Guten Abend

I don’t recall this setup of what I take to be a prehistoric type of armadillo (not native to Africa) in the grounds of Maputo’s Natural History Museum. I was strolling in the vicinity and paused to look at it for a while.

As I was walking back to my hotel, a security guard called Eric stopped me in the street on the basis that I looked German (a common occurrence) and started speaking that language to me. Guten Abend Eric. Once we switched to Portuguese I ascertained that he had worked for ten years in Germany, was proud of his achievements there and had visited the neighbouring countries of France, Denmark and Poland. As he was an older gent I thought it was probably an arrangement related to the tail end of the Cold War era when countries like Mozambique were aligned ideologically to the Soviet Union and there were opportunities to be had in East Germany with visas relatively easy to get.

In 1987 Eric had a son with a German woman and he has completely lost touch with her, flashing an old Nokia phone that doesn’t support apps. He said he’d given his details to the German embassy in case the son ever came looking, but it’s a tenuous solution and I imagined this situation to be quite painful. I got the sense that technology, time and distance have worked against him, but these are not insurmountable challenges.

He said his German kid is not a secret to his Mozambican family so I suggested he needed to mobilise his other children, nieces and nephews to track him down on social media. Cultural barriers are big but it’s got to be important for anyone to be reassured that they haven’t been abandoned and they’re still in someone’s thoughts every day.

I continued on my way. Fleeting windows into other people’s lives can be fascinating and very poignant.