Balancing Old and Modern Remains Difficult for Even a Wealthy Place like Malta

It is always a downer to come back from a street party to find your house flooded. But in Malta, that downer is all the more when the stone house is likely more than a century old, and the party may involve half the country's population gathering around to watch a one-and-a-half-hour fireworks display. In positive terms, it is called "tradition and modernity living side by side." In less pleasant words, it can be summed up as "why does the government spend money on free fireworks, when it may want to consider subsidizing housing repairs with that money instead?"

The repairman who came to the house to figure out the source of the flood worked fast. After seeing the trail of water behind the kitchen counter, he pulverized a couple of backsplash tiles, only to be sprayed by the newly exposed pipes. Strenuously shutting up the decades-old, rusting water mains, he found the plastic pipe with a lengthy crack running across its side. Almost invisible to the naked eye, it was nevertheless powerful enough to leak, for perhaps months, through the Maltese sandstone surrounding it, before the stone and the tile could hold it no longer.

The repairman remained nonchalant after being soaked by the broken pipe, not at all surprised by the findings. "You know, these guys just want to earn quick money," he intoned as he cut a piece of the replacement pipe. "Back in the day, these pipes might have lasted 20, 25 years. But now, we are lucky to find them intact for ten years." It is not exactly a comforting thought for a house whose piping work was done decades ago, and plenty more deep within the walls, not nearly as easy to dig through as simply taking out some backsplash.

Thankful for the quick repairs and the Maltese sun that quickly took care of the floodwater through evaporation, I remain anxious for the next episode of flooding that could come from anywhere. Beautiful as the traditional Maltese stone house is, in its modern reincarnation, maintaining that beauty means hastily stringing together water, electricity, gas, and internet supply lines criss-crossing invisible areas. When problems occur, the brutal solution is the one the repairman took, taking away the physical beauty for the convenience of solving real problems.

It is an apt metaphor for Malta as a whole. The free fireworks festival for the public is like the exterior beauty of the Maltese house. No complaints can realistically be made when all are hidden and forgotten amidst the booming lights that turn its cloudless sky into a kaleidoscope of colors and wows. For a moment, Valletta deserved all the tourist hordes that annoy residents. The UNESCO Heritage city of beige reflected the colors in the sky, as even the visitors onboard the massive ten-storey cruise ship sitting in the harbor got a good glimpse of why they should have gotten off when they had the time.

But reality hits as soon as the last aerial flower faded away as a cloud of powdery smoke. As the clock turned midnight, hundreds of thousands of spectators sought to rush home, pushing and shoving up the medieval stairs designed for a settlement of a few thousand people. At the destination, the bus terminal, crowds mobbed every bus that approached, their eagerness to climb on first reminding the casual observer of so many Hollywood movies that depict zombies aggressively attacking any signs of living beings. 

In these moments, Malta's water pipes came apart, the floodwater of infrastructural inadequacy bursting into the open. The people push, the buses beep, and the drivers shout. The urban equivalent of breaking those backsplash tiles produces a crowd of those who wait for an hour or more just to get a bus going anywhere at all. In their eyes, I see the same dismay that the repairman had when he looked at the cracked pipe. It is a feeling not of anger at why things are not better, but a cynical acceptance of learned helplessness at the suboptimal reality.

Living in Malta, I constantly think that there can be a better balance between the old and the new, the need to preserve tradition and develop a modern economy. Malta is better placed than most, with its high living standards, filled government coffers, EU's resources, and attractiveness to workers worldwide. But if this country struggles, imagine the difficulty for many others who simply do not have the financial luxury. As the old sandstone house lives another day without a total breakdown, the anxiety only builds up further, waiting to leak through the walls.