I Do Not Wear Polyester Hair, Unlike Some People

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  Xai-Xai, Mozambique
Sunday, July 13, 2008

We made it from Maputo, a capital o reasonable size and infrastructure, to Chicambane, a more rural area in the Gaza province.  I arrived in Chicambane at the perfect time.  The first evening was the 100th year celebration of the local church, complete with speeches, singing, dancing and the slaughter of 4 cows.  Beef, it's what's for dinner.  Also in Xai Xai, just 10 km up the road, was an art and culture festival in which each province of the country was represented in food, dance, music, theatre and art.  A crash course in Mozambican culture right at my finger tips!
 
Chicambane consists of a series of rust colored dirt roads (that red brown...dare I say burnt sienna...color of the Africa that pops into your head when you close your eyes) with palm, coconut, orange, mango and grapefruit trees shading mud and reed homes with thatch or sheet metal roofs.  Dirt is dirty.  Period. I felt and looked like I was covered in a fine dust, but strangely I was the only one in this situation.  Everyone and everything else seemed clean...remarkably clean.  Although people are by no means wealthy in this community there is a certain amount of pride in appearance reflected by their grooming and    SPOTLESS pressed clothes.  With this attention to appearance came an attention to hair.  More specifically women's hair.
 
You can take whole university classes on the sociology of black hair in the United States, so I should have expected similar politics in Mozambique.  What was surprising was to see a plethora of wigs in all colors and styles.  Let me emphasize that many of the styles were like nothing I had ever seen and, to a certain extent, defied gravity in such a way that I had to question whether Newton's theory was actually correct.  One of my favorite stories from Megan was in regard to a woman who asked her to shave her head so that the woman could make a wig out of the hair.  This "pedir-ing", (pedir is to ask for something in Portuguese), no matter how outlandish the request, is VERY common in Mozambique.  Strangers with come up to you and pedir you for your watch, shoes, t-shirt and apparently even our hire.  This is not in an aggressive mugging manner.  Simply someone saying "esto pedir...." Fill in the blank. You say no and they walk away.  No harm no foul. I'm not sure how often it works, but there must be some amount of success because it's pandemic. 
 
Blah blah blah, I got off track.  Back to the woman that was pedir-ing for human hair.  By some cosmic luck we bumped into this woman on our way out of town.  She had shaved her head and was sporting a multi-layered polyester "up-do" that made me think a wig of Meg's hair might not be such a bad idea. Peace Corps is about helping a community and this woman clearly needed some help.  In the end esto pedir pictures of that wig, but unfortunately there was never the right moment to paparazzi someone in such a small community.      

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