Mozambique - the arrival debacle
Trip Start
Unknown
1
4
Trip End
Ongoing
Beira,
Mozambique
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Long plane ride. Old German men are stupid, fat, and childish. Mozambique is green, tropical, humid. Roads are shite but the geckos are cute. Lots of poverty but very nice people. 25+ % HIV-positive in Beira (HOLY SHIT!) The Indian Ocean! The Southern Cross! Aid workers and their stupid white Land Cruisers (present company included)... Hot, sticky, sweltering heat (Kevin has made vague threats if I complain about the heat but complaining is what I'm best at and besides, I have to make him feel bad about being stuck out in the middle of the ice floes in the Bering Sea. Sucker!) Have come to no life-altering epiphanies regarding...anything.
Now for the real thing:
Holy crap, Mozambique is HOT. I have a salty river of perspiration running down my cleavage like a fluvial flood. My curly hair has kinked up like a wild pubic sprawl on my head. My eyes sting from the drops of sun block-sweat mixture that keeps dripping down off my forehead. And suffice to say, I have swamp ass again. (I only share this with you all because I have to keep Chad and Dan abreast of all butt-related goings-on.) My feet feel nice, though.
I went to a party last night, the 30th birthday party of an HAI clinical advisor from Colombia. She's a fire cracker and looks like one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's cat-eyed nubile convocations. During the talking and eating and drinking, I had a moment, albeit a sleepy, somewhat dazed one, where I thought, "hell, I could do this..." I guess that sums up Mozambique so far. But man, what a fucking journey to get here. 41 hours...it just doesn't go over well with someone like me who has a rough time of an hour-long class. And upon arrival... well, let's just say I'm not always 100 percent in possession of my common sense.
You'd think that I'd have learned by now that trying to enter a country without a visa is never a good way to go about things... But at the core of my neurotic, overachieving façade is a lazy, lazy person, one who despises bureaucracy and paperwork and paying petty fees. (Find me someone who relishes that kind of thing and I might rethink my very liberal stance on the death penalty...) So, the inner-me won the debate over whether or not I should get a visa for Mozambique before I left. You see where this is going...
I step off the plane in Beira in much the same manner that most tourists step off planes into developing countries in hot climates: a vacant look on my face and even more vacancy in my mind. The heat is shocking, and almost offensive in the way it wraps around you in that invasive, unshakeable way. I wander into some vague semblance of a line and am promptly redirected to a dodgy office with high ceilings, cracked windows, and sparsely furnished with a battered desk that's probably been there since the Portuguese first colonized some 500 years ago.
My passport has been taken away, my luggage is pulled off of me and disappears three different ways, and I am told (I think?) to go talk to the baggage inspectors, which makes no sense to me for what I consider pretty obvious reasons-my bags are no longer in my possession and while I can still see one (I made a half-way futile effort to follow the most important one, the one with my wallet, computer, and camera), I'm still not sure what the point is.
That problem is eventually solved because apparently, they've already gone through my bags and come retrieve me, demanding I pay a 50 percent "duty" on the two wireless routers I brought from the US for the offices here. (Wireless routers here are upwards of $200, so I think they're excited about a pretty big pay-off.)
I'm confused. Well, I'm even more confused than I already was. Where's my passport? I don't have any cash. I have a credit card, will that work? No, no, cash only. What they're looking for is a bribe, and in the best of situations, when my mental faculties are strongest, I am not one to tune into subtleties of any kind (this is why I think no one ever hits on me, a notion Justin assures me is bullshit). I miss the hint and continue to act confused. The entire Beira customs office probably thinks all Americans are retarded now.
Luckily, Molly has seen me wandering around like a stunned cow and comes to my rescue. After some rapid haggling and the exchange of what amounts to about $10, we are free to leave. Oh, and I've gotten a visa, too! (So, my laziness was rewarded, and much like a Pavlonian dog, I will learn the wrong lesson and miss the valuable one that was offered here: prepare thyself, oh, innocent lass abroad!)
Outside, the heat is even more aggressive and I am reminded of Barranquilla, except here, things are greener and the countryside is divided into small rice paddies that have water lilies growing in them and corn patches. It's green, super, brilliant green. The colors are kind of unreal but it's gorgeous. We drive away from the airport along a narrow, pot-hole filled road lined with palm trees and Mozambican women walking slowly with huge bundles of grass balanced on their heads. It's fantastic but I always get annoyed with people when they try to describe the landscape of places they're visiting, so I won't try too much.
Well, that's kind of a lie. We get into the city, which is a weird jumble of decrepit colonial buildings-you could tell that once they were beautiful but now they're kind of creepy-and wide dirt streets full of kids and dogs and whatever else you wouldn't expect. The town wraps around the north end of a bay, so the beach is always right there.
The Indian Ocean! I've never been on the Indian Ocean! This is fantastic. But the water is muddy brown from the river (I don't know the name... the Pemba, maybe?) emptying into the ocean there. Still, there are dozens of kids and families playing on the beach, fishing, etc. We get beer at a little shack and sit there until the sun goes down. There's a full moon that obstructs my first view (non-view, as it were) of the Southern Cross, which is one of the things I am most excited to see. (This is my first trip south of the equator.)
The streets of the city are primitive affairs; in fact, Beira doesn't seem so cosmopolitan so much as a village that's exploded without much strategic planning involved (take that, management class!). The poverty is right there, everywhere. Women pound rice and other pale grains (??) in big wooden...shit, the word is eluding me. Does mortar and pestle make any sense? Anyway, it looks like a lot of work, especially in this heat, and once again, I'm reminded what a spoiled, lazy fucker I am. There are a lot of kids everywhere, running around barefoot. They're pretty freaking cute and it's sad to realize that here in Beira, upwards of 27 percent of the population is HIV-positive, which means that a lot of those kids are already or will be soon(ish) AIDS orphans. If they weren't already born with HIV themselves...
The language-Portuguese-is beautiful, and it's enough like Spanish that I can understand about 70 percent of what is said. I can't begin to answer, though, which is a huge pain in the ass. I feel inept and mentally inadequate-the only other time I feel like this is when I am grappling with biostatistics-but I am determined if nothing else, and just speak Spanish, letting them correct me ever other second (it IS a different language, after all...). On the good side, one Mozambican told me that if I stayed here for a while, I'd become his Mean Machine, which was his way of saying that I'm quick, as in quick-witted, sharp, and sassy. Sweet. I've always wanted to be a mean machine.
My long nap in Johannesburg during my 14 hour layover there actually got me into the right time zone, so I avoided the jet lag plague and went to sleep under a mosquito net watching the geckos crawl around on the walls. I slept like a rock, face down, drooling all over the pillow and awoke refreshed to the sound of roosters crowing, dogs barking, and people yelling. (I have two sleep modes: drug-induced coma sleep, which doesn't really involve drugs but you probably couldn't wake me up by dousing me in ice water; and not-sleep, which is basically a torturous insomniac delirium. I cycle through these two modes pretty regularly, so really, jet lag wouldn't have bothered me too much.)
And here I am, at the OR (Operations Research) Center, trying to finish all my bullshit course work and figure out how much time I'll spend traveling around to the villages and treatment facilities over the next two weeks with the World Food Program dude. That's the drill for the first couple days of my stay here, anyway.
