Kuando Kubango gooooood morning!
Menongue and Sunday and just opened the door to the horrific board of contention (and the dirt [and the waste]), here: a hurricane of dust and trash that sweeps the city.
powerful winds are due to the rains began to fall in the center of the country and generate monsters (of garbage) here.
sand and dust everywhere, eyes, throat, ears, in his underwear.
So I spend my relaxing weekend.
I came Menongue Friday, after a grueling week and incredible in the south of the province. Kuando Kubango is very apocalyptic! never seen anything like that.
is a place of absolute disorganization, ignorance, corruption, incompetence, inefficiency, lack of everything when everything is difficult and complicated.
for example, all that is 200,000 km2 Kuando Kubango (Italy makes 300,000) to Menongue only here there are gas stations. distances and poor roads (trails than roads), bombed, full of mine-infested rivers with no bridges to cross make it even more difficult.
engineers who join us are all of a radical failure, brutal. not an offense, for the most part are literally illiterate. and drivers? worst thing ever, do not know the access roads to the cities, they can not go on the sand (in this province is the more normal condition) and one out of the way to invent his own way (in a post of mine ... oh infstato ). also do not follow orders, arrest without reason or authorization, do what they want.
We started Sunday morning at 3 am (now normal time of commencement day) filled with gasoline at a time sappertutto Rim of the municipalities, three territories available (it seemed) only from the Namibian side of the River Kubango.
The operation required to cross over into more or less unknown in Namibian territory, and to base in the town of Rundu, on the traditional canoe through them repeatedly in the mighty river Kubango to reach the predetermined location.
The operation was logistically complicated: several repeated incursions are not easy, especially if the canoes come across hippos, as has happened to the group of Mark, if Angolan authorities on shore leave you without support nor the vehicles, if administrators do not know their own health unit, or which ones work and which do not, nor where it comes from and how.
result: back where we came from Orla and refers the Angolan side, a legendary street and of all that impossible, but ultimately doable, though difficult.
the apotheosis of the inability, ignorance and corruption of the directors was complicated when we discussed an expedition in the interior of the region and for which we absolutely need more fuel. administrator Kalai (halfway) with a friendly smile has promised the delivery of fuel to our return, no doubt, and sent us in the middle of hundreds of miles of uninhabited bush.
reneged on our return has run the floor and if we had not had more fuel than expected, we would have probably started life in the middle of the savannah. we could not go, simple, no?
Angola, so devastated and drained by ticks of corruption and the most total social breakdown. simply cross the border with Namibia and immediately everything organized, beautiful, clean, economical, orderly, even the villages of straw, straight asphalt roads with lots of road signs, cut grass savanna English (or rather kept low by the impressive herds of cattle that graze everywhere). Namibia is incredibly different! yet it is the same land! The other Africa.
But in Angola, always trash everywhere, scrap cars and trucks in the main roads, destroyed, full of potholes, sand or sharp stones, stretches of land burned continuously, garbage (again, is that there is too much!), Disorganization , exorbitant prices, lack of basic hygiene, lack of health services, education, corruption, disorder, trash, wildlife exterminated, inefficiency, waste.
in the cities where we were: city (or country) who are at the great river Kubango where no water for both washing and for drinking. other cities (countries) where the only option is to stay the night in huts where the roaches will walk overhead (is true) and other such things unthinkable.
Kuando Kubango is really bad. as a team, some say that the people here is touched, it's crazy because of the war. seeing as I drive there.
many people here still want the war, that of General Savimbi and UNITA.
perhaps that is what the state of Angola "punishes" sti territory left in a state of absolute misery.
all Orla Angolan talks almost more English than Portuguese, and accepts only dollars, not the Namibian Angolan kwanzas.
mah
experience extremely short!
animals I have not seen, even if they are passed rivers filled with hippos, swam in rivers infested with crocodiles (at right, though) and I saw a lot of elephant poop on the street.
tomorrow we'll find another two fronts, some on land and instead Cuchi my team that remains in Menongue waiting and depending on the helicopter flight to Rivungo this perhaps ... the most extreme boundaries of this territory forgot ...
letters coming from the edge of the world in the next blog
chauu
