The other neighbors

            I live in a quasi-compound with three other teachers and their families.  Their kids play in our yard, we walk through theirs’ every day on the way to school, we use each other’s clotheslines, cook for each other occasionally, all of that good stuff.  However these families are not my only neighbors.

            To our right, we have the secondary school.  We look out our window every morning to see the students in their black and white uniforms walking to school.  Every 45 minutes, we can hear the school bell ringing to start and end the classes.  We can also hear when the students are being particularly rowdy between classes or at weekend events. 

            To our left, we have the military base.  I’ve started crossing paths with the recruits on their morning runs and at 6am on the dot every day, someone plays the wake up call on a trumpet.  You’d think after playing it every day, they’d have it down.  They don’t.  They still sound terrible and out of tune.  On the weekends, or on weeknights it doesn’t seem to matter, we can hear music blasting from the barracks.  It sounds like they’re having way too much fun to be in training, but Mozambicans all love their music at 4am.  I think I may have also mentioned in one of my first posts a particularly intimate experience where a storm knocked down my fence as well as the fence surrounding the base and I spent a few days with a clear view of one of their latrines and all who used it…

            A bit to our front, we have the hospital.  We are at the entrance of a large neighborhood and are the first house many encounter on their way back from the hospital.  We frequently have people come up to our door to ask for a glass of water so they can take the medicine they were just prescribed.  Unfortunately we are also among the first houses to know when someone has died at the hospital.  It is customary in Cabo Delgado (I don’t know if this applies to the rest of the north) for the women close to the deceased to wander through the neighborhoods wailing immediately afterwards to mourn.  This first day and the actual funeral only times when public mourning is acceptable.  The waves of mourning women has gone down since the winter started but they are bound to increase again as rainy season returns in a month or two, bringing with it more mosquitos and more malaria.

            Usually, the wailing women are coming from the hospital.  A few Sundays ago, I was sitting in our alpendre sewing with our REDES girls when we heard frantic crying and we watched woman jog by clutching her baby.  I had expected the crying to get quieter as she got further but it didn’t.  A few seconds later, the crying suddenly became louder and it wasn’t getting farther away anymore.  The woman hadn’t made it very far past our house when she turned around to walk home, wailing.