my hair likes africa
it is currently hot here in mozambique but i’m not sure if it’s hot & humid, or hot & dry, or hot & something else. yes, i know, this is something that i should be able to figure out, but once i just get to really frickin’ hot, my sensory appreciation regarding the subtleties of the heat, the texture of it, the wrinkles that make this hot different from the hot somewhere else, tends to diminish. in fact, most rational thought beyond calculating exactly how close i can sit to the airconditioner without getting my hair caught in the vents, tends to diminish.
on the subject of hair, whatever the specific brand of hot this is here, it seems to do well by my hair. my hair now has bounce, shine, and no-frizz and almost every day is a good hair day. (and those of you who see me here, you must be wondering if my current hair is now qualifying as a good hair day, what exactly is a normal or even, god forbid, a bad hair day? these people obviously have not seen me walking down the streets of new york with a frizzy yet limp poodle on top of my head that i am desperately trying to tame into a ponytail.)
so my hair likes africa. it is as if the climate has thickened my hair, changed it, making it, if i can be so lamarckian about it, more african. i am acquiring good hair. perhaps if i stay here long enough, my hair will become thick enough that it will stay in a barrette and i will be able to do all pull off some of those cool hairstyles that African people and other folks with thick hair do.
and as long as i am acquiring traits, i have a couple other african ones that i would like:
1. the ability to look right when crossing the street so that i am not run over by a car driving on the left side of the road. maputo is a small city with no rush hour traffic, or really any traffic whatsoever
Friday, December 8, 2006
door, and as quickly as i could picked out a box, trying my best to ignore the calls of “sister! sister! i have good price! look here, sister!” in the end, i got a box, but it is really not the size of box i wanted. i just couldn’t stand to look through the boxes longer than 0.002 seconds so just took the first remotely appropriate box.
4. earllier-riser-ness. actually, i just think that southern africa needs to institute daylight savings time. the sun comes up somewhere in the 4s and by 5am light comes streaming in through even the thickest curtains. by 5:30 or 6am i am, unfortunately, up. perhaps one day i will consider this a joy to be up so early, but apparently lamarckian genetics, unfortunately, does not provide instantaneous characteristic acquisition. sigh.
so how exactly brutal was the mozambiquan civil war (1975-1990)? well, out of a population of a little under 20 million, an estimated 1 million died, 1.7 million took refuge in neighboring states, and several million more were internally displaced. RENAMO, the guerilla insurgents, targeted civilians and infrastructure on their attacks. UNICEF estimated the under-5 mortality rate during the war at 375 deaths per 1000 live births.
health centers, schools, relief workers, and relief centers were prime RENAMO targets. RENAMO destroyed, looted, or forced to close 978 health clinics (48% of the country’s primary health-care network). they would go into hospitals and kill patients, including pregnant women. by 1985, 3000 schools had been destroyed or forced to close, 400 teachers killed and an unknown number kidnapped or mutilated. relief convoys were regularly attacked. captured RENAMO documents showed that international aid workers were considered valid and important targets. RENAMO had boiled children alive in front of their parents and used decapitated heads of old people as seats. a US state department report documented RENAMO tactics to include “shooting executions, knife/axe/bayonet killings, burning alive, beating to death, forced asphyxiation, forced starvation, forced drownings, and random shooting at civilians in villages during attacks.”
(15 years of civil war does wonders for traffic reduction) but the drivers here take the point of view that the few cars that are here own the road. the greatest concession that they will give to a pedestrian crossing the road is to honk as they speed up. even the africans have been known to start sprinting in panic as a vehicle barrels down on them. the only thing that slows the cars down are the potholes. besides significantly reducing the number of cars on the road, the war also changed maputo from being considered one of the most elegant city in africa to a city where big pieces of the sidewalk and the road are missing. drivers have to dodge massive potholes, and this doubly handicaps them as they have to remember to drive on the left side of the road as well (darn you british!). it is still not instinctual for me to look right when i cross the road.
2. the ability to roll my r’s. my tongue is apparently quite handicapped in this department and so, you can imagine my joy when, after having struggled with the rolled r in spanish for years, i learned that portuguese has the same r. i have been taking portuguese classes and my original goal was to go from zero to fluency in one month. so far, i mostly just speak spanish with a pathetic attempt at a portuguese accent - i call is “portañol” (=portuguese + español), so i may have to move my fluency benchmark to two months.
3. mob tolerance: the other day i needed a box so the driver took me to the “box market” which is really a dirt parking lot where about 10 vendors have their “displays” of boxes, all fully assembled. business at the box market must not be very brisk as when we pulled in, the car was immediately mobbed by all the vendors pitching the high quality and low costs for their boxes (which, by the way, were all clearly used boxes). i had to really think how much i really wanted a box as i don’t deal very well with mobs. in the end, i took a deep breath, opened the car
a “pothole” on my street
a “pothole” on the sidewalk
