Living in Lubango

I live in Lubango, the capital of Huila Province. And living in Lubango is mostly dusty and expensive. I am nowing paying more rent for a two-bedroom apartment than we paid for a three bedroom house on the waterfront in Inhambane, or for an apartment in the better parts of Maputo. My apartment is on the first floor and the soccer pitch for amateur clubs is right in front of my house. Unfortunately it is about to be repaired (well, rebuild is probably a better description), so there are no official matches being played at the moment. The apartment is not very far from our future office and Ludger, who also works for GFA lives just around the corner. The bakery is 50 m up the road and around the corner there is a small shop with very irregular opening hours that sells daily needs (canned tuna, bottled water, soap and beer). So most necessities are available most of the time.

The neighbours are friendly, and love their music, one of the sons is a DJ and another is engaged in the sale of bootleg CDs (orders, anyone?). But they usually do not play their music very loud and when they do, usually not for very long. It is not half as bad as the continuous TV-noise we had to endure from our neighbours Santiago.

Otherwise, Lubango is a standard provincial town with a climate that is similar to that of Johannesburg or Harare. The city is situated at 1700 m above sea level and on three sides surrounded by an escarpment that rises to over 2000 m.and annual rainfall is about 700 mm. So it does not get too hot and there are few problems with malaria. On the other hand, it does cool down at night, especially in the austral winter (June – August).

On one end of the escarpment surrounding the city, the Portuguese built a miniature of famous Cristo Rei of Rio de Janeiro in concrete. Even the miniature is still impressively large, but that is about all that can be said for it. In my opinion it does not have any artistic merit. The expression on the face is rather wooden, something which, I suppose, could be considered quite an achievement if you are working concrete, but the result is still not very appealing. Luckily the statue is rather far away.

Lubango is, as I said, dusty. Very dusty. I am not sure where it all comes from, but every surface is always covered in a film of dust. You could polish your shoes (or have them polished) every morning. Indeed, shoe polishing seems to be a major source of income on the informal street market, shoe polishers are everywhere.