Living the Vida Louca in Tete

The crazy life – or vida louca in Portuguese, pretty much sums up how we live in this town of opportunity, north (or south, or east) of the borders of where we call home. 

Tell people you are heading off to live in Tete and they’ll gasp in horror, saying you’re crazy.  An interesting observation from people who usually haven’t visited themselves, but perhaps they aren’t too far off the mark – there is plenty here to make you crazy, if you weren’t already so when you arrived. 

Collar a veteran ex-pat, and they’ll regale you with toe-curling stories of no shops, no roads, no restaurants, no supplies, no electricity, no potable water, no English…and then tell you how easy ‘you new un’s’ have it.  Still, here’s the list of crazy-making daily challenges we face.

Dust.  Wafting and curling its way through window cracks and under doors.  Softly layered onto every horizontal surface, clinging to your hair, creeping between your keyboard keys, hazing the screen, sucked up by the fan and forcing your computer to run slower and slower until eventually it spits and splutters out of life.

Reverse hazard beepers – a safety measure the mines insist on: their continual screeching drills inside your brain, making your teeth ache.  Why, oh why, can’t someone invent an on/off switch for them, so that they can be switched off when they leave the mine and use the vehicles in the suburbs and town?  As an early morning wake up call, the neighbour’s rooster can be dealt with (piri piri chicken) but land mining his driveway would be frowned upon.

The leisurely processing at retail pay points, and, if you are unlucky enough to require a factore, waiting for the painstakingly handwritten itemized listing of the entire contents of your grocery trolley.  After you’ve already received a till slip and paid for them.  Sigh.

Ordering food immediately when walking into a restaurant, and arriving well before we plan to eat.  I don’t know what I’ll want to eat in an hour’s time, but I do know that stirring hunger pangs are not the time to call for a menu.

Road traffic and obstacles of all kinds – cars, trucks, bicycles, motorbikes, pedestrians, taxi’s, goats and cows, tractors, potholes, subsided road shoulders - hazards fly at you from 360° and dare I mention the officials stalking the byways...

Just a few of the things testing us as we live the vida louca in Tete.