The Bungle in the Jungle - Part I

So, about a week ago I hit the road for Malawi. I was taking a vacation and wanted to get out and see the country side and all that Southern Africa has to offer. I ended up getting much more than I bargained for.

Sunday morning I headed to the train station painstakingly early. After my 3:30am wake-call I boarded the train at about 4:30am. The reason that I was trying to get there so early was because the train that was leaving today was third class only. I needed to get there early if I wanted a seat. The train today was going to take at least 10 hours and could be as long as 15. If I had to stand, lean on the back of the seat, or hang out the window it was going to be a very long day.

Unfortunately, I was not early enough to guarantee myself a seat, so it meant I was standing. If you've ever taken a train in a third world country (or into NYC at rush hour) you know what it can be like. Third class was packed to the brim with people, most of whom were sleeping come our 5am departure. Of those who were not sleeping, everybody was looking right at me! Everywhere I looked, instead of making that split-second of awkward eye contact before both looking away, nobody would look away! I decided to relish the moment and take a minute or two to try to telepathically communicate or stare into their soul or see who would blink first. After successfully losing staring contests with everybody on the train, I had managed to pass the first hour of my trip.

Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the scene inside third class: people sitting on each others laps, men hanging out the window, people crowding the isle, mothers with three or four kids all screaming and crying. The last person I talked to that tried to take a picture on the train here ended his story with "and then the other passengers threw me off the train."

The other thing about the train in Mozambique is its a moving grocery store. It stops about every 30-45 minutes, where the train is mobbed by all the local villagers bringing their produce to the train tracks to sell to the passers by. Some favorite items include dried cassava, beans, onions, carrots, bananas, oranges, grilled chicken, fried chicken, live chicken, potatoes, sugar cane, mirrors, knives, or anything you grow... I wondered how people grow knives or mirrors, but it turns out they purchased them from the previous train that passed through the day or two before.

Bungle no. 1: After about two hours worth of train riding I was approached by the train security guard. This is a guy wearing full military fatigues and a fruity little beret (not a manly green beret, but a fruity one). He came up right where I'm standing and demanded that I leave. "Great," I'm thought. "Here this guy thinks he's the boss and is gonna threaten to kick me off the train." Panic swept through me as I feared that I would be abandoned literally miles from a phone or car or anybody that speaks Portuguese much less English. He started pushing me towards the front of the train car. I reluctantly went along fearing the worst. He pushed me on in through the next two cars until at last I had nowhere else to go. He opened the door of the final car before the locomotive, and in we stepped into the dining car. At this point he was content for doing his duty of removing a horrible distraction such as myself from third class, and went back to the rest of his duties.

Bungle no. 2: And then I almost died! After being in the dining car for about 2 hours, it was starting to heat up. Remembering that the train car is basically a big metal box, the windows are so poorly designed there's never any draft, the train averages about 40mph and slows to a crawl going up hills and stops in the sun for 15 minutes at a time for everybody to go to market its easy to see that inside the car can get much hotter than the 85 to 90 degrees it is outside the car. On top of this, regular readers of my blog know how the locals around hear like to clear their vegetation before sowing and/or after reaping the land. With FY-yuh.

All of a sudden, as the train was going up a long, slow incline (the only reason you know you're going up an incline is because the trains slows to a crawl) you could hear shouts coming from the front of the dining car. Eventually, the shouts migrated back to the end of the car where I was sitting and I discovered why. The locals had decided to burn the brush on either side of the train tracks at the precise moment the train would be traveling through. Rather that stop the train like any reasonable person, the driver just kept of going. On either side of the train, a raging inferno of trees, brush, and shrubs made the inside of the cab hotter than a [inert your own clever analogy here, or perhaps submit them as comments. Winner gets a high-five].

This sauna of a train car wasn't just a flash in the pan. The train rolled on through at least 90 seconds of burning jungle until there was not a dry brow in the entire car. In between thoughts of "This is going to be great for my website!" were equally as prevalent thoughts of "so... this is kind of a crappy way to go." and "I wonder who will inherit my guitars?" While being maybe the most scary and unbearable minute and a half of my life, it was also perhaps the best thing that could have happened to the proprietors of the dining car. After the incident, refreshment sales went through the roof.

Later on in the dining car, after temperatures had returned to normal. Two remarkable things happened. The first was when I managed to avoid having to pay for a meal after the third attempt from the waiter. The second was when I met Mangono.

Mangono first asked me if I spoke French. I told him I spoke English. I asked if he spoke Portuguese, and he replied yes. We had finally found a method to communicate. I know I have a knack for stretching the truth a bit (read: a lot), but I guarantee that none of this is stretched. Over the next few hours we talked about about sustainable agricultural practices, educational philosophy, cultural homogeneity versus lingual homogeneity, health care, and international trade practices. It was a very interesting conversation to say the least.

Mangono struck me as a person who was slightly more well informed than other folks that I have run into here. There is so little news generated in Mozambique and most of them do not know anything else of what is happening around them in Zimbabwe or South Africa, many people still think Obama was elected the king of Africa and are still waiting for him to visit their neighborhoods, and rumors and hearsay are believed more than what is read on the paper. Mangono knew all about the history of Southern Africa, and the continent as a whole, he knew what was going on in the rest of the world and how it would effect him. He was also very well read, which I found very distinct for a country where the literacy rate is about 38% and the HIV rate is about half of that that this guy would be talking about the Conference of Berlin or NAFTA, two things that most other Americans have no idea what they are (go ahead, take a reading break and look it up).

Its at this point I decided to ask Mangono what his occupation was. He replied that he was a Christian. I said "That's great, me too. But what's your occupation?". He replied with the same answer. It struck me as more profound of an answer than he probably meant it to be. At this I had to know more, so I asked him what his story was.

Mangono was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC aka Zaire). When he was a child, they lived out in a rural village that was the home of an American missionary (I'm told he spoke French, the official language of the DRC). It was at that point that Mongono, and eventually the rest of his family, met Jesus. He also learned some English from the missionary, which was very rough but passable, and also taught him to read and gave him some of the early education he received.

But due to the conflict in the Congo that seems to perpetuate most of its history, Mangono eventually crossed paths with the harsh realities of life in Africa. One night, raiders/rebels came through their tiny village and threw a grenade into the house of his aunt. She jumped on the grenade to protect her kids, and it would be the last thing she did. Mangono was the only relative that could step in to care for the children, and it wasn't long after that that he and his newly inherited family made it out of the Congo into a refugee camp in here Mozambique.

That was almost 9 years ago. Since then, Mangono has learned Portuguese, found "work", when people will hire him, and graduated out of the horror that can sometimes be the refugee camps into a country, language, and culture that is not his own. He was on the train heading out to Cuamba (town at the end of the line) for a few days to visit friends from his church that he helps pastor.

When I asked him what his plans were for the future, if he had any desire to go back to his home country, what he does for income, what is becoming of the family he inherited, he had big plans. The last few years he has been petitioning the government to grant him funds to let him build a library. The reason: because he knows that God wants him to build a library here in Nampula. I've heard from several kids here that the library is nothing to go out of your way to see. Mangono sees it as a way to increase access to information and resources that currently nobody has as a way to improve the quality of life. The governent, I'm guessing because Mangono is a foreigner, refuses to fund it. He said in the midst of the library and everything else he is trying for he is trying to use his refugee status to get to Europe, Canada, or the US, something he hopes will afford him the income to be able to come back here and start the library.

The more I am around here and the more I hear peoples stories and have experiences of my own the more I am convinced that Africa is completely jacked up. Its not jacked up because of lack of infrastructure or the AIDS pandemic or the economy or how people live. Its jacked up because in spite of all the adversity that people like him face - seeing family killed, being uprooted from your home, coming into an entirely new land and language, facing rejection and not finding work because you're a refugee - he knows that God has laid the way and is so incredibly thankful for all the blessings in his life. And when you grow up in Congo you probably know dozens or hundreds of people effected by conflict and bloodshed. And when you move into the refugee camp you're living among thousands, coming to Mozambique can seem like a lateral change if not a downgrade. Trusting that God is guarding you through all that, and that he's has purpose for you greater than being a second class citizen in a third world country, that's pretty jacked up.

Stay tuned for the rest of my adventure to Malawi. Its not one to be missed.