Fast Food Nation

I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday break and are excited, as I am, to see what 2011 will hold in store for us!  Sorry that it has been awhile since my last update, but it has been a busy last couple of weeks for me here in Mozambique.  I hit the road (literally the one road) for Christmas and got my first glimpse of life outside of Mangunde.  Due to complications with our visas, our holiday travel was restricted to in province (for me, Sofala); therefore, I hopped on a mission jeep (the only way to leave Mangunde, because it’s a 45 minute drive to the main road) and headed first for Beira, the second largest city in Mozambique.

As we made the 4 hour trek into Beira, I could feel the world slowly reappearing in front of me.  Even though I had only been at Mangunde for 2 weeks, I swear it felt like 2 months.  It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the past two weeks getting acquainted with Mangunde, but you simply have to leave every once in awhile to remind yourself what civilization looks like.  The sun was lowering on the horizon, coating the vast green landscape with a golden hue and I could not have been happier as we neared Beira.  We drove past towns and villages with roadside vegetable stands – buckets of mangoes, pineapples, cashews, tomatoes, cucumbers, even litchi.  I never thought a stack of tomatoes could make my jaw drop like that, but I was in awe.  This is commerce, capitalism, people, products, money being exchanged.  It seems trite, but it was truly a glorious thing after experiencing the veritable famine that is Mangunde.  When you have to spend a whole day looking for a ride and driving an hour and a half into Muxungue, the nearest town, to get a tomato, a silly little vegetable stand passed by on the side of the road feels divine.   I didn’t realize how isolated I had been in Mangunde until I began to reenter civilization that day. 

It got better though.  My destination for that night was actually Dondo, a small town outside of Beira (think the Burnsville of Minneapolis without all the chains restaurants, roads, houses, etc.) where another PCV is living.  I got off the jeep, and realized I had no idea where her house was.  It didn’t matter though, I was on a cloud and could not wipe a smile off my face. I looked around in awe – to my right was a sorveteria (ice cream stand), past that I could smell someone selling grilled frango (chicken), vendors wearing their yellow vests were selling mCell credit, and it was cheia de people…everywhere.  Being that there is really nothing to buy at my site, I was loaded with meticais that I was anxious to spend on as much food that I can’t get at site.  I started with ice cream, followed it up with fried chicken and only then did I call my friend to meet up.

As refreshing as all of these new sensory experiences were for me, there was one which trumped even the ice cream.  As far as I had been able to investigate thus far, no one in Mangunde owns a fridge.  When you have been sweating all day from the oppressive heat, or have just finished a run in the morning, sucking down a liter of luke warm water is about the least appealing option one could entertain.  Luke warm soda and beer is even worse, by the way. Until the ice cream, I had not touched anything cooler than room temperature for what felt like a lifetime (I guess it was only 2 weeks, but still).  Naomi, David and I found a restaurant on the outside of town and I ordered a cold preta and a meio frango.  It was divine.

Ok, enough fantasizing about food.  The next day we headed together to Gorongosa, a small town where a few other PCVs live which is on the outskirts of the famous Gorongosa National Park.  Apparently, before the civil war Gorongosa was burgeoning with diverse wildlife – elephants, lions, gazelles, rhinos, birds, you name it – and rivaled some of the other famous parks of Southern Africa like Kruger and Serengeti.  Unfortunately, during the civil war, the park could not be maintained and was forced to shut down for something like 20 years.  Without regulation, and with the violence and pressure on the locals to survive, the wildlife population was gravely damaged during the war.  People poached the animals heavily for bush-meat and took over crucial habitats for subsistence farming.  All of this led to the sad reality that, when the war ended and the park was surveyed in the mid-90’s they found it virtually empty, a ghostly shadow of what it had been in its heyday.  The positive spin on Gorongosa is that it is slowly being revived.  The Mozambican government, in partnership with philanthropists and NGOs is trying desperately to repopulate the park.  While it is still only a vestige of what it once was, you can apparently see wildlife starting to poke their heads out of the forest again.  It will take decades to restore fully, but it is an interesting story to follow as the government tries to regain a vital economic moneymaker like a marquee wildlife park.  It’s another topic for another day, but it is also fascinating to follow the complicated cultural and geographic barriers to restoring a wildlife sanctuary.  One quickly finds that it is not enough simply to truck a bunch of elephants in and let them roam.  You need to also convince the local populations to leave the park grounds and leave the wildlife alone.  This means building new towns, schools, etc. and finding local support. 

Anyway, sorry, none of this was really relevant to my Christmas vacation In Gorongosa because we didn’t even enter the park.  Hopefully it was interesting nonetheless.  When we arrived at the PCV’s (Brian and Jordan’s) house we were quickly regaled with food and entertainment.  There were about 12 volunteers from my group (Moz 15) and last years group (Moz 14) that got together.  We played cards, shared stories, watched movies, and ate and ate and ate…I think the theme of this blogpost is going to be food.  Highlights were: fiesta night with chips and nacho cheese dip, pancakes, a Christmas cookie decorating competition, and stockings filled with gross Mozambican candy…but the hand-sewn stockings were touching.  You don’t really appreciate chips and nacho cheese dip until you have to roll out the dough, cut and fry the chips yourself and make the cheese dip from scratch.  I will never again complain about spending $3 on a bag of chips and $4 on a jar of salsa.

After our fabulous festivities I headed back to Mangunde..and here I am, again.  Back at home.  In my time away from site, I covered a lot of miles, however, and had many interesting experiences with the very well-serviced “public transportation” of Mozambique.  Generally people get around on chapas, which are ubiquitous on Mozambican roads and are essentially 16* passenger vans which are on the verge of total breakdown and are loaded with up to 25 people easily.  Sometimes you watch a chapa drive by and you can’t help but laugh.  The cobrador, which is the guy that sits in the back and collects people’s money, might be hanging out of the sliding door precariously while there might be 7 people packed into the first row face to face, essentially straddling each other.  What is really funny is when you are looking for a ride and you flag down one of these pavement-scraping chapas and they actually stop.  The way the cobrador encourages you to subir you would think that the chapa was empty, when in fact there may be 20 people stuffed in there liked sardines. 

On one particular occasion, a chapa stopped for us that was straight up chock-a-block with passengers.  Looking in the window, I felt like you would see heads poking up from under arms and between legs.  It was like a circus.  The cobrador, however, eagerly rearranged half of the chapa, insisting on fitting us in but causing an uproar of “Eh pa!”’s and “Ah..nada! No ha espaco para o muzungue!!”from the other passengers.  I have to give him credit, however, he got us in there.  I was crouching on some kind of console with my leg bent under me uncomfortably (how long is this ride?) with my knees planted into the stomach of the nice woman across from me and our mouths about 6 inches apart.  I felt like if I moved at all she would have a pretty good case for sexual assault against me.  That’s actually pretty typical though, and it could’ve been worse, that ride was only about an hour.

On another more harrowing 5 hour chapa ride, my friend and I actually reserved seats a day in advance.  Safe, right?  This was a slightly bigger chapa that resembled a minibus.  Surely, we thought, we’ll have a nice comfortable ride in a padded seat.  We got to our seats nice and early, excited to relax into a nice long journey, maybe put the earbuds in and get a little shut-eye en route.  So naïve.  First, the cobrador told us that the seats we reserved were not, in fact, the window and the aisle seat as we had been told, but instead the middle two seats, infamously known as the jump seats.  The jump seats are essentially the aisle.  After everyone has filed into the chapa, they swing down these poorly padded boards with pitiful back rests which stretch between the real seats and function as makeshift benches for their lucky occupants.  Hooray us!  As if sticking us in the jump seats wasn’t enough, however, this entrepreneurial cobrador decided to put one more on us by continuing to sell tickets for the chapa after it was already fully booked.  We were sitting comfortably in our jump seats hoping to leave asap when the cobrador told us to make room for the mother and two children that he just sold tickets to.  What fun!  So we squirmed and nuzzled closer together than we ever though we'd be and made room for another family in or snug row.  It turns out that it didn’t really matter that our tickets said seats 9 and 10 on them, because I was currently sitting on about a third of seat 8 and a quarter of seat 9, while David was wedged onto fraction of seat 8 with a small child essentially in his lap for the 5 hours ride.  It's funny to look back on, but was really quite uncomfortable at the time.  And then, just when I was getting ready to try to relax as best I could given the circumstances - I had my little travel pillow out and my head jammed up against the seat in front of me -  the guy who took my window seat from the beginning pulls his phone out and proceeds to use it as a speaker to play obnoxious Mozambican dance music for what turned out to be the next 3 hours.  Apparently, this gentlemen thought that it was his duty to provide the musical entertainment for the whole chapa at 4 in the morning.  So much for trying to getting some sleep on the road.  Maybe it's a cultural thing, because a few minutes later, another guys two rows back started playing different music loudly and unabashedly on his phone.  So now we had two dueling cell phones providing us with a nice clash of Akon and mozambican reggaeton for the majority of the ride.  Hasn't anyone heard of headphones here?

Chapa riding isn’t all torture and discomfort though.  My favorite part of traveling through Mozambique on chapas is the beautiful display of capitalism and commerce that can be found at any of the many chapa stops on the road.  It's really a site to behold.  Every couple of towns, the chapa will stop to let people off, get gas, or simply have a break – there’s no schedule so the motorista is sort of on his own clock.  If he’s thirsty, he’ll stop the chapa and make everyone wait while he sips down a Coke at a roadside banca or if he has to pee he’ll pull over in a grass field and hop out casually while other passangers who have to pee find ways to jump out of windows and relieve themselves as well.  Anyway, whenever the chapa makes these frequent stops, it takes about 3 seconds for vendors on the road to identify their new potential buyers.  I'm convinced that you can literally buy anything through the window of a chapa...anything.  My favorite window purchase: a cold Coke and bag of cashews.  I never thought I would enjoy coke and cashews at 6am – I know it sounds disgusting, right?  At home I would never consider drinking a soda before 11, but here, all conception of time or flavor preference defers to the mighty trump of coldness.  My thirst for refrescos at dawn is also helped by the fact that I've been sweating uncomfortably in a half jump seat since 4am.  I don't even really drink Coke at home, but here it is an elixir, plain and simple.  And they use real sugar too, not that awful corn syrup that is unavoidable when use shop at grocery stores in the states.  Anyway, the beauty of the chapa window vendors is that if you don’t see the items you want readily available, you can simply yell out the window, “castanhos!” and there will be a frenetic chain of vendors screaming for the castanho guy to get his ass over to that window and you'll have your cashews in 10 seconds flat as the chapa pulls away onto the road.  It's amazing!

I have yet to try one particular drive by delicacy, but I’ve seen kids selling little to go Ziplocs of soggy French fries and grilled chicken.  I think that is just the ultimate.  It’s like a little McDonalds chicken nugget meal right here in Mozambique.  Maybe someday.

Okay.  Well, that was a longer post than I thought I was getting into.  So if any of you have made it this far, thanks for sticking with me!  I’ll post again soon about how life is treating me back here at site as we get ready for school to start in a little more than a week! 

Take care!