Bebado

Thursday morning I woke up very early in the morning to pickup my friend John Mucavel here in Maputo. He was to accompany me to Chókwè where we had some meetings with the Ministry of Agriculture and the governing body for the irrigation canals, HICEP.

Wednesday night John got a call on his phone. John owns a tractor and it is his PRIZE possession. each and every day he talks about it and his chest puffs up when he does so. He is so proud of it. Well the phone call that he got on Wednesday night was from his neighbor. Johns tractor was gone! It was not at John's house. John was 300 kilometers away and couldn't do much about it but worry. So that he did.

Minutes later his phone rings again. It is the local Municipio leader (mayor) of John's beloved city, Hókwè. The mayor said that he was driving behind John's tractor which was raging down the dirt roads of the small agricultural community raking havoc. John's tractor operator had stolen the tractor while drunk and taken it out for a night on the town.

The "bebado" (drunkard) drove around town on his rampage and led to a stand off with the mayor. The mayor pulled the keys from the tractor and thought that he'd out smarted the drunkard, just then the drunkard took a swig from his bottle of cerveja preta and said "I own this place" and started the tractor with no keys. (which is a crime)

Then the drunkard in a rampage ran over a local's cow and killed it (that was someone's fortune, think of it as your kid's college education fund) and eventually came to a place where the drunk was tired, so he parked the tractor and went for a nap under a nearby tree.

Just then they caught the culprit napping and took him to a 3m x 3m jail hut in Hókwè.

John's prized tractor was saved a seemingly unavoidable defeat.

The next day John goes to visit him in jail to resolve the situation, as chance would have it the thief was drunk as could be while in jail! The clever chap had put moonshine and to-to-too in a water bottle discussed as such!

Chókwè is a place where money talks and a white man leaves a footprint that can never wash away, with almost no rules or limitations except a wall of tribal pride and bureaucracy and it feels sometimes like the wild west where gun and badge rule with an iron fist.

-Alexandre Oliveira de Carvalho