epa, apanhou peixe

on Friday John and I were making our way back to Chiguidela for a meeting when we got a call from Engineer Marijuana (that's his name).

Marijuana told us that he needed our help, a little boy had been run over by an excavator in Hókwè.

John and I were fairly close to the scene so we rushed. When we arrived we saw a frail boy who had wounds all over, punctures and such, what you would imagine from someone who had just been run over by a excavator. Mozambicans have a way of sitting on their hands when terrible things happen. Here I was with grown men all around me, and a half dead little boy, and the men were twiddling their thumbs saying "How sad" and "What a shame". I had to force them to grab a plastic sheet out of the back of HICEP's vehicle to wrap the boy in and carry him as if it were a stretcher into the back of their truck so that he could be taken to the hospital.

When I found out how the boy had been hurt I was amazed.

The excavator was cleaning out a irrigation canal. Whenever an excavator cleans out an irrigation canal as soon as the tires dig up some dirt with traction, fish come out of the canal's muddy slush where the tires had just been.

Well, this 12 year old boy was being very mischievous and wanted to grab some fish. So the little boy did what he knew he wasn't supposed to, play to close to the excavator. He would jump on the back of the excavator and hang off of a little latter that was attached to the machine and grab the fish that would be unearthed from the canal and throw them to the bank so that he could collect and take them home to eat later.

Tragedy struck. The boy slipped from the excavator at the wrong moment. He slipped from the latter behind the operator's box just as the operator of the excavator started to move backwards. The operator had no idea the boy had slipped on the slick mud into the canal directly behind the excavator awaiting his judgement which sadly came to the boy there in that bank. The operator heard a scream and stopped the machine. Only later to scoop the boy up in the bucket and call Eng. Marijuana and myself to take the boy to the Hospital.

I don't know if the boy lived, the good in me hopes that he did, but I hope I've learned never to play around the excavators in my life that I enfront daily in exchange for fish.