We walked across town to the fairgrounds, chatting in English. This friend is a student at the Universidade Pedagógica here in Chimoio. He was born and raised in a tiny town in the neighboring province of Sofala and had multiple Peace Corps Volunteers as secondary school teachers. Without ever living in an English-speaking environment, he has achieved an impressive level of fluency. I have met a few young Mozambicans here with an astounding drive to learn English, especially those who recognize the opportunities that it can bring. I have given away all the magazines I have finished reading and passed around thumb drives full of music: there just is not much English-language material available here and most of the American music on the radio is NOT the kind that anyone should use to learn the language. [Note: any Time/Newsweek/other accessible, preferably non-trashy magazines sent here will find a good home with a young English-learner. Mailing info can be found here.]
We arrived at the fairgrounds just as the last few dance groups were entering. After fighting through the crowd to buy our 25 meticais tickets – and repeatedly telling the kid who greeted me with “baby” that I was not in fact his baby and I would not be buying his ticket despite his switching to calling me “senhora” – we passed through the gates and were greeted with the delicious smell of grilling chicken and the sight of hundreds of secondary school students in brightly-colored costumes awaiting their turns to march to the judging area and show off their Mozambican-flavored samba skills for the audience.
They started with a mini-parade, each team dancing around a banner declaring their school’s name, wearing matching outfits consisting of layers of ruffled, satiny material in alternating colors. Mostly short skirts and bikini-style tops for the girls and knee-length shorts and vests for the boys. I don’t think I have written much about Mozambican dancing, but let me tell you, the vast majority of Mozambicans I have encountered can dance and they love it. They can stomp their feet and shake their hips with a velocity that seems to defy the limits of human physiology. And they do it effortlessly. As a muzungu with two left feet, I get pretty envious. (Most people here are pretty entertained when I explain that I have dois pés esquerdos.)
After the entrance parade, each team had the opportunity to strut their stuff for about fifteen minutes front and center. The first group was large, probably about 40 students, arrayed in two parallel lines, girls matched with boys. Then suddenly, about halfway through this first performance, the sound system cut out just as a new song was beginning. As the dancers paused and looked around at their teammates, a quiet murmur passed through the crowd of hundreds of paying customers. Then, instead of the building noise of an indignant crowd not getting its money’s worth, or the peeved stomping of teenagers who had spent weeks rehearsing a routine they now couldn’t perform, the crowd quieted, the dancers exchanged a last few glances, seemed to shrug, and restarted their routine without the benefit of music. They stayed pretty well synchronized and gradually regained a decent amount of energy and enthusiasm.
At first, I shook my head a little: “What are these kids doing, pretending like they still have music?! You can’t samba in silence!” Then it dawned on me what I was watching. These are teenagers who have experienced a lifetime of things like sudden power outages. Here, if you gave up every time there was an unexpected turn like no music for your dance competition, you wouldn’t get very far.
Very quickly during training in Namaacha, I got used to the power flickering off and on for varying stretches of time, particularly when the weather was bad. There were always candles on hand and I always knew where my headlamp was. The lights would go out, a few candles would be lit and life would continue. In my house here in Chimoio, it isn’t an infrequent experience to turn the faucet on in the middle of the day only to find there isn’t any water flowing from the pipes. I always have a few bottles of drinking water filled and buckets of wash water stored in the bathroom. A dinner party would be a challenge and laundry goes on hold, but life goes on. If the water stayed off, I have a holding tank in my front yard that I could boil and filter when needed. Here, unpredictability is routine.
Just this morning, I arrived at school to find that the power was out. I had planned to use Powerpoint slides and a projector, but that idea was out the window. Luckily, I could borrow a laptop to read my slides, as it was a class in Portuguese that would have been quite a challenge to give from memory. But, if the laptop hadn’t been there, I probably would have been flipping through my textbook to pull out the key phrases in Portuguese, and my students probably would not have blinked. As it was, I dictated the short case study I wanted them to analyze and for most of them, it was probably just a throwback to their secondary-school classes, where most teachers dictate large blocks of text to students who don’t have books of their own.
In the few experiences I have had traveling within Mozambique, my flights have been delayed for multiple hours with not real explanation of why. I have spent hours sitting in a chapa just waiting for it to fill before we can even start our trip to the next city. But the stories I have heard from people who travel frequently make these sound like a study in German efficiency.
Just when I think I have learned food prices, they change. Carrots in the market vary from 50 to 100 meticais per kilo, depending on the availability that day. Eggs go up and down from 5 a piece up to 6 and back down to 5. If you have the money and you want to avoid major price fluctuations, you can go to the giant, modern land of cans and jars and hermetically sealed plums: Shoprite. Just don’t assume that because they had chunky peanut butter last week, they will have it today. Or any peanut butter at all. They may have a broad variety of imported cheeses, or a completely empty dairy case.
Very little here is truly predictable. In just a few months, I have already learned to roll with it for the most part. Showed up for a meeting with someone who went on vacation without telling anyone? More time for lesson planning. The person who was supposed to clean the yard came at noon instead of 8:00 am? Gave me the morning to do laundry while I was waiting to let him in. A rat ate the bread I planned to use for my egg sandwich? I bet I could use agua e sal crackers to make a decent matzoh-brei.
For students who have grown up with this kind of unpredictability, the natural response to losing the music that accompanies their dance routine is to continue. At times, for those of us who are used to a more predictable environment, one that enables us to feel more in control of our circumstances, this comfort with things going awry can sometimes seem like an infuriating passivity. When something goes wrong, you are supposed to do something about it, dammit! But that presupposes a well-defined, predictable norm from which to stray. When awry is the norm, maybe having the tenacity to keep going according to your plan without letting your environment derail you is the best response. In the case of the Carnaval dancers, after a couple of minutes of dancing acapella, the music kicked back in, the crowd cheered and they continued without missing a beat.
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