26/03/10

After the reconnect conference I headed down to Maputo for another REDES planning meeting this weekend as our big yearly conference in April draws near. The meetings don’t actually start until Saturday, but traveling in Mozambique is such that it made much more sense to come straight down to Maputo, so we got to kill yesterday in the city. Did some essential Maputo shopping in the morning, getting the couple things that simply don’t exist anywhere else in Mozambique, then spent the afternoon just walking around the city. Even as a female by myself in broad daylight, on the major streets, and with my bag tucked very tightly under my arm, I felt perfectly safe just walking around for 3 hours which is not something I would have expected before coming to Africa. Walking around Maputo is a nice little change because, unlike at site where everyone stares at me because I am the only light-skinned person within 50 miles, nobody stares at me here. That being said, I am apparently beginning to shed my look of a tourist because less and less often do I get accosted by the men on the street selling “African” masks, necklaces, and drums. I have also mastered the Mozambique finger wave to tell them no, so they back off when I do that. And being in Maputo is funny because in some ways you could be in any city in the world. It has the same little shops, crummy buildings, and people on the streets trying to sell you sunglasses or peanuts. But then every once in a while you are reminded that you are clearly in Maputo and not New York: two 8-year-old boys try to sell you exotic-looking green and blue birds they are carrying in crudely made cages, or the guards (untrained men who were just looking for any means of employment) in front of every bank and other official building holding fully-loaded (yes, this has been confirmed) semi-automatic weapons.