It was exciting last week when after school one day, as we were getting ready for Thomas' Skype piano lesson, Rhea called our attention to a fire going on up the street. The kids and I tend to be overexcited by what we call "police activity." We obsess about the causes, the consequences of the issue, how the problem will be resolved, etc. So keeping with our typical behavior, we watched out the windows for over an hour, with the help of binoculars to see more detail. Coincidentally, Thomas' piano teacher forgot about the lesson, which was a good thing because the piano sits at a window that was facing the fire--it would have been a distraction the entire lesson. The fire appeared to be in the middle of some apartments, somewhat close to another embassy home, so we were a little worried. My heart sank at the thought that people's houses were burning, especially with the recent basement fire in our own building the week before fresh on my mind. However, after escalating six flights of stairs to the roof with our binoculars, Briant and I could see that the fire was coming from some construction supplies being used to build a mall right next to them (the one and only soon to be mall here in heart of Luanda). Sad, but it made me feel better that houses weren't burning down. From this experience, we learned that there are firefighters here of some sort. We've never seen a fire truck or firefighters, and we can't imagine the struggle they had to get there in traffic. It did take about 15 minutes after the fire started until we heard sirens, and another 10 minutes after that until we saw any change in the smoke. Glad it wasn't our house!
Here are the phases of the fire:
While on the roof, we took advantage of the view and got pictures of the Neto University that is under construction, named after the first president of Angola.
This is the Catholic school that we pass frequently. Both Briant and I were shocked at how pretty the view of the city looked with the hills covered in trees and the skyscrapers--it looks so clean and could possibly be something out of a 1st world country. From afar, there are no signs of the slums, trash, potholes, etc. You can see the traffic though, but I'm afraid that the fire caused a lot of the traffic on this particular night. Cars were being diverted to other roads to get away from the fire that was directly close to a major road. We're glad we're close enough that we can just walk home!
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