Monday, March 13, 2006
The Flat, Part One
I've realized that if I wait until I've written about everything I want to, you all won't get an update until the end of April or so! So I'll post in chunks, in accordance with what I am able to write each day or week, and leave you hanging until the next entry because my storytelling is not at at all linear or even in manageable chapters!
Here is what I managed to write last night...
Today Ricardo and I finally moved into our new flat, only 12 days after the original date the landlady was supposed to hand over the keys. Although supremely frustrating at times, this flat was well worth the wait…and what a wait it was!
Ricardo found this apartment while I was at the Nia intensive in Cape Town. It was the first and only flat we looked at, and the one that we ended up renting – such luck is practically unheard of here in Maputo – but something inside me just knew it would work out this way. To paraphrase one of my favourite authors, Paulo Coelho, “When you wish for something with all your heart, the whole universe conspires for things to work out.”
I can’t think of anything I want more at this moment than to put down roots with Ricardo in Maputo. Being a 21st Century Nomad is certainly fun and full of adventures, but it’s a lifestyle that can leave a girl lonely and disconnected in the long run. Many things lately – from my community living time in Chimoio to the Nia intensive last month – have led me to the conclusion that settling down is just what I need right now. Mind, body, and spirit are all shouting out for me to stay in one place and enjoy a slower, more stable life.
So to that end, Rico and I set up an appointment to visit this flat as soon as I got back from Cape Town at the end of February. The apartment is located downtown in a pretty upscale neighbourhood called Polana and is 4 blocks from the ocean and near several restaurants and shops. The building itself is pretty drab and in dire need of some paint and a couple of structural repairs, but it is quite sturdy (it survived the earthquake!) and has 24-hour security guards in the front, so I can’t complain. Most buildings in Maputo look as if they took several direct hits during the country’s civil war, so it’s pretty standard that a nice apartment would have a horrid exterior. The building is also directly across the street from one of the coolest architectural sites in Maputo, an abandoned old Portuguese mansion called Vila Algarve that is covered in blue and white tile murals, so that adds a lot of character to the place.
Our flat is on the 3rd floor (technically the 4th – people here count the ground floor as level zero) and there is no elevator, so we get a really good workout huffing it up the stairs, but that’s good because both Rico and I are pretty out of shape at the moment.
The first time we visited the flat it was total chaos. The place was being inhabited by our landlord Dona Flávia and her, like, 15 school-aged children. There was barely room to walk around the flat because it was so full of gaudy furniture and kids running around. The worst part was the living room – Dona Flávia had, in good upper-middle-class Mozambican taste, furnished the room with a horrid set of black sofas imported from South Africa that had a pattern that looked as if the cosmos had suddenly gotten ill and spewed planets and nebulae on the dark velour. This sofa set dominated the whole room, but every spare space was filled with clutter. My favourite, in addition to the seating choice of course, was a huge fake-wood clock with plastic roses glued at each hour mark and gold lettering across the front that proudly announced, “High Class Quartz Clock.” Needless to say, I was a bit overwhelmed.
Despite the tacky furnishings and plethora of teenagers in the flat when we visited, Rico and I were able to recognize that behind it all lay a fabulous opportunity. Three bedrooms, lots of natural light, wooden floors, and the perfect location. We squeezed each other’s hands in silent approval, then sat down to negotiate with Dona Flávia. She originally wanted US$ 500 per month for the flat, but we were able to bring her down to US$ 450...
Oh, the suspense!! I'm sure it's just killing you!!!
Here is what I managed to write last night...
Today Ricardo and I finally moved into our new flat, only 12 days after the original date the landlady was supposed to hand over the keys. Although supremely frustrating at times, this flat was well worth the wait…and what a wait it was!
Ricardo found this apartment while I was at the Nia intensive in Cape Town. It was the first and only flat we looked at, and the one that we ended up renting – such luck is practically unheard of here in Maputo – but something inside me just knew it would work out this way. To paraphrase one of my favourite authors, Paulo Coelho, “When you wish for something with all your heart, the whole universe conspires for things to work out.”
I can’t think of anything I want more at this moment than to put down roots with Ricardo in Maputo. Being a 21st Century Nomad is certainly fun and full of adventures, but it’s a lifestyle that can leave a girl lonely and disconnected in the long run. Many things lately – from my community living time in Chimoio to the Nia intensive last month – have led me to the conclusion that settling down is just what I need right now. Mind, body, and spirit are all shouting out for me to stay in one place and enjoy a slower, more stable life.
So to that end, Rico and I set up an appointment to visit this flat as soon as I got back from Cape Town at the end of February. The apartment is located downtown in a pretty upscale neighbourhood called Polana and is 4 blocks from the ocean and near several restaurants and shops. The building itself is pretty drab and in dire need of some paint and a couple of structural repairs, but it is quite sturdy (it survived the earthquake!) and has 24-hour security guards in the front, so I can’t complain. Most buildings in Maputo look as if they took several direct hits during the country’s civil war, so it’s pretty standard that a nice apartment would have a horrid exterior. The building is also directly across the street from one of the coolest architectural sites in Maputo, an abandoned old Portuguese mansion called Vila Algarve that is covered in blue and white tile murals, so that adds a lot of character to the place.
Our flat is on the 3rd floor (technically the 4th – people here count the ground floor as level zero) and there is no elevator, so we get a really good workout huffing it up the stairs, but that’s good because both Rico and I are pretty out of shape at the moment.
The first time we visited the flat it was total chaos. The place was being inhabited by our landlord Dona Flávia and her, like, 15 school-aged children. There was barely room to walk around the flat because it was so full of gaudy furniture and kids running around. The worst part was the living room – Dona Flávia had, in good upper-middle-class Mozambican taste, furnished the room with a horrid set of black sofas imported from South Africa that had a pattern that looked as if the cosmos had suddenly gotten ill and spewed planets and nebulae on the dark velour. This sofa set dominated the whole room, but every spare space was filled with clutter. My favourite, in addition to the seating choice of course, was a huge fake-wood clock with plastic roses glued at each hour mark and gold lettering across the front that proudly announced, “High Class Quartz Clock.” Needless to say, I was a bit overwhelmed.
Despite the tacky furnishings and plethora of teenagers in the flat when we visited, Rico and I were able to recognize that behind it all lay a fabulous opportunity. Three bedrooms, lots of natural light, wooden floors, and the perfect location. We squeezed each other’s hands in silent approval, then sat down to negotiate with Dona Flávia. She originally wanted US$ 500 per month for the flat, but we were able to bring her down to US$ 450...
Oh, the suspense!! I'm sure it's just killing you!!!
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Surprise, Surprise
Guess what? We're still not moved into our new flat. Supposedly it will happen tonight, but then again that's what the landlady said yesterday, and last week, and at the beginning of the month. I'm just trying to be patient, understand that we'll move when we move, and remember that we'll get to discount these late days from our June rent so this isn't a financial problem either.
It's just so frustrating. I'm really looking forward to moving into our flat, and each day that the landlady dilly-dallies around is another day that Rico and I are living out of suitcases, eating all our meals in restaurants, and not having a proper work space. I'm finding it very hard to sit down and concentrate, be it on business stuff or on catching up on the blog.
I feel pressure to write - and I really do want to write about the experiences I've had in the last month - but right now I'm just a bit overwhelmed with the whole moving thing (or lack thereof).
The challenge, I suppose, is to sit still with all this anxiousness and pressure. Me fretting about won't make the landlady haul her junk out of the flat any faster, and it will only spend my energy. Wringing my hands over everything I've meant to write and haven't had a chance will not make my words come any easier.
My solution for everything at this point is to chill. Good writing and a good flat will come to those who wait...
It's just so frustrating. I'm really looking forward to moving into our flat, and each day that the landlady dilly-dallies around is another day that Rico and I are living out of suitcases, eating all our meals in restaurants, and not having a proper work space. I'm finding it very hard to sit down and concentrate, be it on business stuff or on catching up on the blog.
I feel pressure to write - and I really do want to write about the experiences I've had in the last month - but right now I'm just a bit overwhelmed with the whole moving thing (or lack thereof).
The challenge, I suppose, is to sit still with all this anxiousness and pressure. Me fretting about won't make the landlady haul her junk out of the flat any faster, and it will only spend my energy. Wringing my hands over everything I've meant to write and haven't had a chance will not make my words come any easier.
My solution for everything at this point is to chill. Good writing and a good flat will come to those who wait...
Friday, March 03, 2006
We've Officially Got a Flat!
It's amazing!!! The flat is ours!!!
Ricardo and I just went over to the flat and had a meeting with the landlady. We signed all the final papers and payed a deposit of 3 month's rent, and she's agreed to move all her stuff out by Wednesday. I am having serious nesting urges, and can't wait to move in.
Today the weather is very windy, rainy, and cold. Yesterday it was easily over 90F. I haven't really figured out the climate here in Maputo yet. It reminds me of the schizophrenic weather in southern Brasil...
Well, Rico and I just had lunch and are off to run a couple of business errands and then go to GAME, this big South African department store just north of the city, to start shopping for our home!!!!! I feel like such a sap, but I am really excited about buying appliances and picking out towel sets.
Tonight I'm hoping to have some quiet time, what with the nasty weather and all, to finally sit down and write properly. Last night I was set on having a good write, but we got a big surprise that ended up delaying my plans and expulsing us from the flat we're currently staying in. For now, I'll just let you know that it has to do with a sewer (technically, I think it's a cess pool). You can let your imagination run wild from there until I conjure up a description to do the whole smelly event justice.
Until then, keep well!
Ricardo and I just went over to the flat and had a meeting with the landlady. We signed all the final papers and payed a deposit of 3 month's rent, and she's agreed to move all her stuff out by Wednesday. I am having serious nesting urges, and can't wait to move in.
Today the weather is very windy, rainy, and cold. Yesterday it was easily over 90F. I haven't really figured out the climate here in Maputo yet. It reminds me of the schizophrenic weather in southern Brasil...
Well, Rico and I just had lunch and are off to run a couple of business errands and then go to GAME, this big South African department store just north of the city, to start shopping for our home!!!!! I feel like such a sap, but I am really excited about buying appliances and picking out towel sets.
Tonight I'm hoping to have some quiet time, what with the nasty weather and all, to finally sit down and write properly. Last night I was set on having a good write, but we got a big surprise that ended up delaying my plans and expulsing us from the flat we're currently staying in. For now, I'll just let you know that it has to do with a sewer (technically, I think it's a cess pool). You can let your imagination run wild from there until I conjure up a description to do the whole smelly event justice.
Until then, keep well!
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Quick Update
Okay...once again we're at the internet café and I have a million e-mails to respond to and some research about bananas I want to do. Time is short, but I am still glowing and zen-like from my Nia training so it is all good.
So for a quick update:
- Ricardo and I have found a great flat and will be moving in tomorrow! It is a 3-bedroom with wooden floors and a small varanda. One room will be our bedroom, the other will be our office, and the last one will be a Nia room / guest room!!! I'm envisioning decking the whole thing out with mirrors so that I can dance the night away and watch how silly I look in the process. We signed a 2-year rent contract, so we're definitely moving down the "put down some roots" path, which makes me very happy. Next step: buy an oven, a washing machine, living room furniture, a work desk, some chairs, and A NEW MATTRESS!!! Yes, the glorious day is near. Behold the goodness of South African department stores that stock semi-decent mattresses.
- Work is going well. Ricardo and I cranked out a proposal for the EU in 3 days!! It was for additional support for the smallholder farmers in the Espungabera area that will be supplying the tea for our factory. It was definitely tough to put the whole thing together in such short time (I usually like to have a month or two), but it was good because it made me let go of perfection. Some parts of the EU proposal were not excellent, but it was okay. I just prioritized and moved on to write more important sections. All in all, a very good excercise for someone addicted to perfection.
- Speaking of work, we should have word from the EU this week about whether or not the microfinance proposal I put together has been accepted. If so, that's another million dollars chalked up to our fundraising efforts!
- Random things:
It's really hot in Maputo. Like 110 degrees F hot, and really humid. I sweat all day...
Ricardo and I went to the only gym in town last night for a trial workout. The gym is in the top floor of a really shi-shi hotel, with a view of the indian ocean as you run on the treadmill. I think we are going to join after we get back from Brasil.
I hand washed half of my clothes in a bucket this morning, then hung them up on curtain rods in the flat we are currently staying in. I can't wait to have a washing machine again.
We leave for Brasil in 2 weeks. My mom is going to meet us in São Paulo, then we will all go to Rio together. Big events during the trip: my mom meeting Rico's family, and being in Rico's best friend's wedding. Good times!
Okay...that's about it. I promise I am going to get my act together and write about this Nia training I keep referring to. It was life-changing, and I'm dying to share!!!
So for a quick update:
- Ricardo and I have found a great flat and will be moving in tomorrow! It is a 3-bedroom with wooden floors and a small varanda. One room will be our bedroom, the other will be our office, and the last one will be a Nia room / guest room!!! I'm envisioning decking the whole thing out with mirrors so that I can dance the night away and watch how silly I look in the process. We signed a 2-year rent contract, so we're definitely moving down the "put down some roots" path, which makes me very happy. Next step: buy an oven, a washing machine, living room furniture, a work desk, some chairs, and A NEW MATTRESS!!! Yes, the glorious day is near. Behold the goodness of South African department stores that stock semi-decent mattresses.
- Work is going well. Ricardo and I cranked out a proposal for the EU in 3 days!! It was for additional support for the smallholder farmers in the Espungabera area that will be supplying the tea for our factory. It was definitely tough to put the whole thing together in such short time (I usually like to have a month or two), but it was good because it made me let go of perfection. Some parts of the EU proposal were not excellent, but it was okay. I just prioritized and moved on to write more important sections. All in all, a very good excercise for someone addicted to perfection.
- Speaking of work, we should have word from the EU this week about whether or not the microfinance proposal I put together has been accepted. If so, that's another million dollars chalked up to our fundraising efforts!
- Random things:
It's really hot in Maputo. Like 110 degrees F hot, and really humid. I sweat all day...
Ricardo and I went to the only gym in town last night for a trial workout. The gym is in the top floor of a really shi-shi hotel, with a view of the indian ocean as you run on the treadmill. I think we are going to join after we get back from Brasil.
I hand washed half of my clothes in a bucket this morning, then hung them up on curtain rods in the flat we are currently staying in. I can't wait to have a washing machine again.
We leave for Brasil in 2 weeks. My mom is going to meet us in São Paulo, then we will all go to Rio together. Big events during the trip: my mom meeting Rico's family, and being in Rico's best friend's wedding. Good times!
Okay...that's about it. I promise I am going to get my act together and write about this Nia training I keep referring to. It was life-changing, and I'm dying to share!!!
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Tras la Tempestad, la Calma
I am back in Maputo and genuinely happier, calmer, and more grounded than I've been in a long time. The Nia training was fabulous and not only did I dance a lot, I gained many lessons that can be applied in life as well as in physical movement. More to come about that over the course of the week...
Ricardo and I are still in our client's flat, but have found a wonderful 3 bedroom apartment that we hope to close a contract on sometime next week. I am looking forward to putting down some roots, painting our walls cool beach-inspired colors, buying furniture, and even potentially getting a cat!
Right now, though, I am having a string of busy, busy days and am not able to write about my personal life as much as I'd like. Rico and I have to finish a proposal by tuesday night that will hopefully get us money for our outgrower scheme in the tea project. It's all somewhat last-minute, which I don't love, but I am calm about the whole thing and not letting the pressure of work stress me out. Seriously. It's a great feeling to know you have a lot of work to do, but not let it overrun your life. I am very happy about that.
Hope you are all well...
love,
Ali
Ricardo and I are still in our client's flat, but have found a wonderful 3 bedroom apartment that we hope to close a contract on sometime next week. I am looking forward to putting down some roots, painting our walls cool beach-inspired colors, buying furniture, and even potentially getting a cat!
Right now, though, I am having a string of busy, busy days and am not able to write about my personal life as much as I'd like. Rico and I have to finish a proposal by tuesday night that will hopefully get us money for our outgrower scheme in the tea project. It's all somewhat last-minute, which I don't love, but I am calm about the whole thing and not letting the pressure of work stress me out. Seriously. It's a great feeling to know you have a lot of work to do, but not let it overrun your life. I am very happy about that.
Hope you are all well...
love,
Ali
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Earthquake in Mozambique
Participating in the Nia Intensive in Cape Town this past week has been a very special experience for me, and I have not wanted to access e-mail or the internet. It just felt right to distance myself a bit and do some serious reflecting on my life without trying to analyze everything through writing.
However, I wanted to blog today just to let everyone know that Ricardo, BL, Patricia, Gemelli, and all of our other friends and loved ones in Mozambique are safe after this morning's earthquake.
Ricardo called me on the cell phone around 12:30am, just after the quake had ended. He was in our client's flat in Maputo where we are currently staying, and said that the desk and shelves shook and shook for about a minute. He had no idea what was happening until BL called from Chimoio and said there had been an earthquake, and that everything had shaken in our old house as well.
I couldn't sleep after that phone call. Early this morning I woke up and checked the internet for news, and couldn't believe my eyes. The earthquake was a magnitude 7.5 and was centered at Espungabera, which is the little town where we are carrying out our tea project! Apparently there were at least 5 aftershocks, and the quake was felt throughout the country and into parts of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. The news report said people went running out of their homes into the streets all throughout Mozambique, and there are still no reports on casualties or injuries.
Thankfully, we are all safe and there is no need for you all to worry.
Love to you all.
Ali
However, I wanted to blog today just to let everyone know that Ricardo, BL, Patricia, Gemelli, and all of our other friends and loved ones in Mozambique are safe after this morning's earthquake.
Ricardo called me on the cell phone around 12:30am, just after the quake had ended. He was in our client's flat in Maputo where we are currently staying, and said that the desk and shelves shook and shook for about a minute. He had no idea what was happening until BL called from Chimoio and said there had been an earthquake, and that everything had shaken in our old house as well.
I couldn't sleep after that phone call. Early this morning I woke up and checked the internet for news, and couldn't believe my eyes. The earthquake was a magnitude 7.5 and was centered at Espungabera, which is the little town where we are carrying out our tea project! Apparently there were at least 5 aftershocks, and the quake was felt throughout the country and into parts of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. The news report said people went running out of their homes into the streets all throughout Mozambique, and there are still no reports on casualties or injuries.
Thankfully, we are all safe and there is no need for you all to worry.
Love to you all.
Ali
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Maputo and More
Ali arrived in Maputo, unpacked, then boarded a plane for Cape Town to begin NIA training. She will have sporadic access to the Internet which is why she asked me to write and tell you all where she is. She sends her love and looks forward to reading your comments.
Katherine (Ali's Mom)
Katherine (Ali's Mom)
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Movin' On Out!
Today is the big day. Ricardo and I are finally moving to Maputo!!!!! What started out as a month-long business trip has become the catalyst for us to get the hell out of dodge. We are going to start looking for an apartment first thing Monday morning. Hopefully we will find something in a good neighborhood and within our price range without too much of a delay.
This is a very different move from anything I've ever experienced. I think instead of "moving", it's more accurate to say we are changing our "home base". We will still come back here to Chimoio with some frequency for our responsibilities with Agrolink and our tea company, MozTea. I'm guessing that for every 6 weeks we spend in Maputo, we will spend 1 in Chimoio. I think it is the ideal balance, and will allow me to keep my sanity and enjoy my living environment, but not cut all ties with the work we have going here.
Yesterday I packed two suitcases with the essentials - work stuff, clothes, incense, 2 kinds of tea, Splenda, creams and perfumes, and *only* 7 pairs of shoes. Part of me was reluctant to pack everything up because I still don't believe that this move will really happen...everything in Africa goes wrong when you plan it out, you can't trust that anything will run smoothly. I have hopes that we will find an apartment and have an easy move to Maputo, but I'll have to see it all work out to believe it...
For as much complaining as I've done in the last week, I realized this weekend that I am actually going to miss several things about Chimoio. I will miss some parts of the chaos of sharing a home with 3, 4, or 5 people depending on the month. I will miss cooking for everyone, and sitting around all together to watch a DVD and shoot the shit. I will miss Zeca and our dogs, and the lovely climate here (Manica is the most mountainous province in Mozambique). I'm actually sort of sad that we are not going to spend as much time here anymore. And then I fall back into reality. I'm relieved and happy and excited to be moving on...
Our plane leaves at 2pm, then we will stay at a client's flat in Maputo until we find our own place. I won't have daily internet access, but hopefully will manage to check e-mail and blog 3 or 4 times a week...
So this is it...WISH US LUCK!!!
This is a very different move from anything I've ever experienced. I think instead of "moving", it's more accurate to say we are changing our "home base". We will still come back here to Chimoio with some frequency for our responsibilities with Agrolink and our tea company, MozTea. I'm guessing that for every 6 weeks we spend in Maputo, we will spend 1 in Chimoio. I think it is the ideal balance, and will allow me to keep my sanity and enjoy my living environment, but not cut all ties with the work we have going here.
Yesterday I packed two suitcases with the essentials - work stuff, clothes, incense, 2 kinds of tea, Splenda, creams and perfumes, and *only* 7 pairs of shoes. Part of me was reluctant to pack everything up because I still don't believe that this move will really happen...everything in Africa goes wrong when you plan it out, you can't trust that anything will run smoothly. I have hopes that we will find an apartment and have an easy move to Maputo, but I'll have to see it all work out to believe it...
For as much complaining as I've done in the last week, I realized this weekend that I am actually going to miss several things about Chimoio. I will miss some parts of the chaos of sharing a home with 3, 4, or 5 people depending on the month. I will miss cooking for everyone, and sitting around all together to watch a DVD and shoot the shit. I will miss Zeca and our dogs, and the lovely climate here (Manica is the most mountainous province in Mozambique). I'm actually sort of sad that we are not going to spend as much time here anymore. And then I fall back into reality. I'm relieved and happy and excited to be moving on...
Our plane leaves at 2pm, then we will stay at a client's flat in Maputo until we find our own place. I won't have daily internet access, but hopefully will manage to check e-mail and blog 3 or 4 times a week...
So this is it...WISH US LUCK!!!
Friday, February 10, 2006
Sneeze it all Out
Today is a new day, and I feel much better. Not so much better that I've abandoned my plan to hightail it to Maputo to find an apartment with Rico, but I am calmer. Less moody and irritable.
Last night, right after my little breakdown, I got hit with one of the worst allergy attacks since coming to Mozambique. Usually the allergies come on in the morning, but this time they hit at nearly 11pm. I took a Benadryl hoping it would knock me out right away, but I was sneezing so much that even the drowsy medicine took nearly 3 hours to do its thing. At one point I sneezed literally 37 times in a row...All this in the crater mattress with Rico trying to sleep beside me.
We still don't have a new mattress, and likely won't buy one here in Chimoio because we're going to spend at least the next month on the road. Somehow, though I feel rested this morning, like I sneezed out all of the rage I was feeling last night.
I have a theory that my allergies are actually brought on by stress. I found a website once that referred to "emotional allergies." It's all very strange... I'd never had a single bout of allergy before moving to Austin, TX in 2003. Coincidentally, the move was in the middle of what was hands-down one of the worst situations I've ever dealt with in my entire life. I cried every day for 3 months straight, then every other day for the next 3. In the midst of all this emotion, my allergy attacks started. Since Austin is the "Allergy Capital of the World" I chalked it up to oak pollen, seemingly the worst culprit in central Texas, and went on dealing with my life. After the first year, my emotional situation resolved (a.k.a. the relationship ended) and, mysteriously, that next spring I didn't have a single allergy attack.
Then, when I moved to Chimoio 9 months ago the allergies started again. I am fine for 5 days, then all of a sudden I get an attack. At first I thought I was allergic to some pollen here, or the dust in our house, but if that were the case one would expect me to sneeze and wheeze every single day, which is not the case. Furthermore, I get allergy attacks no matter where I am lately: Maputo, Rio de Janeiro, California... It's the same random, once weekly bout independent of the environment I'm in.
So, in the coming month I'll be able to test out my theory and see if my allergies improve as my stress level diminishes. Check out my schedule for the next few weeks:
Week 1 - Maputo with Rico, working on a banana proposal. We leave Chimoio day after tomorrow, thank God.
Week 2 - I'm going to Cape Town for a week-long Nia training so I can become a certified teacher. Nia is a dance form that connects mind and body and promotes both physical and emotional balance. Just what I need right now. I'm hoping to be able to give classes in Maputo where there is a meditation/yoga/tai chi center.
Week 3 - Maputo again. Ricardo and I will be fundraising for the timber project we just finished, and I will start writing a new proposal for a mango project.
Week 4 - Johannesburg with Rico to meet with a group of MBA students from the University of Texas that are doing a marketing plan for the Fairtrade certified products that our tea company, MozTea, will produce.
Week 5 - Rio de Janeiro! Rico and I are going back to Brasil for about 10 days to be in his best friend's wedding. My mom is flying in from the US to hang out with us, and to meet all of Rico's family. I can't wait!!
Week 6 - Maputo. According to my ideal scenario, we would already have an apartment and would stay in the capital for good...
Seeing it all on paper makes me realize that my situation is going to improve drastically starting Sunday. I can make it till the weekend without falling apart, right? Right??? Yeah.
Thank you all for your kind words and positive vibrations.
Last night, right after my little breakdown, I got hit with one of the worst allergy attacks since coming to Mozambique. Usually the allergies come on in the morning, but this time they hit at nearly 11pm. I took a Benadryl hoping it would knock me out right away, but I was sneezing so much that even the drowsy medicine took nearly 3 hours to do its thing. At one point I sneezed literally 37 times in a row...All this in the crater mattress with Rico trying to sleep beside me.
We still don't have a new mattress, and likely won't buy one here in Chimoio because we're going to spend at least the next month on the road. Somehow, though I feel rested this morning, like I sneezed out all of the rage I was feeling last night.
I have a theory that my allergies are actually brought on by stress. I found a website once that referred to "emotional allergies." It's all very strange... I'd never had a single bout of allergy before moving to Austin, TX in 2003. Coincidentally, the move was in the middle of what was hands-down one of the worst situations I've ever dealt with in my entire life. I cried every day for 3 months straight, then every other day for the next 3. In the midst of all this emotion, my allergy attacks started. Since Austin is the "Allergy Capital of the World" I chalked it up to oak pollen, seemingly the worst culprit in central Texas, and went on dealing with my life. After the first year, my emotional situation resolved (a.k.a. the relationship ended) and, mysteriously, that next spring I didn't have a single allergy attack.
Then, when I moved to Chimoio 9 months ago the allergies started again. I am fine for 5 days, then all of a sudden I get an attack. At first I thought I was allergic to some pollen here, or the dust in our house, but if that were the case one would expect me to sneeze and wheeze every single day, which is not the case. Furthermore, I get allergy attacks no matter where I am lately: Maputo, Rio de Janeiro, California... It's the same random, once weekly bout independent of the environment I'm in.
So, in the coming month I'll be able to test out my theory and see if my allergies improve as my stress level diminishes. Check out my schedule for the next few weeks:
Week 1 - Maputo with Rico, working on a banana proposal. We leave Chimoio day after tomorrow, thank God.
Week 2 - I'm going to Cape Town for a week-long Nia training so I can become a certified teacher. Nia is a dance form that connects mind and body and promotes both physical and emotional balance. Just what I need right now. I'm hoping to be able to give classes in Maputo where there is a meditation/yoga/tai chi center.
Week 3 - Maputo again. Ricardo and I will be fundraising for the timber project we just finished, and I will start writing a new proposal for a mango project.
Week 4 - Johannesburg with Rico to meet with a group of MBA students from the University of Texas that are doing a marketing plan for the Fairtrade certified products that our tea company, MozTea, will produce.
Week 5 - Rio de Janeiro! Rico and I are going back to Brasil for about 10 days to be in his best friend's wedding. My mom is flying in from the US to hang out with us, and to meet all of Rico's family. I can't wait!!
Week 6 - Maputo. According to my ideal scenario, we would already have an apartment and would stay in the capital for good...
Seeing it all on paper makes me realize that my situation is going to improve drastically starting Sunday. I can make it till the weekend without falling apart, right? Right??? Yeah.
Thank you all for your kind words and positive vibrations.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Thursday Night Rant
I think something in the universe must have aligned yesterday and today that has made all of my frustrations and resentments for Chimoio come to surface. I just had a major breakdown with Rico and cried till snot ran down my face. The whole crisis ended up with me blubbering, "I can't stand it here anymore!" and crying on the bed for an hour.
I am seeing red. I hate this place and I am sick of the people I live with. Chimoio is depressing. The people here are depressing and boring and petty. In 9 months I have honestly not met a single local person I'd want to consider being friends with. The person here I have the best relationship with is our night guard Zeca, who barely speaks Portuguese and answers everything with an animated but blindly subservient, "Sim patrão, sim patrão, obrigado, obrigado." Yes, Boss. Thank you. You ask Zeca to unload a truck-full of bricks and he says thank you. Zeca is charismatic and charming, but I hate the relationship we all have with him. The sad part is that try as we might to change things, it's of no use. Zeca will always do whatever we tell him to and thank us in the process. We will always be the latest incarnation of the colonial assholes that ran this place for 500 years before they were chased out in 1975.
My housemates are driving me insane. I want them to shut up and go away. I can't stand to look at them or hear them speak. I'm at this level right now. It's all quite immature.
Rico, as always, is unbelievably patient. I'm aware of what a bitch I must be to be around right now, and it makes me feel even worse. I feel like I have no control over this rage and frustration I feel. I try and think about being non-judgemental, breathing, letting go of things that don't matter, trying to determine if the problem is my environment or if it's me.
Some days I have no doubt it's the environment. Nobody can stand Chimoio. We all deal with this hellhole in our own special ways. One of my housemates drinks and takes pills to zone out of life. Another is a workaholic and won't shut her mouth. She talks and talks and talks and carries both sides of the conversation out loud by herself. Another housemate gets angry and does things like slam doors, or he overeats to smother his anger. I think Rico deals by being unnecessarily patient, borderline ignoring the situation until he explodes. I become compulsively organized with my things. My closet is full of perfectly folded clothes, organized by color and style. My creams are all organized by tube size. My books are in alphabetical order. My computer files and directories make perfect organized sense. These are the things I can control in my life at the moment. The problem is that I get stressed and try and make my housemates be neat and clean as well. Obviously being bossy and compuslive only makes the discomfort I feel that much worse.
Other days...well, other days I have no doubt the problem is me. Today is one of them.
I want to go to Maputo this Sunday and never come back to Chimoio.
I am seeing red. I hate this place and I am sick of the people I live with. Chimoio is depressing. The people here are depressing and boring and petty. In 9 months I have honestly not met a single local person I'd want to consider being friends with. The person here I have the best relationship with is our night guard Zeca, who barely speaks Portuguese and answers everything with an animated but blindly subservient, "Sim patrão, sim patrão, obrigado, obrigado." Yes, Boss. Thank you. You ask Zeca to unload a truck-full of bricks and he says thank you. Zeca is charismatic and charming, but I hate the relationship we all have with him. The sad part is that try as we might to change things, it's of no use. Zeca will always do whatever we tell him to and thank us in the process. We will always be the latest incarnation of the colonial assholes that ran this place for 500 years before they were chased out in 1975.
My housemates are driving me insane. I want them to shut up and go away. I can't stand to look at them or hear them speak. I'm at this level right now. It's all quite immature.
Rico, as always, is unbelievably patient. I'm aware of what a bitch I must be to be around right now, and it makes me feel even worse. I feel like I have no control over this rage and frustration I feel. I try and think about being non-judgemental, breathing, letting go of things that don't matter, trying to determine if the problem is my environment or if it's me.
Some days I have no doubt it's the environment. Nobody can stand Chimoio. We all deal with this hellhole in our own special ways. One of my housemates drinks and takes pills to zone out of life. Another is a workaholic and won't shut her mouth. She talks and talks and talks and carries both sides of the conversation out loud by herself. Another housemate gets angry and does things like slam doors, or he overeats to smother his anger. I think Rico deals by being unnecessarily patient, borderline ignoring the situation until he explodes. I become compulsively organized with my things. My closet is full of perfectly folded clothes, organized by color and style. My creams are all organized by tube size. My books are in alphabetical order. My computer files and directories make perfect organized sense. These are the things I can control in my life at the moment. The problem is that I get stressed and try and make my housemates be neat and clean as well. Obviously being bossy and compuslive only makes the discomfort I feel that much worse.
Other days...well, other days I have no doubt the problem is me. Today is one of them.
I want to go to Maputo this Sunday and never come back to Chimoio.
Clarification
Thanks for your comments. In response...
I think that my work will be a million times more effective in Maputo, the capital where everything happens in this country, as opposed to Chimoio, a small, backwater town where not much happens beyond agricultural projects and NGO handouts.
I did not come here to work directly with communities and smallholder farmers. I did not come here to teach or train staff. While I am good at providing knowledge to people in a way that is meaningful to them, it is not the best use of my talents. Writing proposals and business plans, however, is.
Chimoio is simply not an efficient home base to carry out the kind of work Ricardo and I do together. He takes care of the commercial relationships and negotiations with clients; I then write business plans and proposals and together we present everything to potential funding organizations.
We can work from Chimoio, but it's not the right environment for me. I don't feel like I'm abandoning the work I set out to accomplish, or that I've found my limitations with regard to what I can do professionaly. Rather, I am abandoning what is, for me, an unhealthy and unbearable environment: community living with people that don't respect the natural give-and-take of living together, a small town full of small-minded people, and a set of factors in general that bring out my very worst (while obviously providing growth opportunities as well).
It's been well worth it. I've learned a lot. But I'm just not happy living in Chimoio in a household where I feel powerless. I don't think the problem is Africa. I venture to say I'd be just as unhappy living in a small town in Iowa in a shared house with people that don't hold the same values as I do regarding how a community should function. It is suffocating, and I am tired.
I like living alone, or with a partner or friend with common values.
I like urban environments.
I like communities full of culture, diversity, and smart, open-minded people.
I like having a life of my own - friends, activities, restaurants, bars.
I like being in an environment that doesn't aggressively bring out my worst.
I think that my work will be a million times more effective in Maputo, the capital where everything happens in this country, as opposed to Chimoio, a small, backwater town where not much happens beyond agricultural projects and NGO handouts.
I did not come here to work directly with communities and smallholder farmers. I did not come here to teach or train staff. While I am good at providing knowledge to people in a way that is meaningful to them, it is not the best use of my talents. Writing proposals and business plans, however, is.
Chimoio is simply not an efficient home base to carry out the kind of work Ricardo and I do together. He takes care of the commercial relationships and negotiations with clients; I then write business plans and proposals and together we present everything to potential funding organizations.
We can work from Chimoio, but it's not the right environment for me. I don't feel like I'm abandoning the work I set out to accomplish, or that I've found my limitations with regard to what I can do professionaly. Rather, I am abandoning what is, for me, an unhealthy and unbearable environment: community living with people that don't respect the natural give-and-take of living together, a small town full of small-minded people, and a set of factors in general that bring out my very worst (while obviously providing growth opportunities as well).
It's been well worth it. I've learned a lot. But I'm just not happy living in Chimoio in a household where I feel powerless. I don't think the problem is Africa. I venture to say I'd be just as unhappy living in a small town in Iowa in a shared house with people that don't hold the same values as I do regarding how a community should function. It is suffocating, and I am tired.
I like living alone, or with a partner or friend with common values.
I like urban environments.
I like communities full of culture, diversity, and smart, open-minded people.
I like having a life of my own - friends, activities, restaurants, bars.
I like being in an environment that doesn't aggressively bring out my worst.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
And Then There Were Four...
What at it’s peak was a communal crash pad for 4 brasilian guys, a girl from Portugal, a pregnant Mozambican, and moi, is now being slowly reduced to what looks like, from the outside at least, a normal household. Over the past few months, the baby was born and she and her mother moved to an apartment down the street, and one of the brasilian guys completed his volunteer assignment and went home. We found out today that our housemate Gemelli got an IT job in Tete, the province just to the north of us here in Manica, and will be moving there on Sunday to start a 1-year contract. So that leaves four of us…
Ricardo and I have been talking for some time now about the possibility of moving to Maputo and working from there. For business reasons alone, it makes sense. Agrolink’s main business is doing fundraising for projects, for which we have to establish good relationships with the donor community, banks, investment funds, and other people that influence how money is distributed in Mozambique. All of these people and entities are in Maputo, the capital. Right now we are constantly on the road between Chimoio and Maputo to meet with clients and find potential funding sources for our projects, and it is tiring and expensive.
Beyond the business reasons, living in Chimoio – for me at least – is simply not sustainable for much longer. Living in a small, underdeveloped town with no people other than my housemates that I can relate to makes me feel horribly desperate. Desperate for friends, for intelligent conversation outside work, for museums, live music, shops, and the kind of environment where I look around and recognize my values and interests in the people and places that surround me.
Here I walk out of the house and am stared at by people on the street in a way that makes me sick with Western guilt. I feel foreign here in the most ample sense of the word. I have not connected with Chimoio, nor with any Chimoioans since I arrived here nearly 9 months ago. I’ve found it horribly complicated to establish relationships with people here in Mozambique, even though everyone is friendly and open on the surface. The problems here are so deeply rooted in history, so complex and painful to confront, that they end up influencing all interactions in a way that makes me very, very uncomfortable.
Instead, I have retreated into this isolated world of work and communal living where a whole new set of problems come up. Learning to live with other people has proved to be excruciatingly difficult for me, drawing all the worst aspects of my personality to the surface. I feel completely powerless in this environment, and my way of coping isn’t always the most pleasant to say the least. But for all my compulsively organized and bossy moments, I can definitely say I’ve learned a hell of a lot about myself and what it takes to live and work in peace with other people. Chimoio has been an overwhelming experience, mostly positive in the end, but I am soooooooooo ready to leave it behind.
So with the exit of several housemates and business picking up, Ricardo and I are starting to form a concrete plan for moving to Maputo. It no longer makes sense, both financially and emotionally, for us to stay in Chimoio much longer. We are going to Maputo on Friday to present the final timber proposal to potential investors, and are going to take advantage of our time in the capital to start apartment-hunting. Ideally, we would move to Maputo in April but the timeline is still a bit uncertain…
Ah, on a somewhat unrelated note, we finished the timber proposal this morning at 2:30am. The Executive Summary kicks ass.
Ricardo and I have been talking for some time now about the possibility of moving to Maputo and working from there. For business reasons alone, it makes sense. Agrolink’s main business is doing fundraising for projects, for which we have to establish good relationships with the donor community, banks, investment funds, and other people that influence how money is distributed in Mozambique. All of these people and entities are in Maputo, the capital. Right now we are constantly on the road between Chimoio and Maputo to meet with clients and find potential funding sources for our projects, and it is tiring and expensive.
Beyond the business reasons, living in Chimoio – for me at least – is simply not sustainable for much longer. Living in a small, underdeveloped town with no people other than my housemates that I can relate to makes me feel horribly desperate. Desperate for friends, for intelligent conversation outside work, for museums, live music, shops, and the kind of environment where I look around and recognize my values and interests in the people and places that surround me.
Here I walk out of the house and am stared at by people on the street in a way that makes me sick with Western guilt. I feel foreign here in the most ample sense of the word. I have not connected with Chimoio, nor with any Chimoioans since I arrived here nearly 9 months ago. I’ve found it horribly complicated to establish relationships with people here in Mozambique, even though everyone is friendly and open on the surface. The problems here are so deeply rooted in history, so complex and painful to confront, that they end up influencing all interactions in a way that makes me very, very uncomfortable.
Instead, I have retreated into this isolated world of work and communal living where a whole new set of problems come up. Learning to live with other people has proved to be excruciatingly difficult for me, drawing all the worst aspects of my personality to the surface. I feel completely powerless in this environment, and my way of coping isn’t always the most pleasant to say the least. But for all my compulsively organized and bossy moments, I can definitely say I’ve learned a hell of a lot about myself and what it takes to live and work in peace with other people. Chimoio has been an overwhelming experience, mostly positive in the end, but I am soooooooooo ready to leave it behind.
So with the exit of several housemates and business picking up, Ricardo and I are starting to form a concrete plan for moving to Maputo. It no longer makes sense, both financially and emotionally, for us to stay in Chimoio much longer. We are going to Maputo on Friday to present the final timber proposal to potential investors, and are going to take advantage of our time in the capital to start apartment-hunting. Ideally, we would move to Maputo in April but the timeline is still a bit uncertain…
Ah, on a somewhat unrelated note, we finished the timber proposal this morning at 2:30am. The Executive Summary kicks ass.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Blah.
We're in the final stretch of the timber proposal. Deadline is in approximately 1 hour to send the narrative and financial models to our client. The only thing left between me and a nice, cold glass of juice is the stupid Executive Summary. I hate Executive Summaries. I have especially little motivation to write this one, as I have serious "issues" with the timber client and I am really, really tired after a not so fabulous day.
To start, I moved from the mattress crater back down to the floor with Rico last night without much success in sleeping. Then my dad, bless his heart, made his first international call in - oh, I don't know - 45 years and managed to wake me up at 3:15am. Dad, it was wonderful to talk to you, but please remember the next time you call that there is a 9-hour time difference between New Mexico and Mozambique!!!
So I work up in a horrible mood with a backache...And then I had to run for the toilet. We ate pizza yesterday from one of the two restaurants in Chimoio, and it didn't go so well for the old digestive system. Everyone in the house got the runs. I got hit particularly bad, and have spent the rest of the day drinking juice and orange Fanta and having everything go right on through my bowels in a matter of minutes.
Also, I realized today that I haven't been out of the house in 7 WHOLE DAYS.
I am stir-crazy and tired and ill in the gut...not a good combination. Now, on to that Executive Summary!
Ah, by the way - I don't drink gin and tonic copiously every day. I re-read my post and felt pangs of guilt as I imagined my relatives reading this and thinking that Africa has turned me into an alkie.
To start, I moved from the mattress crater back down to the floor with Rico last night without much success in sleeping. Then my dad, bless his heart, made his first international call in - oh, I don't know - 45 years and managed to wake me up at 3:15am. Dad, it was wonderful to talk to you, but please remember the next time you call that there is a 9-hour time difference between New Mexico and Mozambique!!!
So I work up in a horrible mood with a backache...And then I had to run for the toilet. We ate pizza yesterday from one of the two restaurants in Chimoio, and it didn't go so well for the old digestive system. Everyone in the house got the runs. I got hit particularly bad, and have spent the rest of the day drinking juice and orange Fanta and having everything go right on through my bowels in a matter of minutes.
Also, I realized today that I haven't been out of the house in 7 WHOLE DAYS.
I am stir-crazy and tired and ill in the gut...not a good combination. Now, on to that Executive Summary!
Ah, by the way - I don't drink gin and tonic copiously every day. I re-read my post and felt pangs of guilt as I imagined my relatives reading this and thinking that Africa has turned me into an alkie.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Oh, the Horror!
A short list of things that I didn’t used to eat/use/consume before moving to Africa and now do so copiously, on a weekly if not daily basis.
Gin and Tonic – Back when my high school boyfriend had the habit of hiding bottles of gin in his laundry hamper and taking swigs straight from the bottle, I couldn’t even smell the juniper-infused liquor without wanting to vomit. Now, in the land of poorly stocked restaurants and Malaria, gin and tonic is my new favourite, a drink for all occasions.
Canned Vienna Sausages – Sometimes cocktail, sometimes full-sized wieners. Sometimes cooked, sometimes taken right out of the can and placed inside a roll with ketchup, brine and all.
Canned Tuna with Mayonnaise – I hate mayonnaise. I hate canned tuna. I eat them mixed together with onions to make a gourmet filling for sandwiches at least weekly.
Vegetables that Appear to be Slightly Rotten – Before I’d throw away the whole tomato or onion or whatever that was sporting mold or a mushy bruise on the outside. Now I cut away the nasty parts and – voilá – a perfectly good vegetable is salvaged. I’d say that my criteria in general for when something is spoiled or expired or is unfit for human consumption has changed dramatically.
Sodas – In a land where there is chronic malnutrition and poverty, there isn’t much of a market for diet sodas. I am now a regular guzzler of Coke, Fanta, and Lemon Twist (the local version of Sprite, much like Squirt which I miss dearly from my childhood in the US).
Bar Soap as Shampoo – Okay, I have only done this 4 or 5 times since moving to Chimoio, usually when we travel and our hosts fail to provide us with guest toiletries. But for someone with fine hair that tangles like there’s no tomorrow, this is quite the low point.
Insect Repellent with DEET – My mom tells a story about how she and her husband went fishing in the Amazon and the DEET repellent they used ate the paint off the fishing rods. Part of my nightly ritual is to slather my legs, arms, and torso in oily repellent. Scary…
Do-It-Yourself Wax Strips – Suffice to say the last time I went to a salon in Mozambique to get waxed, the woman managed to pull off a layer of my skin.
Dial-Up Internet – Oh, how I took my high speed connection for granted. I used to think paying for a wireless connection was absurd. Now I gladly pay $150 per month to use a shitty dial-up connection that 85% of the time won’t open pages that have photos or images.
Pirated B-Grade Films on DVD – These are everywhere. Guys walk around on the streets with big stacks of DVDs that come with 5 feature films per disc. We’re talking quality films by actors like Steven Segal, Wesley Snipes, and The Rock. My initial guess was that the DVDs were manufactured in China but after an enlightening conversation with a street vendor, we discovered that they are, in fact, made in Colombia. Like the vegetables, my criteria for what classifies as a good movie has plummeted big time.
Gin and Tonic – Back when my high school boyfriend had the habit of hiding bottles of gin in his laundry hamper and taking swigs straight from the bottle, I couldn’t even smell the juniper-infused liquor without wanting to vomit. Now, in the land of poorly stocked restaurants and Malaria, gin and tonic is my new favourite, a drink for all occasions.
Canned Vienna Sausages – Sometimes cocktail, sometimes full-sized wieners. Sometimes cooked, sometimes taken right out of the can and placed inside a roll with ketchup, brine and all.
Canned Tuna with Mayonnaise – I hate mayonnaise. I hate canned tuna. I eat them mixed together with onions to make a gourmet filling for sandwiches at least weekly.
Vegetables that Appear to be Slightly Rotten – Before I’d throw away the whole tomato or onion or whatever that was sporting mold or a mushy bruise on the outside. Now I cut away the nasty parts and – voilá – a perfectly good vegetable is salvaged. I’d say that my criteria in general for when something is spoiled or expired or is unfit for human consumption has changed dramatically.
Sodas – In a land where there is chronic malnutrition and poverty, there isn’t much of a market for diet sodas. I am now a regular guzzler of Coke, Fanta, and Lemon Twist (the local version of Sprite, much like Squirt which I miss dearly from my childhood in the US).
Bar Soap as Shampoo – Okay, I have only done this 4 or 5 times since moving to Chimoio, usually when we travel and our hosts fail to provide us with guest toiletries. But for someone with fine hair that tangles like there’s no tomorrow, this is quite the low point.
Insect Repellent with DEET – My mom tells a story about how she and her husband went fishing in the Amazon and the DEET repellent they used ate the paint off the fishing rods. Part of my nightly ritual is to slather my legs, arms, and torso in oily repellent. Scary…
Do-It-Yourself Wax Strips – Suffice to say the last time I went to a salon in Mozambique to get waxed, the woman managed to pull off a layer of my skin.
Dial-Up Internet – Oh, how I took my high speed connection for granted. I used to think paying for a wireless connection was absurd. Now I gladly pay $150 per month to use a shitty dial-up connection that 85% of the time won’t open pages that have photos or images.
Pirated B-Grade Films on DVD – These are everywhere. Guys walk around on the streets with big stacks of DVDs that come with 5 feature films per disc. We’re talking quality films by actors like Steven Segal, Wesley Snipes, and The Rock. My initial guess was that the DVDs were manufactured in China but after an enlightening conversation with a street vendor, we discovered that they are, in fact, made in Colombia. Like the vegetables, my criteria for what classifies as a good movie has plummeted big time.
Lizard, Lizard in the Yard
So the superstitions continue...
On the heels of the goat story, my housemates and I were enjoying a bit of late afternoon sun in our dirt lot of a backyard when one of our Rhodesian Ridebacks, Capitu, suddenly started snarling at what looked like a fat twig on the ground. As we approached to check out what on earth was wrong with the dog, she suddenly yiped and pulled her paw back, limping slightly as she retreated away from what we now recognized as a very strange lizard.
This thing was sinister - perfect gray-green camoflauge, back arched, mouth fully open to reveal an almost hot orange lining, hissing and assuming what looked to me like a full-on attack position. The lizard was maybe 5 inches long at the most, but all of us kept a respectful distance. Like snakes and spiders, the lizard struck at some primeval part of our brain that instinctively makes us feel fear and retreat.
I suppose that same primitive part of the brain was behind BL's reaction to pick up a huge rock and hurl it at the lizard. As soon as I realized he was intent on smashing the little beast, I freaked out. I pleaded with him to find a better solution, that the lizard was harmless, there was no need to kill it... For as much as the lizard freaked me out, I certainly didn't want to witness it being smashed by a rock. We finally came to a consensus: Rico got a piece of paper, rolled it up a bit, and managed to scoop up the lizard and relocate it on the neighbor's side of the fence.
Later, curious about the lizard, I spent about an hour searching on the internet until I found a match. Apparently, it was a Flap-Necked Chameleon, an animal regarded by many Africans as having supernatural powers and you'd be hard pressed to find a rural Mozambican willing to relocate the chameleon, much less think about smashing it with a rock.
I choose to interpret it as a good omen that the chameleon appeared in the first place, and an ever better sign that we spared its life...
In other news, our cable TV was cut off yesterday. Why? Oh, come on. You know why...
THE BILL WASN'T PAID!
Unlike electricity and water and a phone line, having TV isn't something I particularly care about, so I'm not going to step in and pay the damn bill. Rico and I usually play the responsible roles of mom and dad in our little community and pay the bills on time, insist on a mimimal level of order in the house, and keep everything and everyone in line. Not this time! I'm curious to see for how long my housemates' laziness is stronger than the desire to watch the models on Fashion TV or the latest episode of PowerPuff Girls (BL and Gemelli have especially strange tastes when it comes to entertainment).
Personally, this is the one late bill that doesn't bother me in the least. I like my life in Chimoio much better when there is no TV to distract me. I spend less time sitting on the fake leather couches watching trash, procrastinate less, go to sleep earlier, and dedicate my time to much more productive activities like art projects and reading.
That said, I'm off to have some cereal and knit a few rows in the latest scarf I'm making. Tchau!
On the heels of the goat story, my housemates and I were enjoying a bit of late afternoon sun in our dirt lot of a backyard when one of our Rhodesian Ridebacks, Capitu, suddenly started snarling at what looked like a fat twig on the ground. As we approached to check out what on earth was wrong with the dog, she suddenly yiped and pulled her paw back, limping slightly as she retreated away from what we now recognized as a very strange lizard.
This thing was sinister - perfect gray-green camoflauge, back arched, mouth fully open to reveal an almost hot orange lining, hissing and assuming what looked to me like a full-on attack position. The lizard was maybe 5 inches long at the most, but all of us kept a respectful distance. Like snakes and spiders, the lizard struck at some primeval part of our brain that instinctively makes us feel fear and retreat.
I suppose that same primitive part of the brain was behind BL's reaction to pick up a huge rock and hurl it at the lizard. As soon as I realized he was intent on smashing the little beast, I freaked out. I pleaded with him to find a better solution, that the lizard was harmless, there was no need to kill it... For as much as the lizard freaked me out, I certainly didn't want to witness it being smashed by a rock. We finally came to a consensus: Rico got a piece of paper, rolled it up a bit, and managed to scoop up the lizard and relocate it on the neighbor's side of the fence.
Later, curious about the lizard, I spent about an hour searching on the internet until I found a match. Apparently, it was a Flap-Necked Chameleon, an animal regarded by many Africans as having supernatural powers and you'd be hard pressed to find a rural Mozambican willing to relocate the chameleon, much less think about smashing it with a rock.
I choose to interpret it as a good omen that the chameleon appeared in the first place, and an ever better sign that we spared its life...
In other news, our cable TV was cut off yesterday. Why? Oh, come on. You know why...
THE BILL WASN'T PAID!
Unlike electricity and water and a phone line, having TV isn't something I particularly care about, so I'm not going to step in and pay the damn bill. Rico and I usually play the responsible roles of mom and dad in our little community and pay the bills on time, insist on a mimimal level of order in the house, and keep everything and everyone in line. Not this time! I'm curious to see for how long my housemates' laziness is stronger than the desire to watch the models on Fashion TV or the latest episode of PowerPuff Girls (BL and Gemelli have especially strange tastes when it comes to entertainment).
Personally, this is the one late bill that doesn't bother me in the least. I like my life in Chimoio much better when there is no TV to distract me. I spend less time sitting on the fake leather couches watching trash, procrastinate less, go to sleep earlier, and dedicate my time to much more productive activities like art projects and reading.
That said, I'm off to have some cereal and knit a few rows in the latest scarf I'm making. Tchau!
Thursday, February 02, 2006
The Goat with the Coin Necklace
Rico and I were supposed to go to Beira yesterday to get the mattress and office furniture but, as so often happens in Africa, things did not go as planned. The Land Cruiser we were going to borrow for the trip was in even worse shape than the last time we drove it, and Rico didn't want to take the chance. Apparently the suspension or the shocks or something along those lines was totally broken (I don't understand much about how cars work, although I can check my oil level, put water in the radiator, and add windshield wiper fluid).
So we stayed in Chimoio for yet another monotonous day of VH1, internet, sweaty fake leather couches, and work on a proposal that has me pretty burned out. Last night I slept alone in the mattress crater, while Ricardo took over my side of the floor bed with the added cushioning from the yoga mat. We both slept reasonably well, but I was so looking forward to a new mattress. We likely won't make it to Beira until next week, though, because we have to finalize the timber proposal and turn in the narrative and financial model to the client by Monday.
Yesterday was actually declared a holiday in Chimoio because the President of Mozambique, Armando Guebuza, payed a visit to our fair town. Unfortunately, we didn't get to observe the holiday...
Anyhow, our brasilian friend Leo who teaches occasionally at the Chimoio Agricultural Institute just down the road told us a hilarious story related to President Guebuza's visit. Apparently, the students and teachers at the Agricultural Institute have been plagued with a pretty serious run of bad luck. The rain was late, crops dried and then became water-logged when it finally did rain buckets two weeks ago, families have been stricken with Malaria, business has been slow, and grades were apparently pretty poor all around. So everyone decided that Chimoio is under some sort of curse that was causing all the recent bad luck.
To remedy the situation, the Agricultural Institute called in a healer who told them what had to be done. First, he called for a goat. The healer then instructed each person suffering from the curse to get a coin and transfer all their misfortune inside the metal. Then, all the bad luck coins were strung together into a necklace of sorts and placed around the goat's neck in such a fashion that it would never fall off. The healer then directed that the goat be set free inside the Institute. He then gave a final word of advice: if anyone tried to take the necklace of coins from the goat, all of the back luck and curses affecting Chimoio would be transferred to this person.
Rural Mozambicans tend to be a pretty supersticious lot, so not only is everyone at the Agricultural Institute afraid to take the goat's coin necklace, they are all afraid to even *touch* the goat. I suppose this wouldn't be a problem, but the goat has taken a liking to the campus and has stubbornly stuck around for the past 2 weeks. Worse than a cursed goat hanging around, President Guebuza's tour of Chimoio yesterday was supposed to include the Agricultural Institute.
Leo told us that everyone was getting pretty desperate: they were too afraid to touch to goat or even shoo it away, but even more afraid of the shame that they would pass should the President see an old billy running around the classrooms and helping himself to the plants in the experimental farm on the campus. What a predicament! I can't wait to find out what happened the next time Leo comes over for a visit.
Okay, time to shower and get to work... Hope you all have a great day.
So we stayed in Chimoio for yet another monotonous day of VH1, internet, sweaty fake leather couches, and work on a proposal that has me pretty burned out. Last night I slept alone in the mattress crater, while Ricardo took over my side of the floor bed with the added cushioning from the yoga mat. We both slept reasonably well, but I was so looking forward to a new mattress. We likely won't make it to Beira until next week, though, because we have to finalize the timber proposal and turn in the narrative and financial model to the client by Monday.
Yesterday was actually declared a holiday in Chimoio because the President of Mozambique, Armando Guebuza, payed a visit to our fair town. Unfortunately, we didn't get to observe the holiday...
Anyhow, our brasilian friend Leo who teaches occasionally at the Chimoio Agricultural Institute just down the road told us a hilarious story related to President Guebuza's visit. Apparently, the students and teachers at the Agricultural Institute have been plagued with a pretty serious run of bad luck. The rain was late, crops dried and then became water-logged when it finally did rain buckets two weeks ago, families have been stricken with Malaria, business has been slow, and grades were apparently pretty poor all around. So everyone decided that Chimoio is under some sort of curse that was causing all the recent bad luck.
To remedy the situation, the Agricultural Institute called in a healer who told them what had to be done. First, he called for a goat. The healer then instructed each person suffering from the curse to get a coin and transfer all their misfortune inside the metal. Then, all the bad luck coins were strung together into a necklace of sorts and placed around the goat's neck in such a fashion that it would never fall off. The healer then directed that the goat be set free inside the Institute. He then gave a final word of advice: if anyone tried to take the necklace of coins from the goat, all of the back luck and curses affecting Chimoio would be transferred to this person.
Rural Mozambicans tend to be a pretty supersticious lot, so not only is everyone at the Agricultural Institute afraid to take the goat's coin necklace, they are all afraid to even *touch* the goat. I suppose this wouldn't be a problem, but the goat has taken a liking to the campus and has stubbornly stuck around for the past 2 weeks. Worse than a cursed goat hanging around, President Guebuza's tour of Chimoio yesterday was supposed to include the Agricultural Institute.
Leo told us that everyone was getting pretty desperate: they were too afraid to touch to goat or even shoo it away, but even more afraid of the shame that they would pass should the President see an old billy running around the classrooms and helping himself to the plants in the experimental farm on the campus. What a predicament! I can't wait to find out what happened the next time Leo comes over for a visit.
Okay, time to shower and get to work... Hope you all have a great day.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Maputo by a South African
Found this online today and thought it was a great article on Maputo.
Revisiting MozambiqueMonday, 08 September @ 20:14:02 Topic: Wits News
"I’ve done it again. Once more I have singularly failed to get past Maputo. Every time I take the trip to Mozambique I promise myself that this time, this time I will press on and reach the fabled beaches of the North: Maxixe, Xai-xai, Inhambane… And then somehow I never do. Maputo, ardent steaming crumbled city by the sea, it seems that I can never leave you behind.
Maputo is six hundred kilometres to the north of Durban, and you could say that it is Durban’s torrid cousin. You can pick out the family resemblances: the broad suburban boulevards, the roadside march of flame trees, the all-pervading mugginess. But Durban is an Anglo-Saxon creation. And if Durban is English Africa, then Maputo is Africa translated into Portuguese. And if you sit at a street-side café just before siesta time, sipping a bitter coffee and idly listening to dealmaking going down at the table alongside, it’s clear which translation is the more beautiful.
Sitting at Chicken Piri-piri with my cousin Guinivere: we slouch on stainless-steel tubular chairs and chat, keeping an eye on the passing scene. Service has improved immeasurably since the last time I was here, four years ago. The waiters seem to be the same aging crew, dressed in the same colonial black-and-white, but a two-hour meal-time has been slimmed down to a snappy forty minutes.
The road island in front of us is crammed with curio vendors, selling everything from the indispensable batiks to lovingly hand-carved pieces of ivory, fresh from under-policed game reserves.
As ever, the citizens of Maputo are impeccably turned out. The passing businessmen are dressed in the Latin manner, with broad-collared shirts in shades of bright pastel, open at the neck. The more casual ones pass by with their shirts untucked. A gaggle of schoolgirls flounce past in non-regulation footgear, hair artfully kinked, ties worn in a Y down the front of their snow-white shirts. A self-assured young buck decked out in camo gear and a revolutionary bandanna struts up and down along the road island, yelling out comments and wisecracks.
One of the most delightful legacies of Portuguese rule are the mulatta women. As an acquaintance once said to me while we sipped beer and watched the passing parade: "I pity the white girls in Maputo. They don’t really stand a chance." They pale in comparison.
Black, white and latte, the women sail past in bright-hued African robes, or sashay along in skirts and high heels. The country is as poor as a church-mouse, but the most hard-up city-dweller dresses like it’s a vocation.
High heels especially are a vocation in a city like this: these chic senhoritas are gold medallists of urban perambulation. Their feet deftly side-step the potholes and the yawning cracks in the pavement, artfully skirting the treacherous patches of rubble. Decades ago the Portuguese planted handsome trees down the length of these boulevards, but over the years of the civil war their great vital roots rose up, pulverising cement, pushing aside concrete slabs. The debris lies there still: no-one has attended to it yet.
Reconstruction is slow. Throughout the war, Frelimo ring-fenced the capital and held it. Much of the rest of the country went to hell, a cruel inferno of landmines and limb-chopping massacre. Maputo was spared; Maputo was left to follow a gentler curve of decay.
On the first afternoon, before lunch, we go for a stroll down the Avenida Friedrich Engels. The name is austere; the avenue is not. It borders the sea, and the houses that line it are the haunts of the influential and the well-to-do. Walls are high and freshly painted, armed guards dot the driveways, the cars are big and glossy. Past the first-world embassies drive the wives on their way to pick up the kids from karate lessons at the international school. This is where the rich and renowned retreat after a day overseeing the nation’s affairs.
But no-one has seen to the park. It lies across the way, wedged between Friedrich Engels and the sea, a narrow bumpy plain of yellowing grass, unevenly thrusting its blades at the neglected trees.
You could grow dizzy, standing on that road, turning your head from left to right. On the one hand, sure-footed power immures itself in moneyed mansions. On the other, yellow untended ground surges past venerable trees, gathers strength at the brink, and plunges precipitously down to the sea.
We cross the road and plough in, picking past grounded flurries of newspaper and plastic. The park is almost unpeopled: a couple sit on a circular bench that barely contains the trunk of a tree. A stroller makes his way down a path; two middle-aged men converse in the shade. At one end of the park a stairway leads down to nowhere. The grass rustles about our shins as we walk; if it were any longer we’d be on the look-out for snakes. Nobody has seen to the park.
Perhaps in time all of the parks will be attended to. The parks and people and the streets and the buildings and the roots of the trees: so I believe. Socialism may be dead, but the spirit lives on here. In the best of worlds the government will turn the tools of Big Capital toward pressing social ends. And that is a part of this city’s charm: the sense that in time it will all be paved over, made over into something bright and new. So I walk the streets in a state of premonitory nostalgia, knowing that one day all of these scenes will be gone.
The city is a wreck but blazing life surges and streams over its dilapidated surfaces. The short skirts and the high heels assuredly pick their way over the decrepit pavements. Near the presidential palace, stunning green-and-blue peacocks hop nimbly over tectonic cracks in the sidewalk. Gilded teenagers josh back and forth as they swagger down shabby broken streets on their way home from the finest schools in the land.
There are more paradoxes than these. Unemployment is high, but people walk with a sense of purpose. The state is corrupt, but things get done. Twenty years of civil war, and the people are the friendliest in the region. The army base in the north-west of town is the most dependable dealer of drugs. Crime is low, even though a decade ago Kalashnikovs were as cheap as lives. (The government solved the AK-47 problem by outlawing the private ownership of weapons. Radical notion.) In fact, your biggest danger in Maputo these days is the police.
On the morning of the second day I had my run-in with third-world cops. Travel tip: never cross the road in Maputo without your passport. In my particular case the problem was compounded because I’d lost my room key moments before. It’s one thing to escape immediate arrest and blag your way back to your front gate, but it’s quite another to stand there and feign really bad Portuguese for fully half an hour while you fend off irritable constabular grabs at your arm and the staff run about looking for the spare key, discovering it doesn’t work, and then taking a hammer and chisel to the door in order to get at the passport in the back pocket of your jeans.
After all of that my English cousin was pretty shaken, and I wasn’t feeling too hot myself. Breakfast was in order.
After a very late night, it’s pleasant to start the day at a pavement café. Prices are a little lower than in South Africa, and the coffee is strong and good. You pick from a range of pastries and toasted bread. At the moment the métical is trading at 3,000 to the rand, and most places drop the last three zeros when they present you with the bill, leaving pleasingly denominated amounts: coffee, 15,-.
It’s just after ten, and the joint is surprisingly busy; suited businessmen cluster at adjacent tables. Breakfast on their way to a late start to the day, perhaps, or would it be a mid-morning snack? Street vendors swoop and swarm; they are unblinkingly ignored by the indifferent patrons. Maputo has a refreshingly forthright approach to the street-vendor problem. Some places have guard-rails between the tables and the street; the bigger ones hire baton-wielding guards. It’s a fairly amicable stand-off: if diners see something they want they just raise a finger.
Newspaper vendors pace back and forth, parading their wares. The headlines scream a story that a South African general plotted with President Chissano to kill Samora Machel, but the serious papers aren’t touching it.
I speak Portanhol, which is espaňol masquerading as Portuguese: Spanish channeled through the nasal passages, you might say. I lean over and ask the businessmen what they make of the tale. "I don’t believe it." They are unanimous. "No, no, not him. He wouldn’t do that."
Pause. "One of the other high-ups, maybe..."
It’s not surprising that the bogeyman in this tale is South African. We are despised, after all, by our Mozambican neighbours. It’s the truth: we are not loved. And it’s not hard to see why. For if Mozambique is our Mexico, then we are their U.S. of A. Black or white, we come across the border in our big air-conditioned cars, throwing our rands and dollars about, buying up the land, closing extortionate deals, speaking loudly in English and expecting to be understood.
We built a spanking new road to Maputo not long ago, so we could truck goods down to the harbour. That highway looks like we annexed a fifteen-metre-wide strip of Mozambican land, tarred it, and lined it with yellow SOS phones all the way down to the sea. But it is seen as a channel of deliverance too, and it has attracted a sort of official cargo cult. "Mantenha a EN4 limpia", say signs along the route: "Keep the N4 clean." And, sure enough, you see women labouring away at the roadside, gathering the litter and sweeping up with handheld brooms.
After years of giving in to easy digs at expat Americans, it’s unpleasant to find yourself on the receiving end of such mingled awe and disdain. Now I know how decent Americans must feel when they travel. Even in the short time I was there the incidents stacked up.
At a trendy bar I spoke to a young Mozambican, and the first thing he said was, "Oh no! South Africa! And I’ve just been saying such terrible things about your country!"
And at the Caixa nightclub, I danced with a girl and bought her a drink. Leaning back with her elbows on the bar, she asked me where I was from. "Africa do Sul," I said. She took it quite well. It’s not like she flinched. But she sort of paused, and then nodded with a curious air of resolve. As if saying to herself, "Well, I’m dancing with a South African. Okay. Okay."
And then when I was hassling with the cops something very interesting happened. The watchman pleaded with them in Portuguese, "Please, he’s just a visitor here. He’s on holiday. He can’t know all the laws of the land."
The temperature rose immediately. One of the skinny young cops spoke heatedly, his voice sharpening and hardening. It was a little fast for me to follow, but it went something like this: "Listen, do you know what they do in South Africa? There they find you with no passport and they don’t wait. They don’t argue. They throw you in a van and they lock you up and then they ship you back home."
Perhaps one can be too hasty in bad-mouthing third-world cops…
On the second afternoon we go to visit the art museum. I generally make a stop there whenever I’m in Maputo, but still it takes us an age to find it, fighting through rush-hour traffic and one-way streets, over potholes and rubble and dust, past Muslim-capped war cripples propelling antique three-wheeler chairs through rivers of cars. Some of the streets are labelled London-style, with blue plaques on the sides of the houses. Others have the names on poles. The streets in Maputo are a monument to everlasting Socialism: Go down Avenida Mao Tse-Tung, and take a left into Karl Marx. If you reach Vladimir Lénine you’ve gone too far…
Our map is abysmal. After we cross a major intersection that has a four-way signpost in the middle with no lettering on it at all, we decide to park and go by foot. Even then, we nearly walk right past the nondescript building with the discreet white lettering on its glass doors: Museo Nacional das Artes.
For once, a country’s National Art Museum lives up to its name: this one has no foreign art in it at all. I don’t suppose Mozambique can afford it. A polished-wood banister leads you upstairs. At the top of the steps, at your back, a great canvas by Malangatana erases the wall. It is easy to play up the Latinity of Mozambique, but Malangatana’s style is something else: a patchy colonial education has let him take up European tools for African ends. The painting is a cacophonous concord of colours: tortured reds, ochres, jungle greens. Malangantana is a sort of indigenous Hieronymous Bosch, and the painting is crammed with haunted figures, faces betraying bewilderment, madness, sorrow, fear. They are jammed up against evil bird-men, disembodied mouths, ownerless eyes, all curving chimerically into each other in a crowded promiscuity of pain. Here on the top of the stairs Maputo’s genial surface drops away, and you look down a pit twenty years deep, a pit of war and shame.
The exhibition hall itself is tiny, a single salon-sized room, and we are the only visitors. We wander among canvases and sculptures. The Makonde of northern Mozambique were surrealists who took no lessons from Dali or Tanguy. Consider this work in dark wood by Celestino Tomás: a monstrous man-beast - Goofy with fangs – lasciviously eats his own foot, all the while reposing unselfconsciously on the head and limbs of a grumpy megacephalic, the latter resignedly performing a sort of obscene yoga in order to keep him hoisted in the air.
We stay for less than an hour. I always make a point of coming back here, but the museum never changes much: it’s a minute enclave of whitewashed order amid the tender chaos of rebirth that storms on outside. The first time I came here, the bathroom was without running water. But at the basins the staff had thoughtfully laid out: a jug, a cloth, a piece of soap, and a towel.
On my last night in Maputo, somewhere past midnight, I find myself deep in beer-sodden conversation with a blond-haired Californian communist. The language is broken Portuguese. The place is a rutted rubbled side-street outside a nightclub. The crowd seems to prefer outside to inside – there’s more room on the dancefloor than out here in the road. The atmosphere is archly Latino –signage in Spanish: muy caliente, very hot; the DJ pushing out a steady stream of Macarena followed by TBD followed by Ritchie Valens followed by Ricky Martin. Nothing I don’t recognise: it’s like any Western nightclub, except that it’s better-lit, and any tune without a sway to its beat is stopped at the door.
Jason is an anthropologist in Africa. He’s telling me that socialism will prevail. It’s all too ridiculous. An American Communist: the last of his tribe. Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself fighting the other corner.
I tell him that Socialism is dead. By now we’ve switched to caipirinhas. And English, thank God. I share with him my vision of a post-socialist Mozambique, harnessing Big Capital in the service of old ideals. Jason snorts. "Frelimo has sold out," he informs me. He leans in. "Listen," he confides, "capitalism has failed." I confess I am a little startled. Haven’t heard that one in a while. Seeing my scepticism, he takes a step back. "Look around you," he cries, sweeping his arm theatrically to take in the fragmented street, the neon shop windows with nothing on display. "See what foreign investment has wrought," gesturing grandly at the cracked and crumbling facades. He spreads both arms wide, his face aglow with mock beneficence. "Savour the fruits of liberalisation, my brother!"
I should remind him of the civil war. And twenty years of Mozambican socialism. I should tell him that what this place reminds me of most is Eastern Germany in 1992. I should, I really should, but I’m laughing too hard for the words to get out.
Losing an argument is a great way to make a new friend. A shot of tequila, and he invites me over to meet his buddies. Three feisty mulatto youths, decked out in shades of khaki (red star at the breast) and peaked guerrilla caps. The makings of a revolutionary cell, I muse. The leader, the loyalist and the intellectual. The leader has long braided hair; the thinker is thin and intense with black horn-rims. I’m loving it. True to form, the intellectual weighs in with his latest grand idea, voice brimming with quiet intensity. They’ve come up with a brilliant big-name beer ad, he says. This is no mere rhetoric: they’ve conceptualised it and shot it, and now they want to market it. Do I know anyone in advertising?
I don’t need to write an article on Maputo. Maputo writes itself. - Michael Prytz"
This article comes from journalism.co.zahttp://www.journalism.co.za/
Revisiting MozambiqueMonday, 08 September @ 20:14:02 Topic: Wits News
"I’ve done it again. Once more I have singularly failed to get past Maputo. Every time I take the trip to Mozambique I promise myself that this time, this time I will press on and reach the fabled beaches of the North: Maxixe, Xai-xai, Inhambane… And then somehow I never do. Maputo, ardent steaming crumbled city by the sea, it seems that I can never leave you behind.
Maputo is six hundred kilometres to the north of Durban, and you could say that it is Durban’s torrid cousin. You can pick out the family resemblances: the broad suburban boulevards, the roadside march of flame trees, the all-pervading mugginess. But Durban is an Anglo-Saxon creation. And if Durban is English Africa, then Maputo is Africa translated into Portuguese. And if you sit at a street-side café just before siesta time, sipping a bitter coffee and idly listening to dealmaking going down at the table alongside, it’s clear which translation is the more beautiful.
Sitting at Chicken Piri-piri with my cousin Guinivere: we slouch on stainless-steel tubular chairs and chat, keeping an eye on the passing scene. Service has improved immeasurably since the last time I was here, four years ago. The waiters seem to be the same aging crew, dressed in the same colonial black-and-white, but a two-hour meal-time has been slimmed down to a snappy forty minutes.
The road island in front of us is crammed with curio vendors, selling everything from the indispensable batiks to lovingly hand-carved pieces of ivory, fresh from under-policed game reserves.
As ever, the citizens of Maputo are impeccably turned out. The passing businessmen are dressed in the Latin manner, with broad-collared shirts in shades of bright pastel, open at the neck. The more casual ones pass by with their shirts untucked. A gaggle of schoolgirls flounce past in non-regulation footgear, hair artfully kinked, ties worn in a Y down the front of their snow-white shirts. A self-assured young buck decked out in camo gear and a revolutionary bandanna struts up and down along the road island, yelling out comments and wisecracks.
One of the most delightful legacies of Portuguese rule are the mulatta women. As an acquaintance once said to me while we sipped beer and watched the passing parade: "I pity the white girls in Maputo. They don’t really stand a chance." They pale in comparison.
Black, white and latte, the women sail past in bright-hued African robes, or sashay along in skirts and high heels. The country is as poor as a church-mouse, but the most hard-up city-dweller dresses like it’s a vocation.
High heels especially are a vocation in a city like this: these chic senhoritas are gold medallists of urban perambulation. Their feet deftly side-step the potholes and the yawning cracks in the pavement, artfully skirting the treacherous patches of rubble. Decades ago the Portuguese planted handsome trees down the length of these boulevards, but over the years of the civil war their great vital roots rose up, pulverising cement, pushing aside concrete slabs. The debris lies there still: no-one has attended to it yet.
Reconstruction is slow. Throughout the war, Frelimo ring-fenced the capital and held it. Much of the rest of the country went to hell, a cruel inferno of landmines and limb-chopping massacre. Maputo was spared; Maputo was left to follow a gentler curve of decay.
On the first afternoon, before lunch, we go for a stroll down the Avenida Friedrich Engels. The name is austere; the avenue is not. It borders the sea, and the houses that line it are the haunts of the influential and the well-to-do. Walls are high and freshly painted, armed guards dot the driveways, the cars are big and glossy. Past the first-world embassies drive the wives on their way to pick up the kids from karate lessons at the international school. This is where the rich and renowned retreat after a day overseeing the nation’s affairs.
But no-one has seen to the park. It lies across the way, wedged between Friedrich Engels and the sea, a narrow bumpy plain of yellowing grass, unevenly thrusting its blades at the neglected trees.
You could grow dizzy, standing on that road, turning your head from left to right. On the one hand, sure-footed power immures itself in moneyed mansions. On the other, yellow untended ground surges past venerable trees, gathers strength at the brink, and plunges precipitously down to the sea.
We cross the road and plough in, picking past grounded flurries of newspaper and plastic. The park is almost unpeopled: a couple sit on a circular bench that barely contains the trunk of a tree. A stroller makes his way down a path; two middle-aged men converse in the shade. At one end of the park a stairway leads down to nowhere. The grass rustles about our shins as we walk; if it were any longer we’d be on the look-out for snakes. Nobody has seen to the park.
Perhaps in time all of the parks will be attended to. The parks and people and the streets and the buildings and the roots of the trees: so I believe. Socialism may be dead, but the spirit lives on here. In the best of worlds the government will turn the tools of Big Capital toward pressing social ends. And that is a part of this city’s charm: the sense that in time it will all be paved over, made over into something bright and new. So I walk the streets in a state of premonitory nostalgia, knowing that one day all of these scenes will be gone.
The city is a wreck but blazing life surges and streams over its dilapidated surfaces. The short skirts and the high heels assuredly pick their way over the decrepit pavements. Near the presidential palace, stunning green-and-blue peacocks hop nimbly over tectonic cracks in the sidewalk. Gilded teenagers josh back and forth as they swagger down shabby broken streets on their way home from the finest schools in the land.
There are more paradoxes than these. Unemployment is high, but people walk with a sense of purpose. The state is corrupt, but things get done. Twenty years of civil war, and the people are the friendliest in the region. The army base in the north-west of town is the most dependable dealer of drugs. Crime is low, even though a decade ago Kalashnikovs were as cheap as lives. (The government solved the AK-47 problem by outlawing the private ownership of weapons. Radical notion.) In fact, your biggest danger in Maputo these days is the police.
On the morning of the second day I had my run-in with third-world cops. Travel tip: never cross the road in Maputo without your passport. In my particular case the problem was compounded because I’d lost my room key moments before. It’s one thing to escape immediate arrest and blag your way back to your front gate, but it’s quite another to stand there and feign really bad Portuguese for fully half an hour while you fend off irritable constabular grabs at your arm and the staff run about looking for the spare key, discovering it doesn’t work, and then taking a hammer and chisel to the door in order to get at the passport in the back pocket of your jeans.
After all of that my English cousin was pretty shaken, and I wasn’t feeling too hot myself. Breakfast was in order.
After a very late night, it’s pleasant to start the day at a pavement café. Prices are a little lower than in South Africa, and the coffee is strong and good. You pick from a range of pastries and toasted bread. At the moment the métical is trading at 3,000 to the rand, and most places drop the last three zeros when they present you with the bill, leaving pleasingly denominated amounts: coffee, 15,-.
It’s just after ten, and the joint is surprisingly busy; suited businessmen cluster at adjacent tables. Breakfast on their way to a late start to the day, perhaps, or would it be a mid-morning snack? Street vendors swoop and swarm; they are unblinkingly ignored by the indifferent patrons. Maputo has a refreshingly forthright approach to the street-vendor problem. Some places have guard-rails between the tables and the street; the bigger ones hire baton-wielding guards. It’s a fairly amicable stand-off: if diners see something they want they just raise a finger.
Newspaper vendors pace back and forth, parading their wares. The headlines scream a story that a South African general plotted with President Chissano to kill Samora Machel, but the serious papers aren’t touching it.
I speak Portanhol, which is espaňol masquerading as Portuguese: Spanish channeled through the nasal passages, you might say. I lean over and ask the businessmen what they make of the tale. "I don’t believe it." They are unanimous. "No, no, not him. He wouldn’t do that."
Pause. "One of the other high-ups, maybe..."
It’s not surprising that the bogeyman in this tale is South African. We are despised, after all, by our Mozambican neighbours. It’s the truth: we are not loved. And it’s not hard to see why. For if Mozambique is our Mexico, then we are their U.S. of A. Black or white, we come across the border in our big air-conditioned cars, throwing our rands and dollars about, buying up the land, closing extortionate deals, speaking loudly in English and expecting to be understood.
We built a spanking new road to Maputo not long ago, so we could truck goods down to the harbour. That highway looks like we annexed a fifteen-metre-wide strip of Mozambican land, tarred it, and lined it with yellow SOS phones all the way down to the sea. But it is seen as a channel of deliverance too, and it has attracted a sort of official cargo cult. "Mantenha a EN4 limpia", say signs along the route: "Keep the N4 clean." And, sure enough, you see women labouring away at the roadside, gathering the litter and sweeping up with handheld brooms.
After years of giving in to easy digs at expat Americans, it’s unpleasant to find yourself on the receiving end of such mingled awe and disdain. Now I know how decent Americans must feel when they travel. Even in the short time I was there the incidents stacked up.
At a trendy bar I spoke to a young Mozambican, and the first thing he said was, "Oh no! South Africa! And I’ve just been saying such terrible things about your country!"
And at the Caixa nightclub, I danced with a girl and bought her a drink. Leaning back with her elbows on the bar, she asked me where I was from. "Africa do Sul," I said. She took it quite well. It’s not like she flinched. But she sort of paused, and then nodded with a curious air of resolve. As if saying to herself, "Well, I’m dancing with a South African. Okay. Okay."
And then when I was hassling with the cops something very interesting happened. The watchman pleaded with them in Portuguese, "Please, he’s just a visitor here. He’s on holiday. He can’t know all the laws of the land."
The temperature rose immediately. One of the skinny young cops spoke heatedly, his voice sharpening and hardening. It was a little fast for me to follow, but it went something like this: "Listen, do you know what they do in South Africa? There they find you with no passport and they don’t wait. They don’t argue. They throw you in a van and they lock you up and then they ship you back home."
Perhaps one can be too hasty in bad-mouthing third-world cops…
On the second afternoon we go to visit the art museum. I generally make a stop there whenever I’m in Maputo, but still it takes us an age to find it, fighting through rush-hour traffic and one-way streets, over potholes and rubble and dust, past Muslim-capped war cripples propelling antique three-wheeler chairs through rivers of cars. Some of the streets are labelled London-style, with blue plaques on the sides of the houses. Others have the names on poles. The streets in Maputo are a monument to everlasting Socialism: Go down Avenida Mao Tse-Tung, and take a left into Karl Marx. If you reach Vladimir Lénine you’ve gone too far…
Our map is abysmal. After we cross a major intersection that has a four-way signpost in the middle with no lettering on it at all, we decide to park and go by foot. Even then, we nearly walk right past the nondescript building with the discreet white lettering on its glass doors: Museo Nacional das Artes.
For once, a country’s National Art Museum lives up to its name: this one has no foreign art in it at all. I don’t suppose Mozambique can afford it. A polished-wood banister leads you upstairs. At the top of the steps, at your back, a great canvas by Malangatana erases the wall. It is easy to play up the Latinity of Mozambique, but Malangatana’s style is something else: a patchy colonial education has let him take up European tools for African ends. The painting is a cacophonous concord of colours: tortured reds, ochres, jungle greens. Malangantana is a sort of indigenous Hieronymous Bosch, and the painting is crammed with haunted figures, faces betraying bewilderment, madness, sorrow, fear. They are jammed up against evil bird-men, disembodied mouths, ownerless eyes, all curving chimerically into each other in a crowded promiscuity of pain. Here on the top of the stairs Maputo’s genial surface drops away, and you look down a pit twenty years deep, a pit of war and shame.
The exhibition hall itself is tiny, a single salon-sized room, and we are the only visitors. We wander among canvases and sculptures. The Makonde of northern Mozambique were surrealists who took no lessons from Dali or Tanguy. Consider this work in dark wood by Celestino Tomás: a monstrous man-beast - Goofy with fangs – lasciviously eats his own foot, all the while reposing unselfconsciously on the head and limbs of a grumpy megacephalic, the latter resignedly performing a sort of obscene yoga in order to keep him hoisted in the air.
We stay for less than an hour. I always make a point of coming back here, but the museum never changes much: it’s a minute enclave of whitewashed order amid the tender chaos of rebirth that storms on outside. The first time I came here, the bathroom was without running water. But at the basins the staff had thoughtfully laid out: a jug, a cloth, a piece of soap, and a towel.
On my last night in Maputo, somewhere past midnight, I find myself deep in beer-sodden conversation with a blond-haired Californian communist. The language is broken Portuguese. The place is a rutted rubbled side-street outside a nightclub. The crowd seems to prefer outside to inside – there’s more room on the dancefloor than out here in the road. The atmosphere is archly Latino –signage in Spanish: muy caliente, very hot; the DJ pushing out a steady stream of Macarena followed by TBD followed by Ritchie Valens followed by Ricky Martin. Nothing I don’t recognise: it’s like any Western nightclub, except that it’s better-lit, and any tune without a sway to its beat is stopped at the door.
Jason is an anthropologist in Africa. He’s telling me that socialism will prevail. It’s all too ridiculous. An American Communist: the last of his tribe. Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself fighting the other corner.
I tell him that Socialism is dead. By now we’ve switched to caipirinhas. And English, thank God. I share with him my vision of a post-socialist Mozambique, harnessing Big Capital in the service of old ideals. Jason snorts. "Frelimo has sold out," he informs me. He leans in. "Listen," he confides, "capitalism has failed." I confess I am a little startled. Haven’t heard that one in a while. Seeing my scepticism, he takes a step back. "Look around you," he cries, sweeping his arm theatrically to take in the fragmented street, the neon shop windows with nothing on display. "See what foreign investment has wrought," gesturing grandly at the cracked and crumbling facades. He spreads both arms wide, his face aglow with mock beneficence. "Savour the fruits of liberalisation, my brother!"
I should remind him of the civil war. And twenty years of Mozambican socialism. I should tell him that what this place reminds me of most is Eastern Germany in 1992. I should, I really should, but I’m laughing too hard for the words to get out.
Losing an argument is a great way to make a new friend. A shot of tequila, and he invites me over to meet his buddies. Three feisty mulatto youths, decked out in shades of khaki (red star at the breast) and peaked guerrilla caps. The makings of a revolutionary cell, I muse. The leader, the loyalist and the intellectual. The leader has long braided hair; the thinker is thin and intense with black horn-rims. I’m loving it. True to form, the intellectual weighs in with his latest grand idea, voice brimming with quiet intensity. They’ve come up with a brilliant big-name beer ad, he says. This is no mere rhetoric: they’ve conceptualised it and shot it, and now they want to market it. Do I know anyone in advertising?
I don’t need to write an article on Maputo. Maputo writes itself. - Michael Prytz"
This article comes from journalism.co.zahttp://www.journalism.co.za/
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
No Sleep 'Till Brooklyn!
Oh, dear. It's 4am and I am wide awake. I was unable to sleep from the moment I curled up in our nest of towels, blankets, and yoga mat around 11pm, and spent the ensuing hours tossing and turning the best one can manage on a hardwood floor. My body was sore from sleeping on the floor (although my back still feels better than with the crater mattress), I was hungry, and for some odd reason I wasn't even tired. For those of you that know me, or for those of you that simply share the go-to-sleep-late-wake-up-even-later gene that dominates my rest patterns, you understand that waking up voluntarily at 4am is just plain wrong.
But here I am in our living room, listening to our night guard Zeca snore on the wicker couch on the porch when he is supposed to be alert and defending our house. It's very strange because here in Chimoio the sun starts to rise about 4:45am and by 5:15am it is totally light outside. By the look of things out the window, were I back in New Mexico I'd swear it was about 7:30am. So to try and make myself sleepy despite the light outside, I had some cereal and am now killing time on the internet. I'm actually still quite awake and it's been a full hour since I hauled myself off the floor. I feel lovely now - I'm even thinking about taking a run on the treadmill - but I have no illusions that this sleepless night will quickly catch up with me.
Rico and I are supposed to go to Beira today in Canas' beat-up old Land Cruiser. The truck is in pretty horrible shape (think no shocks, no 2nd or 5th gears, no radio, no air conditioning), and the road to Beira is even worse. It's the rainy season now, and the already severely potholed road has washed out completely in some places so you have to drive on dirt or, depending on the weather, mud. Never a fun way to pass 3 hours, and I'm sure that with my pending sleep hangover it will only be that much worse.
Maybe this is all in anticipation of a new mattress and office furniture, like a little kid that can't sleep on Christmas Eve because he knows that a mound of presents is waiting to be unwrapped under the tree. Maybe I just need to stop drinking so much tea and coffee...
But here I am in our living room, listening to our night guard Zeca snore on the wicker couch on the porch when he is supposed to be alert and defending our house. It's very strange because here in Chimoio the sun starts to rise about 4:45am and by 5:15am it is totally light outside. By the look of things out the window, were I back in New Mexico I'd swear it was about 7:30am. So to try and make myself sleepy despite the light outside, I had some cereal and am now killing time on the internet. I'm actually still quite awake and it's been a full hour since I hauled myself off the floor. I feel lovely now - I'm even thinking about taking a run on the treadmill - but I have no illusions that this sleepless night will quickly catch up with me.
Rico and I are supposed to go to Beira today in Canas' beat-up old Land Cruiser. The truck is in pretty horrible shape (think no shocks, no 2nd or 5th gears, no radio, no air conditioning), and the road to Beira is even worse. It's the rainy season now, and the already severely potholed road has washed out completely in some places so you have to drive on dirt or, depending on the weather, mud. Never a fun way to pass 3 hours, and I'm sure that with my pending sleep hangover it will only be that much worse.
Maybe this is all in anticipation of a new mattress and office furniture, like a little kid that can't sleep on Christmas Eve because he knows that a mound of presents is waiting to be unwrapped under the tree. Maybe I just need to stop drinking so much tea and coffee...
Our Getaway
Me and Rico, slightly windblown after the ride out to Chicamba in Patricia's jeep, enjoying a Coca Cola by the lakefront.
Here we are in the shade of a kiosk at a lodge on the lake called Casa Messica. In the foreground you can see Gemelli and Patricia, BL is hidden behind her, and Ricardo is in the back with his feet propped up.
This is the view from the Casa Messica. The blue lake with the granite hills covered in forest really remind me of Rio de Janeiro, if you can imagine Rio's Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas before it became polluted and surrounded by apartment buildings.
Here is a view from the dirt road that leads to the kiosk where we had lunch. Chicamba Dam is such a nice spot for a day trip, I wish we were able to go more often.
Update: here is a photo I took on our holiday trip to Rio of the Lagoa. It is taken from a road called Paineiras that links Santa Teresa to the Alto da Boa Vista and Barra da Tijuca by way of the Tijuca national forest. I think the Lagoa and Chicamba are quite similar, especially when you think about what Rio must have looked like when the Portuguese arrived...
Monday, January 30, 2006
Good Morning!
Rico and I have now been sleeping on the floor for 4 nights. We made a little nest out of all the blankets and towels that were in our drawer, plus my yoga mat underneath the whole thing. I am still adjusting to sleeping on the floor, the hardest part being that my hands seem to fall asleep multiple times each night, but overall I must say that my back feels much better. We are on a mission this week to get a new mattress.
Likely, this will involve a trip to Beira in the big white Land Cruiser that we occasionally borrow from our friend Canas. We also need to buy desks and chairs so that we can finally start working from the big colonial house that Agrolink has been renting as an office since July. We share the office with our housemate Patricia, who is Chimoio's best and busiest accountant, so the space isn't totally unoccupied. I must confess I am really looking forward to being able to work from an office that is separate from my home life. Between that an a new mattress, my quality of life seems set to drastically improve in the next week or so.
Yesterday, my housemates and I decided to get out of the house and go for a drive to Chicamba Dam, a beautiful river/lake about 30 mintues from Chimoio. It was well worth the effort. I hadn't been out of the house in 5 days (think about that for a minute. Five days without setting foot in the grocery store, the post office...nothing!) and was starting to become really irritated and depressed from the monotony of life in a small town where your only real responsibilities never take you outside the house.
So Chicamba was really beautiful. Bright blue water, some canyon-like cliffs and hills all covered in semi-tropical forests, with occasional boulders and sheer walls of granite poking out through all the green. We ate lunch at a lakeside kiosk. We all had fish from the lake (tilapia, I think), and I finally tried xima, the ubiquitous corn mush that is a staple in most southern African countries. It is also known as sadsa in Malawi, or pap in South Africa. It is basically a big, thick mound of a cream of wheat-type porridge that is cooked with no salt. I had mine with a tomato sauce and peri-peri, the local blend of peppers and oil that Mozambicans so love, smothered all over the top. It was actually quite good.
Unfortuately, today is back to business as usual. For me that means being at home all day and working on the final details of the timber proposal. Right now, I'm going to make a cup of tea. That's about all I can handle at this point...I'm still very, very sleepy!
Likely, this will involve a trip to Beira in the big white Land Cruiser that we occasionally borrow from our friend Canas. We also need to buy desks and chairs so that we can finally start working from the big colonial house that Agrolink has been renting as an office since July. We share the office with our housemate Patricia, who is Chimoio's best and busiest accountant, so the space isn't totally unoccupied. I must confess I am really looking forward to being able to work from an office that is separate from my home life. Between that an a new mattress, my quality of life seems set to drastically improve in the next week or so.
Yesterday, my housemates and I decided to get out of the house and go for a drive to Chicamba Dam, a beautiful river/lake about 30 mintues from Chimoio. It was well worth the effort. I hadn't been out of the house in 5 days (think about that for a minute. Five days without setting foot in the grocery store, the post office...nothing!) and was starting to become really irritated and depressed from the monotony of life in a small town where your only real responsibilities never take you outside the house.
So Chicamba was really beautiful. Bright blue water, some canyon-like cliffs and hills all covered in semi-tropical forests, with occasional boulders and sheer walls of granite poking out through all the green. We ate lunch at a lakeside kiosk. We all had fish from the lake (tilapia, I think), and I finally tried xima, the ubiquitous corn mush that is a staple in most southern African countries. It is also known as sadsa in Malawi, or pap in South Africa. It is basically a big, thick mound of a cream of wheat-type porridge that is cooked with no salt. I had mine with a tomato sauce and peri-peri, the local blend of peppers and oil that Mozambicans so love, smothered all over the top. It was actually quite good.
Unfortuately, today is back to business as usual. For me that means being at home all day and working on the final details of the timber proposal. Right now, I'm going to make a cup of tea. That's about all I can handle at this point...I'm still very, very sleepy!
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Oooh Baby, Baby!
Ah, I forgot to tell you all about the good news...
A couple of days ago, I got a call from the director of the Mozambican credit union that I elaborated a microfinance proposal for back in October. It was this huge project for the European Union, and it was a bitch to write. I still get this sinking feeling in my stomach when I think about how much was imperfect in the final version of the proposal...
Anyhow, the director called me to say that he'd received a letter from the EU informing that the microfinance proposal had passed to the second stage of evaluation and now will go to a committee for technical analysis. So basically we made the first cut, which is great news especially since I was so hard on myself about the whole thing.
The final result should be out within a month. Keep your fingers crossed...
A couple of days ago, I got a call from the director of the Mozambican credit union that I elaborated a microfinance proposal for back in October. It was this huge project for the European Union, and it was a bitch to write. I still get this sinking feeling in my stomach when I think about how much was imperfect in the final version of the proposal...
Anyhow, the director called me to say that he'd received a letter from the EU informing that the microfinance proposal had passed to the second stage of evaluation and now will go to a committee for technical analysis. So basically we made the first cut, which is great news especially since I was so hard on myself about the whole thing.
The final result should be out within a month. Keep your fingers crossed...
Friday, January 27, 2006
Makes you want to go swimming, huh?
One of our clients had this kayak in his backyard. He uses it to go out on a small dam near his farm, some 20 miles outside Maputo. Check out the standard-issue sign on the side of the kayak!!
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Listy
Two posts in one day! This one, however, is a coped list from a friend's blog. Read away!
(X) Smoked a cigar.
( ) Crashed a friend's car.
( ) Stolen a car.
(X) Skipped school.
(X) Slept with a co-worker.
(X) Been called a slut.
(X) Had a one night stand.
(X) Made out with a member of the same sex.
( ) Seen someone die.
( ) Shoplifted.
( ) Been fired.
( ) Snuck out of your parent's house.
(X) Had feelings for someone, who didn't have them back.
( ) Been arrested.
( ) Gone on a blind date.
(X) Had a crush on a teacher.
( ) Been to Canada.
(X) Been to Mexico.
(X) Been on a plane.
(X ) Thrown up in a bar.
( ) Purposely set a part of yourself on fire.
(X) Eaten Sushi.
( ) Been snowboarding.
(X) Taken painkillers.
(X) Love someone or miss someone.
(X) Laid on your back and watched cloud shapes go by.
(X) Questioned your heart.
( ) Been obsessed with Post-It Notes.
(X) Squished barefoot through the mud.
(X) Been lost.
(X) Been to the opposite side of the country.
(X) Swam in the ocean.
(X) Felt like dying.
(X) Cried yourself to sleep.
( ) Played Cops and Robbers.
( ) Recently colored with crayons/colored pencils/markers.
(X) Paid for a meal with only coins.
(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't.
(X) Made prank phone calls.
(X) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose.
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue.
(X) Danced in the rain.
(X) Written a letter to Santa Claus.
(X) Been kissed under mistletoe.
(X) Watched the sun set with someone you care about.
(X) Blown bubbles.
(X) Made a bonfire on the beach.
( ) Crashed a party.
(X) Gone roller-skating.
(X) Had a wish come true.
( ) Humped a monkey.
(X) Worn pearls.
(X) Jumped off a bridge.
( ) Told a complete stranger you love them.
(X) Kissed a mirror/window.
(X) Sang in the shower.
(X) Have a little black dress.
(X) Had a dream that you married someone.
(X) Glued your hand to something
( ) Got your tongue stuck to a flag pole/light post.
( ) Kissed a fish.
(X) Worn the opposite sexes clothes.
( ) Been a cheerleader.
(X) Sat on a roof top.
(X) Screamed at the top of your lungs.
(X) Done a one-handed cartwheel.
(X) Talked on the phone for more than 4 hours.
(X) Stayed up all night.
(X) Picked and ate berries
(X) Climbed a tree.
(X) Had a tree house.
(X) Are scared to watch horror movies alone.
(X) Believe in ghosts.
(X) Have more then 5 pairs of shoes.
( ) Worn a really ugly outfit to school just to see what others say.
( ) Gone streaking.
( ) Played Ding-Dong-Ditch.
( ) Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes on.
(X) Been told "You're hot," by a complete stranger.
( ) Broken a bone.
(X) Been easily amused.
(X) Caught a fish, then ate it.
(X) Caught a butterfly.
(X) Smoked pot.
(X) Made out with a complete stranger .
(X) Laughed so hard you cried.
(X) Cried so hard you laughed.
(X) Mooned/flashed someone.
(X) Had someone moon/flash you.
(X) Cheated on a test.
( ) Had a Britney Spears CD.
(X) Forgotten someone's name.
(X) Slept naked.
(X) French braided someone's hair.
( ) Gone skinny dipping.
(X) Ate dog/cat food.
(X) Been drunk.
(X) Drank so much you puked.
(X) Played truth or dare.
( ) Been to Japan.
( ) Played mailbox baseball.
(X) Ridden in a taxi.
(X) Been in love.
(X) Been dumped.
(X) Kicked someone's ass.
( ) Celebrated New Years in Times Square.
(X) Lied to a friend.
( ) Celebrated Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.
(X) Been to Europe.
(X) Been to Africa.
( ) Slapped someone I loved.
(X) Driven over 400 miles to attend a show/festival/fetish.
(X) Met someone in person from the internet .
(X) Been in an abusive relationship.
(X) Fallen asleep at work/school.
(X) Used a fake ID.
(X) Watched the sun set.
(X) Felt an earthquake.
(X) Touched a snake.
(X) Slept beneath the stars .
( ) Ridden on a camel.
(X) Climbed a mountain .
(X) Played "Clue."
(X) Had a sleepover.
(X) Been tickled .
( ) Seen a UFO.
(X) Told a lie.
(X) Been robbed.
(X) Been fishing.
(X) Snuck into a movie.
( ) Consulted a psychic.
(X) Won a contest.
(X) Been to a zoo.
( ) Been suspended from school.
(X) Been in a car accident.
(X) Had braces.
(X) Eaten a whole pint of ice cream in one night.
(X) Touched a starfish.
(X) Hated the way you look.
( ) Jousted/sword fought/jedi light thingys.
(X) Witnessed a crime.
(X) Pole danced.
(X) Met someone famous.
(X) Pulled an all-nighter.
(X) Been to the circus.
( ) Been to jail.
( ) Laughed during a sad scene in a movie/tv show.
(X) Played with an Etch-A-Sketch.
( ) Eaten caviar.
(X) Gone horse back riding.
(X) Couldn't sleep.
(X) Had a song stuck in your head.
(X) Hated your computer.
(X) Owned a pet.
(X) Made a banana-split.
( ) Stepped on a nail so hard, that it went into your foot.
(X) Made homemade ice cream.
(X) Actually enjoyed your classes.
(X) Used a magic 8 ball.
( ) Seen a moose up close.
(X) Sung karaoke.
(X) Tripped up or down the stairs.
( ) Had a crush on a family member.
(X) Made a mud pie.
(X) Seen a musical on Broadway.
( ) Cut down a christmas tree.
(X) Smoked a cigar.
( ) Crashed a friend's car.
( ) Stolen a car.
(X) Skipped school.
(X) Slept with a co-worker.
(X) Been called a slut.
(X) Had a one night stand.
(X) Made out with a member of the same sex.
( ) Seen someone die.
( ) Shoplifted.
( ) Been fired.
( ) Snuck out of your parent's house.
(X) Had feelings for someone, who didn't have them back.
( ) Been arrested.
( ) Gone on a blind date.
(X) Had a crush on a teacher.
( ) Been to Canada.
(X) Been to Mexico.
(X) Been on a plane.
(X ) Thrown up in a bar.
( ) Purposely set a part of yourself on fire.
(X) Eaten Sushi.
( ) Been snowboarding.
(X) Taken painkillers.
(X) Love someone or miss someone.
(X) Laid on your back and watched cloud shapes go by.
(X) Questioned your heart.
( ) Been obsessed with Post-It Notes.
(X) Squished barefoot through the mud.
(X) Been lost.
(X) Been to the opposite side of the country.
(X) Swam in the ocean.
(X) Felt like dying.
(X) Cried yourself to sleep.
( ) Played Cops and Robbers.
( ) Recently colored with crayons/colored pencils/markers.
(X) Paid for a meal with only coins.
(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't.
(X) Made prank phone calls.
(X) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose.
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue.
(X) Danced in the rain.
(X) Written a letter to Santa Claus.
(X) Been kissed under mistletoe.
(X) Watched the sun set with someone you care about.
(X) Blown bubbles.
(X) Made a bonfire on the beach.
( ) Crashed a party.
(X) Gone roller-skating.
(X) Had a wish come true.
( ) Humped a monkey.
(X) Worn pearls.
(X) Jumped off a bridge.
( ) Told a complete stranger you love them.
(X) Kissed a mirror/window.
(X) Sang in the shower.
(X) Have a little black dress.
(X) Had a dream that you married someone.
(X) Glued your hand to something
( ) Got your tongue stuck to a flag pole/light post.
( ) Kissed a fish.
(X) Worn the opposite sexes clothes.
( ) Been a cheerleader.
(X) Sat on a roof top.
(X) Screamed at the top of your lungs.
(X) Done a one-handed cartwheel.
(X) Talked on the phone for more than 4 hours.
(X) Stayed up all night.
(X) Picked and ate berries
(X) Climbed a tree.
(X) Had a tree house.
(X) Are scared to watch horror movies alone.
(X) Believe in ghosts.
(X) Have more then 5 pairs of shoes.
( ) Worn a really ugly outfit to school just to see what others say.
( ) Gone streaking.
( ) Played Ding-Dong-Ditch.
( ) Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes on.
(X) Been told "You're hot," by a complete stranger.
( ) Broken a bone.
(X) Been easily amused.
(X) Caught a fish, then ate it.
(X) Caught a butterfly.
(X) Smoked pot.
(X) Made out with a complete stranger .
(X) Laughed so hard you cried.
(X) Cried so hard you laughed.
(X) Mooned/flashed someone.
(X) Had someone moon/flash you.
(X) Cheated on a test.
( ) Had a Britney Spears CD.
(X) Forgotten someone's name.
(X) Slept naked.
(X) French braided someone's hair.
( ) Gone skinny dipping.
(X) Ate dog/cat food.
(X) Been drunk.
(X) Drank so much you puked.
(X) Played truth or dare.
( ) Been to Japan.
( ) Played mailbox baseball.
(X) Ridden in a taxi.
(X) Been in love.
(X) Been dumped.
(X) Kicked someone's ass.
( ) Celebrated New Years in Times Square.
(X) Lied to a friend.
( ) Celebrated Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.
(X) Been to Europe.
(X) Been to Africa.
( ) Slapped someone I loved.
(X) Driven over 400 miles to attend a show/festival/fetish.
(X) Met someone in person from the internet .
(X) Been in an abusive relationship.
(X) Fallen asleep at work/school.
(X) Used a fake ID.
(X) Watched the sun set.
(X) Felt an earthquake.
(X) Touched a snake.
(X) Slept beneath the stars .
( ) Ridden on a camel.
(X) Climbed a mountain .
(X) Played "Clue."
(X) Had a sleepover.
(X) Been tickled .
( ) Seen a UFO.
(X) Told a lie.
(X) Been robbed.
(X) Been fishing.
(X) Snuck into a movie.
( ) Consulted a psychic.
(X) Won a contest.
(X) Been to a zoo.
( ) Been suspended from school.
(X) Been in a car accident.
(X) Had braces.
(X) Eaten a whole pint of ice cream in one night.
(X) Touched a starfish.
(X) Hated the way you look.
( ) Jousted/sword fought/jedi light thingys.
(X) Witnessed a crime.
(X) Pole danced.
(X) Met someone famous.
(X) Pulled an all-nighter.
(X) Been to the circus.
( ) Been to jail.
( ) Laughed during a sad scene in a movie/tv show.
(X) Played with an Etch-A-Sketch.
( ) Eaten caviar.
(X) Gone horse back riding.
(X) Couldn't sleep.
(X) Had a song stuck in your head.
(X) Hated your computer.
(X) Owned a pet.
(X) Made a banana-split.
( ) Stepped on a nail so hard, that it went into your foot.
(X) Made homemade ice cream.
(X) Actually enjoyed your classes.
(X) Used a magic 8 ball.
( ) Seen a moose up close.
(X) Sung karaoke.
(X) Tripped up or down the stairs.
( ) Had a crush on a family member.
(X) Made a mud pie.
(X) Seen a musical on Broadway.
( ) Cut down a christmas tree.
Lullaby and Good Night
I have been a wreck lately and I blame it all, 100%, on the mattress Rico and I sleep on every night. I think even a mattress you'd find discarded and full of stains in a back alley would likely be more comfortable. At this point, I'd even be willing to try it out and see for myself.
Besides being a cheap import from South Africa's bargain basement of rejects that end up as classy products hawked in Mozambique, the mattress has a freakin' crater in the middle where I imagine at some point long, long ago there were springs. Now there is just a big, empty void that you automatically roll into when you lie on the mattress.
Not so bad if you sleep alone. You can sort of huddle up in the slump and pretend you are sleeping in a hammock. But let me tell you, when you try and share the bed with another person, things just go downhill. Literally. Rico and I each end up at a 30-degree angle, sort of forming a V with our bodies as one half sinks towards the middle and the other is propped up by the only functional springs that still remain in the mattress. The good springs, of course, nearly poke through the fabric and if you're not careful about how you turn and wiggle about at night, you get the nasty surprise of a spring in the forehead, a spring in the hip...you get the idea.
We seem to have reached a critical point in our mattress' life-cycle where each passing day represents a significant deterioration in structure. For months, the mattress was bad but bearable. Just a little dip in the middle, nothing to really complain about. But now, this is just insane. At this rate, by next week the crater will be so deep that our butts will sink to the floor when we lie down at night.
Our bed reminds me of going camping and pitching your tent in a spot that looked flat when I started, but when you try and sleep you find out that the ground is actually on quite an incline. The springs that prod you in the night are just like those rocks you were too lazy to dig out before putting up the tent. The slope of the mattress, if you choose the wrong position to sleep in, is just like deciding to lie down with your head near the tent door, only to find out the next day that you spent 8 hours with your head below your heart and nearly faint when you try to stand up in the morning.
Did I mention my BACK HURTS?? I already have back problems, but this is just out of control. Last night it got so bad that after trying to be zen and accept the 30-degree incline, not fight it, I decided that I could no longer deal with the mattress. At 3am I rolled out my yoga mat on the hardwood floor, grabbed a pillow and sheet, and tried to make the best of it. The yoga mat was actually much more comfortable, but I got cold after a while and kept being paranoid about spiders and scorpions crawling over me during the night. So at around 7am, I climbed back up into the crater.
It's now 11am, I just woke up, and I am in a beautiful mood after a good night's rest.
Oh, hold on. What's this I feel? Allergies coming on? Allergies? Today? Awesome! Just the thing I need to complement the shooting pains in my back.
Besides being a cheap import from South Africa's bargain basement of rejects that end up as classy products hawked in Mozambique, the mattress has a freakin' crater in the middle where I imagine at some point long, long ago there were springs. Now there is just a big, empty void that you automatically roll into when you lie on the mattress.
Not so bad if you sleep alone. You can sort of huddle up in the slump and pretend you are sleeping in a hammock. But let me tell you, when you try and share the bed with another person, things just go downhill. Literally. Rico and I each end up at a 30-degree angle, sort of forming a V with our bodies as one half sinks towards the middle and the other is propped up by the only functional springs that still remain in the mattress. The good springs, of course, nearly poke through the fabric and if you're not careful about how you turn and wiggle about at night, you get the nasty surprise of a spring in the forehead, a spring in the hip...you get the idea.
We seem to have reached a critical point in our mattress' life-cycle where each passing day represents a significant deterioration in structure. For months, the mattress was bad but bearable. Just a little dip in the middle, nothing to really complain about. But now, this is just insane. At this rate, by next week the crater will be so deep that our butts will sink to the floor when we lie down at night.
Our bed reminds me of going camping and pitching your tent in a spot that looked flat when I started, but when you try and sleep you find out that the ground is actually on quite an incline. The springs that prod you in the night are just like those rocks you were too lazy to dig out before putting up the tent. The slope of the mattress, if you choose the wrong position to sleep in, is just like deciding to lie down with your head near the tent door, only to find out the next day that you spent 8 hours with your head below your heart and nearly faint when you try to stand up in the morning.
Did I mention my BACK HURTS?? I already have back problems, but this is just out of control. Last night it got so bad that after trying to be zen and accept the 30-degree incline, not fight it, I decided that I could no longer deal with the mattress. At 3am I rolled out my yoga mat on the hardwood floor, grabbed a pillow and sheet, and tried to make the best of it. The yoga mat was actually much more comfortable, but I got cold after a while and kept being paranoid about spiders and scorpions crawling over me during the night. So at around 7am, I climbed back up into the crater.
It's now 11am, I just woke up, and I am in a beautiful mood after a good night's rest.
Oh, hold on. What's this I feel? Allergies coming on? Allergies? Today? Awesome! Just the thing I need to complement the shooting pains in my back.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Home Again
Ali called me this morning to let me know she arrived safely back in Chimoio. For the next few days she will not have Internet access. The phone bill did not get paid in her absence.
She sends her love and asks that you all write soon.
Katherine (Ali's Mom)
She sends her love and asks that you all write soon.
Katherine (Ali's Mom)
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
in Maputo
We made it back to Maputo in one piece and will spend the rest of the week here finishing up the timber project and working with other clients.
I have terrible allergies today and am in an internet cafe with no air conditioning, feeling the sweat drip down my back and legs.
Understandably, I´m keeping this one short.
I have terrible allergies today and am in an internet cafe with no air conditioning, feeling the sweat drip down my back and legs.
Understandably, I´m keeping this one short.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Homeward Bound
We are leaving Rio in a couple of hours to start our journey back to Mozambique...I can't believe my trip is over!!!!!
We will overnight in São Paulo, then head on to Johannesburg tomorrow morning. We should be back in Maputo - and reachable by cell phone - by Friday afternoon (we arrive at 3pm Moz time).
Love to you all, thanks for reading.
Ali
We will overnight in São Paulo, then head on to Johannesburg tomorrow morning. We should be back in Maputo - and reachable by cell phone - by Friday afternoon (we arrive at 3pm Moz time).
Love to you all, thanks for reading.
Ali
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Igreja de São Paulo
There is this fabulous gothic-style Anglican church, the Igreja de São Paulo, directly across the street from the Casa Rosa, that must be at least 80 years old. The plaster exterior of the church is crumbling away, exposing the brick structure of the walls and spires and creating a network of deep cracks in which pigeons and white doves make their nests. It is darkened with soot, and the cross on the main spire tumbled down soon after the picture below, but it is still a beautiful and mysterious building that I love having as a backdrop to the house.
Despite its neglected exterior, the Igreja de São Paulo still functions as a church, with an afternoon service on Wednesdays and morning worship on Sundays. From our varanda you can hear the Dean, a woman called Inamar, conducting sermons and leading the choir in hymns. On Christmas, there is an especially nice service complete with bells and the entire congregation singing traditional holiday carols, only in Portuguese. I was feeling somewhat homesick and out of the Christmas spirit until I woke up on the 25th to the sound of carols and decided to sing along, in English, while sitting alone in the garden in the early morning sun.
The Igreja de São Paulo is one of the main cultural and historical points in Santa Teresa. Until recently, the church had a very unique double purpose, serving not only as a place of worship but as the only movie theater in Santa Teresa. Every Sunday at 7pm, people would pay $5 reais for a ticket and a guaraná soda, sit on the wooden pews, and watch indie films from Brasil, Latin America, the US and beyond, projected onto the white altar at the front of the church. I remember watching "The Motorcycle Diaries" in the church two weeks before moving to Mozambique and having a near religious experience between the beauty of the film, the half-illuminated stained glass windows, and the excitement of an upcoming adventure.
This past Saturday, for the first time ever, I saw a wedding in the Igreja de São Paulo. It was in the late morning, the church was full of people, and cars were lined up all along the street. Rico and I had just arrived from his mom's house and were unloading a bunch of things she had given me for the Casa Rosa: boxes of silverware and dishes, throw pillows, a vacuum cleaner. Curious to see what was going on, we stopped unloading, sat on the stairs, and opened the front gate to get a good view of the church.
After a while, a man in a suit got out of one of the cars parked along the side of the church. He walked around to the passenger side, opened the door, and helped his beautiful daughter out of the car. Since the church is small, there is no waiting area or side room for the bride to get ready for her entrance. It all has to be done outside! The bride was the epitome of who I imagine getting married in the Igreja de São Paulo: short, jet-black hair in a 1920's bob tied back with an ivory scarf, a simple strapless ivory silk dress with a train, and a body full of tattoos. Lots and lots of tattoos that actually looked great with the dress, artsy and alternative just like Santa Teresa.
Rico and I watched the bride and her father wait outside the church, just hidden from the people inside, until the opening notes of the wedding march music came on. The bride adjusted her scarf headband, fluffed out her train, and took her father's arm to enter the church and walk down the aisle. I felt like a total sap, but I started to cry on the stairs. Rico gave me a hug and shook his head. Mulheres...Oh, you sentimental women. He joked around about how we all love a good cry at a wedding, but really I could tell he was moved by the whole thing as well.
We resumed unloading the car and then went to have some lunch. About an hour later, as we were driving back up the street to the Casa Rosa, we noticed that the wedding was over and everyone - family, friends, onlookers, and the bride and groom themselves - had moved from the church to the Bar do Mineiro next door to have drinks in the noon sun in lieu of a traditional reception. The bride, still in her ivory dress, posed for photos with a digital camera, glass of beer in hand.
It was the perfect finish to what I thought was the perfect wedding for Santa Teresa. After all, where else in the world will a total lack of zoning permit an Anglican church to share a wall with a somewhat dingy bar on one side, and an elementary school on the other?
Monday, January 09, 2006
Three Weeks in Tropical Paradise
Oh, how gullible I was when I believed back in November that I would be on vacation in Brasil for three weeks with my boyfriend. What a sweet illusion...I thought I'd go to the beach with friends, do some antique hunting in Lapa, catch up on e-mails, read a good book in the hammock on the varanda, and consume as much meat, pão de queijo, and fresh fruit juice as humanly possible. Right.
Instead, the past three weeks have consisted of the following:
Instead, the past three weeks have consisted of the following:
- Working on a timber proposal for a pissy client back in Maputo who doesn't understand that putting together a $15 million dollar business plan isn't something that can be done overnight;
- Stressing about the fact that I was too busy to work on the timber proposal from day one, and that when I did have time to work I procrastinated;
- Meeting the family. This consisted of an early Christmas dinner with Rico's dad, stepmom, and stepsister; meeting his mom and grandma when I was doped up on drowsy cold medicine; meeting his uncle Alfredo and his daughters; another Christmas dinner, this time on the 24th, at Rico's aunt Claudia's house with her boyfriend and daughter; spending that night at a gas station with Rico's uncle Marcelo, his wife, and their kids; meeting his other grandma for a snack at her house...You get the picture. It's been nonstop family schmoozing since we arrived. And I must say, for all the bad press that in-laws get, I really, really like Rico's family and I feel they genuinely like me as well. Word has it that everyone is talking about marriage...
- Helping Rico's mom move into a new apartment. Moving is a pain in the ass under any circumstances, but Emilia chose to move during the week of Christmas when everything is closing for the holidays and the heat is unbearable. We worked our tails off - especially Rico, who has been solving problems for his mom and grandma right and left - and Emilia (his mom) and Maria Antonia (his grandma) now have a sweet apartment with a huge varanda that overlooks a nice plaza.
- Taking care of the Casa Rosa and everything that a huge house built in 1910 needs in terms of repairs, furniture, and security. This has included buying tons of furniture, lamps, and paintings (the fun part), making sure the alarm works properly and all the sensors are in place, calling the exterminator to spray for rats and termites, buying assorted construction materials, getting estimates for fixing leaks, patching up holes and cracks in the wall, making our pool/fountain enjoyable again, and fixing all the 12-foot tall wooden doors and windows that don't close or are permanently swollen shut. I must say, Rico has been an unbelievable help in all this. Having a carioca boyfriend with a car and good connections in the city is such a blessing, and has made my stress level at least half of what it used to be with regard to the Casa Rosa. The good news is that we got a lot accomplished and the house is looking amazing.
- Conducting an intervention with the woman that takes care of our house and is like a member of the family for us. Yes, intervention, as in serious problems that can only be resolved with intensive outpatient therapy. Feeling incredibly humbled by the situation realizing that if we hadn't intervened this person would probably be dead within a few months. Her situation is so, so sad...I plan on writing a lot more about this whole experience later, but it has made me grateful for all that I have in terms of health, education, money, compassion, understanding, family...
- Trying to visit with friends, enjoy our new cable tv, write e-mails, and rest inbetween all my other responsibilities above.
Needless to say, I am tired and need a VACATION!
Of course, this whole saga wouldn't be complete without the cherry on the sundae. Yesterday, while trying to clear up some space on my overloaded hard drive, I deleted an Outlook directory that I swore I would never need. Back in July, when Ricardo spent a month in Brasil, I was left to handle all of Agrolink's pending business. In order to manage everything, I needed access to some of Ricardo's e-mails that had client info or important attachments for follow-up.
Gemelli, one of my housemates and the company's IT guy, copied Rico's entire e-mail database onto my computer instead of just the directory I needed for the month's business. All of his messages were in Outlook, and I had never used the program. So Gemelli configured my Outlook, imported Rico's files, and got me all set up to work not knowing that I had access to much more that I was supposed to.
Being the good girlfriend that I am, I deleted all of the e-mails from my inbox except the ones in the file I needed. July came and went, and I finished up everything that had been left in my hands. But I couldn't shake the temptation to snoop through Ricardo's e-mails, knowing that while they had been deleted from my inbox, they were still alive and well in the directory, hidden in the bowels of my laptop.
Many times in the following months I sat with the data base icon in front of me, feeling like a modern-day Pandora tempted by an inbox, using all my strength not to double click and read through God knows what from Rico's past. Every time I was able to resist, but I'd always leave the Outlook icon where Gemelli had copied it, Rico's messages deleted from my e-mail but accessible should I ever want to realize my urge. In the meantime, I decided that I like the convenience of Outlook and started using it myself instead of web mail. I downloaded all my e-mails and haven't looked back since.
Yesterday, faced with a nearly-full hard drive and lots of files to download, I decided to clean out my computer. It was like a virtual spring cleaning. Click-happy, I set out to delete things I hadn't used in over two years, photos from the past that had already been backed up, music I don't really like or listen to but insisted on keeping in my iTunes...and the famous Outlook data base with all Ricardo's e-mails.
I want to do the right thing, I decided, and deleted the file. Just in case, I immediately emptied my recycle bin to make sure I wouldn't have a last-minute snoop. The virtual trash can on my desktop became skinny once again and I felt good. Satisfied. Proud of the tough decision I'd made to resist private thoughts and documents and maintain the integrity of my relationship.
Then this morning I went to check e-mail. An error message popped up informing me that Outlook could not find the directory where Rico's e-mails had been stored. Okay, I thought, no big deal. My e-mails are stored in another place in my laptop. But the dialog box was insistent. Outlook wouldn't open. I became more and more frantic as I realized what had happened.
Somehow, after Gemelli's initial configuration of Outlook, my e-mails became associated with the original Outlook.pst that contained Rico's e-mails. Thinking I was doing the right thing and deleting my hidden copy of my boyfriend's messages, I actually deleted ALL THE MESSAGES IN MY OUTLOOK!!!! Everything is gone. Adios. Such is the hard luck of the semi-computer illiterate. And, perhaps, the just payback for a girlfriend that saved prohibited e-mails should the day come when she wanted some sweet revenge.
Sigh. At least I have copies of everything on Yahoo web mail, but this entails configuring everything all over again and downloading over 90 megabytes of information. Please keep in mind that I live in the third world and rely on a dial-up connection that is precarious at best.
After I cried and confessed to Rico what was going on, I was able to see the humour in the whole situation. I even managed to laugh. I can only hope that my good mood lasts through the 4 days it will certainly take to download all my emails and reorganize my folders in Outlook.
Did I mention I need I vacation?
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Sailing in Guanabara Bay
Here is the view of downtown Rio from Rico's uncle's sailboat as we cruised through the bay. The water was calm, the wind was great, and the sun exceptionally strong.
This is the back view of Sugarloaf as we headed out of the bay and around into the open waters near Copacabana beach. Things got pretty choppy and I made the mistake of going down into the cabin to pee. It was like being in a cardboard box on a roller coaster. While I was fine out in the open air, the trip to the bathroom made me soooooooooo seasick!
You can't really tell it by my smile, but here I am just dying to vomit over the edge of the boat. Thankfully it didn't reach that point, as Rico decided to turn the boat back into the calmer waters of the bay. Of course, about 10 minutes before our sailing adventure was over, I felt just fine...
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Friends
This new year has made me reflect a lot about friends. Most of mine are far away, our friendships established after a couple of intense hours, weeks, or years of shared time and space. We manage to keep in touch thanks to e-mail and the occasional phone call, sporadic contact leading up to a shared lunch or quick encounter in an airport before one of us is to catch a plane and head off to the next far-away destination.
I miss my friends, and I am reminded in these initial days of 2006 that true, lasting friendships are hard to come by and just delicious when they finally fall into your life.
I have been blessed with the opportunity to reconnect with several of these true friends, be it in person or via e-mail. Lambros, my Greek friend I met at a tourist office in Athens when I was 14, wrote a lovely recommendation about me in his blog, The Yellow Spacesheep. He and I used to write real, honest to God letters to each other, faithfully decorating paper and envelopes with crayons and ink sketches each month along with the latest news and reflections from each of our lives. We wrote faithfully to each other for years and years. Each day I would expectantly check the mail to see if a letter from Lambros had arrived. He is an artist, and each new letter usually included a sketch or comic strip for me to hang inside my high school locker.
In the summer of 1999, I visited Lambros and his family in Athens as part of a month long trip to Europe. It was a really difficult time in my life, and I was struggling with the things that torment many young girls in our society - low self esteem, an eating disorder, and an incessant desire to be perfect. Lambros gave me some of the best advice of my life as we painted together in his studio one evening.
"To be truly happy," he said, "you only need to do three things: Love yourself, trust yourself, and learn to say 'no'."
What wise words from an 19-year old boy...
He is now in London, working as cabin crew with British Airways, following his heart. Our friendship is now virtual - I miss our letters - but it is still so nice to know that someone on the other side of the world still thinks of you fondly.
Here in Rio, I've met up with several friends from the past, distant but still close to my heart. Maura, who was my neighbor and classmate when I lived here in 2000/2001, is someone I always make a point to visit when I am in town. She is wonderful to be around, one of those people that just lifts your sprits without even trying. We hung out together the other night, drank caiprinhas and danced to axé music in the first pouring rain of the new year in the front yard of her house.
Maura was there for me during a period of crisis in my life a couple of years ago, when all of my other friends in Rio preferred to forget that anything was wrong and totally avoid hanging out with me or even sending e-mails. But through the whole time I thought my life was over and that I had screwed everything up, Maura was there to remind me that I deserve to be happy, invite me to stay in her house until I felt better, make me espresso and diet cookeis, and tell me that everything would turn out okay in the end.
I met up today with Isabella, a friend from Maringá that I met only briefly at a barbecue about 5 years ago when I was visiting a mutual friend of ours that I'd studied with during my student exchange. Isa is very liberal, a leftist and an environmentalist, and we actually met through a huge argument about cultural imperialism and how the United States is the source of most of the evil in the world today. Needless to say she nearly keeled over when she found out that I am American, with my accentless Portuguese and house in Rio. From that moment on, we became friends. She made a special effort today to take the streetcar up to Santa Teresa to visit me in the Casa Rosa. It was the first time we had hung out since the original barbecue where we met so many years ago, but it was obvious by the effort she made to see me that the seed of a true friendship was planted back in Maringá.
There are so many others that are special to me...Gaby in London, Erin in Austin, Kyle in Burundi, Hannah in Pennyslvania. I am truly blessed.
And I am expcially grateful for these good friends when I realize that many people choose to be near me not because of friendship, but because of greed or falsity or self interest. My eyes have been opened once again to the futility of the students at the business school I attended here in Rio. People that I considered my ture friends have, over the years, shown their true colors and completely abandoned our friendship when it was no longer of use to them...
I have several friends here in Rio that refuse to come to my house since we got the Casa Rosa in Santa Teresa. Why? Becasue the neighborhood has a reputation for being eccentric, for rejecting the upper class Zona Sul way of life, for being dangerous because there is a mix of social classes up here on the hill. People that see no use in having a friend that lives in Santa Teresa, as opposed to friends that live in Leblon, or Barra, or Ipanema.
These are people that were happy to be my best friends when I lived in a different neighborhood, when my mom was head of a money management firm and they needed a job recommendation, when being American was equated with being chic and rich, when I was single and always ready to hit the dance floor. They swore that we were best friends and that nothing would ever change that...
Year by year I began to notice their true colors. The fact that these friends were more concerned with money and status than with the ups and downs that come from a relationship. As soon as I had a crisis in my life, got a boyfriend, moved to a not-so-chic neighborhood (albeit in a bad ass house!)...what was before a fun if not a bit superficial friendship was chucked out the back door along with last season's Louis Vuitton handbag, Ugg boots, yellow Lance Armstrong bracelets, and all the other things that were out of style and no longer propelled that person forward in the eyes of the socialite trash that rules their world.
I am grateful for the true friends I have and that I know will be there for me through crises and successes, monetary affluence and times where you just can't afford to buy a new dress or go out because you've got bills to pay...
People that know how to differentiate money from worth are few and far between, especially in the little business school world I live in here in Rio.
I miss my friends, and I am reminded in these initial days of 2006 that true, lasting friendships are hard to come by and just delicious when they finally fall into your life.
I have been blessed with the opportunity to reconnect with several of these true friends, be it in person or via e-mail. Lambros, my Greek friend I met at a tourist office in Athens when I was 14, wrote a lovely recommendation about me in his blog, The Yellow Spacesheep. He and I used to write real, honest to God letters to each other, faithfully decorating paper and envelopes with crayons and ink sketches each month along with the latest news and reflections from each of our lives. We wrote faithfully to each other for years and years. Each day I would expectantly check the mail to see if a letter from Lambros had arrived. He is an artist, and each new letter usually included a sketch or comic strip for me to hang inside my high school locker.
In the summer of 1999, I visited Lambros and his family in Athens as part of a month long trip to Europe. It was a really difficult time in my life, and I was struggling with the things that torment many young girls in our society - low self esteem, an eating disorder, and an incessant desire to be perfect. Lambros gave me some of the best advice of my life as we painted together in his studio one evening.
"To be truly happy," he said, "you only need to do three things: Love yourself, trust yourself, and learn to say 'no'."
What wise words from an 19-year old boy...
He is now in London, working as cabin crew with British Airways, following his heart. Our friendship is now virtual - I miss our letters - but it is still so nice to know that someone on the other side of the world still thinks of you fondly.
Here in Rio, I've met up with several friends from the past, distant but still close to my heart. Maura, who was my neighbor and classmate when I lived here in 2000/2001, is someone I always make a point to visit when I am in town. She is wonderful to be around, one of those people that just lifts your sprits without even trying. We hung out together the other night, drank caiprinhas and danced to axé music in the first pouring rain of the new year in the front yard of her house.
Maura was there for me during a period of crisis in my life a couple of years ago, when all of my other friends in Rio preferred to forget that anything was wrong and totally avoid hanging out with me or even sending e-mails. But through the whole time I thought my life was over and that I had screwed everything up, Maura was there to remind me that I deserve to be happy, invite me to stay in her house until I felt better, make me espresso and diet cookeis, and tell me that everything would turn out okay in the end.
I met up today with Isabella, a friend from Maringá that I met only briefly at a barbecue about 5 years ago when I was visiting a mutual friend of ours that I'd studied with during my student exchange. Isa is very liberal, a leftist and an environmentalist, and we actually met through a huge argument about cultural imperialism and how the United States is the source of most of the evil in the world today. Needless to say she nearly keeled over when she found out that I am American, with my accentless Portuguese and house in Rio. From that moment on, we became friends. She made a special effort today to take the streetcar up to Santa Teresa to visit me in the Casa Rosa. It was the first time we had hung out since the original barbecue where we met so many years ago, but it was obvious by the effort she made to see me that the seed of a true friendship was planted back in Maringá.
There are so many others that are special to me...Gaby in London, Erin in Austin, Kyle in Burundi, Hannah in Pennyslvania. I am truly blessed.
And I am expcially grateful for these good friends when I realize that many people choose to be near me not because of friendship, but because of greed or falsity or self interest. My eyes have been opened once again to the futility of the students at the business school I attended here in Rio. People that I considered my ture friends have, over the years, shown their true colors and completely abandoned our friendship when it was no longer of use to them...
I have several friends here in Rio that refuse to come to my house since we got the Casa Rosa in Santa Teresa. Why? Becasue the neighborhood has a reputation for being eccentric, for rejecting the upper class Zona Sul way of life, for being dangerous because there is a mix of social classes up here on the hill. People that see no use in having a friend that lives in Santa Teresa, as opposed to friends that live in Leblon, or Barra, or Ipanema.
These are people that were happy to be my best friends when I lived in a different neighborhood, when my mom was head of a money management firm and they needed a job recommendation, when being American was equated with being chic and rich, when I was single and always ready to hit the dance floor. They swore that we were best friends and that nothing would ever change that...
Year by year I began to notice their true colors. The fact that these friends were more concerned with money and status than with the ups and downs that come from a relationship. As soon as I had a crisis in my life, got a boyfriend, moved to a not-so-chic neighborhood (albeit in a bad ass house!)...what was before a fun if not a bit superficial friendship was chucked out the back door along with last season's Louis Vuitton handbag, Ugg boots, yellow Lance Armstrong bracelets, and all the other things that were out of style and no longer propelled that person forward in the eyes of the socialite trash that rules their world.
I am grateful for the true friends I have and that I know will be there for me through crises and successes, monetary affluence and times where you just can't afford to buy a new dress or go out because you've got bills to pay...
People that know how to differentiate money from worth are few and far between, especially in the little business school world I live in here in Rio.
Monday, January 02, 2006
Holiday Photos!
This photo is from our midnight Christmas dinner before the Mercedes broke down. Here we are on the varanda of Ricardo's aunts beautiful mansion in São Conrado neighborhood. From left to right: Maria Antônia (Rico's grandma), Maria Cláudia (Rico's cousin), me, Emília (Rico's mom), Cláudia (Rico's aunt), and Getúlio (Cláudia's boyfriend).
In front of the fake Christmas tree: Cláudia, me, Rico, and Maria Antônia.
Here we are on Christmas Day enjoying leftovers - codfish, turkey, chocolate nut mousse, and wine - at the house of a friend of Rico's family. From left to right: Socorro's husband, me, Rico, Emília (Rico's mom), Maria Antônia (Rico's grandma), and Socorro (the family friend).
Here I am with Bibi and her brand new Hello Kitty dolls. Bibi is the granddaughter of Socorro and was super shy when she first met us. As the afternoon wore on, Bibi decided to come out of her shell and we played with her new mini refrigerator, made chocolate mud pies for the Hello Kitties, and took lots and lots of photos.
Happy New Year to all, more photos and stories to come soon.
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