I’ve been finding that it’s very difficult to sum up all of the diverse thoughts, experiences and feelings that I’ve been having in one concise blog post. It seems that it doesn’t do justice to everything that I’m seeing and doing here. Recently, I’ve been sitting down, poised to write a comprehensive, funny and inspirational entry that sums up all of my joys, challenges, and cross-cultural moments in one grand slam blog post. This, I’ve realized, is not feasible. I get overwhelmed and end up not writing anything. Thus, I’ve changed my approach to the blog posts. From here on, I plan to focus on one or two interesting stories or observations in each entry. Hopefully, all together, they will be a mosaic of sorts describing my experience which can be patched together to get a clearer picture of what I’m seeing and feeling over here. Here is today’s story:
Last week I decided to passear around the villages outside of Mangunde. For those of you new to Portuguese, passear is probably the most important verb you will come to learn. You can passear to anywhere you’re little feet can take you, and the beauty is, you don’t actually have to do anything because you are passearing! I’ve spent hours simply passearing and never actually going anywhere, just making loops, and it’s a perfectly acceptable usage of time. This is especially useful when you are bored without purpose or direction (a situation I often find myself in now as I wait in my empty house for the school year to start and the students and teachers to arrive).
So I was passearing through the villages, what they call the zonas here, outside of Mangunde and I stumbled into one of the village chiefs that I had met earlier in the week. He was very excited to meet me and spoke decent English so I sat with him and shared a bowl of mangos in front of his hut. Lest you think I’m cooler than I really am, it’s not like he was a tribal chief with face paint and jewelry (I hope that didn’t offend anyone), he is simply a respected government representative for this particular cluster of villages. He was wearing second-hand business casual (which is very common for men here) and a red blingy hat with dollar signs and Ben Franklins on it when I ran into him. On a side note, some of the hats people wear here, I just don’t know. Today, I saw a guy wearing an immaculately clean orange, leopard skin pimp hat and smoking a cigarette; what made it interesting was that he was clearly destitute, on crutches, missing a leg, and wearing dirty and tattered clothes other than his shiny hat. It’s bizarre.
Anyway, back to the story. We sat down with our bowl of mangos in front of his hut. I don’t know if you have ever eaten 5 large mangos consecutively, but it’s a lot of mango. If it weren’t for not wanting to be outdone by the chief, I would’ve stopped at two, but I’ve noticed that when people eat mangos here, they eat a lot of mangos, and I wanted to make a good impression. Apparently the chief plays guitar too, so after we finished the mangos, we walked back to my house and grabbed my guitar and drum and sat outside under the tree playing and singing. It was quite a time. You just can’t really describe listening to the chief with his heavily accented voice and $100 bill hat singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” out of tune. It’s a classic memory, and if I ever get access to a fast internet connection I’ll post the video I took of it. As it is now, facebook tells me that it would take 355 hours to upload the 3 minute video.
What made this a particularly intriguing encounter is that, as I was leaving, the chief told me that his full name is Aaron Dlakhama. I recognized his surname, Dlakhama, as the same as the former leader of political/rebel party Renamo, Afonso Dlakhama. Apparently, Afonso, former leader of Renamo, is his cousin and actually comes from a village not far from where I currently live. To give you a little perspective on the significance of this, here is a shamefully simplified history of Renamo and Mozambique:
Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975 led by Samora Machel and his former socialist party, FRELIMO. Frelimo was formed 13 years earlier in Tanzania and supported by other global Marxist forces like the USSR and China, among others. When Frelimo took control of the country a rebel group named Renamo, citing anti-communist aspirations formed in neighboring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Supported primarily by South Africa, Portugal and other interested anti-communist countries, Renamo instigated a brutal civil war in Mozambique that lasted from 1975 to 1992 when a peace agreement was finally reached. Renamo is now the minority party in Mozambique, but has yet to win a presidential election since they began in 1992. If you want to read more about this very interesting but complicated war that crippled Mozambique for 17 years and continues to affect all aspects of Mozambique’s education and development, I invite the casual reader to follow this link to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozambican_Civil_War) or the more interested reader to pick up A Complicated War, by William Finnegan, at your local library.
Anyway, all of this is to say that the chief I met last week may prove to be a very interesting source of insight on the times of war and how remnants of war continue to affect Mozambicans. I have yet to broach the conversation with him, as I have found that, in general, Mozambicans are very reticent about discussing their experiences during the war. I don’t know if the memories are too painful (it was a very brutal war in which many lost family members) or they simply don’t see the purpose in talking about the past. It will, however, be interesting to see what kind of stories I hear as I get more comfortable in my community and the people get more comfortable with me. The central region of Mozambique, including Sofala, the province that I live in, was a particularly active region during the war because it contains the Beira corridor and Zambezi river, two main shipping lines that lead from Zimbabwe to the coast, so there should be a wealth of stories to draw from, and hopefully not too many land mines to step on (that was a joke, family, you needn’t worry about landmines – they are well-marked and quickly being disarmed where they do still exist).
This is turning into a boring history lesson, so let me briefly finish my story as it relates to Mr. Dlakhama. Today (which is Sunday), he stopped by in the morning before church and asked if I wanted to accompany him, with my guitar, to the service. I agreed and what proceeded felt a lot like a processional straight out of the Bible. We were both decked out in Sunday whites with a refulgent sun and a bright blue sky to set the scene. We started walking, me with my guitar in my arms, and him with an African drum over his shoulder striding stoically towards a church some unknown distance away. We headed out on the path that cuts through the rural zonas around Mangunde and began to encounter the small clusters of mud huts and thatched shelters that are characteristic of African rural life. Walking through this so pleasingly pastoral setting while I played guitar and we harmonized to “I’ll Fly Away,” I couldn’t help but have a moment – “how did I get to this place, and what am I doing here?”
When we got to the “church,” which was nothing more than an epic and statuesque acacia tree with a few benches resting under its shady embrace, we waited for the congregation to arrive. We sang “Amazing Grace,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” among a few other songs I knew as the people filtered in and found open benches under the tree. In total the congregation was only about 20 people and the service, which I was told would start at 930, didn’t end up starting until 11 (not uncommon here). The surprise, but one that I half expected, since I was the guest of honor of sorts at this small church, was that I was asked to lead the prayers two or three times throughout the service. Now, I’m not what you would call a deeply religious man. I don’t hold any ill-will towards the church, but let’s just say I went today primarily for the music and cultural experience. Thus, when I was asked to look deep into my heart and find God’s words to lead us in prayer I was a little flustered. The one thing I had going for me though, and this dawned on my as I was stumbling through a line about God having hope for all of his creatures (I had know idea what I was talking about, to be honest) was that no one there spoke a word of English, except the chief whose English was basic at best. Since I was giving the prayers in English, as instructed, I realized that I could essentially say whatever I wanted to and no one would have known the different. I just had to deliver it in the bellowing tone of a preacher bringing his people into deliverance from the gates of hell. I was pretty proud of myself and did my best to imitate this grandiose tenor. I even threw in a couple “diz-la Amen’s” mid-sentence which preachers love to do here because the congregation always echoes you with a reassuring and rousing “Amen.” Other than these crucial details, I honestly don’t remember what my prayers were about. I think I tried to tie it into Christmas and advent, and something about having faith that God would deliver the savior Jesus, but really, who’s listening?
After the service, we played a few more tunes and then packed up to start heading home. I was instructed (because I have no control over what happens to me in these occasions) that I was to attend lunch with the chief and that some kids would take my guitar and drum home for me. So I saw my instruments vanish in the hands of these two 10 year old boys as they jaunted away happily. At the time, I thought that there was a good chance I would never see my guitar again, which would have made me very sad, but, thankfully, the kids managed to return all items intact. How that small child carried my drum, which is at least 30 lbs, all the way back a good 2 miles to my house remains a mystery to me. This is another subject for another day, but one thing which is totally culturally acceptable to do here is to send a kid, an action which is officially referred to as mandar uma crianca, to do absolutely anything you want them to do. “Here’s 5 mts., go buy me a sac of mangos and leave them on my porch.” Totally cool, you don’t even have to know them, and they will drop whatever they are doing to go get you a sac of mangos. Thus, sending the criancas to bring my instruments home, while anxiety-provoking, was very normal. I’m getting off topic. We ended up passearing around the zonas for an hour or so, stopping to eat some mangos here and there, and then returning to Mangunde after a tiring but very interesting afternoon.
If that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, then it went ahead and finally rained later this afternoon, what a day! It was a welcome and auspicious occasion. It has been cloudy, very humid and thundering the last two days, but the rain which was so dearly needed had yet to fall. It bucketed down for 15 glorious minutes while the setting sun still glowed across the landscape to produce a full and magnificent rainbow. It was a site to behold. And that's my story for today. Merry Christmas everyone. Don't get snowed in!
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