Car is King. Without one, sometimes the life of a pedestrian in Maputo is somewhat complicated. Of the mild annoyances of living in Maputo is the number of truck drivers who will, without a signal, turn in front of you while you are crossing the street. It is up to the pedestrian to stay heads up. Some vehicles even accelerate.
While this leaves me wishing I had a car, I also see life from a different perspective. While driving to Matatuine for the closing ceremony of the MMF programme here in Mozambique, I felt some empathy for the pedestrians who had to scurry out of the way of our SUV (I was in the passenger seat). In Ghana too I had exposure to community visits in an SUV when we accompanied a World Bank convoy on one of their visits to a community without water (for some Social Accountability initiative where they were filming communities to show what is really happening on the ground for World Bank staff – presumably because WB staffers do not have enough contact with life on the ground from the Hotel Golden Tulip in Accra).
In any case, I remain unable to reconcile feeling a sort of embarrassment when arriving in such a fashion. I find myself pondering life on the other side.
The field interaction in Ghana still in my mind:
A convoy arrives expecting to have an audience. The community reaches out to bring them alongside their daily sphere of activities, there are festivities, an air of celebration. Then as the afternoon wears on the children’s game of football draws them away from the village central where drumming and dancing with the convoy is captured on film. By late afternoon the convoy is already gone, and peace descends over the village again. There is still no pipe borne water, but somehow the sphere of activities is closed again and the air of familiarity is resumed. The stars come out and the cattle herds are driven on to the pastures at the edge of the football field.
In my own field work, I remember my own trips out to the field by common van (Trotro in the local language). I would leave at 5:00 in the morning from the house and walk 30 minutes from Ada Foah to the main road, where in the early light, the sound of many birds waking up led me on the dark path through the palm trees.
I won’t usually have to take a Chapa on field visits here in Moçambique. I think this is good for security reasons anyway, but it leaves me wondering about the type of interactions that I will have in the field. There is a level of power relations inherent in vehicle choices, the power of the driver’s seat (or the passenger’s seat in my case). But perhaps it is best to just continue questioning, living with the discomfort generated by unequal relations so that it may be a motivation for change.
While this leaves me wishing I had a car, I also see life from a different perspective. While driving to Matatuine for the closing ceremony of the MMF programme here in Mozambique, I felt some empathy for the pedestrians who had to scurry out of the way of our SUV (I was in the passenger seat). In Ghana too I had exposure to community visits in an SUV when we accompanied a World Bank convoy on one of their visits to a community without water (for some Social Accountability initiative where they were filming communities to show what is really happening on the ground for World Bank staff – presumably because WB staffers do not have enough contact with life on the ground from the Hotel Golden Tulip in Accra).
In any case, I remain unable to reconcile feeling a sort of embarrassment when arriving in such a fashion. I find myself pondering life on the other side.
The field interaction in Ghana still in my mind:
A convoy arrives expecting to have an audience. The community reaches out to bring them alongside their daily sphere of activities, there are festivities, an air of celebration. Then as the afternoon wears on the children’s game of football draws them away from the village central where drumming and dancing with the convoy is captured on film. By late afternoon the convoy is already gone, and peace descends over the village again. There is still no pipe borne water, but somehow the sphere of activities is closed again and the air of familiarity is resumed. The stars come out and the cattle herds are driven on to the pastures at the edge of the football field.
In my own field work, I remember my own trips out to the field by common van (Trotro in the local language). I would leave at 5:00 in the morning from the house and walk 30 minutes from Ada Foah to the main road, where in the early light, the sound of many birds waking up led me on the dark path through the palm trees.
I won’t usually have to take a Chapa on field visits here in Moçambique. I think this is good for security reasons anyway, but it leaves me wondering about the type of interactions that I will have in the field. There is a level of power relations inherent in vehicle choices, the power of the driver’s seat (or the passenger’s seat in my case). But perhaps it is best to just continue questioning, living with the discomfort generated by unequal relations so that it may be a motivation for change.
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