29/05/10

Today we ventured outside of Mozambique for the first time since arriving, going to Swaziland for the Bushfire Music Festival. Swaziland is south of us and also in the mountains, so I found myself, for the first time in over a year, cold. It was weird. We also kept getting in trouble because people speak English there! We are accustomed to being able to say anything we want and nobody understanding us in Mozambique, because even the English speakers can’t understand our American accents and slang. Oops. We had been told that Swaziland is more developed than Mozambique, but we were literally blown away by the drastic contrast as soon as we crossed the border. Swaziland is full of Western markers of civilization that simply don’t exist in Mozambique—paved roads, lines (like of people), signs, trash cans, sidewalks, price tags, strip malls. Never in the 9 months I have been in Mozambique have I thought to myself, “I could be in America right now” but in Swaziland I constantly felt like that.
The festival was great. There were all different sorts of music, mostly from South Africa, but also from Swaziland, Mozambique, and a few other countries. And judging by the crowd, some of the bands were incredibly well-known and popular. We ran into a lot of other Moz PCVs, as well as meeting tons of interesting people in our hostel and at the festival, including tons of South Africa PCVs and Swaziland PCVs. At our hostel we met people from England, Canada, America, Israel, traveling and doing different sorts of projects. I even met two separate people with Bowdoin siblings! And we made friends with a guy who was traveling in South Africa and Swaziland and when he found out we are from Mozambique he said, hey I have always wanted to go there, so he came back with us.