Enfim em Joahnnesburg!

Eis que vasculhando meus emails, acho um email que escrevi em outubro de 2003 para alguns amigos que se preparavam para ser voluntários na África. No email, dividido em três partes, que postarei em três dias aqui, conto um pouco das minhas primeiras impressões na África e dou dicas para os próximos voluntários que lá chegarão. Pisei no continente pela primeira vez no dia 24 de setembro de 2003. Fiquei em Joahnnesburg por dois dias, depois segue para Maputo e, enfim, para Beira, onde morei. É claro que essas são primeiras impressões que não refletem necessariamente o que penso hoje.
O único inconveniente do email é que foi escrito em inglês. Mas vou ver se acho os outros vários que escrevi em português. Ah, meu inglês melhorou bwé nesses últimos cinco anos!


JOAHNNESBURG (extra luggages, currency exchange etc.)The first step is getting to Joahnnesburg. As soon as we left the airplane a guy that worked for the airport came to help us to carry our stuff. Of course: we were full of things, we are women and we are white. Never mind, it was of providencial assistance. We jumped the line at the immigration and after 5 minutes we were next to our luggages. Ops: we were carrying lots of things because the guy (Pound Saver) that sold the tickets said that we could carry 20 kg extra but when we did the check in they only allowed us to carry 3 kg extra. Then we had to hide the 20 kg extras in our hand luggages. So, try to arrange these extra kg before with the Pound Saver man.After taking the luggages we met the people from the hotel that we stayed (Africa Center). They took us to the hotel what was a good idea because Joahnnesburg can frightened even me that I am from Sao Paulo. In the airport parking lot some men tried to carry our luggages, and all of them were asking for money.After this premier, we weren’t so excited to go to the city center. We prefered to do what the hotel suggested: go to a Mall. Then I realised that all the Malls wherever we go are the same. Even in the windows, the manequins were white. I saw just one black manequim inside a store. Detail: without head, only the body. After being there for some hours my feeling was that the apartheid hasn’t finished yet. Even in the hotel, all the high staff was white, and the ones that had to do the hard service were black. The guy that took us to the bus station was black, and I couldn’t see his eyes because he was afraid of looking at us since he didin’t seem to look to the other white people that call the shots there.In South Africa, they accept all kinds of currency but they never accept coins in other currencies. So take only bank notes. The currency change is the same as in England if you go to a bank, but in the hotel you can loose more money. It was what happened with us. I had 10 pounds in notes and Shari and I had more 10 euros in notes. Since we didin’t get pocket money for this trip we had to expend this money to pay the taxi from the hotel to the bus station. It costed us almost 18 pounds. And we had arranged the price before, but this kind of services are expensive there.The next day, we took off to Maputo by bus. The bus is really good. It took us 8 hours to get to Maputo. In the border, they charged us a tip of 5 dollars. But we were really lucky, and I remembered that my father gave me exactly 5 dollars before I left Brazil just in case I would need it. That was the only money that we had.