Days of Grace

This whole place comes alive when the sun comes up. At the crack of dawn is already rush hour here. I awaken to sounds of children running off to breakfast and then school, employees showing up for work. A carpenter knocked on my door at 7:30 raring to go. I let him in and showed him what needed to be done and paid him to come back in 30 minutes to put a rod under the sink to cover all the rubbish, refuse and water bins. I waited and waited and had plans to go pick up the furniture at 9. He never showed, so I went to the transportation office and waited some more. I was told to wait for Joe and I did that for an hour and then told I was just waiting on some paperwork and waited a bit more. Steve and Cassandra showed up because the whole entire cellphone world in the whole entire country was evidently not working. mcel was completely down and still is. Can you imagine? If all of AT&T just didn’t work for a whole day? I heard not one complaint, other than my own. Finally, at 11 we were off. We had to stop and get gas and we all piled out as we do around here and went in the gas station for a drink. We all got a Ceres Litchi juice for $1 and some off brand Fig Newtons.

We drove to the furniture place named Maxara (Mashara) but had then decided we were in the area where our friend had told us we could get a motorcycle driver’s license. We are in desperate need of a car, but don’t have $15,000, so we are considering a scooter. Steve wants us to get a motorcycle because it is cooler but the girls have veto power. I hate motorcycles. I think it comes from the horrific burn I got from the exhausted as a little girl at Papa Davis’ birthday party. But I still just think they are loud and dangerous. Maybe if they had Goldwings here but they don’t. They have Figo’s and these really cheap made in China motorcycles and scooters. They are made of the cheapest plastic you ever did see. The one on the showroom floor in Osman’s had screws missing and decal stickers misplaced and uneven. But I just spent the good part of an entire day getting a license to drive one. Once in Maxara we asked where to go to the drivers license place and I saw my table being made, hours from being finished. We drove down a long bumpy dirt road and as always it feels a bit like a parade. I will never forget the drive out to Ibo Island where a dirt road hours off a paved road became more and more desolate, where the sound of a car brought everyone out of the house and the discovery of white people sent children into high squeals. They always give the thumbs up, we make eye contact and we keep going. I pray this poverty stirs me every time. I want to always be compassionate and always be seeking answers.

We drive out to this small painted building, single level, glass windows, several broken. The yard is all dirt but there are rocks in a circle where Mozambican flag is still against a pole. We are told this is the place and we go inside. There are four men there. There is a desk with a notebook and a calculator and a pencil and a few sheets of paper. There is a man with dirty glasses that are crooked on his face. There is a tall thin man with a starched white shirt and a nice smile, the words John Deere in cursive on the collar. There is a tiny little man in a bright yellow golf shirt that hangs almost to his knees, navy pants. A younger man greets us and immediately informs us that the man who we need is not there but he is at home and we can go to his house to get what we need. We don’t want to do that so we ask if they can go and get him. He agrees to this right away, if we pay 50 Mets for him to get the gas necessary to go and get the boss. We are told it is a 20 minute ride away and we realize we are to hunker down for an hour or so. It was longer than that. We sat in this room and talked to the men. They were quite candid and told us that they really never see white people, they asked us if white people married black people. I already knew where this conversation was going. If I had made eye contact I would have gotten four marriage proposals today. They were sweet. They were funny. One guy had been working at that empty office for over 30 years. It is sad that they feel racism, that they have seen a few white people, but never spoken to them. But then again, there are not a lot of white people here TO talk to. We moved out to the porch and lingered, then came inside again. Finally we heard the sound of the motorcycle, where the boy revealed the paperwork without the boss. The men argued over price and we completely got taken for a ride. But we are told that doing this in town takes weeks. This just took most of a day. We paid twice what our friend had paid when he went there.

The men were all a buzz in the back office filing out our paperwork and discussing our surnames and saying our names over and over. Cassandra went back to see what was taking so long and insisted I come back to look. The office was a bathroom, turned office. Complete with exposed piping and white tiled walls. Smack in the middle of that bathroom was a large metal military type desk where those four men peered over our Passports and International Driver’s Licenses and tiny color photos we had made in town yesterday. 650 Mets each and almost 3 hours later, we were leaving as fully certified scooter drivers.

We then went back into Maxura to get my furniture. The little tables were still wet and he missed a whole lot of spots varnishing them and dirt is mixed in with the varnish, but I took them anyway and didn’t haggle. It is not worth it. They are here in my room now and they are fine. I can touch them up and the look nice and are functional and they work for what I need. The desk remained unfinished but I left promising to come back later. It was about 3:30 at this point and we were all tired and hungry. It could be weeks before I can get a ride back out there and months before I can muster up the patience.

We then went into town to find the bikes. We found one in a fabric store, wall to wall capalana fabric and one motorcycle and one scooter, bright yellow. She told us the shop owner would be there tomorrow and could negotiate a price. It had a helmet case on the back that was broken. We found a similar one in another store where I was then sent to a huge warehouse full of cement and paint and thousands of square feet of major building supplies and somewhere in the middle of all that was a cardboard box. The man opened it up and lots of plastic fell out to reveal a burgundy Made in China scooter. $550. It will get me from point A to point B. We are thinking about it. Because of safety reasons, I cannot walk outside of the base alone. All three of us need means to get to one another, to town, to businesses and to the school. I may be a Shopaholic, but I am not an impulse buyer. We may go again to look at them tomorrow.