Fish and quince

As you know by now, the diet in Luanda after 75 was varied: fried fish...or fried fish...or still fried fish which was always served with rice! However, depending on what trading goods you had – money was worthless – and whether you knew the right people, sometimes you could get other stuff. People who worked in the cigarette factory, for example, could swap their cigarette packs for beer with someone who worked at the beer factory. Bottles of beer could then be swapped for a chicken, or a turkey. The supreme merchandise was whisky, the real stuff, not the one everybody made at the garden shed or the one you could buy by the litre in plastic bottles! A bottle of whisky, together with something a bit more trivial, like sugar or potatoes, would be worth a whole pig! Unfortunately, the pigs, eating the same as we did had a disgusting fish taste! It was even worse than eating fried swordfish everyday! Anyway, that didn’t last as the few pigs still around in Luanda were quickly eaten and became extinct! When I started working for Schlum, I either went home or to the beach at lunchtime, but the foreign staff who had no reason or time to go home got a takeaway from the Petrangol canteen. Lunch was always fried fish heads with tomato rice and quince jelly (???) – don’t ask! One of my friends, a French engineer, only liked the jelly so he would swap his fish heads for more quince. The mystery of the fish heads puzzled the engineers, so they decided to find out why the fish only had heads and where on earth did the rest go. They went undercover to the kitchens and discovered that the cooks ate them before serving the heads to the staff!

Teaching and learning

In 76 all uni students in Luanda had to teach in secondary schools due to the lack of qualified teachers. I was assigned to 2 schools. Obviously, I was really bad – I was not properly qualified or trained and there was no curriculum. However, one problem I did not have to face was lack of discipline from the kids. I was 18, hardly older than some of my pupils, but they were lovely and they all respected me. At the time, I drove a used BMW my dad had bought me and they absolutely loved my car. They would follow me out of the school and say: “Miss, you drive so well! Can you give me a lift, miss? Just a ride to the beach, miss!” The father of one of my pupils owned a shop and everyday he would bring me a lollypop, a rare delicacy in those days. It became a joke among my sister’s friends. Whenever someone asked if they knew Sacha’s sister the answer was “She is the one in the BMW with a lollipop?” I quickly learned never to tell them to write about a free theme. I spent many evenings laughing aloud like crazy while I read their compositions! Out of everything my pupils wrote, my favourite sentence was: “Comrade President Neto is considered immortal because even though he is dead he appears on telly every night!”
And please don’t ask me how I had time to work, study, teach and still lead a very busy social life....I think the days then had a lot more hours than nowadays! At least 36!

Baobabs

When Mike was working in Luanda, he was very sad because there was nowhere he could go to climb. He wanted to go to Pedras Negras, but it was too far away from the capital and the roads were too dangerous. One day he decided that if he could not climb on mountains, he could climb….the baobab trees! So we went looking for baobabs right for climbing. We looked, and looked, trying to find the ideal baobab tree. Some had big biting ants, others were not steep enough…… We were nearly giving up when he saw the perfect climbing baobab. An old man was sitting on the shade. As soon as he saw us, immediately tried to sell his baobab fruit. I wasn’t too keen, the fruit is very, very sharp and I really didn’t fancy it that morning. However, to help the old man and to give Mike the chance to try that fruit he did not know and was very curious about, I bought it. Mike tasted it and I asked him what he thought. His answer was: “You know what? When I want to feel like my teeth are growing a beard, I’m sure I’ll find a more pleasant way to do it, without having to eat THIS!”

My first real job was with TAAG – before that I was a teacher but that job doesn’t count and anyway it’s part of another story I’ll tell later. As you may know (or not) TAAG stands for Angolan Airlines, or “Take Another Goat” as the english expats loved to refer to the company, a joke about the company logo which looked like a goat. My work was not very glamorous. I wasn’t a crew member, my feet were firmly on the ground. I belonged in the company’s headquarters, on the fifth floor of the TAAG building, next to Hotel Tropico. I worked for the Finance Department, in the Interline office and it was there that I met my best friend, one of those friends one makes for life; one of those friends we may not see for over 20 years but when we meet again it’s like we saw each other the previous day. Our job was to accept (or refuse) invoices from other airlines for TAAG tickets flown by them. How many rows we had with some companies who thought they could trick us! Whenever I visit a travel agency today I realize what an easy life the staff enjoys. They put into the computer the start of the trip, the destination, the dates and….Hocus Pocus! They’ve got the price! We had to know how to calculate the price of a trip. We had some HUGE green manuals, which gave us the distance in miles between A and B and sometimes C, D etc and with the help of a troglodyte calculator, (huge too) we had to work out the cost! (when my daughters heard this story, they wanted to know if I was born while dinosaurs still roamed the earth!) The IT department (TAAG was very ahead of its time) took the whole tenth floor and used some monsters they called computers, which worked with perforated cards. Working for TAAG was sometimes fun, albeit for a very low salary. Sometimes we would go in groups to have breakfast at the hotel next door – it was always eggs and ham, but in those difficult times of food shortages it tasted delicious! At 5PM everybody went home – very quickly and all at the same time! The lifts were always so full they wouldn't stop on the ground floor, they would go straight to the basement. The problem was that the only way to get out of the basement was….in the lift........ and sometimes it was already 6PM when we finally managed to get out of the building. It’s interesting to note that I was always much more afraid of those lifts than the curfews, the prisons, snipers, assaults, robberies, …… There were a lot of jokes about the safety of TAAG’s flights which was unfair, as the maintenance and pilots were provided by TAP, the Portuguese airline. There may have been some scary moments, but nothing special, really..... and there was a story about how in an emergency in a flight from Sal to Havana the crew discovered that the oxygen mask boxes were kept closed by superglue, but I’m sure that was just a rumour spread by the enemies of the revolution!..... However, the two things everybody agreed upon was that God was Angolan and supported TAAG football club!