Lichinga

After Matola, Lichinga was the place we lived next. In Mozambique, Lichinga was a perfect place to live due to its weather. It was one thousand and two hundred metres in altitude. We could wonder how Africa was hot and how Lichinga was fresh because it was very elevated. I only remember one day I sweated. That day me and my colleagues of school, Momade, Erasto and Camurdine we did a football play. And for me, this day was a troubled one: Lichinga, in its weather, had a great quantity of rain in the wet season and the grass raised above our heads so I recall, a big cut I did in my hand when I pull a tall grass by distraction. Attention that I don’t mean the shrubs raised above our heads... but the grass raised above our heads!! Due to this, I always today say to my son: never, never you pull a grass with your hand! It can be worse than to pull by a blade of a knife!    

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Hummingbirds

Flying over the flowers of our home garden, we had hummingbirds with mainly two colors: the blue hummingbirds and the green hummingbirds. But wonder of the wonders: both of them they had metallic colors. Blue and green metallic colors near iridescent colors: I mean the reflection of the rainbow tints. And we could see these birds all day long! And many of them! It is a wonder I recall many times.

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Tortoises

Lichinga had a garden for children. It was two hundred metres distant of my house. There was, in the garden, a collection of all the houses of the Portuguese colonies and there as well was a camp for roller-skate hockey where I did my learning. But there here also a wondrous thing was! Wild tortoises in a broad numbers. Lots of wild tortoises so large each tortoise as: a football ball or a little larger. If we wandered by the borders of this garden, in the middle of the pine-trees, only was necessary one minute for seeing a tortoise! In addition to the wonders of this land, in my life I had also never seen a pine-tree!! I had never smelt the odour of this tree. The savannah hasn’t pine-trees! Never has! But here the tortoises were found in the pine-trees grounds and the plantation of pine-trees was possible due the altitude of this land. One day I found a little tortoise of the size of a matchbox. There were many of median average but this little one was the smallest. I painted its shell, its carapace with a paint that closed its little sweat pores over the shell and 'she' died one year after the painting. A great grief and sorrow for me.

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Tito

Tito and me we were of an age. We both and my brother we went through the children garden and in the middle of the pine-trees till we found a tank of water of a plantation, a tank built of cement and with a fresh water, almost cold water. There we stared round us and carefully saw if there was not snakes round us and in the water. After we laid our clothes on the grass and naked, and fearing someone saw us, we plunged in the water of the pool and shouted with the ice like water. We swam in the middle of the frogs the prey of snakes! Moreover, fast we were frozen and numb with the water temperature.