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Mozambique: Maputo

Crumbling apartment blocks. With satellite TV. Copyright: Tina Wayland

Maputo. Up close. Off the bus. Walking around.

With holes yay-many feet deep in the sidewalks, buildings crumbling to ruin, broken everything--a city that's been neglected for years. We stood out like sore thumbs, walking in groups of three and more, wary of everyone. I can't say I felt anything but aversion. Not even fascination.

I remembered Havana, so poor and yet so charming and inviting. But this was a city after an apocalypse. Maputo may as well have been abandoned, but for the people who still lived in its ruins. And that was just it: Mozambique, so filled with people, is falling apart around them, and no one lifts a finger to fix a thing. Not one thing.

Imagine having a home for 40 years and never painting, never filling a hole, never mending a fence or changing a carpet. And there you have the whole country: stopped in time for 40 some odd years since independence, with life crawling around in and around it.

I wish I could say I understood. I wish someone could change my mind.

Sent by Tina Wayland (posted on December 29th 2008)