We spend idle afternoons telling stories. I love to regale my Mozambican friends with tales of frozen lakes and snow drifts that can bury cars. We talk about skyscrapers and Minneapolis's skyways. Sometimes, I'm asked about the Twin Towers. We talk about the decentralization of federal power in the states, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (fondly known here as “Commando”) and rap music. You know, American things.

Some of my favorite stories, lately:

How the ghosts in the cemetery across from my house, who are mostly soldiers, sometimes haunt the neighborhood to collect the money owed them by the leaders who sent them into battle and never paid up. How the great warriors of the north could remove their shirts in battle, and throwing them to the wind, their garments became swarms of bees. How before expected times of drought, men hollowed out massive baobob trees, digging cups down into them, to collect the season's rains; and, come drought, the trees could be tapped like giant, natural, watertowers. How herds of cattle in the bush are always guarded by two donkeys to keep away the lions, who, it seems, are terribly afraid of a donkey's strong kick to the head.

Chipanga, a teacher friend, once told me a story about Native Americans – his favorite story, he said, of my own culture. How the White men once amicably – altruistically – apologetically – invited members of a group of Native Americans to study at their mission school on scholarship. The men studied with the Whites for some years and came back home with diplomas and cars and laptops and rejoined their friends and family. When the White men returned the next year to invite more members of this group of Native Americans to study at their mission school, the chief of the tribe refused them: “We have no need for your cell phones and e-mail. And, worse, our men can no longer hunt, they have forgotten the stories of their people, and they have forgotten how to live in the cold.”