An American Illusion?

How nice it is to sit here with nothing to do, enjoying a relaxing Saturday afternoon.  I am under the shade of my veranda; I can smell garlic and lentils cooking in the kitchen and can hear the steel drums of Zimbabwean tunes dancing their way out from the speakers inside.  The sun is bright again, and people have sought refuge.  It’s midday and everyone in Mangunde is resting, leaving me with a disarming tranquility that is rarely found here on my usually bustling veranda.  On a normal day you cannot sit on my veranda without being bombarded with requests to check out soccer balls, magazines, or chess, to charge students’ phones or load memory cards with music.  Today, however, it is hot again, and the people are hiding out.  I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but as suddenly as the heat was replaced by the cool winter breeze back in April, the heat returned.  One day, just like that, it was hot.  I started to sweat, looked forward to cold showers again and pulled my fan out of storage.  With the heat came malaria.  In one day, I talked to 4 or 5 of my favorite students, all of whom had come down with malaria that day.  To give you an idea for how ubiquitous malaria really is here, I asked one of these students how many times he’s gotten malaria and he responded, “you mean, this year?”  It’s unavoidable.  A students who gets malaria goes to the hospital, disappears for a few days and then comes back.  No one blinks an eye.   Where is Marques?  Oh, he’s got malaria.  Ah, I see.   Next topic.  If I get it again.  Teacher, where were you?  Malaria.  Ah, I see.

The big news I wanted to tell you all about, though, is that I have finally made my travel plans for Christmas.  I’m coming home!  I’ll be in the states from December 15^th until January 5^th!  It’s not much time (3 weeks) but I’m pretty excited to come home, see my friends and family and experience a slice of the American culture for the first time in over a year.  Three weeks from now I’ll be coming up on one year here in Mozambique.  It’s pretty crazy.  I love Mozambique, but what I didn’t expect or even realize before coming here, is that I also love America.  It sounds really cheesy and patriotic, and trust me, I’m not the type to say that I love America, but when you are away from it for long enough, the conveniences of a functional society – rules, laws, effective transportation, roads, buses, stores, banks, lines instead masses of people pushing to be first, washing machines, etc. – become magical things that you can only dream about.  The amount of time that Peace Corps volunteers in Mozambique spend fantasizing about America is ridiculous – what if Mozambique had McDonald’s (I don’t even like McDonald’s, but the very thought of a cheeseburger with ketchup mustard and pickles and a large coke is just too much), what if Mozambique had good roads and real buses; what if at the banks here you could stand in an orderly line and not get cut by every shameless idiot who thinks they can just sneak into the front; what if just once I could sit in a chapa and not have every single person looking at me and talking about me.  We see America as this sort of paradise, which has none of the bad things we remember and all of the beautiful comforts that we crave – hot showers, running water, milk, chocolate, pizza, machines, internet, phone service…sounds like heaven.  I am anxious to see if it really is heaven.  I guess I’ve kind of forgotten by now. 

It’s interesting, for as much as us Americans here in Mozambique put America up on a pedestal, the Mozambicans have an even more grandiose version of what they think America is.  On weekends when I am here at school, I periodically show movies to the students in the boarding school.  These movies, along with the rap and R&B music they listen to is their only insight into what America is like.  The movies are often action movies with sweeping shots of New York City or Los Angeles and the kids always let out a collective gasp when they see the expansive sky-scrapers and 12 lane super-highways.  To them it all looks like a Sci-Fi movie.  They look at the shiny cars, impressive weapons and beautiful woman and dream of one day being an action hero or rap artist in America.  They ask, teacher, how much does it cost to arrive in America?  How do you get there?  I tell them that a ticket could cost $1,500 and they can’t even relate to that amount of money so they keep it in their mind as something they might like to do one day.  I don’t have the heart to tell them that 99.9% of them will never have the chance to see America.  This is a conversation I’ve probably had 200 times.  They then ask me if people speak Portuguese in America and whether I know 50 Cent, Lil’ Wayne, Eminem, Akon or Chris Brown.  Surely I have at least seen them pass by on the street, how big could America be?  What about Obama?  Jean Claude van Dam?  Jackie Chan?  I never know what to say.  Sometimes I say no, no, no, no, never seen him, no, don’t know him, sorry, and I see disappointment settle on their faces.  You mean even if I go all the way to America I won’t be able to communicate with anyone and probably won’t see Lil’ Wayne or Akon?  I can hear their dreams deflating inside them, vanishing into a big ball of smoke.  For them, America is not a tangible future or planned course of action like Africa was for me, America represents hope for something better, for something more exciting than a life working in the fields day after day.  Yes, it’s a pipe dream, a delusion; they don’t have a 5 year or 10 year plan for how they’re going to get to America, but it’s an escape, a chance to dream of something bigger and better.  So sometimes I lie to them.  I tell them yeah, 50 Cent is my buddy, we used to rap together; Eminem is my dawg; van Dam, yeah, my older brother; and Obama used to babysit for me and my sister.  Everyone has their own house with hot running water, washing machines and dryers (this gets them pretty confused), their own car.  Everyone has a computer and you can go the supermarket and buy any food you could ever imagine.  If you are poor, can’t work or disabled, the government will pay for everything.  The police aren’t corrupt.  There’s no malaria, no AIDS.  When I tell them all this they light up like Christmas trees.  America really is paradise.  I don’t have the heart to tell them that the real America is not everything they see in the movies; it has its dark sides too.  I think they have earned the right to keep America as their castle in the sky without me spoiling it.  Sometimes their poor grasp of reality is even too much for me to keep a straight face through.  For a week after I showed them Jurassic Park I had students asking me whether those types of animals exist in America.  Same thing happened with “I, Robot” – does everyone have their own personal robot in America?  Terminator, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, all were huge hits but provoked a similar reality-twisting confusion.  I usually tell them the truth that no, America is not controlled by robots and aliens have not yet proclaimed war against Earth, but in general I like to let them believe in something bigger than themselves.  Still my favorite response to an alien movie was, “Teacher, if aliens really haven’t come to Earth yet, then how did the movie know what they look like?”  I had to admit defeat there.  I don’t know how they knew. 

Alright, well that was my big news for the week.  Remember:  December 15^th to January 5^th.  I will probably be in Madison for awhile, but then plan on making a trip at some point to Minneapolis and also will probably go to my cabin up north for a bit.  Please let me know when you’ll be around so I can start making plans.  I’d love to see as many people as I can.  Take care!

Tangerine Jam and the Mountain Queen

Word to the wise, making jam out of tangerines is not as easy as the internet tells you.  I just finished painstakingly peeling 15 tangerines, first peeling off the skin and then laboring over each individual segment to get all of the pith, filaments and inner membranes off, along with the seeds.  After doing this, mixing in the sugar and then boiling it down, I came up with a grand product of one measly cup of jam.  I haven’t tasted it yet, so it may or may not be the most delicious cup of jam ever to exist in the world, but at least I know that it will be one of the most inefficient intakes of calories ever spent. 

Despite the culinary quagmire that was tangerine jam, I have to say that I have been pretty pleased with tangerine season here in Mozambique.  Just down the road from my house I can get 10 juicy tangerines for the equivalent of about 25 cents.  Not bad.  Back in January I could get 10 mangoes bursting with bountiful flavor for about 3 cents.  March was white and seedy watermelons, and June was the month of tiny but surprisingly tasty lemons.  I’m not very used to this whole “in-season” and “out-of-season” thing that happens here, considering that back in the states I can get almost any fruit or vegetable I want anytime I want throughout the year.  They’ll ship bananas in from Costa Rica, apples in from New Zealand, and oranges up from Florida, and we’ll show up at Copps pleased to see what we want right there in front of us 12 months a year.  As I sit here craving a mango but knowing that it will be another four months before those plump little fruits are dangling off the trees ready for me to pluck down, this idea of all fruits all the time seems pretty nice.  Of course, there are sacrifices that we make in order to eat bananas in Wisconsin in December.  Between their transcontinental flight and genetic alterations, the fruits we pick up at Copps are only a shadow of what Nature intended them to be, but that is the price of convenience.  If you want to eat real, juicy, flavorful fruit, and not the overripe, roided up, lab fruit that supermarkets offer, you have to come to Africa, where the fruit falls right off of the tree into your mouth.

All this is to say that I don’t mind waiting for my mangos and tangerines.  It makes it all the more exciting when that one special month comes around and you are buried in figs, or pineapples or cucumbers and you had forgotten how much you missed them.  Here’s the run-down, “A year in fruits,” that I have been able to surmise over the course of my ten months here in central Mozambique:

• December – The bang-bang month of litchi.  A peculiar dark-red, ping-pong sized fruit that is white, juicy and full of flavor on the inside.  As soon as it was here though, it was gone and I was left only to wonder what my Peace Corps service would be like in the next 12 months without litchi.
• January – We were literally buried in mangoes.  Everyone, their mothers and their dogs were selling big old buckets of mangoes that they carted around painstakingly on their heads.  At the price of less than a US cent per mango people were practically giving mangoes away, I think mostly just to lighten the load on their heads.
• February – Enter the not-surprisingly disappointing epoch of the fat seedy cucumbers and small non-sweet (and white on the inside) watermelons.  On the upside, though, you can never get sick of pineapples.  Central Mozambique is the pineapple capital of the world.  In January and February the streets are dense with stacks of pineapples that rise above my eye level and the trucks are loaded down by the ton.  The best thing you can do is get a veritable “pineapple cone” – imagine the idea of a cotton candy put in pineapple form.  Grab the stalk on top, flip it upside down and the vendor will peel the skin away so that you can eat the whole pineapple bite by bite as you walk around.
• March – corn, corn and corn with a side of okra. Grilled on the cob, boiled, or, usually, dried and ground into corn flour to make xima, a staple here that forms the carbohydrate base of every meal.
• April – Just like the fall back at home pumpkins and squash reign supreme, along with this strange woody pod that falls from a tree and is full of a pretty gross tasting chalky substance that people go crazy for.
• June – Hmm.  Lemons and peanuts anyone? 
• July – I never knew what figs looked like outside of a Fig Newton.  Now I know.  I prefer them in Newton form.
• August – More Newton-less figs, plus, finally…tangerines.  It’s a close call between August tangerines and February pineapples in the category of best overall fruit month.  And the Oscar goes to…tangerines.  I could eat a bag of 10 tangerines straight without growing weary of their juicy insides and citrusy bite.
• September, October and November – only time will tell.  My dream which is not going to happen is that all of the fields suddenly spring up with raspberries, blueberries and strawberries and then an ice cream truck selling Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, and, what the hell I’ll dream big, Choco Tacos too, decides to start running his routes past Mangunde. 

Like I said, it’s kind of exciting to show up at the market in whatever month and not know what you’re going to find.  Unfortunately, half of the time you find the market bustling with a grand total of about three people each with a bucket of figs and one dude on the side selling a sac of dried sardines.  On these days you languish home empty-handed, but every once in awhile you are surprised – someone had some extra potatoes, or tomatoes from their farm to sell, or there was one time someone actually slaughtered a bull and was selling beef by the kilo, what a day that was.  Meat is a tough delicacy to come by in these parts.  Chickens go for about three dollar a head, but then you have to kill them, and do all the jazz that goes along with preparing them.  This makes your meat options slightly less appealing.  Anyway, there it is, “A year in fruits.”  I have gotten used to it and enjoy the cycle and surprise.  While it would be nice to have a mango or a pineapple right now, I’m pretty happy with tangerines and figs right now and am sure that there will be a day when I show up to the market asking for tangerines only to get a puzzled look from the vendor be handed a mango.    

Now, onto the real story of the day.  I came into this blog post with the plans of telling you all the story of the Mysterious Mountain Queen of Namuli, but I got so distracted by that damn one cup of tangerine jam that I almost forgot.  Thus without further ado…

The tale began, as almost all tales in Mozambique begin, squeezed into the back on an open-back chapa.  I was with three other friends, all male and in their early twenties.  We had heard about a mountain in the northern province of Zambezia called Mt. Namuli.  The base of Namuli was a day’s walk away from the nearest town of Gurue and boasted the title of the second tallest mountain in all of Mozambique.   Now, as Mozambique is a relatively flat coastal country, this is not the most audacious claim in the world, but it was still an impressive enough title to get us into the back of that chapa heading in the direction of the mountain.  We had been asking around to find out how one goes about climbing Namuli and, through various sources we were able to piece together a patchwork plan of action.  We were told that, upon arriving in Gurue we must head out of the valley that Gurue sits in, through the surrounding hills and remote mountain villages on a winding path that would eventually lead us to the village of the Mountain Queen.  It would be a day’s journey to arrive in front of this mysterious and hallowed queen and we would have to bring a few offerings for her in order to buy our passage up the mountain.

The next morning before dawn, we left Gurue on our way to visit the queen.  The first hour or so of the hike was idyllic.  We strolled through gentle green hills with the rising sun angling into the valley and casting long shadows in the golden sunlight.  The path cut through Gurue’s famed tea plantations and we found ourselves surrounded on all sides by a green and verdant blanket of tea plants. 

Soon enough, we had worked our way through all of the tea plantations and began cutting a steep winding path that passed through a number of small villages.  At times, with the four of us scampering along on our way to see the queen of the mountain I couldn’t help but start humming “We’re Off to See the Wizard” and think of Dorothy blazing her way through jungles and flying monkeys on the way to the Emerald City.  As we passed through these tiny mountain villages on our way up to the village of the queen, to say that we made a scene would be an understatement.  We could hear the calls of ‘uzungu’ (‘foreigner/white person’) before we even arrived at a village.  I don’t know if the previous neighborhood was radioing ahead to the next ones, or they had an elaborate system of runners in place to pass the message, but they knew.  For at least a half an hour we were tailed by a gaggle of at least 20 kids.  Adults would call out from houses and teenagers would watch us from adjacent paths.

At one point just after we had left the limits of one of the villages, however, things got a little dicey.  You always have to be aware that when you are parading through a village with your fancy bags and shiny shoes, everyone is watching you.  Ten minutes or so after leaving one of the towns we noticed that there were a couple of teenagers who had been walking steadily behind us for a time.  They were carrying machetes and kept a good distance from us, not getting closer than 30 or 40 yards, but our sensors went off just a bit as we realized that in this context we were vulnerable.  We were on an isolated mountain path and had just trumpeted through a poor village with our wealth written on our sleeves.  It would not normally have been an unusual situation to see two teenage boys walking along the path with machetes as practically everyone in Mozambique has a machete and it, along with a hoe, is what they all bring to work in the field everyday.  The difference with these guys, however, was that they seemed to be peculiarly interested in us and would not let us out of their sites.  We sped up, they sped up; we slowed down, they slowed down.  I decided to stop at a nearby house to find out what was going on.  I asked a woman standing outside whether she knew those boys who were following us, and told her that I thought they were going to rob us.  Then she called them over, “João, Roberto, come over here.  Were you going to rob these men?”  It was a ridiculous situation.  They glanced at me furtively and laughed, embarrassed.  It was as casual as if I had just caught them trying to sneak a cookie out the cookie jar.  Somehow it didn’t seem like they understood that we were talking about armed robbery here.  There wasn’t much we could do though, so as a last resort, I offered to buy their machetes off of them.  It was a good try, but they declined my offer.  At this point, we had no choice but to carry on and hope for the best.  A couple minutes later, though, there they were again, trailing us.  This time we stopped at the house of a different family to see if the hooligans would pass us by.  They slowed down a bit, clearly a little confused and then proceeded to hide their machetes in their jackets, pass us by and then stop just around the next bend, waiting for us.  It was like a game of leap frog, but with machetes.  We were now quite sure of their intentions and had had enough of this horsing around with deadly weapons, so we offered to hire a nice man who lived in a nearby house to accompany us at least to the next village.  Chances were these punks would not try anything if we were with another local from the community.  We were right.  We passed by the thieves and continued on our way without anymore problems.  We had a greater task at hand – finding this elusive mountain queen.

All in all, it took us about 8 hours to wind our way through 30km of fertile valleys and green hills and arrive in Macunha, the infamous and unassailable village, no, I’ll even say kingdom, where the queen reigned.  None of us were entirely sure what to expect from this mysterious queen.  Maybe a palace?  A golden crown and a hen that laid golden eggs?  Maybe we were just delirious from the long walk, but we couldn’t help but dream of some ridiculous fantasy involving a seven course meal and soft warm beds when we would arrive in her spacious palace.  Well, we got the feeling that we were getting closer and closer to the center of this kingdom but hadn’t yet seen the spires of the palace or reached the mote and guards.  When we finally asked another peasant in the village they pointed us to a tiny little hut just over the next hill.  We were crestfallen.  I think our stomachs had been communicating with the naïve palace fantasies of chicken, pastries, potatoes and big steins of beer that were being conjured in our brains and had started to feel the pangs of hunger.  It was not to be.  This place was a shack at best.  Maybe 10 feet wide by 10 feet long made of crumbling bricks.  No electricity, and as we would later find out while choking on smoke all night, no chimney, just a fire burning in the middle of the floor.  At that point, though, we were still hopeful.  You can’t judge a palace by its meager exterior.  Surely its ornate throne and regal court servants were awaiting our arrival inside the hut walls.  Hmm.

When we arrived we were greeted by a fat woman who pulled out a floor mat and beckoned us to sit down in front of the house.  She apparently knew what we had come for.  I looked around for the throne, jesters and servants; nothing.  What kind of a fraud was this queen?  Finally, a group of people approached us and introduced themselves.  The leader presented himself as the queen’s son, the prince, if you will, who kind of controlled the purse around there.  He gave us the run-down.  The fat woman who put the mat down for us was the queen.  There are no servants, no knights, no damsels, and disappointingly, not even any jesters.  Damn; our stomachs growled.  “You brought the whiskey and flour, didn’t you?”  Shit.  This could be a problem, we were told.  The gods were going to need an offering whiskey and flour before anyone goes on the mountain.  If we didn’t present the offering, the queen, who seemed to moonlight as a sorceress sitting there on her righteous floor mat, would put a curse on us while we ascended and we might have been met with a blizzard on top of the mountain and die – her words, not mine, seriously.  We didn’t want to mess around with a curse of that magnitude, so, after consulting with the Prince, he told us that they conveniently sold flour and whiskey, actually the only two things that they did sold.  Perfect, we bought the offering and averted danger once again.

The next morning, when it was time to climb the mountain, we had to go through our initiation rites.  The queen dumped some flour on the ground outside and then started pouring whiskey over the whole thing.  We were trying to respect their culture and take it seriously, but it was hard when the night before, nearly all of us had though that the initiation circle – a couple of bricks stacked in a semi-circle outside the hut - was the latrine and almost relieved ourselves all over their sacred grounds.  Luckily we had decided to go a little further away from the house and avoided a foul-smelling morning ceremony.  It also didn’t help that the queen seemed to be just flinging the whiskey and flour around haphazardly.  It seemed like a joke, but be didn’t dare laugh.  We all said later that she was probably thinking to herself, “God these Americans will believe anything.”  What made it worse was that the queen was chatting with another old woman the entire time she was tossing flour and whiskey around in our supposed sacred mountain journey ritual.  I didn’t understand what they were saying, but they didn’t sound like supplications to the Gods for a safe passage.  I’m pretty sure they were just chatting about the weather, or gossiping about the latest goings-on in the mountain village.  In any case, we paid our money, she finished the ritual, and we headed off up the mountain.  I have to say, after all of that hubbub, I had kind of forgotten about the mountain itself.  It turned out to actually be a really hard climb.  It was steep!  It took us almost 4 hours to summit the mountain and there were times when the grade had to be at least 45 degrees.  The Prince who had welcomed us and also played the role of our guide up the mountain had made it seem like this was a walk in the park; everyone and their mother could do this hike in a few hours tops; we’d be back down by noon.  Haha, maybe for a mountain Sherpa like himself, but man, there were times when we were crawling up rock faces looking down these sharp drop-offs below us wondering whether we would ever make it.  One of our friends had to stop about half-way up because it was just too much to handle.  Nonetheless, we toiled away and scratched our way up to the top of Namuli and felt pretty gratified for it after it was all said and done.  Oh, and I forgot to say that we did this on my birthday!  So I popped a Jolly Rancher that I had been saving for the summit and we celebrated my birthday right there on the top of the second highest mountain in Mozambique.  After all of the trials and challenges that we had been through in the past couple of weeks, combined with the sheer challenge of climbing the mountain, it was a pretty rewarding way to celebrate 24! 

Okay, I’m going to leave it at that.  I can’t seem to avoid writing ridiculously long blog posts.  So I’m sorry about that, but I hope if you made it this far, either you are unemployed and don’t have anything better to do or you actually enjoy reading my stories, so I’m grateful for that.  I hope that life back in the states and all parts of the world is well.  I will try to post some photos soon of my trip and I hope to hear from all of you soon.  Take care!

To the Edge and Back

It’s good to be home.  Back where people treat me like family, speak a language I recognize, and see beyond the coins in my pocket.  I’m talking, of course, about my home of the past 8 months, Mangunde.  I guess it crept up on me unknowingly, this feeling of hominess here in a place so far from my real home.  I never thought I would regard this dry scrubby landscape and little mission miles removed from any discernable town as a place of comfort for me.  But after the past two weeks of ups and downs – beautiful beaches and verdant mountain slopes juxtaposed with the unavoidable realities of life on this continent like sickness, danger and everything in between – I have to say that I’m happy to be home.

Two weeks ago I finished my exams here at Mangunde, turned in my final grades to the office and set off on the dusty road out of the mission with my backpack loaded up and a grin on my face.  I was free.  The responsibilities of classes, exams and organizing group events for my clubs had all combined to weigh heavily on my shoulders over the past six months.  Now, as the tires kicked up a rich red dust from the road and obscured the fading view of the mission behind me, my stress and workload dissolved into the washed out picture with it.  Ahead of me lied only adventure.

The first stop on our trip was to climb Mt. Zembe, an impressive peak few miles outside of the city of Chimoio which forms a jutting backdrop in the cityscape.  From a distance the jagged rock faces and impossibly sharp summit make Zembe appear virtually unclimbable.  I was travelling with a group of 4 other volunteers and we set off early in the morning for the mountain.  We came prepared for a battle of epic proportions with Mother Nature: machetes in hand, gloves and sweaters for protection against the extreme mountain conditions that can befall one at altitudes such as this, and a sac of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for sustenance.  Oxygen tanks?  Ice axes?  Crampons?  We thought about it, but figured that our sheer will-power would get us through. 

We deboarded the chapa and there we were, no turning back now.  The only thing in front of us was Zembe with her spiked summit almost forming a sinister grin, daring us to continue on.  We asked a few local mountain savages what the best route to the top would be.  With a terrified tremor in their voices and looks of foreboding deep in their eyes they told us to go no further, for no man, woman or goat has ever conquered the great Zembe.  Maybe it was the grit and determination within us or maybe it was just plain foolishness but we forged on, eyes fixed on the summit of the great beast.  “Yes, we can,” we chanted, as we echoed the salient words of our youthful inspiration and climbed.  Step after step, mechanically, up, up and up, we were indefatigable.  We stopped halfway up the mountain to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we had prepared, and then we stop again 10 minutes later to catch our breathes, and then one more time; actually we stopped frequently to catch our breathes, but that didn’t distract us from the goal at hand and the mountain rising up in front of us.  We had been cutting through untamed bush for an hour.  Our arms were burning from the thorns, necks burning from the sun and legs fatigued from the sheer ascent.  I took my sweatshirt, hat and gloves off 10 minutes into the hike, for I had gravely misjudged the effect of altitude on temperature – it was still hot and I would now have to hike holding a sweatshirt in my hands, a setback I would later regret.  I checked my breathing.  The air was still moist and thick, no need for oxygen tanks yet.  We carried on into our tenuous ascent, now sated with peanut butter and jelly.  On one side, fatigue pulled us back down the slope into defeat, but on the other side, ambition and tenacity forced us to continue upward.  The weak fell behind, the strong pushed ahead; such is the fate of humanity.  An errant thought swept past my mind: we should have made more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  After another hour, we finally crawled one final rock face and emerged on the summit of great Zembe.  It was a momentous occasion.  The view was a bit hazy, and it was still hot on top, which made me curse my decision to bring the sweater again, but we were still pleased.  We shot the rope toting crossbow that we had brought up down off the mountain and it snagged a tree at the base of the mountain perfectly.  After tugging a few times to check the strength we clipped on the rope and zip-lined safely down to the base of the mountain.  Zembe was ours, we had done it.  The first leg of the journey was complete and successful!

Okay, we didn’t actually zip-line down the mountain, but we thought about it.  It also wasn’t the first time that anyone had ever climbed Mt. Zembe, but you have to include some things for dramatic effect.  After our trip to Zembe we decided to check out some local historical sites.  In a nearby town there were reportedly some world famous prehistoric rock paintings.  To get there we were told to find the old woman who grants people spiritual admission to the paintings.  The whole affair was a bit confusing because it turns out there are quite a few old women in Mozambique and the map we had just kind of had a big circle on in that said “old woman.”  After asking around a bit though, we located someone who was a woman and appeared to be quite old, so we thought that this was maybe the ticket.  When we said “rock paintings” though, she seemed as confused as we did.  She guided us to a floor mat in front of her house and we sat there in awkward silence with the woman for a solid 10 minutes wondering what exactly was going on.  She sat on her floor mat a few feet away from ours we just kind sat there for awhile, something you learn to do quite well after a year in Mozambique.  Then, as if struck by a sudden inspiration, she hobbled quickly into her hut and pulled out a big binder stuffed with old dusty photographs, school notebooks and receipts that were spilling out of the sides of the binder.  It seemed that this woman had kept every trivial document that she had ever received in her life.  She handed it to us expectantly and sat back down.  We paged through the binder and pointed at the old physics tests and bus receipts while she looked on.  Among the chaos, however, was a photo of the rock paintings that we were looking for.  While we were happy to peer into this woman’s life history, we also wanted to get on with our journey, so we quickly pointed to this photo of the paintings and she gave a knowing grunt as if this was all part of the plan.  Maybe she just doesn’t get that many visitors and was hoping for some company.  She pointed to the little hill above us and said, “500 meticais.”  We weren’t sure exactly what service we were paying for, and 500mts is kind of a lot of money (almost $15), but we gave her the bill reluctantly and headed off in the direction of her pointed finger.  Ten minutes later we were on top of the small hill peering expectantly and somewhat curiously at these “pre-historic” rock paintings.  I have to say, I can get lobster curry, a couple beers and a chocolate cake for less than 500mts, so I was expecting big things from these rock paintings.  I can’t say that I was blown away.  First of all, it was my impression that “pre-historic” meant a really, really long time ago, like before “history” even began.  No one could give us an actual date, and sadly the Mozambican department of tourism is a ways away from getting good plaques up at all their pre-historic sites, so the only thing I had to go on was an internet site that said the paintings were “pre-historic.”  I’m thinking that’s got to mean at least 2 or 3 thousand years ago, minimum.  I don’t know, maybe it was just my impression, but that paint was practically still wet.  The lines were perfectly straight and I didn’t see even a hint of fade in the red paint.  I mean, as far as rock paintings go, they weren’t bad, certainly better than I could do, but I was kind hoping for some real mind-blowing pre-historic history.  Instead, we got a nice chat with a senile woman along with a couple of cartoons and ended up 500mts poorer for it.  A bit of a letdown I have to say.  Feeling slightly disappointed but not discouraged we left the cave painting town and continued on our way.

A few days later I headed north, leaving my home province of Sofala and heading into the unknown lands of Zambezia and Nampula.  Looking out from America, the vast interstates spanning the Great Plains and winding through mountain ranges, the rest of the world has always seemed small to me.  Before arriving here, I only knew Mozambique by its size on a map, a small coastal country maybe the size of California with a little dot on the Southern tip indicating the capital of Maputo.  On a world map a little trip from the middle of the county to the mountainous area in the North seems like a walk in the park, a straight shot up the EN-1 for a few hours and surely we’d be there.  One thing I have learned in my time here, however, is that you do not travel on nice flat maps and on the bright red lines of supposed roads.  A half-inch on my world map took three days of toil – jamming into mini-buses, flagging down rides, and waiting.  Waiting for buses to fill up; waiting for broken down buses to limp their way into the city; waiting for a sympathetic ex-pat to give you a ride to the next city; waiting for the driver to tie the goats, mattresses furniture, and every other earthly possession that his passengers have to the top of the mini-bus; waiting for the goat owner to climb up to the roof of the bus to feed his terrified goat a couple shoots of grass at the stop.  Waiting.  Patience is something that most Mozambicans were blessed with or at least acquired after a lifetime of it.  I am not Mozambican.  I am trying to learn patience.  There are a lot of different ways to get to the same place in the country, each requiring their own forms of patience of courage.  Here is the rundown:

• Option #1 – Chapa.  A chapa is a 15 passenger van that runs as a bus service within cities and in between nearby towns.  At any given time half of the cars on the road are chapas running people from one place to the other.  The advantages: chapas are ubiquitous in Mozambique and you will almost always be able to find one going where you want to go.  That’s all.  The disadvantages are many: They are slow as molasses.  They always cram as many people as humanly possible into the cars.  I’ve counted as many as 25 to 30 people packed into a car that’s supposed to hold 15.  It’s like a game of Tetris trying to fit people together and still get the door to shut behind them.  They load cargo on the top so that between people and luggage the van is practically scrapping the pavement.  The driver will wait to until the chapa fills up before he leaves.  This means that you could be sitting in your cramped corner, sweating your balls off, knees jammed into the seat in front of you (apparently these cars were manufactured to serve people under 6’ tall) for an hour while he waits for one more passenger to complete the car.  There are absolutely no safety regulations on these cars – speedometers don’t work, engine is coughing up smoke, some need a push start, tires are bald and unchecked and most drivers either don’t give a shit or can’t do anything about it because they don’t have the money to make the repairs.    
• Option #2 – Hitch-hike.  This is the Rolls-Royce of African travel.  Sometimes you can get a ride in the front seat of a shiny new SUV or pick-up and cut half the time off of a would-be chapa trip.  Every once in a blue moon the car has AC and radio and the driver speaks English.  The disadvantages: if you think you’re going to be able to find one of these rides everyday, keep dreaming.  I’ve waited hours and let countless chapas pass by, all in hopes of a divine intervention that would bring one of these heavenly chariots to stop in front of me only to pass the whole day on the side of the road in fruitless desperation. 
• Outside of these there are a number of miscellaneous options all with their own faults – there are semi-trucks, coach buses, open bed trucks, flat-beds, bicycle carriers and your own two feet.  Some are fast and unreliable, others are slow but a sure bet.  Pick your poison.

On this particular trip north I was travelling with a friend of mine and we decided to mix it up, alternating between chapas and hitchhiking.  The first chapa we got on was an interesting affair.  The driver was friendly and eager to meet us, which is always a good start, but the chapa had a peculiar vibe to it; almost all of the passengers were kids and the woman in the seat next to me was making tuna sandwiches.  This isn’t normal chapa behavior.  They were heading to Quelimane though, which was on our route, so we jumped in.  We paid the driver up front and he proceeded to stop in every town to buy more and more food with the money that we paid him.  First there were sodas for all (except us), loaves of bread, fried chicken scures, fried fish, tuna cans, a giant bucket of tomatoes and potatoes and finally a freshly chopped off goat leg which he dangled off the driver’s side mirror for the remainder of the drive.  One by one we passed the snacks back to the kids and they gobbled everything up as if they had been starved for weeks.  The women to my right continued to prepare food for everyone while the man on my left was washing dishes right there in the moving car and tossing the dirty water out the window.  It was bizarre.  After talking to the driver a bit, however, I found out that this was no ordinary chapa; it was actually a church field trip that we had been crashing.  The pastor was driving, his wife was making the sandwiches, the altar boy was on dish duty and all the kids were in the back.  They were on their way home and had picked us up to cover their food expenses on the return trip.  It was a bit strange, but they were nice enough and even offered us a couple of tuna sandwiches for the road so we kindly accepted and continued on our way. 

Our next chapa ride was not quite as friendly, however.  After a few more rides we arrived in Nampula and boarded a chapa headed for Ilha de Moçambique, our would-be final destination for the next couple of days.  I didn’t take notice of the condition of the car before leaving because I was anxious to get out of the city and finally arrive at the beach we had been heading toward all this time, but if I had I would’ve seen balding tires, unmaintained and ready to burst.  The three of us (we picked up one more volunteer on the way) were in the back row of the chapa and the driver was gunning it pretty fast on the surprisingly smooth road.  At some point, 10 or 15 minutes in, one of my friends mentioned jokingly that they didn’t want to jinx it, but a few weeks earlier they had been on this very same road and saw a badly crumpled chapa on the side of the road.  After asking others she found out very matter-of-factly that many people had died.  It was slightly foreboding, but I didn’t think too much of it as it’s easy to think that you are untouchable in this country.  That was probably a dangerous thought because not 10 minutes later we heard a loud pop right under our feet where the left back tire was located.  The driver lost control of the car and swerved right into the oncoming lane of traffic (they drive on the left side of the road here).  At this point, everything kind of slowed down for me.  I was calm and helpless.  I watched the images slide past me in the window like a slow motion film.  There was a blue semi-truck approaching in the oncoming lane that we were now in direct line with.  It was right on top of us.  The driver desperately veered to the right, avoiding the approaching truck by God knows how much.  The driver over-corrected though and we fish-tailed to the left.  The mountains in the distance, road, and pedestrians blurred past me as the back of the chapa spun out and I peered intently out the window.  Sitting there in the back, eyes glazed on the smeared images, none of it seemed real.  Now sideways and still with momentum the out-of-control chapa charged off the side of the road down a small embankment and started to roll.  We did a complete flip and finally came to a stop face up with the roof smashed in and windows shattered.  I looked around and took in my surroundings.  My friends were still there next to me.  I felt my around my body for any missing limbs, pain, broken bones?  Nothing.  We climbed out the side window and I surveyed the damage.  The chapa was sunken into the ground and the roof was dented in from the roll.  I checked for the other passengers, but didn’t see anyone.  We happened to crash in the middle of a small settlement of stores and by the time I emerged from the wreck people from the surrounding building had run out and were encircling the spectacle.  I still couldn’t find anyone I recognized from inside the chapa.  They were all gone.  What happened to everyone?  I found out then that we had landed literally less than 100 yards away from a small hospital and everyone was already there.  We had been the last people to get out of the chapa.  We were also just a stone’s throw away from the police station and the officers were asking questions and trying to herd us in the direction of the hospital.  Both of my friends and I had come out remarkably unscathed.  With the exception of some cuts and bruises we didn’t have any significant injuries and were anxious to get away from there as soon as possible.  We picked up our bags and flagged down the first passing car we saw.  Before we could process it all, we were in the back of a pick-up flying down the same road we had just flew off of and the chapa that had crashed was a only an impression on our frail memories.  What had just happened?  It was a flash.  Did anyone get seriously injured or die?  I’m actually of glad I didn’t go into the hospital to find out for myself and see all of the other passengers.  I was told that no one was gravely injured, which was a relief to hear.  Maybe it was too soon, but I joked with my friend that she really shouldn’t have told us that story of the other chapa accident, and that I certainly was not going to pay the collector the 100mts for the ride because he didn’t even get us halfway to our destination.  Just like that it was a memory.  That night we arrived at another friend’s house and the next morning we were on the beach.  Such is life in this country.

Ilha de Moçambique is a tiny island in the north of Mozambique that was first colonized by the Portuguese in the 16^th century.  It was Mozambique’s first capital and has an impressive stone fortress laden with canons skirting one end of the island to protect the port from pirates and other colonial European invaders.  The sand on the beach is as white as a piece of paper and the water is a perfect turquoise.  The first night we spent at a small beach house across the bay on an isolated peninsula.  We had the beach completely to ourselves and it was pristine.  After the stress of school, travel and our accident it was the perfect antidote.  My preoccupations faded away into the sand and my stress was washed out with the azure tide.  The next day we took a small rickety sailboat captained by a few local fisherman to the actual island.  The island is like no place I have seen in Mozambique.  The streets are lined with plastered buildings painted in bright but fading colors.  Alleys twist and turn in between the buildings and as you look up you could imagine that you are strolling through the streets of Morocco or a small Portuguese village (not that I have been to either place).  We visited the museum, perused the shops and took a tour through the impressive fortress (where we learned that the origin of the name “Mozambique” was the name of two locals on the island – Mussa and Bique – when the Portuguese settlers first arrived) and we actually felt like we were on vacation.  Our hostel was a cozy colonial apartment with an open courtyard and a rooftop laden with roses and a view of the surrounding ocean.  Fresh seafood – lobster, crab, and shrimp – cooked in rich sauces with wine completed the picture.  It couldn’t get better than this.  We were in heaven.  That is, until I got malaria. 

Just when things were looking up, too.  I spent one of my precious three days on the island lying in bed sweating out a nasty fever and trying to fight off dehydration and a delirium that scrambled my words into nonsense.  It sucked and once again I was helpless.  I was able to find a pharmacy with the rights medications luckily, though, and I quickly started the drug regimen.  After a few hours on the anti-malarial meds I started to feel better and actually got my wits together enough to go out for a crab dinner that night.  I was not about to pass up my one opportunity to eat fresh seafood for this year.  For the next three days it was at night when the fevers and the cold sweats came the hardest.  I found myself pretty functional during the day, but I was soaking through shirts, sheets and pillowcases during the night.  I didn’t know one human could produce so much sweat.  We stayed at a friend’s house on the way back from the island and when I woke up in the morning it felt as if someone had dumped an entire bucket off water on the bed.  I felt like I was 10 years old again and had wet the bed at a sleep over.

The malaria eventually passed though and the memories of the car accident while still evocative faded away into the rest of the mosaic and here I am again, at home, and at school.  I don’t know how to sum up a blog post like this, but to say that while I enjoyed my romp through misfortune and bliss, I am happy to be in a place that I can call home for now.  I have students that know my name, and while I might not be the best English professor they’ve ever had, they have to at least pretend to like me.  It’s going to take awhile to recalibrate my scales to a quiet life back on the mission after such exploits, but I have a lot of goals and challenges to work through here in my final trimester of this year and I am exciting to see how it goes.  If I ever get around to writing another blog post after this marathon, I’ll be sure to tell you about the mysterious adventure of the Mountain Queen which I didn’t even get around to sharing in this post as well as some of the exciting things I’m doing back at site.  Thanks for listening and I hope that all is well back at home for everyone.  Take care!

English Exchanges and Exam Time

Hello family and friends!  Happy 4^th of July!  I imagine that at home the grills are being fired up, the beer is flowing and the days are long and warm.  Not sure if this is accurate, but it’s a nice picture to imagine while sitting inside on a cold and rainy morning here is Mozambique.  I didn’t believe people when they said in June that it was going to get colder still.  We’re in Africa, how cold could it really get, right?  Well, I’m sitting inside on this frosty July morning wearing a hat, gloves and jacket wrapped in a blanket and I’m still feeling the chill. I haven’t bathed in days for fear of the prospect of taking a cold bucket bath.  Waking up in the morning is the hardest part.  Sometimes I wait until I hear the school bell which rings 10 minutes before the start of classes to finally and reluctantly roll out of bed, relinquish my blanket, brush my teeth, throw some clothes on and run across the field to make it in time for first period.  But I don’t mind the weather.  It’s better than sweating through two shirts before noon which is what I was doing in January and it means that I don’t have to water my now flourishing garden as much which flaunts heads of lettuce the size of basketballs, tomato plants the size of small trees, peas that have climbed 5 feet up, baseball sized onions and a burgeoning cabbage patch! 

July in Mozambique also means exam time, and the end of the second trimester.  This week is the second to last week of school in the trimester which, here is Mozambique, essentially means that it is the last week of the trimester.  An unfortunate reality here is that while the mid-trimester break is a full 2 week break, the week before the break, as well as the week immediately following the break are, for all intents and purposes, also breaks.  Teachers will not show up for their classes (even more so than during the trimester), and students will be utterly dumbfounded if you try to show up to give your regularly scheduled class.  Thus, the second to last week becomes the “exam” week, when all teachers fight for class time to try to get their final exams completed and then take off for the city.  I hate exam week.  It is chaotic, stressful and dishonest.  Imagine: there are 25 different class sections, each with 12 different disciplines and 6 periods per day.  In order to fit their exams in and organize them so that they can give their test to all the sections at the same time teachers scavenge and commandeer other teachers’ periods.  My classes have been the victims of these raids on many occasions already this week.  You will show up to one of your regularly scheduled classes to do a review before the exam only to find a different professor strolling around in your classroom handing out her tests to your unsuspecting students.  It’s maddening.  The kids aren’t prepared for the test and my schedule is totally thrown off kilter because now I have to wait around for a different professor to no-show on a class to make-up my lost class, and all for what?  So that this professor can combine all of his classes to take the final exam at the same time so that he can leave school early.  And what happens during these combined final exams?  Considering that these professors are giving their tests to 4 or 5 classrooms at the same time, there is absolutely no control over the test-taking process.  Yesterday, I was sitting outside a classroom waiting for a time to open up to give my class and was in awe watching some of these simultaneous tests take place.  It was a joke out of a scene from Saved by the Bell.  It felt like a social gathering.  Kids were walking around, talking, sharing answers, paging through their notebooks, leaving and entering the room.  No wonder they don’t ever learn to study, why would they if they knew they could just rely on the smartest kid in the class to give everyone the answers.   This atmosphere is angering enough, but what finally pushes me over the edge is that when I give my exams in which there is finally order and control – I watch the students like a hawk, penalizing them for sharing answers, and giving them zeros for bringing in the cheat-sheets that are infamous here – they complain to no end saying that this simply is not fair and certainly not the way that things are done here in Mozambique.  In their own defense, they always tell me that “Inglês custa muito, Teacher” (English is really, really hard) with this supplicating voice and ask me “how are we supposed to actually know the words without cheating?”  So more often than not they fail the test, unambiguously and entirely. 

As if this is not enough, after failing the test, they then come to me for what is called innocently enough, “recuperation.”  With other teachers, “failing” the test doesn’t actually mean “failing” the test.  The teacher will almost always give a small homework assignment, give the test over, or even offer other shadier ways for students to recover points lost in failed tests – personal work, favors, anything they can think of really.  Thus, when kids fail my tests, they show up at my door expecting and then pleading for “recuperation.”  My response is uniform and unambiguous – “Did you study at all for the test?  Maybe you should have thought of that before…”  To this they get even angrier and repeat the anthem to me that this is simply not the way that things are done here in Mozambique.  Never once does it cross their minds that, instead of cheating during the test or asking to do recuperation after the test, they could actually study for the test and learn the material.  For the vast majority of students, studying and learning simply isn’t an option that ever crosses their mind.  In their minds, English is too difficult, and there are simply too many disciplines to actually learn all of them; therefore, they will just try to glide by with cheating and recuperation (which, by the way, works with most of the other teachers), pass with a 50% and be done with school.  The idea that school is a place to actually facilitate learning is not ever considered.  School is just a necessary phase in life that you have to make it through, to many of them; sadly it is not seen to have an importance in itself and the kids suffer because of it.  In the end though, they survive.  Some of them finish school and go on to university, the vast majority don’t.  They drop out at some point, get pregnant or married, get a low-paying job in the city if they’re lucky or go back to live with their family and spend the days laboring in the small family farm.  Life goes on.  It sounds depressing, but perhaps I’m making it out to be more dreary than it really is.  People are happy and life does go on.  I don’t know, maybe it’s also just that exam week always seems to get the best of me.  Before long though exam week will come to an end and I will be enjoying a relaxing vacation in the mountains and parks of Mozambique, so I have that to look forward to!

On slightly more positive note, I have been doing some really cool and interesting things with a lot of great and motivated students this trimester.  While classes and the challenges that go along with this mode of education can be frustrating, I have found that working with my various activism groups here has been a huge success.  I now have three different groups that make up a large portion of my free time here at school.  At the beginning of the school here I inherited an English theater group and an English journalism group from the previous volunteer which have been overwhelmingly fun and successful.  Additionally, at the beginning of this trimester I started a new “JOMA” group with a local counter-part and a number of new younger students.  JOMA is an acronym that stands for Jovens para Mudança e Acção (Youth for Change and Action) and is a county-wide, Peace Corps sponsored activism group.  It is funded by PEPFAR (the stacked fund from the US government that has its target set on the elimination of HIV/AIDS in Africa among other thing) and has been active in Mozambique for six years now.  As part of the funding agreement, all JOMA groups must have a component which addresses HIV/AIDS in the community and a primary project like art, journalism, theater, music or photography.  My group addresses HIV/AIDS, among other related issues like domestic violence, alcoholism, and corruption, through the mediums of theater and music.  It took a while to get the group off the ground, establishing and set of interested students, getting them to understand what having a JOMA group really means, and finding a time to meet in our busy schedules, but now three months or so since the group’s inauguration and I can say that it has been a huge success.  Within our first couple weeks we developed a theater piece about polygamy (which is very common and driving force being the HIV/AIDS epidemic) and domestic violence and have already presented it twice around the community. 

The transformational moment for our group came about a month ago when we hosted a JOMA worksheet here at Mangunde with three other schools.  JOMA groups specializing in journalism, and art from three surrounding schools came to Mangunde for three days to take part in leadership training, HIV/AIDS awareness and team-building activities.  I have to say, I was a bit nervous for this event.  Hosting 45 students and teachers at Mangunde is not exactly a walk in the park.  First of all, just to get here they had to hire out a few old rickety mini-buses to make the muddy and treacherous 25km trek from the main road to the school.  Secondly, if you run out of rice here, you can’t exactly walk down to the corner store and pick up another couple of sacs.  Thus as host I had to have everything very well-planned and hope that no major obstacles popped up at the last minute (which is a dangerous assumption here in this unpredictable country).  The day everyone arrived, we had to take a special trip into town (an hour away on the aforementioned muddy and rocky trail) to load up the hired car with sacs of rice, xima, vegetables, beans, soda an anything else we thought we would need for the whole weekend.  The chicken feast they we planned for dinner would come from my counter-part’s house who I had enlisted to start rounding up and buying 25 chickens from the previous week.  Cooks needed to be organized, sleeping quarters with blankets and mats, cooking pots and utensils, firewood to cook on had to be hauled in and classrooms had to be arranged.  It was a production unlike my students had ever seen before to say the least.  Once the other groups pulled in for the workshop on their beat-up chapas though, it was all fun and games. 

We had sessions on leadership, gender equality, self-esteem, violence, discrimination, and the biology, treatment and stigma of HIV/AIDS.  I could tell that my students were soaking it all in.  Each session was full of hands-on activities, simulations, and lively discussions.  As mature as many of the students were, I was still surprised to hear many of the debates and opinions that many of them put forward.  Nearly all of the boys were near fanatical in their affirmation that “Men are naturally smarter than women,” obstinate in their belief that housework and raising a child is the woman’s responsibility, and certain that the life of a man is more difficult than the life of a woman in Mozambique.  Outside of this, some of the information put forth about biology and HIV/AIDS was downright alarming.  While they all knew that HIV is spread through sexual intercourse, there were a number of misconceptions including people who though you could get HIV from kissing or touching someone, and that if you have just one partner you don’t need to use protection.  Overall though, it was a great weekend and a great learning opportunity for these kids who have never had a chance to take part in something special like this.  At the end of the weekend they all got certificates and t-shirts which they absolutely loved.  For a week after the workshop, most of them wore their new bright blue JOMA shirts unabashedlly, along with their nametag to school everyday showing off to their friends that they are part of JOMA.  As time goes by, I’m looking forward to seeing what this group will develop into and what interesting new challenges we can take on in the community.  I can already see that the group is bonding and taking more initiative since their workshop.  They began meeting a second time during the week independent of me and have already developed another theater piece on their own about the stigma of HIV/AIDS and the importance of seeking treatment early.  We are hoping that we can present the piece at the hospital next week before the end of the trimester. 

Alright, well those are some of the things that have been going on here in Mozambique in the last month.  It has been a busy trimester and I couldn’t possibly talk about everything that has happened, but at least you have an idea of some of the things I have been up to these last few weeks.  I look forward to hearing how the summer has been treating all of you.  It has been awhile since I’ve heard from many of you and I’d love to hear how you are all getting on.  Take care, enjoy the warmth and long days of summer over there!  I’m going to leave you with a particularly nice poem that one of my 12^th grade students wrote for our English newspaper last week!

The Soldiers Came

The soldiers came

And dropped their bombs.

The soldiers didn’t take long

To bring the forest down.

With the forest gone

The birds were gone;

With the birds gone

Who will sing their song?

But the soldiers forgot

To take the forest

Out of the people’s hearts.

The soldiers forgot

To take the birds

Out of the people’s dreams,

And in the people’s dreams

The birds still sing their song.

Now the children

Are planting seedlings

To help the forest grow again.

They eat a simple meal of rice wrapped in banana leaves

And the land welcomes their smiling

Like a shower of rain.

-Issaca (Trouble-free)

Bottle Cap Symphony

I hear the hum of people and see the orange glow of firelight from 200 yards away.  Where Alberto and I are walking, there is no light.  The moon is far below the horizon and the cloudless night has turned the air to ice so that it bites your nostrils upon each breath.  We listen to our feet pacing in a steady rhythm towards the light which is growing stronger in front of us.  We finally reach the town, Nhahumwe, a buzzing metropolis at this time of night.  The “town” consists of about 7 huts lined up in a row along the main path.  While power lines pass directly over the path on the way to the district capital of Chibabava, no one in Nhahumwe actually has electricity.  There is one small stall selling local beverages which brazenly totes one incandescent bulb, powered by a car battery.  We continue on down the main path to where the firelight and commotion is originating from.  People have been talking about this “espectáculo” in Nhahumwe for days now and it is finally here; there is a palpable excitement in the air.  I am not sure exactly what this “espectáculo” has in store, but I will soon find out.  Gaggles of people mill around in the dark on the outside of a crudely constructed canvas wall.  Taller people crane their necks to get a glimpse of what is happening on the other side of the canvas barrier.  Children and miniature adults climb on top of each other or search for holes in the canvas to see the spectacle.  I pay the 10mt (25 cents) cover charge for Alberto and I to walk through the flap and join the party. 

Inside, the party has the feel of a night club you paid too much to get into.  All the cool people stayed in the street and you walked in to an over-hyped club, paying $10 for drinks, and surrounded by a bunch of drunk yuppies.  But Mozambican style.  There are about 20 people on the inside of the canvas wall, as no one else could afford to come in.  The enclosed space is no more than 30 feet by 10 feet and is open to the air on this moonless night.  At the back by the door-flap, a fire pit glows as half of the patrons sit around it, stoking it and warming themselves in the crisp night air.  In the front the entertainment for the night, a local “band,” prepares for their set, which I’ve been told will go all through the night until dawn.  There are three members of their tawdry crew.  A kid, about 10 years old, sits in a stool at the helms of the drum battery.  At first glance, especially in the diffuse light of the night, his drum set seems to be a complete modern-style kit.  Upon closer inspection, however, I see that everything is made out of local materials – the bass drum an oil barrel sliced in half; the cymbals circular cuttings of tin roofing studded with bottle caps and propped up on a tripod made of tied sticks; the toms carved out tree trunks with canvas and animal skins spread tightly across the surface.  Beside him, an older man wearing a second hand suit coat over a poorly matched Mickey Mouse sweatshirt totes an electric guitar.  Much like the drum-set, the guitar is a very organic creation.   Four string stretch from their wooden pegs in the neck along the length of the guitar coming to rest on a larger board where he does the strumming.  Two exposed wires reach up under to string-bed to form some sort of pick-up and plug into an old 1980s tape player.  Person number three is hard to spot immediately.  He stands hauntingly in a shadow in the corner of the hut wearing an oversized hoodie and strumming a guitar as crude and improvised as person number two.

I am curious how they are going perform as a rock band without electricity.  There is a motley assemblage of 4 or 5 small amps and used radio speakers stacked on top of each other and rigged up by wires in front of the band.  I lean over and ask Alberto, ‘how are they going to play their guitars without power?”  As if answering my question, the drummer kicks the bass drum and lays into a shrill dance rhythm.  Alberto says, “Car battery,” and then the guitars slap into action.  It’s not the kind of electrifying entrance you would expect to see in a rock arena, or a bar stage for the matter, but it’s an entrance none the less.  I have to turn my head sideways and clean out my ears just to make sure I’m not missing something.  While I am sure that the drummer is playing, I am still not entirely sure that the guitarists are playing.  There is a faint hum coming from the area where the once-impressive stack of speakers is resting and the guitarists appear to be moving their fingers.  I ask Alberto if there is something wrong with the speakers; “it’s a little weak isn’t it?”  “Car battery,” he says.  So this is it.  Apparently a concert run on car batteries isn’t quite the same ear-splitting experience as a concert you might walk into in the states.  I approach the band to hear the music more clearly and the hum that I had heard before turns into an audible pattern of notes.  The guitarist plays an upbeat Zimbabwean rhythm – duh da da duh da da duh duh duh – that repeats over and over and over…and over.  I get used to the music and start to feel the rhythm.  The few people inside the hut start dancing and from the clamor I hear outside the hut I can tell that the gaggles of people craning their necks have also started to dance.

The dance that accompanies this music is indescribable.  Knees are wobbling, hips are gyrating, and feet arte kicking up dust in a rapid blur of stomps.  It almost reminds me or Riverdance, but with a little more style.  From the waist up, they are motionless, eyes fixed and back straight, but from the waist down it is controlled chaos with movements that I can’t even begin to separate.  I jump into the roped off dancing area and give it my best anyway.  The crowd erupts.  As more curious eyes turn, I notice that I am surrounded by a circle of onlookers with all eyes focused on my haplessly twirling feet.  I’m trying to learn the dance.  I realize, however, that while I have had about 10 minutes of observation to absorb and execute all of the tortuous vibrations needed, the people around me have been practicing their whole lives.   When there are no TVs, playpens, jungle-gyms, malls, soccer trips, Nerf guns, Nintendos, trampolines, swimming pools or family vacations, sometimes all there to do is pull out the pocket transistor radio, buzzing and hissing in all of its glory, and dance.  I am no match for that experience.  I am at best a sideshow attempt to fit in that they seem to appreciate and tend to laugh at – a gigantic white man glowing in the obscure starlight shaking like in a crazed baboon.  After not too long I begin to feel the cardio.  This is a work out.  Take off the sweatshirt.  I’m starting to get it.  I’ll take anyone on.  Jump into the circle and let’s go head to head.  We’re kicking up so much dust that the spectators have to cover their noses.  When is this song going to end?  The guitar player has been playing the same three notes for 15 minutes like a skipping disc.  I tap out of the circle, an icey sweat dripping down my nose.  The band seems to be just getting started.  The same song that I danced to ends up playing for another 20 minutes on repeat, those three notes over and over and over set to a shrill hi-hat rhythm on the cut-out tin roofing that the drummer is blasting away at. 

After the tenth stumbling drunk comes up to me reeking of neepa – a local drink that burns like gasoline – and congratulating me on how well I dance for a muzungue I decide that it’s time to leave.  As Alberto and I walk off into the darkness, the sounds of the tinny battery-powered guitars, and the 10 year old pounding out rhythms on the oil barrel-bottle-cap-drum-set fade into the trees that envelope our journey home.  I remember the concerts that I used to play back in the states with their 6 foot amps, 15 piece drum kits and multi-track sound-boards and can’t imagine how this crude but charming midnight “espetáculo” could have ever seemed normal.