Mozambican (Short) Stories

Sidewalk out of use!
I walk on the sidewalk through Nampula. Suddenly I man in uniform and gun tells me to walk on the street. I don’t get it. Maybe it is because they are painting: the walls along the sidewalk are amazingly white. Later, from the other side of the street – walking in the street is equivalent to suicide - I understand: it’s a military quarter.
In the following weeks in Nampula and Maputo that happens very often, and the funny thing is, that the 20 cm between walking on the sidewalk and walking on the street next to the sidewalk seem to make the whole difference. It seems to be nothing else but a display of power from guys that probably get paid terribly bad and are the subjects to the power displays of their superiors which leads to a whole chain of people showing their superiority and power towards subordinated people in compensation for being treated abominably themselves.
On day I walk on a sidewalk in Nampula, knowing that I will approach a corner where the guard will ask me to step of the sidewalk. Usually they try to get people’s attention by making a sound like: “Ksss” between their teeth. We would call a dog that way, but not other human beings. So I am prepared to give some kind of a fresh answer. Arriving at the corner I don’t get the “Ksss”. I say “Hi.” To the guard who turns to me with the words already on the tip of his tong. Before he can say anything, I add the compulsory “How are you today.” He just answers “Fine. And you?”. “I am fine, too”, I reply and he lets me walk the short stretch of sidewalk which he should keep free from pedestrians. I’ll save my fresh answer for the next time a guard calls me with “Ksss”. But today this one made my day a bit brighter.

Ostalgic Moments
We are staying at a backpackers in Maputo. While having coffee we hear noises on the street and we can see flags and banners over the fence. The security advisor of our sending organisation told us to avoid demonstrations, but we think a short glimpse from the hostel’s entrance won’t do no harm. We see people with different flags from other countries among which we spot the flag of the former German Democratic Republic (DDR). Even though Mozambique is also a socialist country (at least on paper) this seems strange. We ask someone: And well, it is no friendly socialist brotherhood demonstration. What we already knew, is that many Mozambicans have been working or getting trained in other countries 2-3 decades ago. Many went to eastern Germany (Every second Mozambican we meet seems to speak a few words of German or at least has some more or less remote family member who lived in Berlin, Potsdam, Karl-Marx-Stadt …). And they built up pension rights in those countries. Now some people tell us the problem is that those countries promised to pay those pensions and did not. Another version of the story is that those countries paid to the Mozambican government which in turn does not pass the pensions on to the rightful addressees. I don’t know which story is correct. And for the final effect it probably doesn’t matter. But it is the first time since November 1989 that I have seen someone with the flag of my country of birth in public and I was amazed that there are obviously people thousands of miles away from Europe that still have one of these flags at home. Anyway, it provides me with a moment of comparison between the Eastern German and the Mozambican flag: The former displays a pair of compasses, hammer, grain and other peaceful materials, the latter shows a hoe and machine gun (!!!).

Improvisation
I am sitting in the examination room of the little hospital with Dona Genoveva, the nurse-midwife. Al pregnancy consults of the day are done and no mothers are in labour. So we have time to share some cookies and ideas about midwifery. Then the assistant brings a tiny paper: a prescription for glasses. They are for Dona Adelaida. Genoveva gets a shoe box from the top of the closet. It is filled with second hand glasses of all kinds and shapes: the ones old English ladies forget in the café, quite fancy, modern glasses, boring nerd goggles, even an old pince-nez which would be perfect in a museum displaying colonial lifestyle and a version of my own Hans Anders specs (for the Germans: it’s the Dutch Fielmann). All are tagged with the specifications (only dioptres, nothing about cylinders, but who cares, if you don’t have to pay) and we are looking for +1 on both eyes. We find 3 pairs that fit more or less into our search parameters. Dona Adelaida comes in: A tiny old lady, rolled in her Capulana and with a handbag. She sits down and we show her the 3 pairs of glasses: an old-fashioned male version, one pair of fancy modern glasses and the pince-nez. She opens her bag and gets her bible and hymnbook: the pince-nez are ruled out without trying as she thinks they are broken (“Where are its legs?”), she tests the other two specs by reading in her bible and hymn book holding them in different distances. None of the two glasses does seem to really make her happy, but the old-fashioned male specs seem to help well. So Dona Adelaida walks out of the door, the happy new owner of a pair of Sunday glasses! And I wonder if she really needs to read the hymn book, as she probably knows most of the songs by heart.

Going for a walk
As you all know, we have a new member in the family: Bobby, our watchdog. But we cannot yet let him walk free, because he then runs back home to the cashew centre. So we have to walk him twice a day. The other day I went quite far with him, running a bit (which is almost suicidal with the current heat) and we passed by a group of women next to a cashew tree. They asked me where I was going. I looked at Bobby and told them I was going for a walk. They shook their heads and laughed, probably saying among each other those strange mkunhas (macua for white men) invent the craziest things. People here never go for a walk. They are busy most of the time and when you meet them on the road they are heading somewhere. In their spare time (as far as they do have such a thing) they will sit down and relax.
In the same way, Stefania, who helps in the household, asked me one afternoon where Erik was. I told her that he had gone to the cashew centre (1,5-2 km from our house). She wondered: Why didn’t he take the car? Most people here find it strange that we don’t do everything with the car, now that we have one. And I can even imagine that Erik would like to use it for that trip, but every kilometre has to be accounted for and the budget for transport is not infinite. So we try not to use it if not strictly necessary.
We want to buy a bike, so Erik can cycle to the centre and sometimes I could take it and go to the hospital in Ramiane to visit Dona Beatriz, de nurse-midwife there. But so far, all we found was cheap Chinese junk, almost falling apart still inside the shop. Erik wants to ask a colleague to arrange one for us. He seems to know the better spots. So, maybe next time I can tell about bicycles.

“Water is not the same as water” or “lost in Translation”
One Sunday, while we were in Nampula, we had no electricity. Not when we got up, not around coffee time, not towards lunch time… well, no computers, no internet etc. We decided we could as well take the car and head for a lake a few kilometres out of town that Claudia, the owner of the backpackers had recommended to us. We kept on driving and driving that road she had indicated. After a while we started doubting and decided to ask someone. It’s better to ask men, as the chances are higher that they speak Portuguese. We stopped and asked a man, who looked a bit scary, having only one eye. “Where can we find the lake?” He looked at us: “Lake? What do you mean?” I explained: “Water, like a big pool of water”. Oh, he nodded: “If you go on to the houses over there, there is the guy with the chicken farm, he has water. Or you have to go back to where you passed the stonemason, there they also have water.” A useful answer from his point of view. We decided not to insist, thanked him and told him we would go ahead to the chicken farm. After a few more kilometres we turned around. We were not even sure anymore if we were on the right road and at the entrance of the town we had passed a hotel-restaurant complex with a garden, which is famous for its terrible food, but we thought they could not make many mistakes with the beer. So we turned around.
A few days later Erik had to take that same road to install a rope pump and it turned out that if we had continued some 200 metres we could have seen the lake.
So what was the problem: Portuguese is a second language for the people here. So “lagoa”, the Portuguese term for “lake” does not mean anything to them in this case, because this special lake they call “barragem”, which means “dam”. That’s because it is indeed an artificial lake created by building a dam. And in this area there are no lakes, only dams. Therefore, “lagoa” is a word without meaning to the people here. If we had asked a native Portuguese he would have guessed that we meant the “barrage”. But okay, we had our cold beer in the company of Phil and Pine respectively American and South African, who could also explain the reason for the electricity blackout: All the Mozambican electricity comes from Cahora Bassa Dam, the proud of the country. And the hydroelectric plant needs maintenance every now and then. And that very same Sunday was the day they had chosen to do so: announced in Noticias, the biggest journal in the country, but still, not available in our tiny village. So the whole country, a few times the size of Holland, from Maputo up to the Tanzanian border was left without electricity for more than 12 hours.
Luckily the restaurant with the terrible food has a generator which could foresee us with cold beer and also appeared to have a new director who had just ordered some fine Portuguese ham. Not too bad after all. Furthermore Phil and Pine just came from the “barragem” and told us that every expat soul of Nampula was to be found there and they had not left a single free chair at the bar next to what we so erroneously had called a “lake”.