Arrival

After one month of seemingly endless travel around northern Mozambique, I’m beginning to grow accustomed to the roadside sites of Africa, but so many things still strike me as foreign and beautiful. A girl, not yet school age, pumping water with from a well with a lever she can barely reach, throwing her tiny weight against the job. Everyone everywhere lounging on grass mats. A dog with a collar?? Oh. Nope. Just a tricky ring of white fur. Women carrying 50+ pounds of water, jugs in both hands and balanced effortlessly atop their heads, with a baby strapped to their torso. A man carrying an entire tree on a bicycle, a firewood javelin. People standing on the side of the road, in the pitch black of night that exists only in Nowhere, on the road from Somewhere to Somewhere Else. Just standing.

The driver from Morrumbala finally arrived to pick me up from the Nicoadala camp at 4:15pm. The poor man had been driving all day long on another work errand before coming to get me, but I guess that’s what they’re paid for. I’m still getting used to being important (read helpless) enough to deserve personal drivers. After unloading his very sensible truck-bed cargo of bleating baby goats and bags of charcoal, we hit the old dusty trail at a sprint.

The entire country is on fire. Everywhere you look, the bush is being burned, and although it was not yet 5:00, I could barely see the road ahead. The alarmingly pink sun sat stuck in a white-gray sky, soupy with haze. Between the dust and smoke, and the driver’s yell-speak (an extremely kind man, his average volume hovers somewhere between ear-piercing and earth-shaking), I could barely see straight after half an hour. I finally asked if we could roll up the windows and turn on the AC, fully prepared to flinch involuntarily when he decided to speak again, but happily his words came forth at a relatively normal volume. I guess he had been unable to hear himself over the smoky wind and dust. I’ve begun to notice that all the drivers, while extremely personable and helpful, have their own little quirks. One likes to listen to the same song on repeat. At length. One is very interested in and equally clueless to world geography. And they all slow the car significantly when I take a phone call, as though I may receive news that would necessitate an urgent and immediate change in direction.

After an unexpectedly short trip of just over 2 hours, he informed me we were just 2 kilometers away from Morrumbala, my new home. In the dark of night, unable to see much of the town, I couldn’t have missed the big city lights. All ten of them.

In the words of a kindred wayward spirit, a famously spunky redhead by the name of Annie, “I think I’m gonna like it here!”