Tragedy Strikes Mavudzi-Ponte

Today, I was planning to write an up-beat blog post about a get-together with all the Tete volunteers that happened yesterday. Unfortunately, our gathering, pleasant as it was, was overshadowed by a terrible accident that took place in my town last night.

Around 8 p.m. yesterday evening, an overloaded logging truck was parked on the side of the road in my town. A caixa aberta (open-back pickup truck transporting people) was coming from Kaunda, our neighboring down 20 km away, and headed for the city. There was an oncoming car from the other direction, and due to limited nighttime visibility and excessive speed, the pickup passed too close to the logging truck, severing the cords holding the logs in place and causing the lumber to tumble onto the pickup and the people in it. The logs, logging truck bed, and pickup truck rolled off the road and crashed into the ditch on the side of the road.

Nine people were killed instantly and three more died overnight in the hospital. Several are still in critical care, and at least two lost limbs. These people were all from my community and the neighboring village of Kaunda (Where my friend and fellow volunteer Szasha lives.)

Today is supposed to be Children's Day, a day filled with joy and games. Instead, the whole town is in mourning. Festivities have been canceled, and the town is crawling with police, nurses, onlookers, and grieving family members. The sound of funeral wailing and crying is constant. One of my friends, a nun, had the unpleasant task of searching the wreckage for severed limbs. School will probably be canceled for the week, as several professors and their family members were injured. The timing of the accident, Friday night, meant that the roads were full of people and families traveling to the city to spend a few days with their loved ones.

While this accident is horiffic in itself, it's also personally very scary for me for two reasons. First of all, this happened less than thirty yards from my house, in the exact spot that I often sit and wait for a ride to the city. Even now, from my window, I can see the mangled remains of the pickup truck lying next to the road. The beautiful flowery area next to the road where Poppy used to roll around on sunny days is now the scene of mass death and grief.

However, even more chilling is the following: Szasha and I had been riding in that very same pickup truck just hours before. We had gotten a ride on it from Tete City to our villages -- the pickup was on its way back to Tete City to pick up more people when the accident occurred. The driver, whom I had thanked for the ride and shaken hands with less than three hours before the accident, is now both injured and in jail, pending charges of reckless driving and manslaughter.

Volunteers like to joke around, trading "worst Mozambican travel" stories. The truth is, traveling in this country is a nightmare. Caixa aberta pickups are obviously unsafe, especially when being driven by a maniac at night on pothole-riddled roads. However, the only public transportation available, chapas, are often just as unsafe -- broken down, speeding, and overcrowded. They do not have seatbelts or airbags and are literally falling apart on the road. Just yesterday, the door of one of the chapas that Szasha and I were in fell off of the vehicle mid-ride. Even if you have the luxury of being in a "nice" car, overloaded and underserviced tractor-trailers being driven by sleep-deprived workers are constantly falling off the roads and crashing into other vehicles.

It's no wonder why so many volunteers (Szsaha and myself included) often opt for the third option: Hitchhiking. Given the choice between a death-trap minibus or a South African family's air-conitioned Toyota Hilux (complete with a roll-cage, seat-belts, and airbags) you can guess which option we prefer. But even that has its inherent dangers; just last year, two Peace Corps volunteers here in Mozambique, Lena and Alden, were killed while hitchhiking in a tragic accident involving a drunk driver.

This morning, I woke up aching and sore from traveling yesterday -- but honestly, I'm just glad to be alive. It was a close call, and I'm very, very lucky that neither myself nor any of my friends were injured or killed in the accident. My thoughts are with the family members of the dozen or so people who lost their lives here last night. In a community as small as mine, a loss like this is felt deeply by everyone.