Chapter 1 -- Burr, it’s cold here.

Eduardo Lourenco said that Mozambique was Africa’s terrace overlooking the sea. Well, I say Mozambique is Africa’s Alaska overlooking the sea, and I’m not talking baked Alaska either (believe me, I wish I were). When we said good riddance to the about-to-implode-four-walled-structure that some refer to as the Tiny Ranch on Piney Branch, I never expected I’d revisit the misery we lived through in our last few weeks there – you know, the broken radiator pipe that leaked water through the second level floor boards, forcing the ceiling to collapse into the first level “living” room, leaving us with a pile of wet plaster and no heat in DC’s subzero December temperatures? Yes, that misery. Ok, when I put it that way I guess we are FAR from that kind of misery here. Though it’s cold, and a bone chilling cold too, we still wake up to stunning views of the Indian Ocean beneath a baked Alaskan sky. So, who’s complaining? We are! But just a little. The wind has become like another house guest, a Tasmanian Devil who stops by unannounced on numerous occasions. We make provisions, step aside, pop in our earplugs, and keep on keepin’ on.

Chapter 2 – Dan and studiousness don’t mix

So Dan and I are trying to learn Portuguese. Sounds pretty innocent, but it’s not. Why? Because Dan is the bad student and I am the good student, and because Dan has some kind of charm that I lack, the teacher likes him more. Story of my life. There was a minor (ok blatantly obvious) indication of this way back in DC when last summer we both signed up for a Portuguese class at USDA. Dan missed the first session – something about “band practice.” I went, learned a few phrases, took the book home, DID my homework, and showed up for class the next week (a bit early so I could GO OVER my homework again and make sure it was just right). Dan sauntered in a few minutes after the class had officially begun and plopped down in the seat next to me. He tried to say something, but I told him to shush because the teacher was talking. He mimed the fact that he lacked a text book. I pulled an extra one from my bag! Then he mimed the fact that he was minus some paper, so I tore a few sheets from my newly purchased notebook. Can you guess what happened next? That’s right. He then mimed the sorry fact that he failed to bring a pencil…. SO, I KINDLY gave him one.

The class proceeded as such: we turned to a page in the book; the teacher started at the left and went around the room, asking each student to fill in a blank on the page with the correct answer. 1, 2, 3. I spent a few panicked moments counting the number of students and determining my place in the rank and therefore the corresponding blank on the page I would soon be asked to fill. Dan played air drums to the music inside his head. When it was his turn he threw out some Italian, which resembled some Portuguese, and the teacher corrected his pronunciation and we moved on.

And this is how our classes here tend to go. I spend hours doing my homework and Dan does not. When the teacher arrives he pulls a bunch of Italiaguese out of his ass and manages to engage the teacher in 20 minutes of banter, at the end of which she is charmed by the dynamic elements of his outgoing personality, and we have no time left to review the homework I slaved over. He is the classmate you knew in highschool who sailed by on wit and the willingness to sponge off the studious. The guy most likely to grow up and be the CEO of the last surviving dot.com. I’m the girl most likely to head the card catalogue system in a Nebraska library. Ho hum. Has anyone seen the movie ‘Party Girl?’ It's a lot like 'Clueless', but not.

Chapter 3 Put the peanuts in the coconut and boil that shit up!

So the Mozambicans have some *interesting* recipes to share…. Lately I’ve gotten deep into cooking – it’s a bit of an obsession, really, no doubt the result of sitting for hours at a keyboard trying to write SOMETHING worth reading, whereby I emerge fearing my brain might explode and needing to let off some steam. Rather than kick Dan, ‘er, I mean the dog (that we don’t have), I let off my steam in the kitchen. Many times I cook comforting home recipes reminiscent of my mother’s tasty Texas temptations – chocolate sheet cake, cowboy cookies, five alarm chili. Other times, I venture into new territory with Mozambican dishes like matappa, roissois, emboa. Laura, our empregada (Portuguese for saintly woman we pay to come in twice a week and wash our clothes by hand…) taught me and our friend, Liz, how to make emboa. The first step of which was to go to the market and buy the ingredients: pumpkin leaves, peanuts, coconut, onion, tomato, salt. Most Americans, I presume, don’t even know that pumpkins HAVE leaves, but they do. Big, leafy greens that you can chop and boil to a soupy, sweet pulp. Throw in some peanuts ground down to dust, the milk of a coconut (that you laboriously shredded by sitting on a bench with a jagged instrument protruding from its side designed solely for coconut shredding), some chopped onion and tomato, and finally a cube of vegetable stock (or chicken if you’re an animal killer), and you have emboa. When I wrote my mom about emboa in an email she wrote back that it “sounds just awful,” but the truth is it’s pretty good. Especially on top of polenta-like corn meal mush they have here called Xima.

The tastiest dish I’ve found in Mozambique, however, is by far the rossois. This is a doughy fried pastry filled with shrimp and cream and my mission from the first bite was to master the recipe. The first step to making rossois is to buy some shrimp. Here in this amazing country we can do that without ever leaving the apartment. How? By answering a knock at the door from the woman we’ve come to call “Fish Lady.” Fish Lady has a name, I think it’s Fatima, but she will forever be Fish Lady to us.

Like infants who equate Mother with food and a good diaper change, we (like infants if only for the language barrier) equate Fish Lady with big, succulent shrimp (heads attached). Fish Lady knocks on our door at least twice a week (sometimes more, though we’d prefer not) and offers us buckets full of fresh shrimp. How much for a bucket-o-shrimp you ask? A whopping six dollars. Yep, Fish Lady delivers the blow with a sympathetic look that suggests “I’m sorry to charge you a whole six dollars for a kilo of shrimp, but that IS the market price.” Oh, ok! Whatever you say!

And so for six dollars we receive a kilo of grande camarao and we savor every salty bite. Now, Fish Lady is also pushin’ other kinds of sea creatures (mariscos), and most of them we fail to identify. In fact, we are afraid, at times, to respond to Fish Lady’s knock on the door for fear of what she might “present” as the daily special. For the calamari lovers out there, have you ever seen a squid fresh from the ocean? This many tentacled, muscle-less lump of salt water goo is unattractive to say the least, vomit-inducing absurdity to say the most, and big as hell, you could feed a family of fifteen with one of the squids Fish Lady carries around. But we have no interest in buying or baking that thing, let alone eating it! Fish Lady also offers *other* unappetizing sea creatures, and we are waiting for the day we can purchase the Lockness Monster for a mere six dollars too!

Chapter 4 – Please send Presents

So, many people have asked us if there’s anything we need. Well, thanks to the love of good parents, we have received some mighty fine care packages. Still…. we know how the generous folk out there are itching to do a good deed. For your sake, rather than ours, we do have a few meager requests. We are in desperate need of mindless entertainment. I mean Dan can only do SO much. It’s true that living without a TV or a stereo challenges the imagination and keeps our senses tuned into the finer things in life -- ocean views, language lessons, fish ladies – the moths are finally gone, but we ARE still human, and we NEED some trash people. Trash! (Lisho!)!

So…. You are welcome, encouraged really, to send us magazines, DVDs or games. Even writers like to read trash (or this writer does)((Dan likes to talk trash))(((Fala Lisho))), so fashion magazines, Hollywood rumor magazines, will make a gossip-starved girl happy. DVDs are at a premium here. We can rent them, but we must contend with the obvious fact they were made by a bloke with a camcorder in a South African theatre. This means there are heads and flying popcorn pieces between us and the screen! And when I say games, I’m not talking UNO. I’m talking Scrabble, people. Scrabble!!! We’ve retained SOME dignity, but not for much longer.

So, I’m hoping this longwinded blog entry will save me from the wrath of Dan, which, quite frankly, has become unbearable. I had no idea blog writing was obligatory to the future of our relationship, but you learn a lot about a person when you live with them in a third world country, or any country, (and you happen to LUV them too). Everyone has a cross to bear. This is mine.