A Burden of Responsibility

Another beautiful day in Maputo. Its supposed to be mid-winter, but the sky was cloudless all day long and it was balmy T-shirt weather. It really should be paradise. But I don't know. It seems to me that there is more to paradise than a pretty view.
On our way to find a bank this morning (dodging the obligatory Saturday wedding traffic), a beggar , a young man with a wasted, crooked hand knocked on the window. He looked like a burn victim.
In the supermarket, a young boy asked for 5 mts - he was short for the cost of the bread he and his little brother were buying.
Of course, we made ourselves feel better by giving to both.
A friend of mine recently remarked that her lot is different from the lot of the overseas expat. She is South African and she said `the Europeans and Americans know they can go home and just leave this behind them - the Africans know it won't change.' I really didn't know how to deal with the comment - just as I don't know how to deal with the poverty which laps at the edges of our comfortable expat lives. I don't know where personal responsibility starts and ends. So we all drank more sangria and changed the subject.
But of course the subject doesn't go away. Here we are, living and working in a country not our own. DB works hard, but earns relatively well and we benefit from a lifestyle not available to the vast majority of Mozambicans. We have a lot, in a land where many have so little. And so we become responsible for people. The children without money for bread, the beggars on the corners and especially the people we employ.
We have three employees: a gardener, an empregada (maid and child carer) and a driver. Our gardener only works with us once a week, but as employers, we have become largely responsible for our empregada and our driver, and therefore for their families too. It is a weight of conscience.
There are supposed to be elections in November, but Renamo (the losers after the civil war) are sabre-rattling up in the North. It is difficult to access the news here because the main language is Portuguese, but, according to my empregada, Renamo have been frightening people up in Tete. She tells me that she doesn't think elections will go ahead and that she is worried about what Renamo will do.
She remembers the war when she was a child living across the bay in Catembe. She remembers the fear and running from her home in the night. She tells me she had an aunt who was captured by Renamo and forced to walk to Pont d'Oura to a work camp. The aunt managed to escape across the border to Swaziland, but was gone for a year, too frightened to cross back into Mozambique. My empregada tells me that Renamo would make parents shoot their small children so that they wouldn't slow down the march to the work camps. She asked me if I have ever had `to run' (for my life).
`What will happen?' my empregada asked. `What will happen if there is trouble? Will all the contractors from overseas go home? Will there be no more jobs?'
What would happen? I suppose we'd run home as fast as we could and the people who have been part of our lives would be left behind.
There is a weight to being an expat worker. You become responsible for people and a country other than your own. It is an uncomfortable weight.

The turning of the cogs

Change is afoot in Mozambique. There is building going on and a sense of new found money. Not everywhere, but it seems to be seeping down.
When we drove up to Macaneta last weekend, the rate of building was evident. Little houses and businesses have sprung up around Maracuene to such an extent that we almost couldn't see the bank that has always marked our turnoff. People are building. Not only that, but the road down to the ferry has been tarred and there is work happening on the main road of the Peninsula too. Change/progress is happening fast.
And nowhere more so than in Maputo where the enormous government buildings, complete with a rather hideous facade, a brilliant view over the bay and their own little red pagoda-roof entrance (more of that in a minute) are nearing completion. The new wing of the airport is done and dusted (was there a pagoda there too?) Apparantly the building material for the new bridge across the bay has arrived in town and the road system is experiencing an overhaul. (All rather excellent, considering the dodgy state of the roads.) And yup - you guessed it: all done with Chinese money and lots of Chinese labour at agreement rates with the Mozambican Government that no-one is very sure of. Oh well!
The Marginal is being overhauled too - and not a moment too soon. the potholes have made the road a crash course (pardon the pun) in evasive tactics and it clearly cannot cope with the volumes of traffic brought about by the growing expat population and the growing wealth of the Mozambican middle class. The little red markers have been up for about 10 months, but over the last 2 months or so we have seen real progress in land being bulldozed and tons of sand being dumped on the Marginal edge. How, exactly, the road is going to be uniformally widened remains a bit of a mystery as there are properties (including our own complex) which are rather closer to the existing Marginal than others. The obvious element of the sea precludes it being widened too much the other way. But, as my friend remarked `we have to trust the Chinese'.
And the Chinese seem to be building a pier roughly opposite the gate to our complex. (I thought it was a breakwater, but it looks flat on the top - does that make it a pier?). The idea of a pier is rather disconcerting as, if you have read earlier blogs you will know, the Maputonians are very keen on getting wedding photos taken on the existing pier. At between 5 to 8 weddings on a Saturday, that means A LOT of potential celebratory traffic outside our gate. Joy.
The immediate distraction is the actual building of the breakwater/pier. Presumably, the building can only go on when the tide is low, so in the middle of the night,rocks are loudly dumped and then thwacked into place with the bucket of a front end loader. All a bit disconcerting.
But, the pier/breakwater appears to be progressing well and erm, you gotta trust the Chinese....

There is a man with a spade who you will see on the Marginal as you head towards the Costa de Sol. He makes his beer money by dodging death to fill the huge crater potholes with sand. I suspect he doesn't trust the Chinese at all.