28/09/11

Coming back to Inharrime I needed to get to the edge of town to catch a bus, so I flagged down a passing car for that short ride. As I was shutting the door the driver said “I want to marry you” and I almost got right back out again, but I told myself to suck it up, it was only a two-minute ride. “I need you marry you, you see?” and he showed me his two ring-less hands. I just held up my hand where I wear a ring. “But it’s on the left hand so it doesn’t count” was his response. Creepy AND dumb, well that’s an unfortunate combination.
This morning a girl from my peer-advising group knocked on my door. She held out sunglasses and asked if they were mine. When I said they weren’t she said, “but they guy said they belonged to you.” I eventually learned that a white woman who had caught a ride and gotten out at our school had left these sunglasses behind in her ride’s car. Turns out they were Raquel’s the Spanish volunteer who lives here. She was happy to see her sunglasses again, and surprised that the guy came all the way back to return them through a chain of people and that they actually got back to her.
Raquel recently tried to change a $100 bill, but the exchange places in Mozambique don’t accept bills older than 2006 or something (when the bills changed and the president’s heads got bigger). I have a PCV colleague who is heading back to the states this week to support his father running an Ironman race, so we were able to get him to change it for Meticais and take it with him. But this happens all the time to people who come from America with perfectly legitimate dollars and find they are useless here.