You know, there are few experiences in this life sweeter than seeing the terror on the faces of your fleeing students as they backpedal from a water balloon ambush. If you´re a teacher, like me, who harbors a deep desire to publicly humiliate students then water balloon ambushes on the last day of school are a safe and sure-fire option. We had four teachers up against about 50 students mulling around the soccer field. Strictly speaking, we were outnumbered, but we had the element of surprise and advanced weaponry. Plan A had been to set up heavy artillery shelling from our veranda, aiming the water bombs onto the soccer field 50 meters away using some resistance bands to jerry-rig a catapult. After drawing blood and nailing ourselves with the first few misfires from our failed catapult, however, we realized we were drawing some unwanted attention from the students and therefore abandoned Plan A for a carefully drawn out Plan B: Operation Bull-Rush the field. The students fled like gazelles evading a pride of hungry lions. We prayed on the weak, took no hostages and made them regret all those times they knocked on our door at 5am to check out the soccer ball or charge their phones. I´ll let your imaginations fill in the rest of the details, but it was a grisly scene to say the least.
What else have I been up to here other than shelling students with water balloons when not teaching? Well, I´ve realized in the last couple of months that´s it´s been more and more difficult to pick out interesting things from my daily life that my vast readership would also find interesting. After awhile, you get inured to and don´t even really notice the bizarre cultural stuff that would usually color a blog post and just focus on the stupid frustrating stuff that no one wants to hear you gripe about. Therefore, there are still a few things that pass through my biased corneas and make even me look twice that I might chance to share now.
The first thing which I don´t think I´ll ever not find strange here is the affinity for eating rats and their close relatives. Let me explain. Between about March and November here is the dry season. We saw hardly a drop of rain in 7 months, and everything got very dry. Over the course of the dry months the high grass which fills in between the trees in the temperate forest turns to a dull yellow, the leaves on the trees brown and the earth hardens and cracks. The streams, tributaries and small ponds dry up leaving only the widest rivers with water still flowing in them. Around August the burning starts. At first I though it was strange, the scent of smoke floating by and the horizon filled with haze for miles from the rising smoke. After a month, however, it was strange to drive by a patch of yellow grass that hadn´t been charred and singed by a passing fire. When I finally asked someone what was going on, I was told that the farmers were intentionally burning the fields and forests in order to hunt ratazana. Hmm, I thought, ratazana? Ratazana is nothing more than a giant, glorified rat. Biologically speaking, I might actually put them in the weasel family as they kind of have beaverish teeth and a bushy tail, but I´ve found it best to just think of them as a giant rats the size of fat house cats. Anyway, the farmers burn vast acres of grass and forest and wait for the ratazana to flee from the fire at which point they are waiting in ambush with bows and arrows and sling shots to pick off the rats. I won´t go into the ecological consequences of such vast burns, but the whole event is a tragedy as it ruins the soil quality for long-term cultivation and destroys crucial habitats for other animal species. My biggest qualm with it actually is that it´s all done in order to nab a few smelly rats.
Maybe some of you have seen the picture I posted a few months ago of me standing in front of my house holding one of these rats. Well, that would be the first and last time I will eat ratazana. While it had a nice meaty texture, I couldn´t avoid the smell of rotting garbage that emanated from the dark stew as I lifted chunks of meat to my mouth. I got through about three bites and had to put the fork down and leave the room. Now I just find it amusing when other people buy the rats. A couple months ago I was sitting in a mini-bus waiting to leave from the city and, like usual there was a swarm of anxious vendors trying to reach the bus window to have a go at selling their daily booty to trapped passangers. I´ve seen a fair amount of strange things try to be sold through a chapa window including, my favorite, a guy who was offering on-the-go through-the-window ear piercings, but I wasn´t ready for what I saw that day. Before I saw it coming, someone had thrust a bird-cage full of live scurrying normal sized rats into my face. I don´t remember the price, but I remember thinking, “what would I possibly do with a live rat if I bought one from his cage right now?” Pocket it? Eat it live? Keep it as a pet. It seemed to me a poorly planned business venture as I didn´t notice that he was offering to-go cages.
On another occasion, I was riding on jammed open-back up to the city when we passed a roadside ratazana stand. The way people often sell things here is just hold out chickens or dead ratazana as cars pass by and hope that they are enticed enough to pull off and make a purchase. On this occasion, the ratazana must have piqued the driver´s interest because he screeched to a stop and proceeded to reverse the car for 50 meters on the national highway to talk to a caricature of a scrawny teenager with terribly bucked teeth who was offering up a fat rat, precooked and on a scure for drive by convenience. I imagined that this is about the closest thing to a drive-thru you can get here in Mozambique. When the driver asked in dialect how much the cooked rat would cost him, the vendor wheezed out a price of 150mets through his crooked grill. To me, it sounded reasonable. That´s about $5, no more than you would pay for a drive thru Whopper meal deal in the states, and we´re talking about at least a couple of pounds of rat meat, but all 20 people, who seemed amiable despite being packed like human sardines in the back of the pick up disagreed vociferously. If you live here for even a week you learn to recognize the sound of Mozambican negotiatory disapproval instantaneously. I can only describe the sound that comes out as a high-pitched “Sheeeee” followed by an “-eeeee” which is guttural and drawn out in accord with how strongly the speaker disagrees with the price-setter. Well, on this occasion after audaciously asking the driver to pay 150mets for his rat on a stick, the open-back erupted with a collective “Sheee” signaling that only a fool would pay 150 mets for a cooked rat of that size. It was too much for me at that point to not break out laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. While I was certainly the only college or even high school educated sardine in the back of that truck, I guess I was the only one there not savvy enough to know that only an idiot would pay 150mets for a charred rat of that size. The driver shook his head and we sped off to pick up lunch at the next rat stand.
Enough about rats though. Here in the present, a few clouds have finally rolled in and a morning drizzle has temporarily lifted the week´s oppressive heat and turned today into pure refreshing coolness. Before I go eat some rat-less beans for lunch, I want to leave you with a Mozambican fable I heard a few days ago that, curiously, many people will swear actually happened:
Many years ago there was a poor fisherman who sought the curandeiro (traditional healer) in hopes of a treatment that would transform him into a wealthy landowner. When he arrived at the curandeiro´s hut the curandeiro evaluated the poor fisherman by throwing down precious rocks to judge their scatter pattern on the dry earth inside his hut. Before the fisherman was able to say anything, the curandeiro knew that his ambition was to become rich and already had a treatment ready. Before prescribing the treatment, however, the curandeiro warned the fisherman that throughout the course of treatment, he will be tested by spirits and auspicious events, but that he must, above all, continue the course or all will be lost and he will suffer even more than he is now. The fisherman greedily accepted, dreaming of finally becoming rich. The curandeiro prepared a tonic from precious seeds and tranditional plants and the fisherman gulped it down when instructed.
A week later the fisherman was becoming impatient. He had yet to see any change in his wealth or success as a fisherman in the week since he had gone to see the curandeiro. In fact, he thought, he had been catching even fewer fish than normal and made a mental note that he was going to visit the curandeiro to ask for his offering back. That afternoon, however, he went to the river to pull up the bamboo trap that he had left in a spiraling eddy earlier that morning. When he looked in the trap he was shocked to see a a stack of gold coins in the trap which would normally have been full of fish. He staggered back and called his wife over to carry the trap out and bring it to the river bank. She looked in and congratulated the fisherman on a great catch that day, noting the 8 large fish swimming around in the trap. He came cautiously back and peered into trap, rubbing his eyes in surprise as he also saw 8 fish floating in the trap. He picked the trap up and placed it on his back, preparing to carry it back to the house but noticed that it suddenly felt much heavier than he had ever felt in his many years of being a fisherman. He lurched under the weight but reached the bank and dropped it in the sand. To his shock and horror for the second time that day, he looked down and saw not a fish trap but this time a heavy wooden coffin stuck in the sand. When he opened the lid of the coffin he saw not 8 floating fish but the body of a dead man staring up at him with glazed over eyes. He stammered a curse in shock and slammed the lid shut, calling his wife over for a second time. She came back and, to his dismay, she found a perfectly functional fish trap with 8 fish lying dead now up against the bamboo walls. He could not utter a word and simply sat down on the sandy bank trying to process the events. His wife took the fish inside and prepared dinner.
A week later the fisherman´s wife called him outside and instructed him to to climb the cashew tree in order to bring down the precious fruits because they would make a local beverage to celebrate their recent good luck at fishing. The fisherman climbed the tree and began to throw the fruits down one by one. To his horror, however, he looked into the branches of the thick tree and saw that all of the cashew fruits had transformed into thick and menacing snakes. The agitated snakes began to hiss at and threated the fisherman. The fisherman knew that snakes were sinister and auspicious signs of evil and in their presence he reeled back in horror. This time, however, he remembered the curandeiro´s threat that he would be confronted by tests and evil things and resolved himself to face the insidious creatures and not flee from the tree. The snakes did not take well to his proximity, however, and began to lunge at the fisherman with their venomous fangs. One after the other connected and broke the fisherman´s callased skin. The fisherman yelped out in pain and cursed himself for ever seeking out the curandeiro´s help. In a desperate attempt to escape the maniacal snakes the fisherman leaped from the tree trying to grab the branch of a nearby mango tree. One of the snakes bit his leg just as he pushed off, however, and his momentum was stunted. He missed the mango tree by inches and went sprawling towards the hard dry ground below. With a thud the fisherman slammed into the ground 10 meters below and died instantly.
Later, the curandeiro visited the fisherman´s house, having heard about their unfortunate turn of events. He mentioned to the grieving fisherman´s wife that the fisherman´s ancestors had a long tradition of seeking out the curandeiro for wealth and personal gain. The curandeiro spoke warmly but with an air of detached righteousness, “your husband saw gold in his fish trap and did not realize that it was his own body that he was carrying out of the river in the casket. A greedy man will kill himself with his own greed and a selfish man will have no one but himself to carry his own casket.”
I like that story. I hope you all are well and have learned a lesson today about greed and selfishness. Until next time!
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