Mmmmmmmmm

Today was my last day of teaching and my last full day in Mozambique. This morning the driver was on time at 8AM. I was in class by 8:04.

We covered what we could given that their day ends at 2PM, officially.

There's something I forgot to tell you about yesterday. You'll remember I was encouraging my students to express excitement by saying "Oooooh and Aaaaaah!" but they taught me that in one of the provinces, Nampula, they have several special sounds. So we added the Nampula expression of awe, "Mmmmmm!" to our expressions of glee.

Today when we took a lunch break I asked one of the participants, Minês, if I could record him giving some of the Nampula expressions. I'll see if I can find a way to load the audio onto this blog at some point, but to summarize, he added to our list that

• "Wow!" is different from our wow. It's almost like "Yay!" or it could be used as Surprise.
• "Mai!" when you're sad or startled. He used this when I said, "Yikes!"
• "Eeeeeeee!" is something you say when something bad is happening like something falling.

Lunch was, again, way too delicious. one of the items on my plate was a delicious fish. I must admit that it was much more appetizing before I realized that I could see the face and the eyes. I'm not proud of this and I ate most of it anyway.

As I left the lunch for for the last time I realized why I found the doors to the bathroom there so amusing. When I go through them I feel as though I'm walking into a bar in the wild west. When you walk through them the snap back and swing from momentum for a little while longer.





I got back to the classroom and was thankful that they had locked the door while we were out.

Security may be less that you imagine if the key is in the door.

We finished up the class.
and even had a kind of graduation ceremony

After the class, Malaika (one of the participants in my class) got the driver to bring me to a computer store/music store. It's nothing like Best Buy. The store was about the size of my living room and it had a wall of about 40 CDs total. There was no shrink wrap so I'm thinking these were used but they had exactly what I was looking for as one half of one shelf was labeled "Música Moçambique" I grabbed one artist that I had been told was a local super star and several others that I totally judged by their cover. If nothing else, they are authentic and I am convinced that they will be wonderful gifts for the man of my dreams.

On the way there I was in the most harrowing drive yet. Most of the cars here are manual shift. I've been told no one likes automatics and they are very hard to resell. The driver of our car stalled the car three times on the way to the shop and I was just certain we were going to hit or be hit. At one point we were weaving down a road that was WAY too narrow to be a two way street and the driver got annoyed that the bus that was inches from us in the other direction wasn't passing us and he had to back up. Sometimes I wish I drank.

Malaika and Steve (a consultant to Abt) went to run an errand for 15 minutes while I was in the shop so in the hour and a half that I waited for them I got to really enjoy seeing the way the city here works.

• About 1 in 10 skooter/motorcycle riders wore helmets
• Several buses stopped by. Most of them were PACKED. They started to open the door and started to get out of the bus before the bus came to a stop and started driving again before they door was closed .

I really enjoyed watching the people talking on the sidewalk, playing wack-a-mole with pedestrians, and walking selling manioc and fruit out of baskets on their heads.

I had a few street vendors offer me a "lower price" for their pillows, wallets, necklaces, paintings, giraffe statuettes, African Mama statuettes and combs, but only one fellow was relentless. "Please missus, buy something from me so that I can get some bread. I so hungry." When that didn't work he started, "Don't you go to church?" When I wouldn't engage he eventually moved on.

So that was Maputo. I doubt I will be able to blog tomorrow as my flight leaves for Johannesburg (or as they call it J-burg) at 11:50 and then I fly to Accra in Ghana and arrive at 9:15PM, but since I will be losing two hours it will feel like 11:15 by the time we land.

I also have no idea how long it takes to get to the airport or what the internet is going to be like, but I have to be back at the airport at 5:30 am. Then things will be pretty unknown for a while so hopefully you'll hear from me again soon!

Ciao!

After thoughts: there's something that people do here called "Flashing." It means calling your cell phone just so that my number will show up on it. It's an easier way to give someone your cell number. Just a fun point.

We were talking in the car while I was trying NOT to look at where we were going, and Steve mentioned that there is a society that he is aware of where the women and men together have one language and the women have their OWN language that they do not share with the men. The men are primarily migratory and the women are stationary so this is the way they have developed. This is going to take some more investigation!

As it is now after 10PM and I'm starting to get ready to go to bed, the city is starting to come alive with music. This isn't going to be easy!