The Tapoia is a restaurant dining room and patio attached to the side of the one gas station in my village. They sell frango - grilled chicken. I stopped into the Tapoia this afternoon to get some frango.
One of my students greeted me. He’d gotten a job there last week, he said, waiting tables in order to pay the cost of going to high school, save some money for college, and have a little extra to help his family when need be. I told him that he reminded me of myself when I was in high school and kept a job at a restaurant for those same reasons. It’s work, he said. We both agreed that, in any case, restaurant work is a good way to meet new and interesting people.
I ate my frango at a square table with red and white table cloth set in the corner behind the door. I was the only person in the restaurant’s dining room except for my student, who walked across the floor every ten minutes to see a table out on the patio. Semi-trucks passed on the road outside and rumbled the earth like a hungry belly. As the shoulders of the road filled with people selling mangoes and taking evening strolls, I could hear the amiable gush of street talk echoing through the empty restaurant. And I could make out the sound of a small television set on the other side of the room playing faintly the high-pitched noise of some new rock band.
And I set down my fork.
Who could have imagined hearing Quietdrive, the band of a high school friend, playing from a tiny TV with bad reception in the middle of an unknown village in Mozambique? Many days, after I got off of work at the restaurant, I drove from the suburbs to Minneapolis to play music with Matt and those guys. We recorded songs under a single microphone hung from the light fixture. We bought music supplies at a little shop in downtown Minneapolis where the prices were never marked and seemed to increase or decrease depending on the mood of the cashier.
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In Johannesburg, on my return to Mozambique from the U.S., I met a Brazilian musician who pulled from his backpack a couple of CD cases of well-known Brazilian pop stars that I’d never heard of that he said he used to play with, and we discussed them over a cup of coffee.
I’d met Elias in line for check-in where he stood behind me and when I turned around asked me “O Senhor fala Português?” Maybe it was the jumbled Brazilian ‘r’s and ‘d’s or the eight-hour jetlag and having just rolled off of one of the black fake-leather chairs at the airport where I tried in vain to sleep all night – I stared blankly back at him for 30 seconds. It registered, finally, lighting up like a slow-warming transistor, and I translated for him, Portuguese to English and English back to Portuguese, through check-in, security, and then to buy a cup of coffee while we waited for our flights.
How incredible that I have acquired this ability to speak a language that allows me to communicate with strangers whom I would have otherwise never known! I was reminded of getting off a bus in Johannesburg on my long trip home to the U.S. and grabbing a taxi at 5am to take me to the airport. The taxi driver, who was initially cold to my conversation (maybe it is because it is 5 in the morning, I thought, and I’m just chipper because I'm excited to go home and see my family), immediately warmed up after I heard him mumble a Portuguese word to himself and I started talking to him in a more familiar vernacular. He only left Mozambique, he said, to make money.
Elias, the Brazilian musician, was returning from Mozambique, where he had gone to meet a group of musicians and “write a samba for the country.” He showed me photos of himself and his family, and I showed him some photos of mine that I had with me. (He also showed me a photo of himself dressed as an Iraqi soldier with blood running down his face and jacket, standing on the middle of a street in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, with a horribly goofy grin, both hands giving a thumbs-up. He said that he had been grabbed to be an extra in a movie some British film company was making on the war in Iraq; they shot the scenes depicting Baghdad at war in downtown Maputo).
We kept on the topic of music. None of his kids play it, he said, or his wife. His brother does, though, and so does his uncle. Music was his language, he said. And I thought of Julian and Mike and Orion and Joe and Jason and Kevin and the people that I’ve communicated with through music, people who have made me who I am. I told him about Quietdrive, my "famous" musician friends, and thought about playing songs with Matt at a 16 year-old girl’s birthday party at a VFW. I thought of Uncle Albert, who always tells me that it is by no coincidence that two immortal souls ever meet.
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I made it back to Maputo, Mozambique on January 5th, met Mary in the city, and traveled back together with her to my house some 12 hours north by bus. The rainy season arrived while I was away and the grass around my house, I noticed as I approached the front steps, came up to my waist. I had (only) been gone for a month. When we unlocked and opened the door, we were overwhelmed by a putrid smell. Rain had entered the house, disregarding the wooden shutters on our windows, and my bedroom was a large puddle or a small pond.
We worked until the house became hospitable again. Mary returned to the orphanage to work and I returned to Maputo for meetings. There, I spent afternoons working on organizing the JOMA Project for the upcoming year. Some friends and I presented the project to the U.S. Ambassador, representatives from USAID and the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention). In the evenings, I caught up with friends in the Peace Corps, some of whom I hadn’t seen in over a year. We wrote and performed a song as a farewell gift to Peace Corps’ Mozambique director, Dave Bellama, who has lived here since 2004 and returned to the States the week following our meetings (3-5-4 blues: We got the Dave / We got the Dave Bellama Blues / If he were leavin’ your country / Why, you’d be cryin', too).
I am home, now, content and full of frango, listening to a CD that a Peace Corps friend, Kevin, gave me when I saw him in Maputo. His friend, a Washington D.C. singer-songwriter, Joe Pug, singing, “I call today a distaster / She calls it December the third / Call it what you will / I’m heartbroken still / Words are just words” over a loosely-strummed guitar. I’m returning to my small desk, by the small window where the breeze enters, after killing the stinging centipede that my students call "scorpion" that was crawling across my dry concrete floor. The music is on low so that I can think clearly while I write, and the crickets outside form a constant layer of sound that enters the room with the fresh air.
