The
opportunity for a day trip from my site is extremely rare (you can imagine why
based on my last post). Reliable
transportation between Montepuez and Mariri is even rarer. Mariri is a tiny village 17km out in the
middle of nowhere. No one there owns a
car except for the director of the school and maybe a handful of other
people. In fact, except for when school
is in session, no one even really lives in Mariri. That is why when our missionary friend Chad
said he’d be heading out that way for the day, Will, Mireya, and I couldn’t
pass up the chance to visit Liz and Jamie.
Every few weeks, Chad drives through
several villages in that area to pick up people the missionaries are training
to run the churches and take them to a meeting.
In other words, we got the very scenic route to Mariri (not that any
route in Mozambique isn’t “scenic”).
What we learned is that the government provides money to maintain roads,
but not through the small bush villages.
Those roads are up to the people of the village to maintain. Well, since most folk in the bush don’t have
cars or even have much reason to leave their village, the roads aren’t really
roads. Washed out dirt paths barely wide
enough for Chad’s small pick-up connect each village. It was really neat to get
out of our city and literally get off of the beaten path to see another side of
Mozambique. This route would prove even
more exciting on the way home…
Anyways, the girls were pretty happy
to see us, or at least the baskets of vegetables that we had brought them. “Tempo de fome” (time of hunger) in a city
like Montepuez just means food is expensive.
Tempo de fome in Mariri means all you can really get are things like
rice and onions (I’ll refer you to Liz and Jamie’s blogs for more
details). We were also able to bring
them powdered baby formula. Powdered baby formula? What? The guy in the store was just as confused by
my buying it as you probably are. Liz
and Jamie rescued a day old kitten! A
neighbor had found in their bag of charcoal, umbilical cord still attached and
eyes closed. The neighbors also said
that it wasn’t a feral domestic cat, but actually a wildcat of some kind. I’m reluctant to believe that but that kitty
sure does have some mean-looking paws!
After feeding the kitten and eating
our own lunch, we headed out for the grand tour of Mariri. This is where our adventure really
begins. Liz and Jamie showed us around
their secondary school. In its hay day,
the secondary school of Montepuez was THE school to attend in the north. Even the son of Mozambique’s first president
attended that school. Now, not so much… The school is beautiful but the only thing it
has in the ways of teaching materials is a life-size model skeleton hanging in
the corner of the teacher’s lounge.
Feeding off of each other’s confidence and adventurousness, we decided
to explore the old student housing behind the school. The windows were covered and most of the
doors were locked except two. Both rooms
were so full of trash that we couldn’t really enter. What we saw from the door was quite enough.
“OMG
that looks like a body!”
Liz was the first one to look in the
room. Of course the rest of us had to
take a look. If there was any place or
time in which we were likely to find a dead body, it would be in the abandoned
building behind a school in a part of the country that only stopped fighting a
civil war about 10 years ago. Sure
enough, we peek around the door of the dark room to see the unmistakeable
profile of a face attached to what looked like at least part of a torso. Once the initial shock wore off, we worked up
the courage to investigate further. We
couldn’t get into the room because of the trash and Will’s camera flash was not
enough to confirm what exactly was propped up in the middle of the room. We
noticed that the high window on the opposite wall was open so we scurrried to
the back of the building hoping for a better look. Will climbed up wall a bit and flashed a picture. Turns out it was just the soft-tissue anatomy
mannequin that probably came with the skeleton in the teacher lounge. For a better story, we decided that we should
just tell everyone it was the corpse of the last Peace Corps volunteer they
sent to Mariri...
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| What we could make out from the door... |
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| Meet the "former PCV of Mariri" |
That wasn’t enough of an adventure
so Liz and Jamie took us to a grotto with a shrine to the Virgin Mary and then
for a short hike up a small mountain behind their school. The view was spectacular! I can’t wait until we have time to climb our
own mountains in Montepuez. Folks, I
present to you Cabo Delgado:
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| View of Cabo Delgado from Mariri during the rainy season |
We returned back to the girls’ house
just in time to be picked up by Chad. It
had rained a good bit since we had arrived in Mariri and we were forced to take
an unscheduled pit stop in a ditch that suddenly appeared in the middle of one
of the lovely village “roads.” Where is
AAA when you need them? Luckily, nothing
draws more attention in a tiny Mozambican village than a bunch of white people
climbing up out of a side-ways truck.
After some serious heaving, ho-ing, skilled backing, and somewhat of a
small miracle, the truck was freed and we were back on our way to Montepuez.
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| Gives new meaning to "it takes a village." Also note the stylish purple parka. It's probably a fresh 75F out so obviously we need to bundle up... |
Who knew you could pack so much
adventure into such a short trip to such a small town? Mariri, you did not disappoint.
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