A Seven Minute Walk

Our office is on the ground floor.

    I live in the spare bedroom at the Equip Moz office, which is a few blocks from Jon and Carla's house. I make the walk several times a day to fetch things, go eat supper, then fight my way through the dogs on the way home after tea. Walking here is very different from the US, and it requires some gymnastics to dodge careening trucks, pothole puddles, and street soccer. I thought I'd share some observations from the last few days.
   I lock the deadbolt and two padlocked bars on the grate and thread my way through the soccer game on the hard-packed dirt outside our apartment. Next door two young men are hauling sand, hand-over-hand, one bucket at a time onto the second floor of the building under construction. That is also the area from which some aggressive dogs accost me when I return home late. One of the first things I noticed upon arriving on the African continent six and a half years ago was the people everywhere. There are a lot of people here, but they also just spend most of their time outside. The Portuguese equivalent of 'hang out' is passear, which means to go wander around.

Laundry

 So I pass many people, walking arm in arm down the middle of the street, kicking a round object, sitting on walls. Today I saw a guy pushing a $1500 Giant road bike, with narrow wheels that wouldn't survive the length of my commute. Many make their livelyhood in resale, and I pass people selling fruit, phone credit, drinks from a cooler. Or at night, their bodies. Beira, a city of 300,000 people, has around 7000 prostitutes and a few of them ply their tragic trade along my route home. On Sunday morning I pass church-goers, many of the men in suits, the women in colorful capulana skirts. For several mornings there was a woman hoeing out the grass in the plot next door, with a baby wrapped in a capulana on her back.
It's makes my brain hurt when I remind myself that all these people are people. I wish that I could catalouge their faces, match them to the stories. But I can't. And I probably couldn't bear to hear them even if I could.

    I walk along the curb to dodge the area where the road is always wet from someone's car-wash. Across the street a disemboweled car has found its final resting place. There's a dumpster there today, but in its absence the trash is piled in the street.
    Two lots down a house is receiving a new paint job, and with it appearance of new life. You never realize how much a difference a coat of paint makes until you live in a city that last had time for such frivolities in the 70's before the Portuguese left. A group of kids usually frolics around there, I don't know if its a daycare on just a hangout. They don't point and laugh as much as they used to. On many evenings a game of soccer is played in the street in front of the house with an electric fence and automated gate. They take time-outs for traffic.
The other house with an electric fence that I pass is owned by a Muslim baker. He has a well and shares his water with the community through this hose. Right now the city water is on, but when it was out for two weeks, there was always a queue of people with buckets outside his fence.
    I pass another dumpster location where a three legged dog is snacking before reaching Jon and Carla's apartment building. They live on the fourth floor, and this completely open window looks out from the second floor landing.
Kyran and Jariel have not fallen from it as far as I know.