i was hanging out and talking with my colleague in swaziland the other day about the best tactics for negotiating bride prices.  he is his family’s lead negotiator in this manner and claims to be quite good at it.  we were discussing strategy as this weekend he is going to negotiate for his brother’s new wife.  he is planning at starting the bidding off at 2 cows, as really, one can not go below 2 cows as it is given that the bride’s mother gets one cow and the bride herself gets one cow.  the family will usually start with an outrageous offer of 30 cows.  outrageous!  (it helps in the negotiation to be outraged).  He will start off with his 2 cows and work his way up to his upper limit, 17 cows.

 

in case you are ever in this situation, here are some good lines to get the number of cows down:

 

1.  “but she is a third-born daughter!  it is not like she is the first born!”

 

2.  “but i only paid 12 cows for my second wife!”

 

3.  “but if i give you 9 cows, how will i have enough to

 

when i was a kid, my parents would torture me by dragging me around to tourist sites (“are we there yet?”  “i don’t want to go see the museum.”  “this town stinks.”  what a button of sunshine i was, their shining pride and joy).  one way i would determine how “cultured” these towns that my parents dragged me to was by how many mcdonalds it had.  a one-mcdonald town was a veritable podunk, a place with nothing of interest, no reason to be there.  a two-mcdonald town was better, you could probably find the town’s name on a map.  if we got up to a three-mcdonald town, well then, now we were talking!

 

evidently, i am not the only one who benchmarks things off of mcdonalds.  the economist must have overheard me from the backseat of the volvo (“really dad, there is no reason to even get out of the car at stonehedge.  i mean, there’s not even a mcdonalds there”) and said begeebers!  this kid must be on to something!  check out the below economist international

 

crinca encounter number one:

 

my friend sergio was in touch with a group of crinca, or kids, who are living on the street here in maputo.  there are a pack of about 10 of them that live in a park and find their dinners in the garbage cans.  while they disburse across the city looking for food and such on the weekdays, on saturday mornings they hang out in a certain park overlooking the ocean.  so one saturday morning, sergio and i loaded up a bag with rolls, cashews, and sugar candies and headed down to the park.

 

they knew sergio so all ran up as the car coasted to a stop by the side of the road.  we gave them the food and sat on a parkbench to talk with them.  surprisingly, they didn’t immediately rip into the food, but hung around saying they weren’t hungry right then and would eat it later.

 

personally, when i am hungry, i lose all rational thought beyond food, stomach, now.

 

so, we all sat there on the bench, an unopened bag of food in front of us while sergio asked them

 

“hi.  i have a form that i need you to sign.  so i am going to email it to you and i need you to print it out, sign it, and then fax it back to me.”

 

“umm...i don’t mean to be difficult, but don’t think that will be possible today.”

 

“but it is very important for my report.”

 

“yes, but i am in pemba.  pemba, mozambique. and  each one of those activities here, individually, is not possible.  all three together might take me 24 hours of dedicated work.”

 

“but i need it within the next 20 minutes.”

 

“what part of mozambique did you not understand?”

 

 

 

this country is pretty awesome.

 

this morning, i sat out on the guard’s vacated chair on my building’s front walkway, waiting for the driver to come pick me up to go to work.  to pass the time, i idly mentally chastised myself for not having a copy of my medical helivac evacuation card printed out and in my wallet so as to have it on my person at all times.  last night at dinner, where i had the most delightful chicken with mushroom and cream sauce, we were talking about how messed up the mozambiquan health care system is.  if a medical emergency happens (such as, for example, if something happens to that mozambiquan ferry, photographed above.  and by the way, yes, those little black specs are all people.  can we say disaster waiting to happen?), your best bet is really to get on that helicopter headed for south africa as fast as you can.  i mean, what is the point of having purchased the darn insurance if you don’t carry it with you? stupid, stupid, stupid.

 

actually i was alternating between beating myself up over

 

 

there are basically two roads to ponta.  one comes from south africa and it is a nice paved road until you hit the border with mozambique and then you have a sand road for the last 10 miles or so.  the other road is from maputo and it is anywhere from 3 to 7 hours of sand roads, depending on your vehicle, the weather (sand, unfortunately, does have a tendency to turn to mud when it rains), and your driving constitution.

 

not surprisingly, a lot more south africans go to ponta than mozambiquans.  in fact, the first time i got the bill for

 

what do you do when you walk into a cashew processing factory in rural mozambique and have 50 eyes turn and silently stare at you, the white person, who has come to inspect the work and then ride off in the big fancy car?

 

the NGO i am here with is quite involved in the cashew industry here in mozambique.  mozambique used to have a huge percent of the global market share for processing cashews until international competition heated up with india and lots of places in southeast asia coming onboard.  the industry in mozambique couldn’t compete and more or less collapsed here until my little NGO came to the rescue (faster than a speeding bullet!  leaping taller than a, um, really tall building?  how does it go again?)  my NGO is in large part responsible for the mozambiquan cashew industry turning around and getting back on its feet. to be honest, i have mixed feelings about being involved in this.

 

as i am sitting here munching on some cashews (delicious!), i have to say that a heck of

 

this past weekend i went to “operation massive coordination.”  operation massive coordination required a dedicated team of highly trained professionals to completely disregard their professional work in order to send approximately 2000 emails per day to set up.  it took massive amounts of bandwidth and almost overloaded email inboxes at one point.  it took great strength of character not to delete emails with an impatient flick of the wrist, but to patiently write “hi.  thanks for that suggestion, but i don’t know if, per email #274, that would work for me.”

 

some days i think organizing things were easier when all we had was a pointy spear and a couple of hard rocks (you mean no internet?  gasp!)

 

but what were these logistics organizing?  an awesome weekend for six in kruger, well worth at least 1500 of those emails per day.  six coworkers who are in southern africa on short term contracts got the chance to go back to the days of pointy spears and hard rocks and trek into the bush