(It’s something of a challenge to be smart and snippy without resorting to either exaggeration or exclusion of nine-tenths of the story. I apologise for including all the foregoing in what follows. It’s 21.45 on a Sunday night and I am still at the office preparing for the return trip to Zambézia tomorrow. I am just too tired to bother making the truth interesting.)
What I was doing in January which kept me too busy to update my blog.
Yes, it's another mobile bank, freshly deployed beneath the spreading mango trees in the placid town of Namacurra, which has plainly seen nothing like it. This mobile bank is based in my old stamping ground of Quelimane, which in January was every bit as hot, humid, potholed, mosquito-infested and bicycle-thronged as I remembered it.
Driving such a big truck through such a small town was hair-raising. The first mobile bank is based in Chimoio, a city straddling main highways linking Malawi and Zimbabwe with the port of Beira, where people are accustomed to heavy vehicles. Quelimane is a city on the way to a small, sleepy, silted-up port, and those cyclists in the above photo are generally the biggest vehicles on the streets - except when we go thundering by.
Quelimane also boasts far more (ahem)
picturesque roads in the surrounding countryside than does Chimoio. A view of the main bridge across the Licungo on the road to Maganja - the river then wide with wet-season rains.
That was the good bridge. Here’s the reason why we decided against taking the mobile bank to Maganja every week, much as they need it there.
