Today, while I was reading on the porch, I looked up and was shocked to see that I was in Mozambique. I saw a small, brown child playing happily with a plastic bag on the damp crust of red dirt that is my front lawn, a mud house with a straw roof to the left, and a small field of corn to the right. I think it was my neighbor’s house that did it. You may see a kid playing with a plastic bag in the States (I’d assume he was mentally impaired) and certainly fields of corn, but never a straw roof. It also happens to be my 6-month anniversary in Mozambique. I’ve been in southern Africa for half a year, and I’m still surprised to find myself here.
You can’t make much here, but luckily, you can make delicious brownies. Last night, I made the best brownies I’ve ever made in my life. Out of the six or seven lojas that all sell the same things, one miraculously sells cans of cocoa powder for 120 Meticais. Unfortunately, that loja is also the one run by the man who sent Renee home with a message a few weeks ago. Renee looked down at his feet, and told me, “He wants you to be his girlfriend.” (Same man who feigned motorcycle troubles to talk to me).
The typical loja is a room with a concrete counter, behind which is a wall of shelves containing the products. Between the shelves and the counter stand a Bangladeshi owner, who calculates the cost of your purchases using a calculator (no matter how small the sum) and orders a Mozambican man to retrieve the following items from the shelves:
Plastic sacs of synthetic margarine called Amanda, flour, white cornmeal, sugar, oil, sweetened condensed milk, powdered milk, spaghetti that overcooks in five minutes, tomato paste, chocolate malt powder, custard powder, Benny (magical chicken bouillon packets), rice and beans by the kilo, and things like toilet paper, bug spray, and 777 batteries that die after an hour of use.
As you can imagine, there aren’t a whole lot of meal options. I eat a lot of spaghetti.
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