I’m in a very comfortable place right now. It’s late. My favorite CD – An Afro-Portuguese Odyssey, a collection I picked up by chance in the Oakland Museum of Art several years ago – is playing in the background. I’m alone, a rare occurrence since I left Austin nearly 3 months ago. Everything has been wonderful since then, fast-paced and exhilarating, but it’s so nice to get some time to myself. Before coming to Africa I lived alone or with a cat as a roommate for nearly 7 years. I would sometimes pass an entire weekend at home without exchanging word with another person face-to-face, only realizing that I’d been isolated for days when, startled, I’d run into a neighbor at the mailbox and say hello. I loved my time alone…dancing to music in the living room, staying up until 4am on the computer, drinking wine, and working on art projects. Tonight is the first taste of that life I’ve had in quite a while, and it’s such a relief to be home.
I say that in the figurative sense, but it’s an even bigger relief to be physically home. Yes, our humble abode, the same place where this morning I found a 4 inch leech on the bathroom floor! Honestly, after the weekend I had a slimy, blood-sucking slug at 7am is no big deal.
It all started Friday with an *insane* day at work. Since Ricardo has been in Brazil I’ve basically been running Agrolink as all the other shareholders hold different full-time jobs. In addition to administrative tasks like going to the notary and renewing our Zimbabwean employee’s visa, I have been preparing a huge proposal and following up on current projects. I spent all day Friday with a very important client who is in the process of finishing the inception phase of a seed propagation project. Essentially, a crucial contract was supposed to be signed that afternoon to guarantee a donor contribution, and everything that could have possibly gone wrong along the way did. The afternoon went by in a blur between phone calls to banks in Holland, frantic interest rate calculations, and text messages to the client. By the end of the day I was totally frazzled, all vestiges of thought revolving around a double gin and tonic and my house slippers.
Instead of being able to sleep in and do away with some stress, I had to wake up early and get ready to travel to Espungabera. A good 6 hours away, Espungabera is a speck on the map in the mountains near the Zimbabwean border where we are working on a tea processing project. Agrolink is developing a deal with a potential client in the area, and we had a meeting scheduled for Sunday morning at 8am, with plenty of prep work still to be done in the meantime. Basically, I traveled over 560km in 2 days just for this meeting, a project left in my hands to develop while Ricardo is away.
The trip to Espungabera could have been straight out of a movie, one where things go from bad to worse to unbearable for the protagonist and you can’t help but laugh out loud at the whole bit. To start, we had to borrow a car for the trip, a beat-up old Land Cruiser that was used for several long years as an ambulance for the Mozambican Red Cross. A friend of ours picked up the wagon at an auction a while back and is now dying to sell it for any salvage value. The vehicle, which Ricardo and I affectionately baptized as the “Jipe de Guerra”, is a banged up old whale that has no shocks, no hand brake, no 2nd or 5th gears, no mirrors, no seat belts, no radio, and a diesel engine that blows black smoke at every turn. In any normal situation, driving the Jipe de Guerra along the nearly deserted road to Espungabera would be an unthinkable idea. This is Mozambique, though, and life here is governed by a different set of standards.
Before hitting the road, we had to search the entire town for an open shop where we could purchase 2 tires, a couple of liters of oil, and a jack. Poor Gemelli drove us around for nearly an hour before finding a makeshift stand where some guys were selling used tires and scraps of metal. We bought the necessary tools and two tires for $25, then headed home to fix up the car. The first big laugh of the day came when BL haphazardly unloaded the tires in the back yard right into a big pile of dog shit. Without noticing the mess below, he later picked up one of the tires and inadvertently smeared shit all over his hands. Disgusted, he threw the tire in the air and ran towards the garden hose to wash up. Not noticing what had happened, Gemelli made a mad dash to catch the tire in mid-air and ended up with his shirtfront and pants full of dog shit as well. I laughed uncontrollably from the front porch as the boys ran around the yard like a couple of spooked geese, squawking and wringing their hands in disgust.
We finally got on the road about 2pm, the start of bumpy, teeth-clenching ride that made me remember just how terrible travel can be. Everyone has a different tolerance for the “adventure factor” in a trip; in most cases, my standards are quite liberal, but there are a couple of situations that make me balk. High-speed driving along steep, curvy roads is one of them. Even more so if I’m in a decrepit vehicle on a dirt trail through the interior of Africa. Now I’m certainly not in a position to criticize anyone else’s abilities, but Gemelli drives like an absolute madman. He was right at home as the back side of the Land Cruiser skidded out of control, nearly sending us off the side of a huge cliff in the middle of an elephant reserve area. BL and I, on the other hand, were scared out of our minds. We pleaded with Gemelli to take it easy, but it took several hours and a miscalculated curve that sent us slamming into a sugarcane field for the message to sink in. I was near tears the entire time, praying to whatever being has protected me thus far to keep special watch over our car.
About halfway through the trip, there is a big river with no bridge. The dirt road comes abruptly to an end and all vehicles, livestock, and people have to pile onto a floating platform to get to the other side. The platform, o batelão, is powered by a manual cogwheel that takes three big Africans to spin and moves at a snail’s pace between the banks. We loaded onto the batelão and stared out at the shallow water, grateful for a break in the driving. The light over the river was incredible – it seemed like the sky was split directly above us, one half heavy with gray storm clouds, the other an intense, clear blue. The bottom portion of a rainbow had formed in each half and thin rays of sunlight shone over the platform, accompanying us across the water. BL and I took it as a sign that we would make it safely, aware though that it was still a good 2 hours to Espungabera and it was starting to rain…
1 comment:
that was fun to read!
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