Kizua Mwangola: Part 4: Angolan Again

On our return to Luanda, we found the city to be busier than ever. Perhaps it was the long, empty roads of Huambo that made us adapt to the slow pace of country life. Luanda hits you in the face, overflowing with people, cars, rubble. We were not expecting much of the conservatoria, not quite believing that the express service was actually going to deliver results. To my amazement it did: a brand-spanking cedula and birth-certificate were at the ready, waiting for me.

The next mission was to sort out the ID card. We did the scouting as usual, dropping by during the day and figured out another early start was required. I went solo. I got there for around 05:10 AM, managed to be number 38 after some complications (don't ask), waited for ages and got seen around 09:30. The going was good until around 5 people ahead of me. At this point, a middle-aged white Angolan goes up to the desk - a desk sitting more or less in the centre of the room, in full view of everyone. The chap was talking too softly for me to hear, but our Angolan public servant was not; his loudness was calculated to ensure everyone could participate in the exchange. Proceedings went more or less like this:

- So you're 40-odd years of age, haven't you ever had an ID card before?

- (inaudible mumble by citizen)

- So now you come back with this measly piece of paper (pointing to the birth certificate) and want me to believe this person is in fact you? How do I know?

- (more inaudible mumble by citizen)

- No, no, if it comes from the province you need to go back to the province! You all go when things got though and now want to come back when its sweet, and expect us to just believe your word!! If you want me to accept your documents you need some supporting evidence!!

- (even more inaudible mumble by citizen)

- Back to the province I say!! I'm here to do my job!!

The citizen left the building, but the public servant wasn't quite finished. He kept talking about it while processing the subsequent four cases, getting angrier and angrier as time went by - a full fledged monologue by now, punctuated only by the yesses and hm hms uttered by the customer and a few in the crowd. This went on until it was my turn, at which point he finally stopped talking, but for all the wrong reasons. He could hardly believe his eyes when he looked at my birth certificate, alternating between the paper and me several times with gaping mouth:

- I can't believe this!! Another one!?! What's going on here today?? Where is your old ID card?

- I never had one Sir - I say, starting to despair, but with still one card up my sleeve. Using my politest, nicest, humblest Portuguese I mumble:

- I also have the church's birth certificate, if that helps at all.

Incredibly, the guy changed his tone immediately after seeing the church's document, and suddenly starts displaying me as a model citizen to the crowd, explaining how this is the sort of behaviour he expects, with the neat confirming documents and so on. We all had a chuckle at the expense of these citizens that come round with only one document - me noisily joining the crowd slagging those fools. In the same breath I was thanking God I had remembered the old Portuguese bureaucratic trick of bringing every single legal document you own every time you go to a government agency - this makes it harder for them to send you home for lack of documentation.

The adventure wasn't quite finished after that - there were some other minor problems, but nothing major and the end result was that I _almost_ managed to finish the day with a valid Angolan ID card. Yep, this is the same day in which I initiated my request, and I did not do anything different from a regular, average Angolan citizen. The _almost_ bit was due to some mishaps with my file that I don't fully understand - something to do with stamps; my lovely number 38 ended up being processed at number 72 or so, meaning I was at the very back of the queue by the end of the working day (around 14:30). And this is excluding the other minor incident in which the chap calling out people got the files in the wrong order and jumped from 29 to 60 odd, skipping everyone inbetween; it took the queue something like ten names to notice the problem, at which point we were all shouting in unison: TA ERRADO CHEFE!!! TROCOU A ORDEM!!! (its all wrong boss, you flipped the order!!).

Anyway. Next day I returned at the late hour of 08:00 AM and it took me the whole of 20 mins to obtain my brand-spanking new Angolan ID card.

Kizua Mwangola: Part 3: Huambo

Things ended up going quite well with the conservatoria in the end. It sure didn't look like it in the beginning though. We got there around 07:00 AM on the dot, thinking this was early enough - I should have known better. The fall of Saigon had less people roaming around. Nevertheless, it was an instructive day as we figured out all the requirements to get things done. Next day I turned up at 05:10 AM, and was still number 12 in the queue (!!) but managed to put my request in. On the plus side, I was out by 09:30 AM.

Since it would take 5 working days to pick up the finished articles (e.g. the cedula and birth certificate), we decided to trek to Huambo to visit Cousin R. This is Angola's equivalent of Namibia's Windhoek, as it sits more or less on the centre of the country. Many years ago, the Portuguese had ambitions of making Huambo the capital of the empire; they called it Nova Lisboa. Due to its strategic importance and proximity to the rebels home ground, Huambo and the surrounding areas got shelled intensively during the war, particularly during the late nineties.

These days, the city is a recovering place. It still displays many scars of the recent past, but it also sports a great deal of rebuilt infrastructure. The government sees Huambo and the surrounding areas (such as Cela in Wako Kungo) as key for the agricultural revival the nation requires. Angola imports around 80% of what it consumes, a lot of which are cereals and other agricultural products. This is all the more amazing when one travels through the fertile lands of the plateau, kilometres and kilometres of greenery and very little of it affected by human hand. Imagine something like Hertfordshire but with unspoilt nature instead of farms and then scale that to a Britain-like size and you get close. Excluding the landmines, of course.

After a difficult bus trip, we spent 5 days in great luxury at cousin R's pad, with all the mod-coms. During the day we treked the city, visiting places like the granja, and meeting nice people such as Hugo. Time went far too quickly, and we had to go back to the madness of Luanda.

Kizua Mwangola: Part 2: The Lion's Den

Alvalade is the home of Sporting Lisbon, the mighty lion of Portuguese football. And now, its also the key to my future...

* * *

As promised, the day started early, with a trip to Alvalade's Conservatoria. However, it was just my luck that it had burnt down in a fire recently. Oscillating between hope and despair - have they lost my entry? can we create a new one? - we wondered down to the abandoned shop window to read a notice: the conservatoria had migrated, lock stock and smoking barrels (literally) to a different place. Luckily, it was only up the road, next to the Sonangol pumps by the national radio station.

To our great displeasure, the new place was nothing like the ordered chaos of Kinaxixe. Here we had sheer, unabated, uncontained disorganised chaos. After watching some great examples of Angolan queueing (surely an oxymoron if I ever seen one), I managed to sneakily speak to a worker. She dutifully told me that archive searches were not one of their set tasks; I should know to which conservatoria I belong, and that's that. If I truly wanted to conduct a search, I could wait two weeks for the new IT system that was being installed.

Well, we couldn't wait two weeks - half of our visas!! - nor did I have any belief in time scales for software development - Angolan's or otherwise, worked on far too many of these critters to have any faith left - so we gave up and decided to go for breakfast. I badly needed my morning coffee to regain my strength. God had, of course, very different ideas. An hour walk revealed nothing that could vaguely resemble a cafe and Shahin boycotted all street vendors so, in addition to all our troubles, starvation now beckoned.

We considered our options in a quiet shade under my baptism church. As if sensing our despair, just there and then our friend L decided to ring us. A lawyer! Surely a sign. She didn't know off the top of her head whether there were any other conservatorias in Alvalade, but she would check; in the mean time, we were to ring Portugal and try to rinse out more details. Shahin also thought we should consult the padre and see if we can get any additional info from him.

As we queued up to see the padre, we met another couple that were in almost exactly the same situation as us: a Scottish girl was trying to marry an Angolan chap, R, but they were struggling in both Britain and Angola. The coincidence was so amazing it felt uncanny. We chatted for a bit and traded war stories, commiserating each other. R told us he had had a lot of problems getting his birth certificate, and one of the most important things is knowing the location of one's entry in the registry. This was to be a vital detail.

In the end, all our sources came together:

• The church archives did not know where I was registered, but they knew the exact location (book, page, etc.) of my entry in it; thanks to R, we appreciated the importance of this vital information.
• My uncle knew where we were registered, and L confirmed that there was only one conservatoria in Alvalade. We also found my cousin's B entry in the church archive, and it mentioned the conservatoria (but regrettably, not the location of his book in the archives!).

Great dectective work. Now all we need is to request the documents on Monday.

Kizua Mwangola: Part 1: Dead on Arrival

Not so long ago I started a email newsletter with very restricted circulation: a palavra do dia (word of the day). Its purpose was to teach myself and a few friends and family some meagre words of kimbundu, one of the major Angolan languages. I regret to say it was a rather short lived and somewhat unsuccessful project, but I did pickup one or two words. One of them was Kizua, or "word". My really limited kimbundu has not progressed much further since then, as the title of these series of blog posts attests. What I'm trying to say in terrible pidgin kimbundu is "words from Angola". Perhaps one day a real kimbundu speaker will help me fix the title.

Another pet project of mine was A Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, chronicling my return to Angola. This one was slightly more successful, and a complete book was actually "published" in the end - if with a somewhat restricted circulation of one copy. At the time, many people protested about the long length of posts (all the ten of you), so this time I'll try to keep them short and (hopefully) frequent.

* * *

After a rather long trip, we arrived in the motherland safe and sound. As usual, Cousin R had made a sterling job of organising it all, a feat even more amazing considering she now dwells far away in the provinces and did everything by phone. Cousin Z picked us up and gave us a mini-tour of town.

Its strange but if anything Luanda hasn't changed that much: there are lots of new buildings - all of them sky-high - but the key things are as we remembered, if not worse. Terrible traffic, bad side-walks and expensive things. Luanda is incredibly even busier than any city in Vietnam, with the added messiness that only big African cities seem to have.

* * *

Our first mission after a good night rest was to obtain my cedula. We hoped the job was going to be easy as I already possess a shiny"certidao narrativa" (not quite a birth certificate, but almost. Don't ask.). No such luck, said the man at the Conservatoria (Registry Office). We need to figure out where my parents did the original registration and Lord knows where that was.

Mum gave us some tips. We're going to queue up from 07:00 onwards tomorrow morning in the vain hope that one of the places she suggested is the right one (Alvalade). Of course, cedulas are only requested on Mondays or Tuesdays and collected on Wednesdays and at best take eight days to be processed but hey, we'll try it on anyway. Our spirits are high. And we're that desperate to get out of Luanda and hit the real beaches down south.

Gnarls Barkley: who's going to save my soul now?

http://www.vimeo.com/3263864

I got some bad news this morning
Which in turn made my day
When this someone spoke I listened
All of a sudden, has less and less to say
Ohhhhhh how could this be?
All this time, I've lived vicariously
Who's gonna save my soul now?
Who's gonna save my soul now?
How will my story ever be tollllld now?
How will my story be tollllld now?

Made me feel like somebody
Hmmm, like somebody else
Although he was imitated often
It felt like I was bein myself
Is it a shame that someone else's song
Was totally and completely dependant on
Who's gonna save my soul now?
Who's gonna save my soul now?
I wonder if I'll live to grow old now
Gettin high cause I feel so lowwwww down

And maybe it's a little selfish
All I have is the memory
Yet I never stopped to wonder-ahhhhh
Was it possible you were hurtin worse than me
Still my hunger turns to greeeeed
Cause what about what I neeeeeed?!
And OHHHH~! Who's gonna save my soul now?
Who's gonna save my soul now?
Ohhhh I know I'm out of control now
Oooh-oooh, tired enough to lay my own soul down

holiday pics

Being slightly more clued up on these newfangled technologies, Shahin already has a facebook account and has discovered the joys of microblogging (twitting, for the youngsters amongst us). Me, I'm stuck in time, still editing text files with emacs. Here are some of the pictures she has published:

• Bangkok
  
• Hanoi
• Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island
  
• Cat Bs Island and Halong Bay 2
  

Hope these links work for y'all.

Afrobasket: Good start!

Well it seems we cleared everyone out of our path, including our main rivals Nigeria. However, the game was very tight, and if we do meet them again in the finals, the result may be very different...

Angola x Nigeria. (C) fiba.com.

One negative note for the afrobasket though. As it was with Angola, its extremely difficult to know what is going on. There are no TV stations in the UK showing any games at all (or even the highlights!), the website provides scarce information (would it be so hard to have web-highlights - if webcasting whole games is too hard?) and to top it all, when you type "Afrobasket 2009", Google Ajax's cleverness converts it to "Eurobasket 2009". You gotta be a real fan, basically. I know Fiba in general is not that great, but when I look at NBA's website I cannot help but wonder how hard it would be to provide all that content with Open Source and Free Software (drupal comes to mind).