Just Back: sunrise in Mozambique

At five o’clock, the dazzling light of sunrise wriggled through the stretched curtain
cloth and filled our room, signalling the start of the day.

Before the rays fully took on their ferocious heat, the inhabitants of the coastal town
of Mocìmboa da Praia, in Mozambique, were beginning to stir.

In the central yard of the family compound in which we were staying, Mama was
banging a clay burner on the floor, removing ash and giving life to the dampened
embers from the night before. Her daughter swept away the dust with a hand-held
brush made from a thick bundle of reeds. She scolded her brother as he got in her
way, coming back from the water tank on the far side of the yard.

We stepped outside, snapping on our sunglasses as the whitewashed walls blinded

us. After trying to coax our tongues around the morning sounds of Portuguese, we
walked through the gates on to the dirt-packed road that would soon be bustling.

For now, the frames of empty stalls stood like skeletons as their owners ate
breakfast. Turning right, we walked a short distance through a hotch-potch of
shadows created by the swiftly rising sun until we neared the end of the road and
found Selima.

In a patched-together shack, Selima, a Tanzanian of 40, was frying chips glued

together with egg on his gas stove – chipsi maiai. We exchanged Swahili greetings,
this time with more ease, and ordered two deep-fried eggs. While they bubbled we
crossed the street to find a crate of fresh rolls that were offered warm, dusty and
chewy from the bake-house. As this fishing town took its first breaths of the day, we
feasted and inhaled with it.

Over a cup of tea, we chatted to passers-by in a concoction of Portuguese, French,

English and Swahili that somehow was understood, and watched as life flooded the
street.

Stalls began to fill with vegetables, clothes and trinkets, shops unbarred their doors
and music floated from the record hut. Women walked down the road selling home-
made goods, such as boiled cassava, rice cakes and doughnuts from plastic buckets
balanced on their heads.

Children scampered around legs, avoiding the motorbikes that wove through the
human traffic. We listened to the sounds of life as they rose, blissfully happy on our
broken chairs. Now, the business of a morning enveloped this untarmacked road in
northern Mozambique.