Almost at the centre of civil war!

Mozambique was a Portuguese colony until 1975, when the country was handed over to the Frelimo (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) following capitulation by Portugal after almost 10 years of a terrorist war. Frelimo had been relatively ineffective during the war, based outside the country and receiving support mainly from Russia, but in April 1974 a coup in Portugal overthrew the government and the new regime decided against supporting the expensive war against Frelimo, so in September 1974 it was decreed that the army would n longer fight against Frelimo, and that power would be handed over in 1975 with the granting of Independence.
This move was not very popular in Mozambique, and there was much dissent among the population, who felt that at the very least elections should be held, not simply a handover to a foreign-based terrorist organisation, of which, it was rumoured, many of the leaders were not even Mozambican or Portuguese-speaking. It was believed that Portugal had sold out the people of Mozambique, many of whom, myself included (as I had lived there since 1967), had not seen any real evidence of the terrorist war! Despite this the army was being recalled to the city bases, and some were even being sent back to Portugal.
There was a major incident in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique's capital, which almost spiralled out into civil war. According to legend a group of recalled Marines were having coffee in the city centre and a shoe-shine boy approached, sporting a t-shirt with the Frelimo flag on it. He pointed to this shirt and told the Marines that soon they would be honouring this flag, not the flag of Portugal, and so one of the Marines gave him a slap and told him to be on his way. The boy called the Police, and when the officer remonstrated with the soldiers all hell broke loose. The Marines were armed and a gunfight ensued resulting in a few civilian casualties, before their General managed to calm things down and they were arrested and taken back to base.
This disturbance spurred the disgruntled public to start a movement in Beira for a free independent Mozambique, with elections to decide on the future. The main square - in front of the office block I worked in! - was renamed (unofficially) Independence Square, and a lorry was parked there, equipped with loudspeakers, with a variety of people, some local politicians, speaking for a free multi-racial (Mozambique was one of the few sub-Saharan countries that didn't have a racist agenda prior to Independence) independence, rather than the capitulation proposed by Portugal. There were large, not huge, crowds in attendance, and the whole thing was incredibly peaceful and civilised.
I had a small one-bedroomed apartment not far from the city centre and my sister had travelled down from Luabo, in Zambézia province, with my nephew who was only 4 at the time. The unrest caused by the troubles in Lourenço Marques had unnerved some people on the British-run Sugar Estate on the banks of the Zambezi, which was felt to be a serious target for Frelimo as it provided around 10% of the country's foreign revenue, so, like my sister, had come to the city for a few days while the situation was tense.
The demonstration had started on the Saturday, and on Sunday many of the expats had met at the golf club and discussed the situation. There was talk of a local strike on the Monday to support the movement, and as the company I worked for was a South African owned one, it was felt that we should comply to show support, but my boss asked that we all turned up for work and a decision would be taken if the demonstration was still in place in front of our office.
My sister was hoping to do some shopping while in Beira, and as it was only a short walk to the centre it was agreed that if I didn't come home by 09.00 (we started at 07.00, so a decision on work would have been made very early) then it was safe for her to make her way in.
I arrived at work and there was a crowd of a few hundred around the truck, all chanting and waving placards, but still peacefully demonstrating - so I parked round the back of the building and made my way inside. Everyone was at the front window overlooking the square, which apart from the demonstration on one corner, pretty much looked like any other day with people walking through on their daily business, but it was soon decided that we would also close since many of our clients would be closed, and therefore it was a prudent decision. 
Before anyone could leave, however, army trucks started pouring into the square opposite the demonstrators and armed troops dismounted. They formed up across the square and told the demonstrators to disperse, but then charged across the square towards the demonstrators! We saw innocent people simply walking through the square being hit with batons, and when an elderly couple were knocked down just below us our office manager (a Scot) ran down, against advice, to offer assistance. There were a few gunshots, and as the crowd ran out of the square behind our building, where my car was parked, there were a couple of grenade blasts too!
We were trapped in our building as the army were all milling about in the square and the streets surrounding us, and there was no way I could warn my sister what was going on, and expected at any moment to see her wander into the square with my nephew in tow! By 10.00 all was quiet again, though there was still an army presence, and it was decided that it was safe enough for us all to leave, and stay away until at least Wednesday when things hopefully would have calmed down.
I quickly drove home to find that my sister was safely at home, my domestic help (part-time) had warned her that the streets were not safe, and she had waited to hear from me! We headed out of town to the beach for the rest of the day, and it went without incident - apart from getting two punctures, and having to drive slowly on the second flat tyre to a repair place to get them both fixed as it was deemed unsafe to leave the car and walk with 2 tyres.
It turned out the the government in Lourenço Marques had ordered the army to put down any resistance to the handover the following year, which further enraged many - the army were no longer going to fight against the terrorists, but were going to fight against its own people who were simply exercising their right to protest peacefully!
I found out later in the year, before leaving for South Africa in January 1975, that following the decree in September that Frelimo would be given power in 1975, a powerful organisation, funded by many wealthy Mozambicans who stood to lose a lot upon Independence, and with some serious military firepower, had been planning to mount a coup late in 1975 to take power and thwart the proposed Independence. They had hoped that by then the Portuguese military forces would have been severely depleted, and that Portugal would not have had the stomach to oppose the coup, who had numbers and weapons, so they could have easily taken over. The premature demonstrations had resulted in the army being ordered to stand against any threats to the Independence process, effectively stymieing their coup ambitions.
By Wednesday life had returned to normal, so I went back to work, my sister and nephew returned to Luabo, and it was as though nothing had ever happened!

Giving inanimate objects gender

As someone who has always enjoyed languages, and even etymology (the study of words), and who speaks three languages on a regular basis - English (my mother tongue), Portuguese (for 6 months of the year in Brazil), and Spanish (6 months of the year in Peru) - I am constantly struggling with the gender of inanimate objects!
In English we use "the", "a/an" and "it" to describe anything inanimate - so we talk about "the table", "the car", "the road", and refer to them all as "it", but many languages have allocated gender to everything so in Spanish and Portuguese they talk about "la mesa" and "a mesa", "el coche" and "o carro", and "la calle" and "a rua". So in Portuguese and Spanish table and road is female (a and la) and car is masculine (o and el), and they would also use him and her when referring to these inanimate items. As a general rule if the word ends in "o" it will be male, and "a" will be female - but as can be seen in the examples I used "coche" and "calle", both end in "e" but are different genders! It makes for difficulties for foreigners in these countries.
I did a little research on this and found that there are scores of languages that fall into the gender/no gender categories, and some that have 3 genders (including neuter) like German ("die", "das" and "der") and Russian. Notable in the gender-less category alongside English, are Chinese and Japanese, and in the gender category, with Spanish and Portuguese, are French and Arabic.
Mark Twain once wrote about German: “A person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it! A person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all…”
Apparently much of this stems from the earliest days of human language when certain tasks were considered to "belong" to the male of the species (like hunting) and others to females (like making food) and so the utensils for these tasks acquired the masculine or feminine identifier. Yes, extremely sexist, and even more so that many languages retain these distinctions today, and one article I read claimed that most of the languages that retain gender identification of inanimate objects have the worst records of sexual equality, so maybe there is some correlation.
English used to have gendered nouns, too, but these disappeared during the Middle English period, between 1100 AD and 1500 AD - though I understand now that it not politically correct to use AD and BC, as these refer to Christ (who is only relevant to Christians, and not to the other billions of people on the planet), so we now must use BCE and CE - Before Common Era and Common Era! It means the same thing but doesn't "insult" non-Christians.
There are always exceptions to every grammatical rule and I will end with two amusing ones - in Spanish "masculinity" is "la masculinidade", which is feminine, and in Portuguese "voluptuous woman" is "o mulherão", which is masculine! Give me a simple "the" any day!

Pretogues and Portunhol

I remember vividly the day my father came home from work in 1959, gathered the family and asked "Who wants to go to Angola?" We all jumped up and down and said "Yes!!! Where is Angola?"
So a few days later he bought a small blackboard and started teaching us a few basic Portuguese words - not that he could speak Portuguese, but he had learnt Italian at school and had a knack for languages, something my sister and I inherited (possibly helped by the fact my mother was Danish, though we never did learn to speak that). So at least we could say "Please" and "Thank you" before we set sail.
Early in 1960 we left a cold and snowy England on a boat from Tilbury headed for Luanda, Angola. I am not going to cover that adventure here - the days of seasickness crossing the Bay of Biscay are best forgotten anyway - because this post is about foreign languages. Our few words were not adequate at all, but my sister and I were enrolled at the local "English School of Luanda" where we had some lessons in Portuguese, but I seem to recall the ones about metric measures rather than anything about grammar and syntax, if we indeed had those!
There was a good expatriate community so we spoke English exclusively amongst our friends (Americans, South Africans, British), but I used to play with my next-door neighbour's children, a Portuguese family, so my linguistic skills improved, and I became pretty fluent, and even picked up some of the accent.
We were in Angola for three years before we returned to Africa, this time to Mozambique (another Portuguese territory) and started speaking Portuguese again. The same situation existed there, a very large expatriate community so most social conversation was in English, and, indeed, some of my peers lived there longer but had little interest in the local language. We were schooled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) so spent 9 months of the year away at boarding school, but when we were back in Mozambique I used to spend almost as much time with Portuguese friends as English-speaking ones, and my vocabulary came on in leaps and bounds, though my grammar didn't.
As I was not having formal lessons I knew nothing about correct verb tenses, proper sentence structure (though, fortunately, Portuguese has a similar sentence order to English!), syntax, and so on, but was becoming very fluent - though my friends teased me that I was speaking "Pretogues", not "Portugues", that is the Portuguese that was spoken by the indigenous population (the blacks, or "pretos"), who had no formal education and to who Portuguese was a second language (after their tribal dialect).
My command of Portuguese was now so good I was on more than one occasion mistaken for being Portuguese, despite my grammatical shortcomings! In 1975 (shortly before Independence), however, I left Mozambique for South Africa, and never returned, and my use of Portuguese diminished and dwindled, though I did have a few Portuguese-speaking friends in South Africa, until 1978 when I returned to the UK and stopped speaking it at all.
Fast forward to 2009 and my first visit to Brazil - 31 years after last speaking Portuguese - and it all started flooding back, much to the amazement of my nephew, who lived there, but had no idea of my language skills! What was amusing was that every time I spoke people commented on my command of the language, but then added "But it is Portuguese from Portugal!" - there are far more differences between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese than I ever imagined, and, 5 years later, I am still trying to get to grips with them all.

Now we come to Spanish. Because I do not have permanence in Brazil I needed to find a second home for the remaining 6 months of the year, and my research led me to believe that Peru might be a sound choice, except for the fact that I spoke no Spanish. Brazil is surrounded by Spanish speaking countries, and, in fact, apart from French Guiana (French), Suriname (Dutch) and British Guyana (English) all the other South American nations speak Spanish. There is fairly easy migration between the South American (Mercosul) countries, and there is a lot of Spanish spoken in the bigger cities (in fact my nephew always has a couple of native Spanish speakers working for him - he speaks Spanish as he spent a fair amount of time in Spain), and I found that my Portuguese helped me a lot in my understanding of Spanish, but realised I needed some help with my oral skills.
I decided to take some lessons in spoken Spanish, but found it far harder to pick up that Portuguese (or French back in my school-days), possibly because there are so many similarities in the vocabulary with Portuguese, but sentence structure is slightly different, and the pronunciation of letters and combinations of letters is vastly different. But armed with my basic skills I headed for Peru in 2012 on my reconnaissance visit, and found that I managed adequately, apart from one hotel where the only staff member could not, or would not, understand me - everyone else seemed to cope with my mixture of  Portuguese and Spanish (Espanhol) - Portunhol!
I am soon heading back to Peru for my third 6-month stay, and, though my Spanish is by no means great, I am confident that I can get by, and last year toured 5500 miles (almost 9000 kms) alone by motorbike without any problems. In some of the remoter areas there were no English (or Portuguese!) speakers so I had to manage, and even dealings with the Police at roadside checks (who were mostly amazed at this lone Gringo on a motorbike!) went without incident.
Although my Portuguese and Spanish are not that grammatically correct, I am pretty sure that I am fluent in Pretogues and Portunhol!