“A fifteen-minute walk. Ten minutes of waiting. Thirty minutes on the “Xipamanine-Malhazine” bus. I arrive in a long, narrow street. Rickety carts loaded with hand-pulled coconuts jolt on the uneven cobblestones, women selling freshly fried “Bajias” and “Rosquinhas” (doughnuts) freshly fried on the side of the road, boys leaning on a low wall chat in the shade of a sheet metal roof, cars slow down before a speed bump located just before the exit of a small football pitch.

“Mulungu mulungu!” a word that I keep hearing in the background during the first weeks of going to work, it doesn’t always seem to be addressed directly to me, it’s almost an exclamation. The white man has arrived in Mafalala, one of the poor neighborhoods of the city of Maputo where there are no new buildings or palaces, everything is built so that it “stands up”, just enough to make sure that thing, be it a stall, a stove for cooking, works. There are no street lamps, no asphalt, no mailboxes, no parking spaces for cars, no trees, no pedestrian crossings, no newsstands. In this narrow street, however, there is a tailor who from 8:30 in the morning, every day except Sunday, has been sitting at a small table with a black sewing machine, next to him he has a pile of clothes about as high as his chair. A few steps away, on the left, there is a small patio and a writing on one of the walls that surrounds it: Machaka.

Machaka in the traditional language spoken in Mozambique, Changana, means “family”. A few days after my arrival I discovered that “Mulungu” is also a word in Changana and that it literally means “white person”. It was therefore a real exclamation, perhaps a greeting, or a real game that reminded me, with a bit of nostalgia, of the years of the good old “Yellow Twingo!”, a game we always played as children to pass the time during bus trips. It was based solely on the rule: if you see a yellow Twingo you have to say “Yellow Twingo!”, the first one to say it earns a point. Whoever scores the most points by the end of the day wins”.

What is Machaka? It was the first question I asked João when I met him. Machaka is a cultural association that aims to promote culture in the Mafalala neighborhood, it told me its story, how the association was born, what they do, their goals, their successes and their difficulties. I asked many questions and received many answers. After seven months here, however, I realize that they were all partial answers, not because there was something wrong with what I was told, but because words, at least mine, take away a bit of importance from certain things.

How can I tell what I have experienced and what I am experiencing here without leaving anything out? I think that in part it is inevitable, because this experience, for me, will have been greater than the individual parts that composed it. When I look at João, Horácio and Omar, I see boys, young, happy, with the desire to be volunteer, to play and dance non-stop. Sometimes I see them even on their “bad days”, with sleep in their eyes, the tiredness of the African heat, with the desire for “descanso” (rest) and to be alone with their thoughts. Boys like me or like many others I have met in Italy. If instead I close my eyes and try to think about it I see something else, there is much more at stake: Machaka is born in a small square, from a deviation of a narrow and long road, which continues for hundreds of meters. A little further on there is a pharmacy, there are two kiosks that prepare sandwiches, one that sells tires, two stalls that sell fruit and vegetables, there is a football field. From this point on the road changes, Machaka will be approximately 500 meters away.

“Mulungo, I ask you for 20 meticais.” “Mulungo, are you okay?” “Mulungo, do you want to buy something?”. People’s faces are gaunter, their eyes are dull, bodies of boys lie on the ground with their backs leaning against a sheet of metal that acts as a fence to someone’s house, they are sleeping and people are passing around them. A boy half my age helps me pick up a glass bottle that we want to use to make a work of art together with the children of the neighborhood. He has a thin body and the look of someone who hasn’t slept for a while, he asks me why I was picking up the bottles and why I was doing it in that particular street. I explain to him that I am a volunteer, that we are making a turtle out of glass bottles and I invite him to come and meet us in Machaka.

He replies that he would come and, abandoning my gaze, walks away. Drug use, any type of drug, is the plague of this neighborhood. It enters homes and captures children, sisters, friends depriving them of everything they have. It empties them. This is what I saw in this long, narrow street: “Rua da Goa”, also called “Boca de Fumo”. It is what I read in “Trainspotting” or heard in my parents’ stories about the plague of heroin in Italy in the 80s, people emptied. “Here, there is much more at stake”, I repeat in my head. It is not “just” music, it is not “just” dance, it is not “just” theater, we are not “just” teaching English or math, it is not “just” an after-school program to study more and raise the grade of a class test.

The future of Mafalala depends on the children and the children depend on the future of this neighborhood. But there can be no future without the possibility of choosing. And when can I choose? When faced with multiple possibilities all equally accessible I manifest my individuality and with a free gesture I decide which life, among those possible, I want to live. Machaka does just this, it frees children to be able to choose, to be able to be passionate, to be able to learn, to be able to make mistakes, to build an alternative: theirs.”