Bruce Willis knows all that transpired in Moz
Trip Start
Unknown
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3
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Trip End
Ongoing
Nampula,
Mozambique
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Policemen... jeez. In the best of situations, policemen are a dodgy specimen best left to the lions. I've never had one get me out of trouble, only into it. Still, you'd think that after 27 years at it, I'd have figured out certain things... Not so if it involves storming the realm of Not Very Good Ideas. Mostly I just get cut up and banged up but sometimes I manage to do something so stupendously ill-advised that I nearly land my ass in jail (a place I've miraculously never actually been, despite my valiant efforts to the contrary). I'm enough of a radical to believe that it's imperative to toe the proverbial line whenever possible and have a healthy disregard for rules and regulations (so, I've a bit of the anarchist in me, too... whoopee! And I'm loose in Africa!)
Eh, maybe not entirely true; cops the world over scare the piss out of me because they tend to be of dubious intelligence and given disproportionate amounts of power to wield somewhat indiscriminately over their compatriots. And it's precisely this power imbalance that makes Johnny Law so jumpy, especially when it comes to photographing them when they are involved in dodgy and immoral endeavors (ipso facto, it is never a good idea to photograph cops). But I've never been put off by that and usually I'm slick enough to pull off a couple good shots before they even know I'm there. But I have a new camera with an indecipherable instruction manual and an erratic and unpredictable flash, so when I saw three spiffy Mozambican policemen surrounding a cowering woman out in the slums, I instinctively shot a couple pictures-with the goddamned flash!
I immediately recognized the folly of this act, especially as they peeled themselves away from that poor woman (who, at this point, is probably Number One Fan of dumb Americans) and proceeded to surround me. Oops. And they're pissed. Really pissed. They're yelling at me to give them my camera, which I really have no choice but to do. While I can be borderline slow when attempting normal, everyday activities (mentally, I mean. Otherwise, I'm like a hummingbird on crack.), when it comes to being in deep shit, I am an ace with the old brain. I give them my best innocent and confused face and stall while I frantically delete the incriminating photos.
Bruno takes over from here-thank god, because my Portuguese extends to some butchered Spanish approximations, though I did look up the translation of "pernickety" (pedante...not the most inspired of translations) and know that puta is the same in both languages but that's certainly not going to help me in this situation. The police are convinced I've done something underhanded and sneaky (they're right but they can't prove it and luckily, none of them were a crack with digital technology). But then they continue to yell and gesticulate and generally froth in my face, at which point, I start getting a little more nervous. A growing crowd of Mozambicans jostle around us, eager for some Mazunga (whitey) entertainment. Finally, the clink reluctantly bade us (me) free to go, and everyone was left with the somewhat accurate impression that Americans are stupid motherfuckers (this one, at least). I probably didn't learn any good lessons from this experience, either, except to reiterate what my parents taught me years ago: just don't get caught.
This isn't the only time that weekend that I managed to make myself even more conspicuous in Africa. In the market in Nampula, a wild and fantastically chaotic affair that involves multiple mobbings (not muggings), my shirt strap comes untied, and my boob flops out. I am grateful that I don't have a firm enough grasp on Portuguese to understand "Look! The white woman has her boob hanging out!" Ha Ha. It reminds me of the time I accidentally flashed my entire family reunion (I must have been smoking pot with my Uncle Trevor because I could have sworn I still had my bikini top on) and turned at least one male cousin off women forever.
Anyway, Molly, Bruno (said Mozzie), and I were in Nampula in northern Mozambique, doing a little touristy action and checking out the incredible beaches. These were the stuff tropical paradise clichés are made of-long stretches of sandy white beaches, clear turquoise waters, coral reefs, funny looking colorful fish... The journey there was comical; our plane (and another plane) was stranded on the tarmac without fuel for several hours because no one had thought to arrange it-just a slight oversight, given it's an airport and all... When we do finally start taxiing down the runway to take-off, the cabin starts filling with smoke. Molly and I laugh nervously and I write in my Bruce Willis notebook, "Smoke in aircraft. Sweet. May be about to die," just in case the black box got lost in the wreckage but apparently, it's no big deal, because in a matter of seconds, we're in the air, smoke still leaking into the cabin. Hmmm....
Nampula is gorgeous, surrounded by the same kind of sudden jutting rock mountains that I saw in southern China and Halong Bay in Vietnam. Our company-some acquaintances of Bruno's-left something to be desired but Molly and I kept ourselves well entertained with mildly perverted conversations. Let me give you an idea of how our mind-singular unit, at this point-works. Back in Beira, Bruno asks us if we know what a McGregor is (it's a kind of Scotch, apparently). We are confused. We think it should be a euphemism for a sexual act or toy, kind of like a Dirty Sanchez, so we decide that a McGregor is a woman wearing a strap-on. Just as we're deciding this, we careen past three highly-evolved Winston mutts (see Moz Installation #2), involved in an oddly nonchalant doggie threesome. "They're making Winstons!" Molly cries, and now we have a verb (another euphemism, this time for doggie-style sex-making) to go with our new noun... (Used in a sentence: Want me to be a McGregor tonight and make Winstons with you?) I'm still giggling typing this.
In a manner of forced segues, our linguistic adventures don't end there. Rather, Nampula saw the advent of a short love affair with word plays. We can blame Bruno, since it was his somewhat non-sequitur observation that started the whole thing. Passing the main round-about in Nampula, he casually mentions that he once saw a plane in the middle of the plaza there. I consider this for a minute, deciding that any pilot who accomplished such a feat of aeronautical mastery was both a genius and a fucking lunatic (I know a few of these kind of people, including both my parents, so I'm not that surprised...) and say so. No, no, he corrects me. It fell. The plane fell? This is even more impressive to me, and I try out the Spanish past preterit: se calló. Molly corrects me to adjust for the Portuguese: caiu, pronounced "kai-you." I get excited because of the six or seven French words I know, this is one of them, meaning Polar Bear. (I don't really know this and am probably wrong.) I point this out-kaiyu caiu, polar bear fell-and we're all silent for a few minutes, imagining a polar bear falling out of the scorching African sky, twisting madly, like a doomed cat. And then we laugh hysterically because the image, so improbable, is hilarious, and because linguistic gymnastics is among the most entertaining pastimes on the planet.
This initiates a weekend-long frenzy of not-so-subtle word games. Oddly enough, the Mozambicans we're traveling with see the humor in the subtle twists and double-entendres but we completely lost them with the more obvious word plays. Fresh off the caiu-caiu kick, we pass a truck (we're pushing 180 km-yikes!) that has another truck parked on top of it-"truck on truck!" we holler-and then a few miles down the road, we pass a man riding a bicycle with a bicycle balanced on his head, and we're overcome with glee, yelling "bike on bike!" (or, bike-on-man-on-bike), which brings me around to another African miracle (to rob-and butcher-a fine turn of phrase by Tim O'Brien): the things they carry.
People here carry everything on their heads, and in massive loads. To me, who can barely balance a wet towel draped over my head, this is sheer magic. The man had a bicycle (a bicycle, for fuck's sake!) balanced on his head. And he was riding a bicycle at the same time! Women stroll along imperturbably, carrying gallons of water, large sacks of food, pumpkins, tables, wood, grass, truck tires, pretty much anything you can imagine, balanced serenely on their noggins. I saw a man walking down the street balancing a wheelbarrow on his head. Let's take a minute to consider this... a freakin' wheelbarrow! I'm in awe. I get really excited about it and jump around, twisting back to watch them. It's incredible, especially for me, because I am definitely NOT a graceful creature, despite having the kind of freaky long toes and boney feet that make ballerinas sigh with unrequited passion. If I tried to carry a wheelbarrow on my head, I'd probably manage to break both my legs and kill a small child in the process.
Out in the country, where I traveled for the week with the guy who coordinates the food supplementation program for HIV-positive people on antiretroviral drugs, you see people, even little kids, walking along the side of a single dirt track, miles and miles from any village, with those gigantic loads on their heads, and you know they're going to be carrying that shit for hours, out in that freaking oppressive tropical sun. But the kids smile huge smiles and give us big thumbs up and I can't help but smile hugely back and wave like an idiot. I'm not doing any favors for the "cool American" image here (it's a big lie, anyway).
The country side is incredible. I'm no good at nature writing-I leave that to the Annie Dillards and Stephen Goulds of the world-but I'll take a quick crack at it: very green, passed through forests, savannahs (authentic African savannahs! How awesome!), across crocodile-infested rivers (I'm not allowed to go swimming...), palm trees, rice paddies, corn fields, and everywhere, women walking along in colorful capalanas with babies tied to their backs and little kids scampering along. Well, that was a pretty sucky visual image... sorry, I'm much better at describing the bizarre, depraved, and disgusting stuff.
But Mozambique smells good, fresh and raw. It has a visceral quality to it, like all the smells are real (oof. Could I get any more cheesy and unimaginative there?), the same smells you would have smelled 100, 500, 5000 years ago. True, the bathrooms are hardly a party in your olfactory glands but they also don't take on the epic proportions of stench that characterize (for example) a Chinese public bathroom (though that loo in that Moroccan bus station, the one that left me in a state of sheer panic and terror, still tops my list of Bad Bathroom Experiences). Even the overcrowded district hospital in Búzi, which was stifling hot, with heavy, unmoving air, and smelled of sickness and a little like dying, was easy to breath in (though it left me sad and uneasy with the state of the world).
Traveling around to the rural villages was a trip (quite literally, I guess... let's all take a moment to collectively groan at my lack of wit). We worked like possessed meth heads-awake at 7 am and working until 7 pm or later, then dinner, then exhausted sleep. My brain hurt at the end of the day from all the struggle of communicating in a language I don't really speak. We'd go out into the villages, tramp along the narrow dirt paths that wove through a maze of little grass thatched-roofed, stick and mud huts. Corn grew in weird, indiscriminate bursts, and every so often, we'd pass one of the community wells, where a group of kids would be madly priming the pump. (That has to be one of the most inappropriate metaphors in the universe for Africa... apparently, Adam Smith didn't have the Third World on his mind when he was working out his economic theories that would eventually drive the industrial world forward and bury the rest of it in a stinking pit of poverty and asinine economic regulations.)
Anyway, amateur economics aside (man, one could go on for days ranting about what a mess economic theory and interests have made of Africa!), it was pretty cool, and I managed to get in a shit ton of interviews that I need to somehow figure out how to use for my thesis, despite not having been cleared to conduct these through any of the human subjects review boards...fucking bureaucratic nightmare, there, my friends. Best avoided all together; do now, make amends later, right? (I am apparently not cut out for the academic life.)
It was sad, though. It's easy, I think, to feel disconnected from the reality of this disease (HIV/AIDS, if I didn't allude to that earlier) when I'm back in the States, researching food aid policy and crafting clever logistic models with neat little inputs and outputs and outcomes. USAID would be proud of me but it doesn't do shit to reflect the messiness and complexity of trying to help the woman laying on the ground in front of me, almost too weak to clutch her severely malnourished baby, who's probably the saddest thing I've ever seen in my life. Her arms were tiny little sticks, improbably small and her head was disproportionately large, with the veins sticking out. Her ribs stuck out, too, and she was covered in open sores. I remember seeing a Pulitzer Prize photo taken of a little girl starving to death in the Horn of Africa (the photographer later committed suicide) and she looked too much like the unresponsive infant in front of me.
Oosh. What a problem. I was taking part in a nutrition meeting with the mothers in the Vertical Transmission Prevention program (HIV-positive moms, hopefully HIV-negative babes) and one of the women, breastfeeding a really cute baby, asked me (rhetorically?) "AIDS doesn't go away. We're not going to get better. When will they have a cure?" I didn't know how to answer. I'm really not good at being serious and the last couple days stretched the limit of my capacity for not making an inappropriate joke out of everything.
But it's not all terrible. The antiretroviral drugs work small miracles and people come off their death beds (so to speak) and are able to participate in life again. One little girl, born HIV-positive, was a firecracker. She ruled over a gang of boys with a ferocity and confidence that was hilarious and made my heart go "La La La..." (in the same warble of Bert and Ernie's "La La La, Linoleum!" song). Her mom laughed a lot and told me how she couldn't keep up with her daughter's energy or her appetite.
And it was so cool to be out in the country. There are all these impromptu markets in the most unexpected places, and like most non-American places I've been, the things you can buy off the street here crack me up. We interrupted one of our interviews to conduct what appeared to be a covert drug deal but was really just a transaction involving weird bits of cow. The next day, as we're packing to leave, I find a bloody cow head in the back of the truck. I'm a little perturbed-the fucker was bleeding all over the place-but more confused. What part, exactly, do you eat, I ask somewhat naively. Obede, the HAI-WFP food coordinator, laughs at my ignorance, and says, the whole thing, chopped up. The brain, too, I query, somewhat slyly. Yes, definitely the brain, it's the best part, he assures me. That's when I know he's a liar, and I know this because I've eaten brains (pig) before and they were quite possibly the most repulsive thing I've ever had the misfortune of ingesting, and that includes the time I ate my own poo when I was a baby (though not before finger painting all over the walls with the contents of my diaper). But the food here is actually pretty standard, non-mysterious fare, if a bit monotonous.
Since, we're on the topic of food (it's all I think about anymore... one way or another-either I'm hungry and want to eat, or I'm doing research on food), I'll end it with a happy discovery: Mozambicans love mayonnaise! One restaurant had "Mayonnaise" as an entrée (you could order it with a side of crab or lobster). And the grocery store in Nampula had an amazing, almost religious, display of mayonnaise! I was so excited I picked up the biggest jar there (huge!) and hugged it.
I'm kind of in love with my Portuguese dictionary, too. It has words like "dirigible" in it.
