bad boys, whatcha gonna do?
thursday was visa day; the day to go to the border and convince the mozambicans that i liked their country and that they should let me stay a little longer. actually, it doesn't take any convincing as long as you have enough money.
the plan was for clemenica and i to go in hanlie's car with her and isabella so she could run some errands in nelspruit for ADRA. this meant that eduardo wouldn't be going with us, which also meant that i was going to have to drive from the school to hanlie's house early in the morning.
7am, ready or not, i was going to tackle driving in africa where everything is backwards. we get to hanlie's house without much incident, minus a few pedestrians i nearly ran over, (hey, you stay on the sidewalk, i'll stay on the road). we leave the school's car there and get in the parada's car. i get in the backseat with isabella to play the part of "nanny" for the day. we make it to the border and then on to nelspruit in good time. hanlie has to run to home affairs to get isabella's passport so clemencia and i hop out at the light (i think they call them 'robots' here) nearest the post office to get a package that i had been waiting for since before our last border run. as we are walking to the PO i turned to clemencia and say, "the key?" fully expecting her to have it. her smiling face suddenly turns to a shocked realization. it was back in the car, in Maputo. (i have recently adopted a no-worries attitude, could be the influence of the land of 'hakuna matata', or the fact that we had no other choice.) i continue marching towards the post office. we go to where box is, across the street from the PO, to confirm the number. then we go to the lower office where the package pick up is. that was a no-go. the lady said we couldn't have the package unless we had the slips from the mailbox with a tracking number. our only resort was to buy another key for 70 rand ($11-12). fine, where do we get a key? upstairs. so we trapse outside and upstairs to the main office building. the lady up there tells us that we can only get a key if we have a written consent from peter (the owner of the mailbox), it didn't matter that clemencia was his wife. this is where this system gets confusing. peter is in the states. he could write a written consent and send it to the post office box that we were trying to open in the first place. it would take 3 weeks for his letter to get here and by then we could run back to maputo and get the key and still have 2 weeks, 6 days and 17 hours to wait for his letter which we now wouldn't need since we would already had the key. i can thank my mom for this next move, i learned from her, at a very young age, the art of confident convincing, or if all else fails, just talk their ear off. i have heard it said that my mom could talk a mule out of his hind leg or sell the brooklyn bridge to a blind man. so i started by asking the lady if she was interested in buying any new york architecture. she told me to meet her at the metal window, outside. she escorted us back across the street and got the mail out herself from behind the box (ahh, so that is why the boxes don't have backs on them.) she handed us the slips and pointed us to the package department. we went and retrieved the packages.
1st victory of the day.
the rest of the day went by rather uneventfully. we ate, we shopped, etc.... even the return to the border was smooth, well, other than that one guard that i ticked off because i tried to take a picture of the 'welcome to mozambique sign'.
we made it to maputo by 7pm. it gets dark here by 6:30pm and now i was going to tackle the night driving adventure back to the school. it takes approx. 30 minutes to get from jair and hanlie's place to lifeline, depending on the traffic. we were about 8 minutes away from the school when we passed by a routine traffic stop. i should have just kept driving. i could have claimed ignorance. the cop flashed his little plastic flashlight at me and motioned me to pull over. he came up and i greeted him. i handed him the car papers and my license. (mistake.) he saw clemencia and i were white and decided this was an opportunity to make some extra cash (i'm not kidding when i say they will use ANY excuse to bribe unsuspecting suckers). he makes me get out of the vehicle to see that we are missing the light that illuminates the license plate and says something about a ticket for a couple million meticais (about $50-100), if you only knew how many cars here don't even have real license plates . i didn't understand completely since he is babbling in portugese and he wouldn't let clemencia get out of the car (which wouldn't have helped anyway since she still can't speak much english). at this point i realize that this isn't a routine traffic stop anymore and he wants money and i realize that of all things he has in his hands -my driver's liscense should not be one of them. i quickly reach out and take it back. i should have grabbed the car papers while i was at it (mistake number 2). i go back to the driver's seat and get in. he comes up and acts like he needs to write a ticket and that he needs my license back. at first i play dumb and that i can't understand portuguese. clemencia, at this point, is ready to hand over some money just so we can be on our way, i look at her and silently motion 'no'. i'm determined to win this one. she motions for me to give him my DL but i'm firm on this one too, he's not going to get it. i know he is bluffing. he knows that he has nothing valid to write me a ticket for and he is just trying to scare us into paying him off. he tells me he is going to take the car if i don't give him my license. i say ok and show him the keys. (he bluffed again.) he calls out for the other cops to come over. 3 more join him. one of them speaks english. at this point he changes his story and tells the english speaking cop that he didn't have my DL in the first place and all he wanted to do was look at and let me go. so this cop tells me to give it to him, just so he can look at it, i thought about it for a second and then remembered jair's words..."no matter what, don't give them your license." cop #2 tries to tell me that he now thinks i'm guilty since i won't give it to him and i tell him, if the guy wants to give me then write me a ticket and let me go. cop #2 says, "why do you say, write a rent?" (rent apparently means ticket) "this tells me you did something wrong" i said, "no, he wanted my license back to write me a ticket, let him just write me a ticket and let me go." he wasn't buying that the other cop had my DL in the first place and that he had acted like he was going to write me a ticket. (devious man with the plastic flashlight) cop 3 and 4 just stand there. none of them can figure out how to get me to give them my license back. i am about to spit fire. i try to tell them all that the only thing the cop really wants is a bribe. (third mistake, fortunately this isn't baseball.) in order to convey my point i finish my ranting by pointing to myself and saying, "maloongoo" (white person, foreigner) and then pointing to all of them and saying, "mulandee" (black person, native). i think they got the idea. they knew that i knew. they all looked surprised at first, like they couldn't believe i actually knew those words since they are in their mother tongue (shangana, not portuguese), but as soon as they escaped my lips i wondered if i had just given myself a free night stay in a mozambican jail cell. had i gone too far? now i was scared. after the shocked (angered?) expressions wore off, cops 3 and 4 smiled and walked away, they tell cop 1 to give me back the papers. cop 1 was now pissed and defeated. after about 6 more minutes of arguing with cop 2, cop 1 returns to try to lecture me and regain some respect, after about 3 more minutes he realizes its pointless and hands me back the papers.
victory 2 of the day. whoo hoo. i didn't lose my license, i didn't give in to a bribe, i didn't spend a night in jail, we didn't lose the car and i didn't die. i feel like i accomplished quite a lot.
now to go change into a clean pair of underwear and make sure clemencia doesn't need some oxygen to resuscitate her.
the plan was for clemenica and i to go in hanlie's car with her and isabella so she could run some errands in nelspruit for ADRA. this meant that eduardo wouldn't be going with us, which also meant that i was going to have to drive from the school to hanlie's house early in the morning.
7am, ready or not, i was going to tackle driving in africa where everything is backwards. we get to hanlie's house without much incident, minus a few pedestrians i nearly ran over, (hey, you stay on the sidewalk, i'll stay on the road). we leave the school's car there and get in the parada's car. i get in the backseat with isabella to play the part of "nanny" for the day. we make it to the border and then on to nelspruit in good time. hanlie has to run to home affairs to get isabella's passport so clemencia and i hop out at the light (i think they call them 'robots' here) nearest the post office to get a package that i had been waiting for since before our last border run. as we are walking to the PO i turned to clemencia and say, "the key?" fully expecting her to have it. her smiling face suddenly turns to a shocked realization. it was back in the car, in Maputo. (i have recently adopted a no-worries attitude, could be the influence of the land of 'hakuna matata', or the fact that we had no other choice.) i continue marching towards the post office. we go to where box is, across the street from the PO, to confirm the number. then we go to the lower office where the package pick up is. that was a no-go. the lady said we couldn't have the package unless we had the slips from the mailbox with a tracking number. our only resort was to buy another key for 70 rand ($11-12). fine, where do we get a key? upstairs. so we trapse outside and upstairs to the main office building. the lady up there tells us that we can only get a key if we have a written consent from peter (the owner of the mailbox), it didn't matter that clemencia was his wife. this is where this system gets confusing. peter is in the states. he could write a written consent and send it to the post office box that we were trying to open in the first place. it would take 3 weeks for his letter to get here and by then we could run back to maputo and get the key and still have 2 weeks, 6 days and 17 hours to wait for his letter which we now wouldn't need since we would already had the key. i can thank my mom for this next move, i learned from her, at a very young age, the art of confident convincing, or if all else fails, just talk their ear off. i have heard it said that my mom could talk a mule out of his hind leg or sell the brooklyn bridge to a blind man. so i started by asking the lady if she was interested in buying any new york architecture. she told me to meet her at the metal window, outside. she escorted us back across the street and got the mail out herself from behind the box (ahh, so that is why the boxes don't have backs on them.) she handed us the slips and pointed us to the package department. we went and retrieved the packages.
1st victory of the day.
the rest of the day went by rather uneventfully. we ate, we shopped, etc.... even the return to the border was smooth, well, other than that one guard that i ticked off because i tried to take a picture of the 'welcome to mozambique sign'.
we made it to maputo by 7pm. it gets dark here by 6:30pm and now i was going to tackle the night driving adventure back to the school. it takes approx. 30 minutes to get from jair and hanlie's place to lifeline, depending on the traffic. we were about 8 minutes away from the school when we passed by a routine traffic stop. i should have just kept driving. i could have claimed ignorance. the cop flashed his little plastic flashlight at me and motioned me to pull over. he came up and i greeted him. i handed him the car papers and my license. (mistake.) he saw clemencia and i were white and decided this was an opportunity to make some extra cash (i'm not kidding when i say they will use ANY excuse to bribe unsuspecting suckers). he makes me get out of the vehicle to see that we are missing the light that illuminates the license plate and says something about a ticket for a couple million meticais (about $50-100), if you only knew how many cars here don't even have real license plates . i didn't understand completely since he is babbling in portugese and he wouldn't let clemencia get out of the car (which wouldn't have helped anyway since she still can't speak much english). at this point i realize that this isn't a routine traffic stop anymore and he wants money and i realize that of all things he has in his hands -my driver's liscense should not be one of them. i quickly reach out and take it back. i should have grabbed the car papers while i was at it (mistake number 2). i go back to the driver's seat and get in. he comes up and acts like he needs to write a ticket and that he needs my license back. at first i play dumb and that i can't understand portuguese. clemencia, at this point, is ready to hand over some money just so we can be on our way, i look at her and silently motion 'no'. i'm determined to win this one. she motions for me to give him my DL but i'm firm on this one too, he's not going to get it. i know he is bluffing. he knows that he has nothing valid to write me a ticket for and he is just trying to scare us into paying him off. he tells me he is going to take the car if i don't give him my license. i say ok and show him the keys. (he bluffed again.) he calls out for the other cops to come over. 3 more join him. one of them speaks english. at this point he changes his story and tells the english speaking cop that he didn't have my DL in the first place and all he wanted to do was look at and let me go. so this cop tells me to give it to him, just so he can look at it, i thought about it for a second and then remembered jair's words..."no matter what, don't give them your license." cop #2 tries to tell me that he now thinks i'm guilty since i won't give it to him and i tell him, if the guy wants to give me then write me a ticket and let me go. cop #2 says, "why do you say, write a rent?" (rent apparently means ticket) "this tells me you did something wrong" i said, "no, he wanted my license back to write me a ticket, let him just write me a ticket and let me go." he wasn't buying that the other cop had my DL in the first place and that he had acted like he was going to write me a ticket. (devious man with the plastic flashlight) cop 3 and 4 just stand there. none of them can figure out how to get me to give them my license back. i am about to spit fire. i try to tell them all that the only thing the cop really wants is a bribe. (third mistake, fortunately this isn't baseball.) in order to convey my point i finish my ranting by pointing to myself and saying, "maloongoo" (white person, foreigner) and then pointing to all of them and saying, "mulandee" (black person, native). i think they got the idea. they knew that i knew. they all looked surprised at first, like they couldn't believe i actually knew those words since they are in their mother tongue (shangana, not portuguese), but as soon as they escaped my lips i wondered if i had just given myself a free night stay in a mozambican jail cell. had i gone too far? now i was scared. after the shocked (angered?) expressions wore off, cops 3 and 4 smiled and walked away, they tell cop 1 to give me back the papers. cop 1 was now pissed and defeated. after about 6 more minutes of arguing with cop 2, cop 1 returns to try to lecture me and regain some respect, after about 3 more minutes he realizes its pointless and hands me back the papers.
victory 2 of the day. whoo hoo. i didn't lose my license, i didn't give in to a bribe, i didn't spend a night in jail, we didn't lose the car and i didn't die. i feel like i accomplished quite a lot.
now to go change into a clean pair of underwear and make sure clemencia doesn't need some oxygen to resuscitate her.
posted by jessy at 12:03 AM
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