Last weekend, a 5-day weekend, I took a small trip south to see Mary where she lives and works. I spent the majority of my time with her at the convent where she teaches high school English and helps care for girls at an orphanage. Not far from her home, there is a lagoon with crystal blue water and powder-white sand, a little cove set off from the rest of the water, where some trickle of a river meets the ocean. We spent an afternoon there and drank lanha, coconut juice from young coconuts, that men in the village sell. With a couple of cuts from a machete, the coconut becomes a cup.

A little further up the coast, the land juts out into a thin peninsula, only so wide that a small city meets the coast on both its sides. We spent an afternoon in that Inhambane City, wandering, exploring, and talking to fishermen on a flooded stretch of beach. The fishermen showed us their morning's catch: bucketfuls of shimmering minnows (to later be dried and sold inland) and a half-dozen crabs. We watched old women fish for crabs with their feet: Skirts pulled up to their knees, in the shallow water, they walked - it looked like a slow latin dance - so that their feet dug into the sand and they could feel what lied underneath. When they felt something, they kicked it up - and if it was a crab, or other edible sea creature, they dropped it into one of the rice sacks that they dragged behind them in the water. The fishermen told me that the crabs don't succeed to clamp on to the old women with their pincers; the technique takes time to learn (and maybe scars), but the old women have learned how to feel to avoid being hurt.

On an abandoned stretch of beach, we stumbled into hundreds of miniature crabs, little bigger than my thumb, which, upon our approach, took off with the collective effect of a flock of crows startled in a cornfield. But instead of a commotion of flapping and cawing, there was only a quiet but chaotic pitter-patter, hundreds of crabs' legs making hard contact with the sand.

Only slightly further up the coast on the same peninsula, we saw a humpback whale. I couldn't tell how far away it was - it was the only thing between us and the horizon. When it jumped, we could make out its features. It made a huge splash, heading into the water nose first, and stayed in this position - what looked like a headstand (or, more appropriately, a nose-stand). With only its enormous tail stuck straight up and out of the water, the whale proceeded to splash in the obnoxious manner of an ill-behaved child at the beach. But there was no mother to run out into the water to scold him or calm him down. The waves were enormous - their dampened reverberations made it all the way to the shore.