Fire!!!

The news of Haiti's earthquakes was fresh in my mind last year as we moved to Maputo into a 5 story, cement apartment building. I understand why disasters of such are terrible for the third world where everything is made of cement and is often not made or cured properly. What never really crossed my mind was fire. Ok, maybe I gave it a brief passing thought. Our apartment is completely sealed with iron bars to keep out theft. This makes sense but I doubt it would pass fire code in the US. I remember in school getting little stickers of firemen that we could put on a window that is our escape route in a fire. Fat chance here, I would need to sleep with a bolt cutters under the bed. I guess our best escape is out the door and down the stairs which makes the most sense anyway.

So fire was an option but not really much of one given my understanding that cement does not burn as much as wood :). I had come down with a cold last night from our long trip by bus from Beira. These colds following the long trip to Beira are becoming a habit. I guess getting up at 3 in the morning and spending time on a bus with 30 people from Beira for 15 hours increases the chance of catching cold. Duh! In anycase, I could not sleep and decided to get up for some medicine for my headache. I went to the kitchen in search of water. I noticed the windows were fogged up and I heard a funny noise. I decided to open up the window and it was a good thing because to my shock my head stuck out into smoke and sparks coming from below.

"This is not good," I thought. If verbalized it would have been the understatement of the year. I instantly thought of all we ever owned in Mozambique going up in smoke in our apartment in Mozambique.

"Oh, well" is what I thought. "Nothing I can do about it. I had better get Jenny and Nadia out."

Thankfully the smoke had not penetrated any of our rooms but was just beginning too. We grabbed our shoes, documents and Nadia and headed downstairs only stalling to get a couple of buckets. I thought it could come in handy. Jenny grabbed our entire cash box and stashed it somewhere on her person. She did a good job of concealing it because I never noticed it.

We joined other onlookers on the street to see the window of the apartment two flights down on fire. I remember it was the one that usually cooks with charcoal in their window and sends smoke up to the second level. It must have caught the plastic that they were using to conceal it. Jenny used to always complain about the smell and the stupidity of live fire for cooking in a building such as this. We had already taken a child to the hospital in Gondola because of the fumes given off by a charcoal fire in a closed house. So it was not a complete suprise to us that this was the apartment that was on fire.

The fires had actually diminished by the time we got down but I did not know it. Someone had already knocked on the door but no one answered in the apartment. I thought surely they would be harmed by smoke inhalation. My first thoughts were to get water and climb up the veranda and put it out. I had seen people get up there before. Call it heroism if you like, but in the moment I was mainly thinking of how to save our apartment. A couple who had passed in their car, had actually called the police and the fire department. I knew none of this, so he and I ran up to my apartment to get water in hopes of getting the people to open it up. I knew that they did not have water piping in that apartment. By the time we came back down the owners had woken up and were putting the fire out from inside just as the police, and surprisingly a nice looking fire truck and team of firefighters arrived.

Fortunately no one was hurt. Us and our neighbors in the apartment below got out soon enough. We went back to bed with a fan blowing to take out the extra smoke that was stinking up our house in the kitchen and veranda. It was not enough to have hurt us but it did leave questions lingering had it been a bigger fire. The thought did occur for us to look for a smoke detector. Could they exist here? They might. We finally resigned ourselves to the fact that with all the smoke coming up from normal cooking, it would be going off every 15 minutes and decided to place ourselves in God's protection instead before going to sleep instead.