A Motley Crew

Time – the precise time, anyway – may not be important in Africa, but that is not to say that no matter is urgent. That little lesson was reinforced as I sat at a local church meeting with Mario and Samuel about some project details.

I had been expecting a call from our landlord for the past several weeks, ever since he asked Laura if he could take some of the bars off of our windows to re-use them in another apartment. They are redundant so I did not mind, though I am not sure in Mozambique whether or not I would have legal ground to argue even if I did mind.

Weeks later, this is the day that he finally called. “The workers are here now,” he said, “Could you be home in 10 minutes to let them in?”

I have waited for this call for weeks, and now you want me home in ten minutes?

I was planning on returning to work out of my home office soon. “Give me forty minutes,” I replied. That gave me enough time to quickly wrap up the work I was in the middle of at the church and get home.

When I arrived at home, I was greeted by the crew that the landlord had hired to remove the bars. Three young men, none of them yet 20, all wearing tattered street clothes. One held an old and well-used screwdriver, another a hammer and the third a standard kitchen knife.

Under any other circumstances, I would have been afraid.

Once inside, they asked me for a screwdriver that would actually fit into the heads of the screws they were trying to remove.

Remember, labour is cheap. The proper tools are not. I did not have a proper screwdriver either.

They hammered and chiselled away at the stubborn screws. Several times, I was sure they were going to slip and shatter the window. The thought had occurred to them as well. They debated amongst themselves leaving the most difficult of the three sets of bars, and forfeiting the $2 prize that they stood to split between them once they had successfully completed their mission.

Doubts aside, they persevered. Eventually. “It will just take 20 minutes,” the landlord had assured me over the telephone, “and then you can be back on your way.”

It was at the hour-and-forty-minute mark that I looked up to see that the motley crew had woven my clothesline through the bars and were yanking furiously to try to free them from the window opening.

That was just 20 minutes after I had looked up to the sight of the boy who appeared to be the foreman standing precariously, partly propped into the air by a windowsill, and partly by the shoulder of his crew member. I got a ladder from the other room, and they thanked me.

When the crew was finished their assignment, they promptly left. Their work may have been urgent, but those three panels of iron bars are still sitting in my home, though no longer affixed to the window. I do not know when the landlord will come to pick them up. He will probably need them urgently next month, when I have long since forgotten that they are sitting there. And no doubt my phone will ring when I am doing something somewhere else.