21/12/09

Often buses and chapas (vans) will pile the excess luggage, furniture, or bikes on the roof and tie everything down with rope and a tarp that looks far too old to actually hold anything down. Today a coach-sized bus drove past me down the EN1 with one of these typical 10 foot piles underneath a tarp, but also tied on top of this bus were two live goats, standing in front of this pile and tied to either side of the rack to keep them from falling/blowing off. I was the last person on the chapa today so I had the seat right up against the sliding door. At one point the driver pulled over to help two guys whose car had broken down. When we went to leave afterwards, the sliding door fell out and wouldn’t close so we drove part of the way with the conductor reaching over me to hold it almost shut until he was able to force it shut and tie it with a rope.
Today I went up to see Donna, whose house had been broken into. Donna replaced a PCV who had lived in the same house and it turns out that this girl had been broken into about three weeks ago. The robbers had simply ripped away from the wall the metal grate over one of the windows and climbed in through that window. This grate was supposed to be repaired before Donna moved in, but it wasn’t because things rarely happen in a timely manner in Mozambique. They took her laptop, ipod (but not the chargers for either), camera charger (she had her camera with her), two pairs of running shoes, a hiking backpack, a normal backpack, money (but luckily left her American credit cards), lots of clothes, canned food, eggs, razors, toothpaste. Her bedroom door had been locked, but somehow they were able to get someone into her bedroom through a very tiny space in the grate on one of the windows. It had to have been either a very very small person or a child, which stinks to think because there are tons of kids who are always hanging around her house who would have noticed that she wasn’t home for two nights. In this same neighborhood another PCV’s house got broken into last week, as well as Donna’s Mozambican next door neighbor. She is going to move as soon as possible (which won’t be very soon). It is a shitty situation for Donna to be in because whoever robbed her and her neighbors were clearly people who had been watching them and knew when they were coming and going (her neighbor was robbed while she went to the market in the morning). It stinks for Donna to have to be suspicious of everyone now. And she is also very spooked by the fact that they were able to get into her bedroom, so Ann and other PCVs have been staying with her ever since so she doesn’t have to be alone in the house.