As soon as the Peace Corps mandated standfast was lifted enough to allow travel, we were on a 4am bus out of Chimoio and headed, yet again, to Quelimane. All other volunteers across the nation have been instructed to travel to their sites and stay there until things have settled back down to normal, but having never in fact been to my site, I instead returned to the city for a meeting tomorrow. As usual, I have no clue as to my role in this meeting, but simply that my presence has been requested.
On the bus, a girl somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12 (malnourishment makes it really difficult to tell) was seated below her mother on the floor in the aisle, either from lack of space or lack of money to pay for it. Several hours after leaving, as we were roused from our half-sleep stupors for a side-of-the-road pee break, we looked down to see her sitting in a puddle of urine. I felt for her, as I had strategically dehydrated myself to a state of pruney-ness in anticipation of this 8 hour minimum bus ride, crossing 600 kilometers of nowhere. No sooner had she changed clothes and re-boarded the bus, did her carsickness kick-in and leave her in an even bigger mess than before. She was such a pitiful little thing, I just wanted to take her home (theoretical, yet nonexistent home) and give her a bucket of hot water and a cup of tea.
Thankfully, there were no mishaps along the way and we arrived at the projected hour of noon. In rolls our big yellow bus, equipped with anime-animals and Chinese characters on the outside, wall-papered with cartoon Chinese babies on the inside. I felt strangely transported from the Orient back to increasingly familiar, curiously smelly, dusty Quelimane.
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