The False Alarm

It was Wednesday night, and I was sitting at home, eating a Crunch bar (score!) and watching the recent episodes of New Girl that I had finally gotten a hold of. My phone chirped and I picked it up to read the message that had just come in from my roommate:

"Rebels are attacking our district."

My heart started to pound. Our district? An attack?

I ran outside to listen for shouting or gunfire. I heard nothing except the voices of my neighbors, whispering in a panic.

"They are burning cars in Kazula!" they told me, "Our police just left to go redirect traffic from the cruzamento so no one goes there."

I sat down and listened to my neighbors talk. They kept saying things like "This is how the war started last time," and "I am leaving the country tomorrow morning, and that's that."

I asked them if this couldn't just be an exaggeration -- after all, there's nothing Mozambicans love more than to gossip. "No, no no," my neighbors said, "This information came from the police, not just some random person. They're even sending the army from the city."

I immediately texted Szasha and Peace Corps, as I stuffed things into my emergency bag, wondering in the back of my mind what materials are best for stopping AK-47 bullets. (My concrete walls? Metal sheeting? Trees?) Was I going to have to evacuate? Were the rebels coming here? If someone bursts into my house, where should I hide?

After several tense hours, nothing happened and people started drifting away to sleep. "We're going to sleep badly tonight," said my director, "But we'll know more in the morning." And so, I went to bed, lying awake for a while before eventually drifting off into a very troubled sleep.

The next morning, I awoke to a beautiful sunrise and the sound of birds chirping. I walked out and found my roommate and her best friend calmly having breakfast on the porch. When they heard me come out, my roommate turned and smiled.

"Mentira, she said." It was a false alarm. "Someone got confused and called the police, and they overreacted."

Turns out, absolutely nothing happened in Kazula. The village was overrun with truckfuls of police and armed soldiers for no reason whatsoever. The mental image is a bit funny, actually.

But what's not funny is the fear that I saw in the villagers when they thought this was real. Many of the families who live outside our complex wandered out into the bush to sleep instead of staying in their homes. People were talking about burning their FRELIMO party membership cards. Children were crying. Women were praying to God.

The general consensus among analysts is that RENAMO does not have the power and resources needed to stage a comeback or a civil war. However, they still clearly have the ability the strike fear in the people of Mozambique. I doubt that this will escalate into a fullblown civil war, but I worry that it will get bad enough to set Mozambique decades back on the progress its made in development.