waiting and believing in tea

I was just now sitting on the front veranda of the office. The sun had just set. And I am waiting for water to boil for my tea. Because I believe in tea. I sit on the cement wash board/basin it felt warm after it spent the afternoon soaking up the sun. The air is just perfect, not hot, not cold. Beira is hellish in the hot season, but come April it’s incredibly pleasant. Dusk is my favorite time of the day. Somehow the colors bring about a holy atmosphere and life seems to calm before it darkens. From my washboard I have a 90 degree view of Beira: To my right a residential area. I, from the 3rd floor of the building where our MCC office is located could look down into the neighboring yard- a complex of some sort with a high fence and a manicured lawn. There’s a tree planted in a star-shaped bed. No one would pay any attention to this compound from the street and I’m guessing that’s how the residents like it. I wonder if it would be disconcerting to them to know that I can look right down into their lives and movements.
If I look up to the left a bit, I see the bus stop, little miniature vans stopping for at time and then sliding off. There’s shouting and pushing, but mostly it’s fairly calm. Behind them are the walls of the cemetery—part of it belonging to the Catholic church, part for the Muslim community.
Straight in front of me but in the distance the sky is pinkening over of the port and railway station—linking the broader world and southern Africa. I wonder who and what all has come and gone through this port in the past 500 years.
Straight in front of me, but much closer, in the yard, I see, and hear, bats who live in the fig tree in the office yard. Swooping around, no doubt doing a great deed by decreasing the mosquito population of malaria-ridden Beira. Though, I think, I wonder if fruit bats also eat mosquitoes? I’ll have to look it up, along with the history of the Beira port. They are large bats and like this particular tree which produces some sort of fruit. They are large bats, and they sometimes leave a stink of guano (I learned about guano playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego) in the office bathroom. Mozambicans don’t have the same superstitions about bats as Western culture sometimes does—vampires and Halloween crap. Africans associate owls with evil though. Strange isn’t it, how humans have a tendency to have superstitions around animals, but not always with the same animals. In Africa, witches ride on the backs of hyenas rather than on brooms, or sometimes in the small baskets that they clean their maize in. I read an article the other day, something our MCC reps sent out about how climate change is causing more witch killings in Africa as people blame the witches for the changes. The article suggested that maybe climate change was also a factor in witch killings in Europe and America.