Where am I? Honestly, you'd have to be here too to understand.
I'm living in a room in a formerly Portuguese-owned house in the hills of southern Mozambique, near Swaziland. The house has four other rooms: one bedroom, a bathroom, kitchen and dining/living room. The house once had running water - the bathroom is outfitted with a toilet, sink, tub and shower - but no longer does (the lines deteriorated and there was no money to fix them). We boil our drinking water, which we fetch from get from a pump in the back. We have electricity. We don't have a landline telephone, but we have cell phones. I understand that this is common here (building cell phone towers is easier than stringing wires). We have a gas stove. We have a concrete washboard in a basin outside the house to wash clothes. We have chickens and ducks and papaya, mango, avocado, pear, lichi, banana and ata (like a green gourd outside, inside tastes and looks like vanilla yogurt with black seeds) trees. We bury our garbage (which is little) in a hole in the yard.
I live in a room with a 12-pt bold red label on the door. It says "MICHAEL BOLTON" in all caps. My clothes hang in the closet and I have a mosquito net around my bed. There is nothing on the pink-painted cement walls except for a small framed picture of a tropical beach that is warped from water damage. There is one window, which faces the front yard, and, beyond that, an often-muddy paved road.
Looking out to the road, one sees chapas - 15 passenger vans that hold 25 - white Toyota pickups with young men and school children in the bed, and women wearing capulanas - colorful wrap-around skirts - balancing bags and buckets on their heads as they pass. Many people pass to go to the outdoor market where they sell chickens, tomatoes, Coca-Cola, and cell phone cards. They weave on and off of the dirt sidewalk, trying to avoid both the matope - the thick red mud that comes when it rains - and the fast-passing vehicles on the pavement.
In the background, I hear cars passing. The roosters in the backyard are always making noise. Sometimes, I have to chase them out of the pantry. We have a radio in the living room tuned to a station that plays Mozambican music interspersed with Stevie Wonder, Elton John, the Backstreet Boys, South African and Zimbabwean and Brazilian music.
Jo (the 'J' pronounced like the buzz of an electric razor) yells: "Manu-Madeus! ("Mah-new Mah-day-oosh" - Manu to denote familiarity and Madeus, a mispronounciation of Mateus, my name)." Jo is three years old and the only son of the couple that I live with. He loves to point at things and tell me what they are. Sometimes I ask him for help with names of objects around the house. Usually, he just offers it.
R, my host mother, labeled nearly every object in our house: banheira, jarra, panela, radio. There is a scrap of paper taped to the ceiling that says "tecto."
R and I usually eat fresh eggs for breakfast. I drink Ricoffy, an instant coffee and chicory mix, with Cremora and water from a thermos labeled "thermo." During the day, I attend language lessons for Mozambican Portuguese (which is not spoken exactly like that of Portugal, and with some Bantu mixed with it).
My language class consists of four other students and meets with a Mozambican tutor at various places around the area - someone's kitchen for instance, when we talk about food vocabulary. I attend sessions on public health and classes on education.
After class, I study with R and play with Jo. I boil water and pour it into a large black basin to splash on myself in the shower. Here, most people bathe twice a day, and I am happy to rid myself of so much accumulated red dirt. Sometimes I help R cook. We often have a dinner of rice and some sauce - coconut or curry or cove ("coh-vee" which is something like spinach) - around seven. Soon after, we go to bed. We wake when the sun rises and the roosters are crowing.
