One of our neighbors is “difficult.” He was arrested in 2005 for raping his daughter.  His wife turned him in. He served time in jail.  Not a jail like the one you have in mind with antiseptic everything and sterile bars but a dark, stinking, roach-infested pit of a room.  I visited the jail once in Tete and it forever turned me from a life of crime.  Well, actually I wasn’t planning anything…

So he went to jail and got out right before we arrived to stay for the first time in our idyllic African cottage.  Idyllic, except for the fact that the roofers ran out of thatch so the peak of our roof was open to the sky.  Wonderful for star-gazing, but less so in a rainstorm.  Rain was falling.  There was a convicted pedophile living next door.  This was not working out the way we had envisioned village life.

Now, this year, when we were preparing to come up to Dinthi, I heard the latest chapter of this family’s sad soap opera.  The wife discovered that the husband had been sleeping with one of the teachers.  In a fit of rage she set fire to the thatch roof of the teacher’s house and burned it to the ground including a large number of school supplies that were being stored in her house. 

So now the wife is on the run.  She disappears.  In her absence she is required to make restitution to the teacher and the school.  Months later she comes back to the village and requests a letter of transfer so that she can move to another village.  The village leaders refuse.  First she must make restitution.  In the meantime, her husband has taken some of the children to the new village but refuses some of the others saying they aren’t his.  During all this time, several of their children have continued to live in our village and attend the school.

Yesterday, Eusebio told me that the family will sooner or later disappear from the village and their house will be abandoned.  I didn’t realize that you needed a letter to move into a village.  It seems that someone who just shows up in a village is probably a trouble-maker.  Otherwise, why would they move from where they were living?