Mozambique Past-Present, 2018

It is June 5, 2018 and I am preparing for a one-month trip to Mozambique. While I have planned this trip as part of my dissertation on the cold war relations between Mozambique and the GDR, I chose to take along my father, who had worked in Beira in the 1980s on the construction of the railroad Beira-Dondo. Our family stayed in Mozambique for two years before returning to the GDR in 1984. What would he recall after all those years? Would he be able to remember the places that he worked? Would those places still look the same, would they have vanished or changed completely? And what would I remember, as I was only three years old when we left for Mozambique. Although he had shown us slides in the 1990s, those images and stories had faded over time. Would I remember anything? I decided to bring some of these photographs with me in the hope of locating some of the places from my childhood.