Soap and Rain

by Roberta Caldas Schmoi (Germany)

Making a local connection Mozambique

It hadn’t rained in months and the people of Ilha de Moçambique, an island near Nampula with a forgotten World Heritage Site, were struggling. A friend and I took a bus from Pemba and got off at an intersection hoping that a truck would pick us up to take us to the island. This is how we travelled in Mozambique: on the back of trucks and squeezed between people, animals and huge bags of grains and fruit. I am not complaining. I enjoy the adventure. What I remember most about this trip was all the transport we took. The time somebody struck my foot under a bag of rice during a seven hour ride on the back of a truck and I didn’t have enough space to move away; or the time we needed to change a flight and some guy on the street called a friend of a friend on his cell and it was all done like that, casually and informally. There was also the 11 hour train ride from Nampula to the border of Malawi where we watched the train getting fuller and fuller with goods bought at each stop including live ducks and chicken, oranges, vegetables and really anything you can imagine while sharing the car with a child caring for an infant with diarrhea. Anyway, back to that intersection. Soon a truck pulled over and we hopped on with our backpacks. Everyone was staring at the two white Portuguese speaking girls that clearly didn’t belong. We felt uncomfortable. Sometimes it felt like people were laughing at us. As we entered the island rain started to pour. Not any rain, but rain that was being held back for months, heavy, cold and comforting. It changed everything. Everyone in the trucks suddenly smiling and laughing. Somebody got a soap bar and offered it to us asking if we wanted to shower. We were not sure if it was a joke, but soon we noticed it was not. Everyone was doing it and we were included in this moment of joy. It was the most unexpected token of kindness and acceptance that I ever got. We took the soap and soaked in that moment.