Monday, May 01, 2006
a weekend in Nampula
This weekend Eli and I took a bus down to Nampula to spend the night at the home of our Makua teacher´s mother´s house. It was a good time- his mother lives in a neighborhood outside of the city, in a little cement house without electricity. The experience was very cultural- as in we saw more of the traditional moçambican culture. Since we live in a city we see a lot of western things, but as soon as you step a little bit outside of the cities borders, you see bigger differences.
One interesting thing we learned is that our makua teacher has a son! We had no idea, until he introduced us to the kid (our teacher is a 12 grade student, 21 years old). It turns out that he had been married before, but he was a student with out a job, so one day his wife left him- taking everything in their house with her, including the kid. Now that he lives in nacala and has a job, she has been asking to move back in with him (he has refused). Interesting.
While at his house we had some interesting food, like octopus and rice for dinner, and my favorite type of tea- a hot water and sweetend condensed milk combination (they call it tea, but really there is no tea). I thought it was good as is, but many mozambicans like to add sugar to this mix.
On sunday morning we went to the craft market. Our teachers friend was supposed to pick us up in her car, so we waited 2 hours for her before we decided she wasn´t coming and made the 15 minute trip by foot :-) The market was pretty large and interesting. Unfortunately, we didn´t have a ton of time, and we felt bad about buying lots of things with our mozambican friends with us. So we kept it down to 3 peices of makonde art. We got 3 tree house scenes, 1 large and 2 small which are pretty neat. The only problem with the market is that being white, makonde art vendors are practically fighting to put their goods in front of your face, and if you really don´t want something, you have to say so about fifty times before they stop trying to sell it to you. If you take something to look at it, sometimes they don´t want to take it back, so you ahve to just set it down.
Anyways, we had a good time in Nampula. We were sent home with a large sack of peanuts, beans, cucumber and melon.
Today someone came to our front door selling live crabs. They were $1 per kilo, so we got 4.5 pounds for $2. We were putting them in a plastic bag when they ripped the bag open and escaped into our living room. We had to round them up and throw them into the freezer to kill them- we´ll let our empregada cook them tomorrow.
In other good news, on Friday we set up two computers in the school library. We´re really excited about getting some computer classes started (2 more computers should be set up soon). I´m still trying to get some rules-norms for computer use set up, but it´s looking promising.
-paul and eli
One interesting thing we learned is that our makua teacher has a son! We had no idea, until he introduced us to the kid (our teacher is a 12 grade student, 21 years old). It turns out that he had been married before, but he was a student with out a job, so one day his wife left him- taking everything in their house with her, including the kid. Now that he lives in nacala and has a job, she has been asking to move back in with him (he has refused). Interesting.
While at his house we had some interesting food, like octopus and rice for dinner, and my favorite type of tea- a hot water and sweetend condensed milk combination (they call it tea, but really there is no tea). I thought it was good as is, but many mozambicans like to add sugar to this mix.
On sunday morning we went to the craft market. Our teachers friend was supposed to pick us up in her car, so we waited 2 hours for her before we decided she wasn´t coming and made the 15 minute trip by foot :-) The market was pretty large and interesting. Unfortunately, we didn´t have a ton of time, and we felt bad about buying lots of things with our mozambican friends with us. So we kept it down to 3 peices of makonde art. We got 3 tree house scenes, 1 large and 2 small which are pretty neat. The only problem with the market is that being white, makonde art vendors are practically fighting to put their goods in front of your face, and if you really don´t want something, you have to say so about fifty times before they stop trying to sell it to you. If you take something to look at it, sometimes they don´t want to take it back, so you ahve to just set it down.
Anyways, we had a good time in Nampula. We were sent home with a large sack of peanuts, beans, cucumber and melon.
Today someone came to our front door selling live crabs. They were $1 per kilo, so we got 4.5 pounds for $2. We were putting them in a plastic bag when they ripped the bag open and escaped into our living room. We had to round them up and throw them into the freezer to kill them- we´ll let our empregada cook them tomorrow.
In other good news, on Friday we set up two computers in the school library. We´re really excited about getting some computer classes started (2 more computers should be set up soon). I´m still trying to get some rules-norms for computer use set up, but it´s looking promising.
-paul and eli
# posted by Paul and Eli @ 5:26 AM 
