The White Party

Last night we went to a party at the house of one of Agrolink’s shareholders. Supposedly, the party was to celebrate this person’s departure from his current job with a tobacco company where he has worked for several years. Really, though, it was just an excuse to gather what could be considered the socialites of Chimoio for a little see-and-be-seen. All of the guests had to wear white (I wondered all night whether the theme was imitating New Year’s in Brazil or P. Diddy’s annual party in the Hamptons) and, coincidentally, most of the guests were also…white. To be fair, there were several black Mozambicans at the party as well, but I was shocked to see how many young, white people came out of the woodwork for a get-together where they didn’t even really know the host. I think everyone here is simply hungry for new friends, stimulating conversation, something – anything – to take away the monotony of life in Chimoio.

I have been here for six months and I can’t say that I have made any new friends outside my household. Living with five friends is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it was great to land in a town in rural Africa and already have a support structure in place. I have built-in entertainment with a group of people that I know and trust. Given the absolute lack of things to do in Chimoio, we have little motivation to leave home. Why bother, when you already have a group of drinking buddies, DVDs to watch, music to dance to, and shit to talk? The problem is, my built-in social group has severely limited my forays into the outside world here. Other than a handful of Mozambican work associates, I literally don’t know anybody other than my housemates. I don’t call anybody on the phone. I have nobody to invite for a coffee and a chat.

Last night I realized just how nice it is to talk with people outside my housemates that have interesting stories to tell and could potentially become friends. I ended up meeting a group of people around my age that are here in Chimoio from different parts of the world, each brought here by a different, sequally compelling motive. A girl from Seattle who has great spiky, short blonde hair, suggested that we all invent three different scenarios that had brought us to Chimoio for the others in the group to decide which version was true. It was a fun game, and I turned out to be surprisingly good at it. In fact, I was the only person in the group that successfully guessed everyone’s true occupation on the first try. I correctly guessed that in my company there was a guy from Mississippi studying community water-use rights in a village near here, a girl from San Francisco who is here as a Peace Corps volunteer and works in an HIV/AIDS program with a local NGO, and a guy from South Africa that works with a commercial de-mining company. I stumped everyone with my three scenarios except the water rights researcher. They all already knew each other, and we were mutually shocked that in my time here I had never met them. It made me realize just how isolated I have been thanks to my work and my living situation.

We hung out for a while, getting to know each other a bit better, then Ricardo and I decided to head home. Poor Rico is still not fully recovered from his Hepatits A, and can’t drink any alcohol. So at parties, he drinks as much Sprite as he can stomach, then hangs out with the rest of our tipsy group until his patience runs thin. We said our goodbyes, then drove off the farm and back to the big city to watch some TV and eat fresh mangoes before hitting the sack.

I have been deliberating all day as to whether or not I should make an effort to find my new friends today and invite them for a beer of something… I’m pretty sure I will. The excitement at the possibility of having a great group of friends here – as has happened to me just about everywhere else I’ve lived – is fabulous.

Ah – I nearly forgot the coolest part of the evening. On the way out to the party, which was in a beautiful house on a farm some 15km outside Chimoio – we had to cross the railroad tracks that run along the so-called Beira Corridor (the route that connects landlocked Zimbabwe with the busy port of Beira). We were in the ’92 Land Cruiser that a friend periodically lends us, and the back of the vehicle, that had been converted to hold several people and a stretcher when in the service of the Mozambican Red Cross, was packed full of housemates and crates of beer. When we approached the railroad crossing, I noticed a man running back and forth along the length of tracks near the road holding an old, reflective lantern with a red light inside. He swung the lantern wildly, creating the effect of a flashing red light. On the opposite side of the tracks, the man had already lowered an old wooden barrier to prevent cars from entering the crossing. On our side, however, there was no barrier and the dark man with the lantern was our only warning not to go onto the tracks. Rico stopped the car and we looked to the right just in time to see a huge white headlight on the front of an old, rusted train, bearing down towards us at breakneck speed.

It was an incredible experience, one of the few since I have arrived in Africa that have totally broken my sense of time and place. Watching the old train whiz past, precariously rattling in its squeaky tracks, with no other cars or lights around, I closed my eyes and felt the wind, perfumed by a recent monsoon rain, swept over my face. This place is indescribable, completely caught between the perils and blessings of modernization, left behind, disputed, impoverished, and yet wiser in many ways than we will ever be.