Swazi-South African-Mozambican Tri-Border Point
Sunday is typically our only day off of the week. After a Saturday night running the pool table at a local bar (and winning beers for a betting friend in the process), I woke up early (as in around 4:30) to the rumble of the backup generator for the bank next door. It’s about fifteen feet outside of my open bedroom windows and normally only turns on during power outages (which happen daily but usually last just minutes). On this particular weekend, whoever runs the bank had forgotten to buy more electricity credits; the power grid was on, but the bank was forced to run continuously on generator power until Monday. Doesn’t make for a great Sunday morning sleep-in. Not to worry though, a breakfast of bread and tea and a few glasses of water later, I was tying up my hiking boots, ready to trek off with a big group of Americans to the “Tres Fronteras,” the mountaintop meeting point of the South African, Swazi, and Mozambican borders.
No sooner had I finished tying my boots when my 22 year-old cousin, Neto, sauntered into my room asking me where I was headed and if I would like to meet his friends. “Sure,” I replied, “when?” “Right now,” he says. He leads me out to his room (a separate concrete block off of the main house) where I find two of his friends pouring shots of “Hankey Bannister” scotch whiskey. Keep in my mind that it’s a few minutes past 8 am at this point. Working through the bottle of whiskey, the three of them engage me in a babbling conversation about being best friends and about how I had to hang out with them, drink multiple bottles of whiskey, and learn how friends be friends in Mozambique. By the time I escape to go on my hike (about 45 minutes later) the bottle is empty and I’m five shots deep. So much for having a restful Sunday…
I set off in the morning sun with 20+ other Peace Corps kids on a gravel road headed due west out of town. A couple hours and a few thorn scratches later, we’re posing for photos on top of a big rock pile that marks the intersection of the borders of South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique. We were rewarded with cool mountain breezes and sweeping views into all three countries. The group splintered on the decent and I ended up with three friends (the Spades crew – see “Afternoon Tea” photo - the four of us get made fun of for playing Spades all the time with the same teams that started at 5 am on the floor of the JFK ticketing area in September…) wandering down a steep and bushy part of the mountain side. Taking an unorthodox path home would have meant additional hours roasting in the midday sun were it not for a pickup truck driving by as we made it back out to the road. We hopped in the back and waved to the others as we blew by them on our way back into Namaacha.
Sunburned, tired, and hung-over (from my morning “friendship shots”), I wolfed down a plate of rice and matapa (greens stewed in a thick sauce of coconut milk and mashed peanuts – yummy!) and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later feeling rested, recovered, and ready to relax the rest of the Sunday away. I set out to type up this blog post in Word when, low and behold, Neto and his buddy Michele whistle to me from the street to join them. Before I know it, we’re sitting at a barraca filling each other’s glasses with another bottle of Hankey Bannister. A heaping tray of xima (flour boiled in water until it becomes a flavorless but filling paste resembling mashed potatoes), slabs of grilled beef, and tomato-onion salad joins our whiskey bottle a little while later. We tear the tray to shreds, ripping at the beef barehanded. Over the next few hours, Neto and I chat about his girlfriend (16 years-old; he found out this week that he got her pregnant; scary times in Neto’s world) and about life in Mozambique in general.
I would like to interject here for a moment:
Having moved around a lot over the last few years, I continue to find it remarkable how eager people seem to be to engage in pretty intimate conversation if you show yourself open to it. From truckers on the Pan-American Highway in the Atacama Desert, to bunk mates on Chinese sleeper-trains, to people wandering the same piece of beach in San Francisco, to old American friends, to a Mozambican host cousin with a recently pregnant girlfriend, and everyone in between, most people (young or old, rich or poor) are asking themselves pretty much the same questions. That shouldn’t be particularly surprising – pickup any great book and list some themes – but I guess I’m kind of struck by how eager people have been to engage me (or is it me with them… regardless, it’s reciprocated) in these conversations yet how, outwardly, people often seem so set on convincing those around them that they carry a great degree of certainty in their decisions. I don’t mean this as a critique of choosing a definite path for yourself so much as I’m trying to point out that if, across the board, everyone is asking the same questions, why do so many people seem to go to such lengths to sell their “certainty” to each other? Wouldn’t asking yourself questions be a lot less scary if everyone around you wasn’t pretending that they had fixed answers? That’s not to say that people should just float around in “a nebulous world of uncertainty” (cheers to Mr. Woll on that one). It’s just to say that if people were less keen on trying to convince others of the certainty of their decisions, maybe everyone around them wouldn’t feel the need to try so hard to come to any fixed conclusions; if we all stopped bullshitting each other, it would be a lot easier to stop bullshitting ourselves (and vice-a-versa). In that sense, I’ve been very lucky to have spent the last several years scampering around the world running into countless great conversations that have allowed me to feel pretty comfortable running around the world running into countless great conversations. “Estamos juntos,” translation: “we are together,” is a common goodbye here in Mozambique - it seems kind of fitting here.
Anyway…
Bottle number two of Hankey Bannister is soon followed by bottle number three. This bottle is followed by an additional group of Mozambican friends and another whopping tray of xima, meat, and salad. By the time we stumble out of the barraca around 9 pm (roughly five hours later), I’m steering Neto down the street by his shoulders. After a short delay climbing into the back of a covered pickup-bed to help a drunk cop break into his own car to drive home, we wander back into town (I live dead-center in the middle of town), swing by some shady friends’ spots, and return to Neto’s room to cap the night off. Two of Neto’s friends and I leave him asleep sitting up on his bed and I head back into the house to eat the grilled chicken my sister has left out for me from dinner (I was still hungry?). The end. Estamos juntos.
No sooner had I finished tying my boots when my 22 year-old cousin, Neto, sauntered into my room asking me where I was headed and if I would like to meet his friends. “Sure,” I replied, “when?” “Right now,” he says. He leads me out to his room (a separate concrete block off of the main house) where I find two of his friends pouring shots of “Hankey Bannister” scotch whiskey. Keep in my mind that it’s a few minutes past 8 am at this point. Working through the bottle of whiskey, the three of them engage me in a babbling conversation about being best friends and about how I had to hang out with them, drink multiple bottles of whiskey, and learn how friends be friends in Mozambique. By the time I escape to go on my hike (about 45 minutes later) the bottle is empty and I’m five shots deep. So much for having a restful Sunday…
I set off in the morning sun with 20+ other Peace Corps kids on a gravel road headed due west out of town. A couple hours and a few thorn scratches later, we’re posing for photos on top of a big rock pile that marks the intersection of the borders of South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique. We were rewarded with cool mountain breezes and sweeping views into all three countries. The group splintered on the decent and I ended up with three friends (the Spades crew – see “Afternoon Tea” photo - the four of us get made fun of for playing Spades all the time with the same teams that started at 5 am on the floor of the JFK ticketing area in September…) wandering down a steep and bushy part of the mountain side. Taking an unorthodox path home would have meant additional hours roasting in the midday sun were it not for a pickup truck driving by as we made it back out to the road. We hopped in the back and waved to the others as we blew by them on our way back into Namaacha.
Sunburned, tired, and hung-over (from my morning “friendship shots”), I wolfed down a plate of rice and matapa (greens stewed in a thick sauce of coconut milk and mashed peanuts – yummy!) and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later feeling rested, recovered, and ready to relax the rest of the Sunday away. I set out to type up this blog post in Word when, low and behold, Neto and his buddy Michele whistle to me from the street to join them. Before I know it, we’re sitting at a barraca filling each other’s glasses with another bottle of Hankey Bannister. A heaping tray of xima (flour boiled in water until it becomes a flavorless but filling paste resembling mashed potatoes), slabs of grilled beef, and tomato-onion salad joins our whiskey bottle a little while later. We tear the tray to shreds, ripping at the beef barehanded. Over the next few hours, Neto and I chat about his girlfriend (16 years-old; he found out this week that he got her pregnant; scary times in Neto’s world) and about life in Mozambique in general.
I would like to interject here for a moment:
Having moved around a lot over the last few years, I continue to find it remarkable how eager people seem to be to engage in pretty intimate conversation if you show yourself open to it. From truckers on the Pan-American Highway in the Atacama Desert, to bunk mates on Chinese sleeper-trains, to people wandering the same piece of beach in San Francisco, to old American friends, to a Mozambican host cousin with a recently pregnant girlfriend, and everyone in between, most people (young or old, rich or poor) are asking themselves pretty much the same questions. That shouldn’t be particularly surprising – pickup any great book and list some themes – but I guess I’m kind of struck by how eager people have been to engage me (or is it me with them… regardless, it’s reciprocated) in these conversations yet how, outwardly, people often seem so set on convincing those around them that they carry a great degree of certainty in their decisions. I don’t mean this as a critique of choosing a definite path for yourself so much as I’m trying to point out that if, across the board, everyone is asking the same questions, why do so many people seem to go to such lengths to sell their “certainty” to each other? Wouldn’t asking yourself questions be a lot less scary if everyone around you wasn’t pretending that they had fixed answers? That’s not to say that people should just float around in “a nebulous world of uncertainty” (cheers to Mr. Woll on that one). It’s just to say that if people were less keen on trying to convince others of the certainty of their decisions, maybe everyone around them wouldn’t feel the need to try so hard to come to any fixed conclusions; if we all stopped bullshitting each other, it would be a lot easier to stop bullshitting ourselves (and vice-a-versa). In that sense, I’ve been very lucky to have spent the last several years scampering around the world running into countless great conversations that have allowed me to feel pretty comfortable running around the world running into countless great conversations. “Estamos juntos,” translation: “we are together,” is a common goodbye here in Mozambique - it seems kind of fitting here.
Anyway…
Bottle number two of Hankey Bannister is soon followed by bottle number three. This bottle is followed by an additional group of Mozambican friends and another whopping tray of xima, meat, and salad. By the time we stumble out of the barraca around 9 pm (roughly five hours later), I’m steering Neto down the street by his shoulders. After a short delay climbing into the back of a covered pickup-bed to help a drunk cop break into his own car to drive home, we wander back into town (I live dead-center in the middle of town), swing by some shady friends’ spots, and return to Neto’s room to cap the night off. Two of Neto’s friends and I leave him asleep sitting up on his bed and I head back into the house to eat the grilled chicken my sister has left out for me from dinner (I was still hungry?). The end. Estamos juntos.
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