Where solutions exist and no politician has the integrity to implement them.
Perhaps at the very core of the Portuguese problem is the disfunctional judicial system. There are laws, but finally, no one is held accountable. While corruption exists, democracy fails.
Anyway, there’s nothing worse than a back-seat critic. Or is there? How about an amateur economist?
1. Sell the $1 billion worth of submarines ordered by the previous Government. Sell them at a loss and still this injection of cash will serve the people in a way tax cuts will not.
2. Decrease IVA to 10% and implement a long term 100% compliance strategy which targets sector by sector starting with lawyers.
3. Halve the size of the public service but invest in state of the art technology and training to get government departments working efficiently and effectively.
4. Raise minimum wages. Raise taxes on cigarettes, imports, luxury vehicles and dare I say, fuel. Raise the tiny fee we pay to see a doctor – we voluntary foreigners – raise it by 3 euros and you won’t be hurting anyone.
5. Invest in radar speed detectors throughout the entire country to both lower the accident rate and raise revenue. This surely would pay for itself and then some. And then some more.
6. Put a Government levy on credit card spending. Stiffen the regulation of banks, limit their rights to charge fees and tax banking sector profits. Reward personal saving.
7. Devise a nationwide campaign to promote “made in Portugal”. Restore the Portuguese pride in their country and bring them back to their grass roots local economy and away from the corporatisation of the EU.
Rant over. Goodbye Socrates. Never has there been a Prime Minister so cute or with a more appropriate name. I only pray there’s a Plato to follow you.
I’ve been obsessively curious about these small doors in the rock face that seem to be especially common around here. Some are very discreet, and when I once asked a neighbour he teased me by saying “It’s private”. “Secret?” I asked, “Yes, secret things” of course, came the answer.
From someone else I heard that all these little holes in walls were hiding spots for the tungsten that farmers dug from their land during the Second World War, to sell to the Germans. WW2? Now I was fully sucked in.
Despite Salazar’s Estado Novo having much in common with the 1930′s dictatorships of Italy and Germany, Portugal was bound by a 500 year old alliance with Britain and was somehow able (unified with fascist Spain) to remain neutral. Salazar apparently didn’t like Hitler anyway. This doesn’t mean Portugal missed the war, of course, but instead played a discreet double hand with both sides. During the war, Portugal was a place of intrigue: of espionage, of refuge for the rich and escape for the Jews, and of favours played out to keep both the Axis and the Allies appeased. And Salazar was paid in gold.
Whether or not the large deposits of wolframite ore that Portugal had had anything to do with the negotiations for neutrality can be debated. In any case, the Germans needed to secure a supply of tungsten (which comes from wolframite or scheelite ore) for use in the manufacture of weapons.
Tungsten, today most commonly used in the filament of light bulbs and halogen lighting, was then a vital component to strengthen alloys (metal combinations) and made armaments more heat resistant.
Salazar granted concessions to both the English and the Germans for several mines in the Alentejo, the Beira Alto and around Castelo Branco in the East. Thus began Portugal’s Black Gold rush. High unemployment and a depressed rural economy provoked thousands and thousands of young people, farmers and entrepreneurial types to leave their homes for the mines.
Firstly, the Germans and English provided fairly paid employment for miners, people (normally women) to wash the ore and in the processing factories. They were accommodated and fed. But perhaps more exciting was the widespread illegal mines run by freelance prospectors and by local landowners. The finds by these prospectors were sold to the Germans, or to the English, via intermediaries. There was also a side-industry of forgery.
And fortunes were being made! Even just having a job in the mines, a worker might earn the rough equivalent of €5 a day, and while not extravagant, it did have a lot more buying power in 1942 than it does today. It was highly preferable to the misery of ration tickets, and for some, a weeks’ wages was more money than they had ever seen. The bigger bucks was made by individual prospectors. Stories of men rolling cigarettes with 100$00 notes, using taxis and hired cars, illiterate men sporting parker pens in their breast pockets, of stays in luxury hotels with prostitutes, and fables of villagers trying to buy trains, or even whole railways emerged. The train story still circulates today, apparently much to the embarrassment of the current residents of the village.
In reality, a new sector of country people could afford to educate their children, build houses and see a doctor. The search for tungsten and the promise of riches lifted the spirits and gave hope to the disadvantaged rural communities of 1940′s Portugal.
As the war wore on, the price of tungsten began to drop and by 1944 Salazar had began to tire of German gold and to favour the Allies. The British motive had always been to deprive the Germans of as much tungsten as possible, and now they had began a more precise campaign to disrupt mining. On their side was that the towns had begun to fill with sick men and young widows in black. Frequent accidents and the ubiquitous health problems of the miners tinged the vibrant reputation of the mines. But there had been an environmental impact as well. Rivers full of dead fish and contaminated drinking water directly contributed to the local people’s resentment of the continued German presence. The British capitalised on this by encouraging dissent which even led to minor skirmishes at some mines. With the war turning in favour the Allies, Churchill finally convinced Salazar to kick the Germans out.
So today, all that remains are some strange little villages with ruins of large factories and company housing. In Arouce, one the main centres of tungsten mining, there is an unexpected aura of wealth in the town planning, but we saw no obvious sign of mansions, art deco style theatres or grand hotels. Only the stories live on. But they have nothing to do with the little doors in the walls.
I’m sure most of you have forgotten by now that this is a blog about building a house. I myself have wanted to forget that this is a blog about building a house. But this has all changed this week. I’m back on the case.
The story so far in brief:
Way back in 2007 I saw this house and wanted to be sure my plans for it would be accepted by council before I bought it. So I hooked up with a builder (we shall call him Fatface) and an architect (let’s call him Moron) and they together, via reams of bullshit, took 9 months to put a projecto de architectura together. Meanwhile I learnt Portuguese and subsequently discovered that the delay was due to Fatface telling Moron that I wasn’t going to pay. So I got on a plane the next day with the cash and knocked on the architect’s door. The project was finished that afternoon.
The council approved the project and I bought the house. I found a new architect and a new engineer for the projecto de especialidades. The engineer said the project[1] would take two weeks and I said pigs might fly. In two weeks we submitted the project and in about four months it was approved.
Meanwhile I had been cleaning up, digging holes, removing an oven in preparation for the build. I auditioned 8 builders for the job. Only one had any idea of the house I wanted to build, as I had picked them off a site in an aldeia do xisto in the Serra da Lousã and that’s exactly the style of my place. But they would have travel time of at least an hour each way, and for this wanted to charge a premium. Fair enough. I waited, I researched, I shopped around some more.
Some of the builders really made me laugh. When I explained I wanted to use meia- canudos for the roof, one showed me a straight 100 yr old tiles-on-battens example as in a shed. Believe me, I know the Portuguese for rockwool, ceiling, water barrier and even pumpkin: but maybe he didn’t. I’d take a look at jobs they’d done in stone and shout quel horreur! Awful cement mortar/ mismatched stone and styles/ uninsulated/ simply hideous things I saw. Clearly I’m not in the right area for decent builders. I will admit though, I did scoff when someone told me the project was too hard, too complicated for these guys. Mmm.
Then came in the great big ugly global financial crisis and stole half my money. The project was off, or delayed, at least until I knew what would happen next. I started the blog, hoping it might pay some living expenses. It didn’t. A year went by and I applied for a one year extension on the building licence. Still no sign of any money growing on the trees. I waited, procrastinated. I had the money to start the project but not to finish it. Even if I could finish the house there would be no one to buy it because the housing market was a dying duck.
I then applied for another 6 months on the building licence and in December 2010, this expired. This is what I had been dreading. Project death. It had cost in the end about €1500 including flights and hire cars and whatnot. But mostly it cost me in time and energy and heartache.
But when the council decided not to give me another extension (even the last six months was outside the legislation) the camara’s architect and I talked about a renovation. The basic rule of a renovation is that nothing of the outside is altered. The house cannot be enlarged, you can’t change the height, you can’t use any cement structures, you can’t make new openings for windows or doors.
And frankly what a relief. I had been clinging onto the project for dear life, but its weight was pulling me under. Once or twice people had suggested I simplify the design, but I couldn’t see how. The project had to be ripped from my womb first. Now I had to redesign, and it could only get simpler, cheaper, and more fundamental.
Along came Penfold, the surfer, writer, illustrator, philosopher, carpenter, renovator, restorer builder. And sort of a neighbour. As we took the tour through my house of horrors his face showed the same distress of the others who had gone before. Other builders usually mumbled and agreed to send me a quote or something, and some amateur builders criticised this or that, (because criticism makes you smarter, you know). One “builder” mistook a french drain for bathroom plumbing and another, practically in tears, told me the project was too big, because I was so very small.
But at last I was talking to someone who wasn’t overwhelmed by a need to condescend, but instead by the need to construct! Finally someone who could see what I had been trying to do but who could simplify it, under the terms of a renovation, and especially in terms of getting the project finished. He added instead of subtracted.
Brothers and sisters I have seen the light! Like all good ideas, the solution is so obvious that you wonder why you didn’t think of it sooner. This should and could have been a renovation all along. The new plan means that I get to do more of the work myself (good) than would be possible in a building-project. It’s more likely it’ll be just me most of the time, plus a labourer for assistant jobs. And a licenced builder consulting.
Let’s look at the plans:
It’s massively simpler than before. All existing stone walls remain. The floors and the roof stay. No more new windows and door openings. So, anyone want to buy 68 windows and doors ripped from a french chateaux?
It’s not the house I dreamt of anymore. I’ve lost a 45m2 living room and a bedroom. It’s no way as luxurious a floor plan as I had – and it will not fetch the same sale price. It probably won’t satisfy its financial reason-to-be. But it’s do-able, and in these tough times, I’m happy just to be motivated again.
[1] An architecture project involves only the physical appearance of the house, as the name suggests. The specialised project covers the plans for water and sanitation, gas, electricity, the structure, roof, thermal & acoustics plus any additional things like solar, universal access, grey water systems, sprinkler systems, universal access etc.
