23/08/10

When I arrived at the “junta,” the bus terminal in Maputo, this morning I was rudely reminded that I am not in the company of my big, intimidating father anymore, as I was immediately swarmed by rather rude and forceful bus drivers. I found the bus going to Inharrime, found a nice seat in the back by a window that opened, and prayed for other people to come fill the bus up so we could leave. You know the extremely old rickety buses you saw in movies about Africa back when we (I) were kids? That, unfortunately, was the bus I was riding, but it was fairly full, going to my town, and beggars can’t be choosers. When I told Anna, who I had come to the junta with, this she responded, “Such is life. Although the woman behind me is chanting in some stange language and rocking back and forth. Curious to see where this goes..."
I was exhausted from a weekend full of meetings and not getting quite enough sleep for many nights because I was trying to catch up with the people I don’t get to see often, so I went to sleep immediately. We left the city at 8am which was good, though the bus was far from full which I have never seen happen before and things that I don’t understand or am unfamiliar with here make me nervous. About every 45 minutes of driving we would pull over to the side of the road and the driver and the guy in charge of the bus would crawl underneath and do some fiddling, and they would refill something, perhaps gas or the oil? We obviously weren’t making good time doing this but I had already paid, was overjoyed to have the entire seat to myself (you are always basically sitting on someone else’s lap in the buses and chapas here), and I was in no hurry, so I just kept sleeping. At one point in my sleep I sensed something was different so I opened my eyes to see two ~15 year old boys had opened my window from the outside and were standing there looking at me with their faces about 12 inches away from mine. But at the same time I woke up and realized what was going on the ~11 year old boy in front of me gave them a disgusted look and firmly shut my window.
At 2pm we finally arrived in Chissibuca, only two towns and probably little over an hour from Inharrime, and the bus broke down. For a while everyone sat on it and waited because we had been waiting all day for it to start up again, but after a while it became clear it might not be restarting. I eventually got out and stood by the side of the road with my stuff trying to flag down a ride. Since I still had a few hours of sunlight left I decided to try to see if I could get a free ride, since I was pissed that I had already paid to go all the way home, plus from where I was it would have taken three separate chapas to get me home, just due to how their routes run. I wanted to go back and argue with the broken-down-bus conductor to get some of my money back, but I was afraid to miss a potential ride while I was fighting with him. Nobody was stopping for me, including all the white South Africans with tons of room in their cars. Eventually a large chapa from Maputo pulled up to me and tried to get me to get in but I said, “no I don’t have any money, I already paid for the bus home but now it’s broken down over there.” The conductor of this chapa told me to just get in and he would go work things out with the original bus conductor. Then surprisingly the original (broken down) bus’ conductor came over on his own accord and told me to get on this bus, he would take care of it, and pulled out money to give the new chapa. I was surprised and relieved that he was so unnecessarily kind.
I finally got home at 6pm, setting a new record for me: 10 hours to get from Maputo to Inharrime, a trip that takes less than 5 hours in a private car. The instant I arrived in Inharrime an adolescent greeted me as “senhora professora” and I thought, “yes I am home.” And when I got back and saw all the girls who hugged and kissed me as if I had been gone for years, it all didn’t seem so bad.