War Stories

Call me up when you are badass enough to kill your own turkey for Thanksgiving.

11/22/2011

My host mom, Celeste, and I have a great relationship. We rarely engage in much conversation but, as most moms do, she has quickly picked up on my quirks and habits. She’ll drop a “estas com fome… “ (you’re hungry, huh?) as I squat next to her by the coal stove, then flash a knowing smile as she chuckles to herself and pulls my lunch out of the frying pan. When I come home from playing basketball, I rarely wait ten minutes before I’m commanded to get clean, “vai tomar banho” (go take a bath); a bucket of hot water (with a bucket of cold next to it to get the temperature just right) is already waiting for me in the bathroom. When she realized that me saying “cheguei tarde” (I got home late…) meant I had showed up at 5:30 am and been let in by my 7 year-old cousin, her response: “Tem que brincar” (you gotta play). I would be remiss in not throwing a shout-out to the real Momma Roberts in this post. Not only is the kitchen always stocked to my taste when I make my occasional appearances back in DC, but dinner requests are always honored. And pre-dinner conversation over a glass of wine is unrivaled by any chats in Portuguese with my temp mom here.

Anyway, Celeste is looking out for me. I’m out bragging about her fish samosas (“chamusas de peixe” in Portuguese) to my American friends. We got each other’s backs. This Friday we are having a huge Thanksgiving party. She’s agreed to make one-hundred chamusas for our party for only 150 mets. To put that into perspective, she’s going to buy ingredients, hand make thin samosa wrappers, cook and mash fish-onion-spice filling, individually wrap and fill one-hundred perfect samosa triangles, and then fry them one-by-one for 150 meticais. “150 meticais is how much?” you ask, yeah that’s about five dollars.

Like I said, as well as Celeste and I get along, she rarely seems interested in engaging in too much conversation. That’s why I was surprised to watch her and Samuel, a guy who stays in a room off our house on weekdays, go off on a two hour chat about the civil war (oxymoron?) years here in Mozambique.

For those of you who don’t know the history of obscure corners of Africa, Mozambique became independent from Portugal in 1975. Frelimo, the socialist political party that spearheaded the independence movement, took control of the newly sovereign nation under the guidance of President Samora Machel. Immediately following independence, the government of what was then Rhodesia engineered an internal resistance movement within Mozambique, Renamo, aimed at destabilizing the country and, by extension, aimed at preventing Frelimo from supporting the movement for an independent Zimbabwe. Similarly motivated, the South African government threw their support behind Renamo fearing that an independent black Mozambique would support Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid ANC party (read William Finnegan’s “A Complicated War” if for some reason you decide you want more history on southeastern Africa in the 1980’s), The Frelimo-Renamo conflict snowballed into a 17 year internal war that completely ravaged the country. When the war ended in 1992, Mozambique “was widely considered the world’s poorest country.” Renamo wasn’t really organized around any idea beyond de-stabilization – its actions reflected this. And Celeste and Samuel’s stories reflected these actions.

It would have been weird to watch Momma Celeste super engaged in any two hour conversation. But to hear her and Samuel chuckle like old friends reminiscing about childhood fun as they chatted about personal accounts of a vicious war was, for lack of a better word, weird (I’m curious if some of you Vietnam-era readers can relate to how unsettling it is to listen to people tell horrifying war stories in this same tone). According to my mom, an entire wedding party was shot up at a house down the street from where we live. She remembers hoping, behind locked doors in the house I currently write from, that the Renamo soldiers singing in the street outside wouldn’t knock on the door and force the parents in the house to murder their own children before robbing them (I guess it happened elsewhere in town). Samuel (not originally from Namaacha) remembers hiding out in a pond in his hometown farther north and ducking as Renamo bullets killed a group of young kids hiding out right behind him in the same pond. Pretty sobering dinner conversation…

But as tough as it is to hear some of that stuff, it was interesting to get some primary-source anecdotes about a history I had previously only read about. Hopefully I can happen across a few more similarly interesting conversations within the household before I dip out in a couple weeks.

Anyway, all is still well here. Hopefully no one took that blurb in the last post too seriously – wasn’t meant as a criticism, really just lamenting that people seem to have to be more guarded around each other than they seem to want to be. Time for me to doze off into some Lariam-induced psychotic dreams (Lariam - a malaria prophylaxis that may as well be classified as a psychedelic drug – I’ve experienced the Apocalypse and stabbed people in my dreams, among other fun things) gotta be fresh to give a lesson on “Determinacao de Planos” in Portuguese to a group of Mozambicans at model school tomorrow. Hopefully the geometric patterns in my dreams tonight will inspire a great geometry lesson!