Well, it’s raining. It’s been raining, everyday, for a week. For awhile, after it didn’t rain for a month here, the rain was a welcome and refreshing change. Now, I’m urging you all to send some energy waves to the rain god to tell him to hold off for the afternoon. Here is the problem: it is Friday; I’ve been teaching here at Mangunde for two weeks now, but have not left the school grounds for about a month. I love Mangunde, life here when school is going on is full of energy, very busy, and a lot of fun. A month, however, is a long time to spend in a small, isolated little plot of land. My plan was this: leave Friday morning for Chimoio, head up to Tete city Saturday, spend the weekend there and not come back until Monday!! I don’t have classes on Fridays and was able to rearrange my Monday classes to make it work. My bag is packed. I’m ready to see civilization again, to eat some food other than beans and rice, and to see some friends. If only the rain god would see it my way he could have a little sympathy. It’s 25km from Mangunde on a dirt road to make it to the National Highway, from which it would be smooth sailing. When it rains, however, the “dirt road” becomes the “mud road” and it becomes nearly impossible to pass. Therefore, here I sit; it’s 11am Friday morning, and I’m not necessarily emotionally ready to hold tight at Mangunde for another couple of weeks. I don’t have any money (the nearest bank is 4 hours away in Chimoio) and the only food left available here is beans, rice and an assortment of leaves that nature didn’t intend humans to eat.
Therefore, I’m going to do what I know how to do best when there’s nothing to do and when I’m putting off making lesson plans for next week – write in my blog. I just wrote an entry about what school has been like for the past couple of weeks – it has been an adventure and a blast – so I want to talk today about life outside of school here at Mangunde (well, life outside of school doesn’t really exist here because you are always at school, but life outside of the classroom is definitely bustling as well).
This past Sunday was a great example of a fun and interesting day in the thick of life here at Mangunde. In the morning, I woke up to dance music blasting from what sounded like the grounds in front of the main school building. Curious to find out what this commotion was, I wandered over there and found practically the whole school chilling in front of the school, eye’s fixed on the front veranda of the school building which was functioning as a makeshift stage for the lip-syncing and dancing competition that was primed to begin any minute. It was a warm, glorious morning with fluffy white clouds in the sky. You could tell that the students had bathed and washed their clothes because they were looking spiffy in their best jeans, pressed t-shirts, and some were even sporting their knock-off Raybans. This was all about looks and swag, and it was pretty exciting. There was a student working the DJ table and another charismatic 11th grader working the mic and encouraging everyone to drop their inhibitions to come up to the stage and dance. Tim and I got up there and started doing our best white-boy dances to a chorus of laughter and the party had officially begun. People were break dancing, poppin’, lockin’ and jumping all over the stage. I could never in a million years see this happening at my high school in the US – everyone would be nervous and shy, but here, it is like a big little family. Everyone was getting up there and strutting their stuff – well, I should add, all of the boys were strutting their stuff. The girls were fully MIA at this party. It’s unfortunate, but it is just one of those things in such a genderized culture that there isn’t that implied co-existence and friendship between the girls and boys. Everything here is pretty segregated – they sleep on different sides of the campus, don’t eat together, and certainly today, don’t dance together.
Anyway, as the freestyle dancefest wrapped up, the lip-syncing competition was poised to begin. I took my seat at the judge’s table and got ready for the first act. It was a riot. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the kids seemed to choose mostly 80s power ballads sung by Mozambican or Angolan artists to lip-sync to. Little 12 year old kids were up there on their knees, pouring their hearts out on the stage as they belted out the sorrowful Portuguese lyrics. I tell you, I could never see this happening in the States. A couple of groups of kids put on some Angolan rap to lip-sync and dance to which was pretty exciting to watch also. All in all, it was a pretty impressive exhibition, and I was excited to find out that they do this every Sunday morning after church here!
After the show I agreed to meet with one of the workers at the health center who had been nagging me for the past couple of weeks to bring my guitar out to his house so that I could accompany his family in a few songs that they had been working on singing together. Truthfully, I didn’t really want to go at first; I had a lot of lesson planning to do and it just seemed like another guy asking for another favor (which you get a lot here unless you start saying no to people). Regardless, I decided to go, and it turned into a really awesome experience. So, we took off from my porch with guitar and drum in hand, ready to make the trek to his house. I wasn’t sure how far he lived away, but given that he didn’t seem very well off, I imagined that we might be in for a bit of a walk. The sun was oppressive that day (if only it could be today…); sweat was running off my brow and down my arms, and my neck was getting singed in the scorching heat. We walked down the main road that leads out of Mangunde, passed the little loja that sells oil and sugar, passed the enormous baobob tree that splits the road into two, passed the huts that usually mark the turnaround point of my runs when I run this way, and kept walking. At that point, however, we had started talking, and, as I found out more about this mysterious man I was walking with, I became more intrigued and the extra distance and crushing heat didn’t seem so overpowering now. It turns out that this man, who I had taken for a lowly hospital sanitation worker, was actually a student at the school as well. He must be at least 40, and has a wife with 2 kids, but he works in the health center in the afternoons and attends 7th grade classes in the mornings. Lest you judge him for only being the 7th grade in his middle ages, he had a pretty remarkable story to get him to where he is today.
I asked him whether he went to school when he was a kid, and he told me that he did, but that those were the days of war in Mozambique, and times were very different. Many people had fled to Zimbabwe or South Africa, and the country was left with very few teachers. There was no infrastructure and the government was in no position to worry about education. Therefore, people were essentially on their own when it came to school. Classes would be held under trees, or wherever they had space, and anyone who had passed 5th grade was usually the most qualified teacher in the village. He said that he loved school and that teachers would teach what they could, but that there were always more important things to worry about. Everyone was afraid, all the time. If you lived in the cities, you were at risk of a Renamo raid at any time, and if you lived in the rural zonas you were at risk of a Frelimo raid at any time. Raids from the roaming bandidos affiliated with Renamo or Frelimo generally came at night, so most people left their homes and slept in the woods at night, only to return to their huts during the day. Bandidos killed indiscriminately, with Renamo people under the assumption that anyone living in the cities would eventually be recruited by Frelimo, and Frelimo people under the assumption that anyone in the zonas would eventually be recruited by Renamo, making every civilian a potential enemy. With trade routes cut off, and any semblance of industry completely annihilated, the people living in the zonas had nothing but what they could scrape up from the wild – no food, no clothes, no tools. For food, people were reliant on the food they grew in their machamba outside their huts. If the weather cooperated, they would hopefully grow enough corn to dry out and grind into flour to cook xima for the year. But, as he explained to me very matter-of-factly, people were hungry and starving. For clothes, often all they had were leaves. As I was asking him more questions about his life, I realized that he could have been talking about the weather if you didn’t know what he was saying. To me, his words were tragic accounts of a life of fear and suffering, and I couldn’t help but notice how unaffected he seemed by it all. As we continued, I asked him if the killing was so widespread that most people around today have been, in some way, affected by the war. He then added, without hesitation, that his village was attacked by a Frelimo raid when he was very small and his father was taken away by the bandidos as he, his mother and sisters watched. He said that they have never heard from their father since and had to assume that he was killed. Again, he could have been talking about the score of last week’s football game the way he casually dropped his father’s murder. I realized, however, as he was saying this, that this is not an uncommon story at all. It does not make it any less tragic, but I’m sure that, to him, it is not a unique travesty. It was a reality for everyone who lived during the war and I would imagine that you get hardened to stories of lost children, destroyed villages and missing fathers pretty quickly. He explained it best when he told me, “people would justify the killing by just saying, ‘this is guerra.’”
After his father was taken away, his family fled to Zimbabwe, where they spent the next 14 years until he moved back to Mozambique about 10 years ago. At this point, I was so invested in his story that I didn’t want to arrive at our destination quite yet. The war is a very curious topic here in Mozambique. I’ve read about the destruction and destitution that it brought to Mozambique for 17 years and seen some of the remnants of war in a society that is still recovering; however, in four months here now, I have talked about the war itself with almost no one. It is as if it never happened. You know that it was devastating to countless people and that nearly everyone lost a loved one or two, but people addressing any of that pain, or reliving those poignant days is eerily absent. People do not talk about it, do not reference it, and certainly don’t want sympathy for it. It seems as if the only thing people could do after such a bleak period was move on and focus on the challenges ahead without looking back. It is not as if life is easy now. Mozambicans still have to worry about feeding their families, avoiding HIV/AIDS, malaria, other diseases, and getting their kids to school. Maybe it is just that they don’t have the time or energy to talk about the past, however difficult and evocative it may have been.
When we arrived at his house, I met his mother, brother and a number of children who belonged to one family or the other. He was very proud to have me visiting his little homestead which consisted of one main hut, a couple of thatched shade shelters, and a latrine. They sat me down in their nicest second-hand lawn chair and graciously offered me a glass of water. He was excited to get to the music, so he hastily gathered his family around in a semi-circle and addressed them nervously. At first, they were all looking down at the ground somewhat bashfully, but eventfully the music started to arise from within them and the traditional African melodies that they were singing took shape. As the song went on, the modal harmonies and shrill call-and-responses began to seep into the song’s empty spaces. I picked up the guitar chords pretty quickly and before I knew it we were putting on quite a show. I gave one of the kids my camera to record the spectacle and we went on like that for 4 or 5 songs. The kids got up and danced while everyone filled in the African harmonies and I accompanied in the back on guitar. It was a blast. Every time they finished a song all 10 people would sprint over to the camera so that we could watch what we had just played – laugh at the missed lines and evaluate the freestyle dance moves that were on display! I told them that it was sounding really nice and they were giddy with excitement that their own little African Partridge family was on their way to stardom. After a couple of hours a storm rolled in, and I decided it was time to call it a day, but I promised them that we would do this again in a few weeks and he promised me that he would get his family to practice that one song and go over the lyrics to that other. Maybe, I told him, we can perform at the school’s Sunday talent shows one day!
Well, that was quite a weekend here at Mangunde full of song, dance and fun! As I sit here finishing this blog entry on a Wednesday, now 5 days after I wrote the first paragraph of this post, you may be wondering, “What ever happened to the rain?” “Did my prayers work?” “Did he make it out of Mangunde last weekend or was he stuck there unable to pass through the mud?” Well, like any good TV series writer would do, I will leave that story for another blog post! You will have to stay glued to you computer screens in order to catch the conclusion of this cliffhanger. I will say this to give you something to chew on: as I was writing this post last Friday, I was indeed finally summoned by a car that was going to attempt to brave the mud road and try to leave Mangunde. I boarded the outbound truck and what followed was quite an adventure!
If I don’t write until Sunday, cross your fingers for the Packers in the Super Bowl – and for me, because I still don’t know how I’m going to find a way to watch it…
Take care!
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