What came first? The brick or the brick oven?

About 5hrs (about 250mi) north of the provincial capital Quelimane lays the town of Alto Molócuè, where I will be working for the next year. I arrived yesterday evening with Sansão (World Vision district coordinator) in a comfortable pickup truck listening to bad covers of Whitney Houston and Lionel Ritchie and chilled by too much A/C. Along the way we had passed number of villages whose mere existence seemed to be an open air market in a small opening off the road’s shoulder strewn with blankets on the ground and a mass of people, most just “blanket shopping” and others just talking. For a half-mile before and after these villages the shoulders were crowded with people coming and going. Beyond the ripple of the market, the road was empty save maybe a chicken playing chicken with traffic or a small pod of kids, wearing more dirt than clothes, up to kid type things in the bush.

Hills rose and fell but never as dramatically as the mountains forever on the horizon. I for some reason find it surprising to encounter giant granite monolithic mountains here. They seem random and out of place, but maybe that’s because they are scattered without a visible pattern and rise so drastically that they are of little use. I can only imagine what a bunch of climbing-crazed hipsters would say if the saw some of these faces.

Without suspense suddenly we were in Alto Molócuè. The road had risen as it had before, but here at the top this time there was a town. I’m not really sure why there is a town here. It’s inland several hours from the coast, not in the cool growing climate of the mountains, yet hilly. There is a river that runs through it, though not of the trout fishing kind, more of the clothes washing kind. I need to figure this out, why there is a town here.

Most homes here are brick to protect from the cooler winters that one finds at 500m elevation. The red soil of Alto Molócuè is easily convinced into bricks, though it is not at all clay burdened. However simple bricks are made from the dirt in your front yard; mix in a little water, pressed the mud into a form, let it dry in the sun and then fire the bricks in a brick oven (what came first the brick or the brick oven, the world will never know). The result is a house that is the same exact color as your grass-free (i.e. clean) yard. Add a dried thatch roof and your gots yourself a house. Most are 1 or 2 rooms big (10ft x15ft) with or without windows – no one really sits inside during the day so fewer windows often means fewer mosquitoes at night. Out back there is somewhere to cook, maybe under a tarp near a tree or under a little thatch hut with walls that stop halfway to the roof. You’ll also find two little walled, but not usually covered, structures at the back of the yard: one has a cement slab with a hole in it as a floor and provides a great deep knee bend workout and the other is just cement and for bathing; though for some the bathing room doubles as a urinal, a most unpleasant surprise first thing in the morning in my experience.

I spent my morning wandering aimlessly around town for about 2 and a half hours and generally surprising a lot of wide-eyed people. The older women always looked the most shocked upon laying their eyes on me, but are always the most cordial when I say hello. I imagine a lot of evening conversation today will go something like “Did you see that white guy today!? He must have been fed well!? Did you see that beard!?” Alto Molócuè is big enough that you could easily walk in a straight line for over an hour and still be in town. It’s not the most centralized place. The market area lays on one hill and the hospital and government center on another. In between the 2 sides is a river, over which there is only one bridge.

I don’t have my own red brick house yet and am not quite sure when I will. That project will start tomorrow, hopefully, but more likely Monday or Tuesday, possibly Wednesday. I’m for the mean time I’m renting a room at compound run by Catholic priests, Sacred Heart priests for all you Catholics out there. It’s comfortable. I have a room with 4 beds, a ton of windows, a/c if I want it and a bathroom with hot water, but its kind of on the edge of town and not near anywhere that serves food which may be an issue seeing as though I don’t have a kitchen and wandering at night is never the best idea. Also last night, when the person in the room next to me farted I discovered that the walls are paper-thin. Oh well. Two can play at that game.