01/10/10

Today is the one-year anniversary of our (Moz 14) arrival in country! One of the fastest and most eventful years of my life. Moz 15 has landed and begun their orientation and training, welcome and congratulations to them, though none of them are on the internet right now.
One of my favorite things about the past year is all of the interesting people I have met. In America people are less likely to start a deep conversation with someone they just met. Also, as much as I loved them, the last 8 years of my life didn’t exactly expose me to lots of different kinds of people (a 700 student boarding school in rural Indiana and a 1700 student liberal arts college in Maine). I love teaching here, I love learning about myself here, and most of all I love meeting new interesting people here. I’ve met the French couple cycling from Cairo to Cape Town on a tandem; the guy who works in the cooking oil factory in Inhambane and told me about how they get all their crude oil from Argentina and while most of what they produce stay within the African continent, they have buyers in England and Switzerland; the Portuguese and French couple who decided to move here when the economy tanked; the two Algerian men with a huge Algerian flag painted on the hood of their truck who drove all the way down to South Africa for the World Cup and then drove back up, hitting as many countries as they could, the Kiwi who was hitching through South Africa and Mozambique and when a lodge offered him a job as a dive instructor for a few months he thought, sure why not; the American who is spending his study-abroad semester in college living in Mozambique with his sister and coaching swimming at an expat schoo; the man who, upon finding out I am American, put on Neil Young and proudly demonstrated he knew all the words; the light-skinned Mozambican (probably Arabic descent) who kept talking about how reverse-racism is such a problem here, how he is constantly overcharged because his skin is lighter, but also how stupid the blacks are and how when he was growing up his parents never let him play with them and it’s because of this he doesn’t speak any African dialects; the man who works in Maxixe but who family lives in Chimoio (find them on a map) so every Friday at 4pm when he gets off work he drives there to spend the weekend with his family, the rotund pastor who translates the bible from English and Portuguese into local dialects for a living, the two British boys cycling from South Africa to Kenya raising money to buy mosquito nets; the Rasta man from Zimbabwe who just hangs out at the beaches now; the truck driver who loves hunting and fishing and told me all about his different expeditions; the guy who happily bobbed his head grinning to the song “Two Princes” (Just Go Ahead Now) by the Spin Doctors (an American pop song circa 1997) every time he played it, which was about 8 times; the European guy (I forget which country exactly) who ended up working at a hostel in Swaziland, at least for the time being; the guy who tried to convince me there were lions around Inharrime, I just hadn’t seen any yet; the Angolan woman who went to Portugal to escape the situation in Angola, met a Mozambican man and married him, and has lived here since; the Irish guy who has lived in Malawi for two years and his two friends visiting him, and the Namibian guy with his mini guitar who was taking the year to wander around Africa. But even the people who don’t have some funny “story” are interesting. There are the white people here who instantly identify themselves at Mozambican and there are the white people who say they are Portuguese, but quickly follow it with “but I was born here and have always lived here.” There are the occasionally unfriendly people here, but generally Mozambique is full of friendly people, and quite a few too-friendly men.