Time to tell about Nicane

It`s about one week ago that I reached my “final destination” – Nicane. It`s been a quiet week. Our house is situate at the margins of the village. In the village, there is few things to see and do: a market, where a few things are being sold (dried fish, bread and sometimes maybe a few bananas, 3 onions etc… ), 2 little shops for soap, salt and those things, a bar, which is closed very often, because the owner has to work his land, a mill, where people have their corn grinded, a school (until 7th grade (pupils up to 15 years), a few water points and a cinema. There is electricity for 6 months now and it is used to have the cinema and to play music loud out into the village every evening (telling by the volume that reaches our house outside the village, it must terribly hard at the village itself.
Our house - which we share with some bats, a few lizards and the usual insects like spiders and the likes - needs some renovation, but furthermore is quite cozy. We have a guard, Eurico, who comes every evening and makes sure we are safe. I cannot tell if this is really necessary, but it gives a comfortable feeling. He stays until the morning. And then, when he leaves, Isabel comes. She does the cooking, washing and cleaning. Sounds quite “colonial” or “snobbish”?! Actually, at the moment I have so little to do, that it would be easy to do everything myself. On the other hand, you know me, I even don’t like to wash the dishes… And I hope I will eventually have a bit more to do than the household. I was thinking of some voluntary work at Erik’s organization or with some luck in the health care sector. And I hope to meet someone of the local “hospital” (5 km further on) who I heard is supposed to be in Nicane vaccinating school kids tomorrow. Only that the teacher responsible for the health care at the school, whom we asked to teach us the local language, did not know about it , when I asked him today. Things are going “the Mozambican way” here, for sure :-).
Hopefully, we will have a car soon. This is more for security reasons, because there is no other car around, and it would be good to know that we can get to a hospital in cases of emergency. But of course, it would also help me to get around and contact health workers in the wider area and to do shopping in the next town, at 25 km.
At the moment I do know so little about everything here, that I simply don’t know where to start looking for something to do. Isabel told me that there has been a traditional birth attendant in Nicane until 1-2 years ago, but she died and now there is nobody. So the women have their kids alone at home if they cannot find anybody to take them to the hospital by motor.
Well, I have many ideas, but still feel I have to get used to the place here and get a better impression of how things are working around here, to see how I can fit myself in. And of course find something that helps me getting a longer term visa.
Until then I stick to the household things: Saturday I will start to make a veggie garden with Eurico (that is, if I can arrange for digging material etc until then) and I started with some seeds for lavender and rosemary and other herbs. Doesn’t look very successful until now, though. Maybe I’ll have to brush up my gardening skills.
Finally, today morning something very funny happened: Erik had bought a ventilator before I arrived. He had put it together, but the shield in front of the little motor he had left because it had some holes in it. He wanted to use it to put soap onto in the shower so the water could strain off. Then we had the plastic lid of a coffee tin and made some holes into it to use it for the soap. And I put the shield from the ventilator into the bowl with the dishes to be washes and then be put onto the ventilator. Put it disappeared. I asked Isabel, but she had not seen it.
That was 3 days ago. This morning a guy from the village came to see Isabel and a few minutes later she walked in holding the shield and asking if this was what I was looking for the other day.
It somehow ended up in our garbage pit. And as our garbage pit is highly interesting to kids, no bag of garbage ever remains there for more than a few hours. Somehow, Isabel knew whom to talk to and found someone who had seen kids at the other end of the village playing with that ventilator shield and recovered for us.
Erik calls this the “village’s sixth sense”.

… update… it’s now already Saturday evening before I got Internet working. We started to make the veggie garden, it has been raining, which saves me the trouble of watering this evening. And on the pictures you get some impressions about our house and “room-mates”.

Big hug,
Anna