The Journey Home

The road to Nauela is not a long one (cue that song from The Russians Are Coming “it’s a long road to…” when they’ve just gotten off the submarine and are walking along the beach) by Mozambican standards, but when it poured the night before and left mud pits, and a particularly pointy piece of charcoal from the sack you’re sitting on is digging into your right buttcheek, and that sack of flour that appears to have a hole in it is starting to slide on top of your foot, you feel every bump in the dirt road. And just when you thought they couldn’t possibly fit another person, here they are slowing down so someone else can squeeze in among the tangle of limbs and babies and chattering and chickens.

I don’t mind these cramped hour and forty minute rides (or much much longer, if you’re going any further. Be warned, there are no facilities on this vehicle). When I can stop paying attention to the corner of that wooden table - which is also hitching a ride, along with a stack of plastic chairs, buckets of various shapes and sizes, a broom and 2 pots (they’re with me) and 9 boxes of gin - to make sure it doesn’t gouge my eye out, there is a breathtaking (or maybe that was that last bump, which almost made you bite your tongue off) 294˚ view of mountains and valleys and mango trees.

I yell for the driver to let me off outside my house (door to door service – what more could I ask?); he doesn’t hear me because he’s in the part of the truck that is actually made for human beings, and I’m out in the wind in back, so someone reaches around and bangs on the side of his door. My neighbor calls my name and comes running, and takes my broom and pots for me as I try to get off the truck without landing on the ground in a horizontal position (usually by this time my feet and a good part of my legs are numb). I walk around to the back of my house to greet my family and receive comments about how dirty I am. I climb the stairs to my porch, wondering what someone dropped at some point to cause half of the second stair to be missing. The metal grate that serves as a screen door makes a familiar scraping sound as I pull it open. I kick aside the crunchy cockroach corpses that accumulated in my absence, and I’m home.