An Afternoon at the Cruzamento

Last week I made my triumphant return to Mangunde after having spent nearly two weeks in the capitol city of Maputo for a mid-service Peace Corps conference. Maputo was glorious. All 62 of us that are left from our training group (Moz 15) congregated to do our mandatory medical and dental examinations, receive more training sessions from PC staff and to catch up as many of us hadn't since each other since we swore in and left training back in December 2010. PC put us up in a pretty chic hotel with hot running water, AC, big clean beds, TVs and a pool...as I'm writing this, I'm realizing that this isn't necessarily a description of a super chic hotel, but when you've been taking bucket baths, have been eating nothing but beans, leaves and rice for a year, and sleep on a foam mattress who's size could generously be equated with a prison bed, a $20 room at Dollar Inn would seem like the Ritz Carlton. Again, take this in perspective, because it would be easy to sit there from America and be like, pshhh, I can call Dominoes and have a hot cheesy pizza delivered to me in 10 minutes, and then I can run to the store and pick up a pint of ice cream and a case of beer to make a night of it, but, sadly Dominoes doesn't deliver to schools so far in the middle of nowhere that it would take an air drop a 4x4 to get the pizza there. That in perspective, when I say that there are at least 20 pizza places in Maputo, three Thai restaurants, Indian food, a gelatoria, and that you can even get beer on tap, you have to respond with a jaw-dropping, “no way Maputo is unbelievable, it's like heaven on Earth.” Ok, with that out of the way, at some point I knew I would have to leave this veritable paradise that we call Maputo and enter into the real Mozambique, the one that ranks 165 out of 169 countries globally on the development index, the one who's national HIV prevalence is 12% and the one in which my friends and colleagues live and toil through everyday.

My journey back to school had me fly into our provincial capitol of Chimoio in the smallest most terrifying plane I've ever flown in, take a mini-bus to Inchope, a town halfway to my destination, and then catch a semi the rest of the way to the turn-off to my mission. This is a trip I've done many times. It's not too bad, and depending on your luck with various rides can take anywhere from 3 to 5 hours. The tricky part is that the road to my school, 25km of rocks and mud, doesn't exactly have the most reliable transportation schedule. It operates under the systems and wait and hope. You arrive, you wait, you wait, and you wait for a car to pass by heading into the mission, and then you hope that it has space for you when it does come. Some days, and how beloved they are, you arrive at the turn-off and a car happens to be heading into the missions simultaneously. Other days, however, you arrive at the turn-off, and six hours later the sun has set, the women who were also waiting there pack up their things, put out their fires, head home and warn you that you shouldn't stay out here because there are bandidos that come out after dark. Normally though, you wait about 3 hours and a car eventually comes. I can't say yet that I've come to enjoy those three hours waiting at the cruzamento, but I can say with confidence that, after a year in Mozambique, maybe I've adopted a more African mentality, or maybe I just don't care as much about being on time and predictable, but I don't mind the waiting as much as I used to. When you do enough waiting and sitting around, you learn to adopt a certain mindset to get yourself through the inexorable hours of nothingness. Waiting long hours at the cruzamento, I find that my mind enters a nearly transcendental state of clarity, or deep meditation. The only other time in my life where I felt I could enter such a state was during my year of organic chemistry in college. Back in college we called it “zoning out” but now I realize that I was just practicing a skill that would come to be very useful later in life. Despite its imperfections, an afternoon spent at the cruzamento can be an opportunity to soak up a culture's personality and float into a greater understanding of why they do some of the things they do. I guess, at the end of the day, that's why I don't mind it as much as I used to.

I just stepped off of the semi on the road side of the EN-1 at the cruzamento to my school, Mangunde. The semi-trucks here are all shipped second-hand from America and have the drivers side on the left despite the fact that they also drive on the left side of the road here. Therefore, when I step out of the passenger side of the towering cab and hop three feet down onto the pavement I am already in the oncoming lane. Normally I would be careful and check both ways before crossing the only and thus largest highway that spans the country from Maputo in the south to Pemba in the north, but I realize that we are in the middle of nowhere and there won't be another car that goes past within a half hour and so just walk. When I told the driver to pull over here he had peered ahead squinting his eyes and said, “Here? Are you sure? Where is a white like you going to go out here?” The driver and other passengers that he had picked up on his shipping route down to Maputo to make a few extra bucks had been talking about how dangerous southern Africa was and how many times his cargo or phones had been robbed out of his truck in Congo and I don't think they knew that I was listening or understood their Portuguese because when I chimed in that I had also been robbed they seemed to respect me a little bit more. They were impressed with the fact that I used to have an iPhone and I told them what a magical machine it had been until it was stolen. They couldn't believe that you could take pictures and post them on the “internet” instantaneously, and then have a map guide you to wherever your destination might be. Pure witchcraft they thought.

Anyway, when I tell him that I am getting out here, on a random stretch of nothing on a 150km stretch of the EN-1 halfway between Inchope and Muxungue, two towns which, in themselves, are nothing but dirty truck-stops, I tell him my reason for being here. “I am a teacher. There is a mission school 25km down that dirt road and I teach English and biology there.” I've told this to enough people now that I'm usually able to predict their reactions. A switch seems to go off in them. People respect you. It's a wonderful thing. Whereas before I was maybe a backpacker, or a South African trying to go to the beach, using their country for its cheap thrills and no rules, now I am not necessarily one of them, but at least closer to them. A teacher is a very respected profession here in Mozambique, and a white person who, in their minds, has given up a life of big houses, cars and wealth to come teach in Mozambique is not only an enigma, but also quite laudable. This particular driver gives me a surprised, “ahh...you are a teacher...” when I tell him why I am getting off at this inconspicuous dirt road, and arches his eyebrows in dismayed admiration. When I offer to pay him for the ride down he waves it off and wishes me luck in my second year here.

Waiting at the entrance to the road to the mission there are 20 or so women who are most likely anticipating a ride into the hospital at the mission. In order to get to them, however, I have to wade my way through a hoard of pineapple bearing children who are all trying to jimmy their way closer to the truck driver who is now taking a pee on the side of the road. They have all picked up their most precious pineapples and ebb past me to get a shot at a sale. This is pineapple month and at some point in the past couple of weeks all the kids in Mozambique put down their buckets of mangos and picked up stacks of pineapples. Now it is a frenetic, “fifteen, fifteen, fifteen...ten, ten...take two for twenty-five...” I squeeze my way past them and find a nice shady spot on the dirt to put down my bags and start waiting. Everyone is watching me. Why is it that I can't go anywhere in this country without everyone watching me? They are talking in dialect and looking right at me. A woman laughs; now everyone is laughing. How could I possibly have done something funny or even remotely interesting? I had simply walked across the road and put my backpack down. Why am I always a joke to these people? I feel like I did in 7^th grade when I didn't have anyone to sit down next to at lunch and just ended up sitting by myself. Eyes press on you like little thumbs poking into your sides and back. I could take out my iPod but that would just make it worse. How about a crossword puzzle? Worse yet. I decide to leave my stuff where it is and go over to the little snack stand that some entrepreneurial Mozambican smartly built in a place with a captive clientele. There's no energy here, so the soda is warm, but I'm parched. “Two Lemon Twists please.” In Mozambican style I down each 300mL glass bottle in one extended swig. Sated, I mosey back over to my stake out where I left my bags. The women are still watching me, but not as intensely as they were before. They have probably figured me out by now. “He's probably another one of those Italian donors for the mission, or maybe a teacher.”

Every single woman has a child on her back. I count 18 women and 22 children. I realize what it must be like to be a woman and not have a child in this country. The questions and the gossip. There are two other men there waiting. One seems to be healthy and accompanying his wife and child to the hospital, the other is lying on a blanket behind me. He is weak and frail. His face is young, maybe 30 years old, but the gray streaks through his hair and beard and his tired sagging cheeks betray him. My first thought is that he must have AIDS or TB or both. Then I realize how horrible it must be to know that everyone's first thought when they see you is “He must have AIDS” and I feel guilty for even thinking it. I think of how horrible it must be to have an expiration date on your life. No one with AIDS in Africa lives for more than about five years after their infection. No one talks about it either. When you go you just go, disappear. So and so was sick, passed away last week. There was a patient at the hospital a few weeks ago who passed away. She had come from far away to get to the hospital and didn't have any family with her. When she passed away, there was nothing to be done. I asked if a family member would come to get the body, or if a service would be held and was told that she didn't know anyone here. She literally had no one. They would bury her out in the small anonymous cemetery behind the hospital. No service, no words of remembrance, no tears, just disappear. I wonder if the man lying on the blanket behind me will share her fate and have a place next to hers in the cemetery.

The sun is dipping down and the once sweltering afternoon sun is relenting just slightly. As a small herd of goats stumbles out onto the road from seemingly nowhere and sniffs the ground for shards of leftover pineapples, I realize that soon enough a car will come by and I will be forced into what is always an uncomfortable situation. The car that comes will not have space for all of the women hoping to make it in to the hospital today. At best the white Toyota pick-up that the mission sends out to pick up patients will fit half of the women and children into the back of the pick up in one trip. Maybe another car will come, maybe not. Maybe they will have to wait and hope for another chance tomorrow. I, on the other hand, will be put in the front seat. Regardless of how much or little space there is left in the car, the first spot always goes to me. I am a teacher, I am a visitor, I am white, I am important. I'm not sick, I don't need to go to the hospital, I'm just coming back from a party with other PC volunteers. Can I get a ride? If I got HIV, I would not just disappear. I would be sent to America, receive state-of-the-art drug therapy and could have the chance to live out a very productive life. So what am I supposed to do when I get put in the front seat and the car pulls away with a full load of patients stuffed in the back and another 10 patients left behind at the cruzamento to wait for tomorrow? Get out and give up my seat to someone who needs it more than me? Make a fire and camp out at the cruzamento until tomorrow? I'll tell you what I'm going to do today. They are going to offer me a seat in the front and I'm going to take it because I hate riding in the back on the bumpy road into the mission and I'm scared of bandidos. I'm going to feel guilty for a few minutes, but eventually I will rationalize that I'm already doing a lot more than is required of me by being here in the first place and that someone will take care of those people. Is this wrong? Am I a bad person? The truth is, even if I give up my seat to some deserving patient, I know that no one will take it. It would be unheard of. It's just the way it is here. The driver would frown in confusion and the patient would hesitate, wondering why he's deserving of such treatment. I get on the truck and wave goodbye to the cruzamento and the patients that have been left behind. I hope that the mission will send another car today to pick up the rest of the past and ease into my seat as the driver turns the radio up to Rihanna. Even if it doesn't change you completely, being here in Africa, here in a place with such austere contrasts, will make you look in the mirror and think about the decisions you make. Every decision has a consequence, and by the sheer weight of your privilege in life, your decisions are no longer just yours, they are collective and have a much wider impact than you ever thought an insignificant little person like you ever had the power to make. Now I look at myself in the real rear-view mirror in the car and realize why they were laughing at me when I first got there and put down my backpack at the cruzamento. I have sunscreen all over my face, not rubbed in.