First Chapter

First Chapter -  Supervisor Course in Angola

We arrive at Luanda

One autumn morning, in the city of Lisbon, Portugal, already outside the apartment door in which I spent about two months for research work on Jose Saramago, my mobile phone rings and across the line I hear the voice of Nora Mansour, the wife of the Israeli ambassador in Angola. From her remarks, I understand the Government of Angola is tremendously interested in a local education course, similar to what Felisa and I did last year on Sao Tome Island.

I returned to Israel and forgot about Angola. Towards January, frequent calls from the Israeli Embassy in Luanda and the Foreign Ministry in Israel began: The course is underway. Recent arrangements before flight: A very long security briefing warning us that Angola is not Sao Tome and there are many dangers lurking there for every man and woman. More vaccines and we are already at the airport in route to Johannesburg and from there to Luanda, the capital of Angola.

Felisa and I are getting excited. We both know that at least from the point of view of our joint work, no problem is expected, since we have already worked together and learned to know each other well.

Everything else was in heavy fog. An email I send to the Vice Dean at the University of Luanda is not being answered and this time we are almost going to the unknown. We have been told that all the students are educators, and we reckon we will meet with school principals and supervisors again, such as on the island of Sao Tome, and therefore we are calm, at least from a professional point of view. We are missing many details: We do not know how many participants expect us, are there any advanced electronic means? Etc. etc.

We'll have to "flow with the changes" again.

In the afternoon we land in Johannesburg, for a night's stay before the flight to Angola. Johannesburg is a city I know little from my stay there for two months, twenty years ago. However, at that time it was a completely different South Africa, a state controlled by whites through the terrible apartheid regime, which allowed the white minority to control the black majority.

I wanted to show Felisa Johannesburg but the taxi driver, on the way to the hotel, warns us not to go to the center of Johannesburg. "It's very dangerous over there. Thousands of people sit by the roadsides and can rob, kill and the like."

I was really sad. Even 20 years ago, I did not like my stay in Johannesburg, the reality in which white exploits black was and remains unbearable to me. But what is even more unfortunate is that even under the control of the locals, the people themselves do not live in heaven and the class divide has widened.

Felisa and I do not take a risk and stay at the hotel.

The next morning, Saturday, we are on our way to Luanda, the capital of Angola. Sure, at least the African landscape, the real jungle we saw in the past, will bring us back the good spirit that blew us away for the ride.

As the giant Boeing plane lands at Luanda Airport, we begin to understand where we are.

Cops and deaf cops walk around the terminal. Some positions and behind them are men sitting in front of a computer working slowly and exhaustingly. Long queues linger and we end up with one.

I look back and see this huge plane and I really want to take a picture of it. The moment I wanted to say this to Felisa we see a Japanese guy with a camera standing at the door shooting exactly the same plane. A few seconds after the poor man filmed the plane, two civilian-clad police officers and several other uniformed men attack him. He looks rather frightened and tries to explain that he just took a pretty picture. The Japanese began to sweat and his explanations were not received sympathetically. We saw how he was instructed to go into the back room with a finger and there for a quite long time. Of course, after they confiscated the camera.

Angola is a country that has known a bloody civil war that lasted 30 years. Only two years ago, the war ceased and its signals were evident everywhere, and this event lit a red light for us. We realized that you had to be careful here, and removing the camera from the bag requires extreme care.

After about two hours of standing in line, I arrived at a clerk sitting in front of a computer monitor, having trouble reading the script on my passport and what appears on the monitor. He seems to need eyeglasses. In retrospect, I think we hardly ever saw people wearing eyeglasses. stamping a passport and finally being allowed to tread on Luanda land. An embassy car was waiting for us outside with a local driver who knows several sentences in Hebrew and Avital, the consul of the Israeli embassy. While driving towards the hotel, we get the first lesson on how to defend against potential dangers in this country.

I look to the side of the road, looking for the witness of Africa, and I can't find it. Shabby-looking houses, huge piles of garbage in the streets, a derelict look that leaves me on the edge of depression.

When you think that Angola is one of the richest countries in the quarries: gold, diamonds, oil, you wonder why this is how its capital city looks?

A Portuguese writer Miguel Sousa Tavares who wrote a romance called Equador, tells a story of a king's official envoy to the island of Sao Tome. He describes how, on his way to the island, his ship docked in the port of Luanda and in the distance the city seemed metropolitan to everything. Only as the ship approached, the port did he recognize the apparent neglect. The story takes place at a time when Angola was still a Portuguese colony. Many Portuguese were there and life in the city was European, at least for the most part. After a few days of being in Luanda, on one of our trips to travel around the city (very little, really) I comprehended what the author expressed.

Avital warns us that in Luanda, you do not walk alone, you do not walk in the streets with any piece of jewelry, because it is immediately torn: over the neck, wrist or ear .... Be careful and drink only mineral water. "And don't worry as soon, the hotel will receive a comprehensive security briefing from the Israeli security officer." We start to worry ...

The hotel we stayed in was quite fancy, from the room window you can look out onto the wretched street and from a distance you see the Atlantic Ocean, clouds standing in the center of the sky and the color of the sea is black. I photograph the view over the window glass of my room, so I do daily, during the different hours of the day and evening as the sea changes color and slowly I begin to feel a close proximity to this landscape.

The security officer meets us in the lobby of the hotel and warns us not to leave the hotel but with the company of local people who come to take us in the car. Felisa and I look at each other, wondering among ourselves if we did right that we agreed to come to this scary place. Later, when we talk about the things we hear, we decide to be disciplined, because apparently the people know what they're talking about. Only after a few days of staying there do we feel safer, but we still dare not go alone, as we did in Sao Tome every day and night.

Nora, the ambassador's wife, very nice lady, comes to take us to a first work meeting at the university. First, we take a tour of the "room of Israel", a large room furnished with student chairs. The room and furniture are a contribution of the State of Israel, initiated by our ambassador here. Then we go to a meeting room attended by Vice Dean Vitorino and Anna, the lecturer who was appointed to be, on his behalf, in charge of the course. From our "side" sits Nora, the security officer, a local guy named Elbash who serves as the embassy speaker, Felissa, and I.

Anna is a black-skinned woman, tall, tall and beautiful. From both her laughing and serious eyes, we immediately feel that everything will flow properly.

It turns out that most of our students are lecturers of the university who train teachers to be teachers in the various subjects. Therefore, we will have lecturers (most of who have a Ph.D.) in mathematics, physics, literature, English, French and more. Most of them studied in Cuba, Portugal and Spain.

We ask whether the participants come voluntarily or are the course forced upon them. Vitorino says that all of them voluntarily enrolled. Moreover, city school administrators who heard about the course wanted to be admitted and he did allow some senior educators to join the group of the course.

At dinner at the hotel, (where the meal costs $ 45 Tabin!), Felisa and I summarize our impressions of today. It is clear to us that we will have to work hard, we expect the group to be at a higher level than the one in Sao Tome (in retrospect, we were very right). And we have to flow with the changes.

But what really worries us this weekend is the fact that we will have to be locked up in the hotel till Monday morning, because we were really prohibited from going outside. And we are the same two women, not very young, who felt free and happy on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, an island that resembles a real paradise, without violence and fear of walking in the (dark) city streets in the late night. We decide to check out the area and if we realize it's not really dangerous, we will wander around a bit and see what happens around the hotel. In the meantime, we gather in Felisa's room and prepare the first day carefully. A feeling of suffocation surrounds us. These closures in air-conditioned rooms, in tropical weather, the knowledge that we can't get out, get in our car and drive are unpleasant and today creep in between our rooms, the Internet room (the great happiness, the internet, the connection to the outside world!!!) and the lobby of the hotel, crowded with white businessmen, sitting in meetings with the locals and planning how to make a lot of money at the expense of the largely Angolan people with hunger.

Tomorrow our training will begin and the blessed agenda will take us out of this sense of gravity.