Some days ago I had to visit the schools in other villages really far from the center, in an area called “mato” meaning “rural area” or -better- “simply nothing”. The phone stop to work just out of the town and the asphalt stop as well, so you start to drive on a soil-street where the rainy season dig enormous halls and makes waves...it means that you start a rally.
Really nice if you have a pick-up...quite difficult if you are in bicycle or motorcycle...hopefully i had it!
The north of Angola -where I'm- is full of different landscapes.
I had 8 hours of wonderful going around, passing through forests of trees and palms, vegetation unknown -for me of course-, the Congo river -that someone still call Zaire-, and the plane, completely empty “savanna”...where you can find just grass, some small trees and these incredible “land-mushrooms” that came out from the ground.
I didn't know what they were...i had to ask, and the driver kindly stopped to show one of them.
They are the house of salasè -as they call the termites-, he just remove one of them to show the small insects at the bottom and after he putted it back.
The insects build an house that seems a mushroom, with the cylindrical base and a roof like mushroom's hat.
In reality, after the first floor they continue to build “mushroom on mushroom” and at the end the house is very big and looks just a nice-big-soil-small mountain.
The strange thing is that the land is full of these houses....you can see them regularly distanced everywhere.
The villages are far one from the other, in same areas there are no “povo” - population in Portuguese but I think that the correct meaning is more linked with “tribe”- because the soil is not good for cultivation or just because the war pushed them in more difficult part to achieve for the militias-soldiers.
The school are sometimes from the 70's, still from the Colonial period, but sometimes are just local Chapels or a tent of palms leaves, no walls and just some chairs...in the reality, many times, if the students are a lot they have to bring a chair from home -and you can see these small babies carrying a small plastic chair, always colored in pink or blue :)-.
The villages are poor but really clean, the community has a soba -local administrator elected from the population- that has to take care of the community.
I saw few villages in bad condition and dirty, with rubbish everywhere but,of course, there are no facilities. Really often the access to water is not easy-if there is no wheel they have to go to the nearest river- and there is no electricity -some has street lamps and a community generator....but really few-.
Going around like this I found also an old village, where the house are from the Portuguese domination, that the driver said was the village of a tribe that has to move during the war because too well situated on the principal roads and so often object of violent act. Near the houses there is still a military-van, with a a gun on it and everything is invaded by vegetation. When we passed through it Veronica -my colleague- started to talk about the war.
I saw that it is easy that someone start to tell story about the civil war...there is a big scare in the Angolan society related to it.
Criminal and violent acts were so strong and the end is so closed that the people are still really linked with the past war. If we think that until 2002 the country was in war, we can see that many generation -also the newest- are linked with its memory.
As in many civil-ethnic war the acts of violence were often directed against unarmed and innocent tribes-community in a so nasty and cruel way that the memory has still a long life, and -i think-doesn't matter if the “development” is arrived and run fast...someone is still too linked with the past also if the process of national reconciliation,and the will of going on, are acting in a good way.
Even with these considerations, the travel continued through nice places to see and visiting small school where these wonderful children look at me as an incredible attraction – I discover that for every one here I'm “really white”- and the teachers are often not in the work place -he went to buy bread...she is sick..he is in the town...- until to end with a really nice surprise.
In fact we were transporting some persons, that had to arrive the city and where highjacking -common in Africa-, they were carrying fresh fish and other things to the local street market...and when we dropped them, they offer a fish and a sugar-can to thanks!!! :)
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