Maputo

Hello from Cambine!

It has taken a long time to get here. We arrived in Cambine late last night after driving all day from Maputo. We were stopped for a little over 3 hours when the car overheated. The tube that you put the water in had broken, so we had to find a person in the village we were passing through who could fix the part.

The trip over here was long and very tiring. I got to Johannesburg at 5 PM (10 AM Eastern) after 17 hours on a plane and was unbelievably tired. I had wanted to stay in the airport hotel but that plan changed when I found out it was $309 for one night, so instead I slept on a bench in the terminal. Candido and Dieudonne arrived at about 10 the next morning, and we hung out together in the airport until our flight to Maputo in the evening.

Maputo is the capital of Mozambique, and all I can say about it is that it's completely different from anything I've ever experienced before. We had to bribe a security official $20 to bring our bags through, because Dieudonne and Candido had picked up several bags in the US, which they weren't supposed to do. Mozambique was playing a soccer game that night against Nigeria, and driving into town from the airport, we passed through slums where huge groups of people were crowded outside buildings trying to watch the game through windows, much like the end of Slumdog Millionaire.

I can tell a thousand stories to try to explain what Maputo is like and I'm not sure any of them will do justice. But I will say that I was ready for anything Thursday morning when Candido and I went for a walk and maybe 2 blocks in we passed a dumpster, and a woman was standing next to it peeing. Every street was lined with vendors, I think the large majority of people in the city are selling things on the streets, and Candido pointed out to me that many of them might go days without selling things, because so many people are selling the exact same things.

We stayed in Maputo Thursday and Friday because Dieudonne had to get some work taken care of there. Friday afternoon we went to see our friend Lucille, who is an American who has lived in Mozambique working for the church for a long time. On the way back was an interesting moment. We had been drinking beer at Lucille's, and the man who was driving us back had only had a couple, but he didn't finish his last one so he brought it in the car with him. Then his phone rang, so our driver is holding a beer and the wheel in one hand, and a phone in the other. Ifirst reminded myself that this is how people live here so I shouldn't panic, but then I remembered that dad always said that many more people die in Africa in driving accidents than anyone else, and maybe this is why. Those are the kind of things you see every day here.

I'm sorry for making this post so long, in the week I've been here there have been so many things to talk about and many more things I would like to write about. I'll just say that I've probably written about 1,000 words already, but I could write a million words about Mozambique and if you have never been to Africa, you still wouldn't be able to fully understand what it's like, that's how different it is.

Until next time.