“Do you want to learn Chinese?” “No I don’t want to karate!”

THE AMERICANS ARE BACK.

Big Bend has been hit with yet another wave of incorrectly pronounced words, glorious gifts and goodwill; all courtesy of Loveland Colorado. Two of the men who came out last year are back and they have a new couple in tow; it was lovely seeing them again however it was shocking how it seemed like we’d only just said goodbye! I blinked at 4 months shot straight out the window.
We dragged them along to soup kitchen with us (well, we didn’t drag... they came willingly and brought peanut butter sandwiches) to meet the kids and Aunty Vinah. They helped serve the food, danced with the kids and generally got stuck in! Soup kitchen love having visitors and Aunty Vinah was out to milk them for donations, and she wasn’t bothered about coming across subtle!
Soup kitchen seems to be growing all the time, we see new kids every week and this week there have been some new animal additions; Aunty Vinah’s dogs haven’t been ‘for the snip’ so they keep having litters all over the place. So this week I was introduced to 8 tiny puppies still blind and rolling in the mud, they are cute as hell and I want one. Aunty Vinah is happy to give them away free as well because she struggles to feed them, now I just have to work out where I can hide one in hostel...

WANT IT

Again the missionaries came along with tons of toys, clothes and presents for the children at Moriah, and once again there were plenty left over once everything had been handed out. So in steps Ashley and I; we’ve become pretty good at positioning ourselves in the way of free stuff over the last 6 months, you just need to surround yourself with generous people! 
Just kidding; the missionaries are always HUGELY kind to us and shower us with things to hand out at our other projects, and for that I am eternally grateful. This time around we must have been given about 50 odd dresses made by a charity called ‘Dress A Girl’, so we took them all to soup kitchen so that all of the girls there could have a pretty dress. Here’s two websites, they really are great people and are just trying to do a lovely thing!

http://www.dressagirlaroundtheworld.com/
http://buildingchildrenofpromise.org/

Even after handing out dresses to all the girls at soup kitchen (who they would fit!) we still had a lot left over so we decided that on the way back along the road we would stop if we saw any women or girls and hand them a dress. A selfless and kind thing to do, right? Well, the police officer that pulled up behind us didn’t think so...

We had pulled over at the side of the road and I was handing a woman and her daughter two dresses out of the suitcase in the back of the truck when another vehicle was coming up behind; Ashley was shouting at me to hurry up but it was too late. I hadn’t realised the vehicle was a police truck. So the driver pulls up behind us and wants to have a chat with Ashley who is driving. She goes to his truck for about a minute and then gets back in ours with a stony look on her face, and then she says; ‘he wants me to pull up in a space ahead so he can arrest me.’
So we pull in and this bent police officer is saying how we shouldn’t stop on the road bla bla bla, we needed to pull in more bla bla bla, what were you doing, what is in the suitcase etc. We tell him all about soup kitchen, being volunteers, the dresses and that we just stopped for one second to do a nice thing. At which he says ‘I have three orphans at home, I want dresses’. Yeah, like hell you do.
He obviously wasn’t arresting anyone otherwise he would have done it straight away the first time he stopped us, so we begrudgingly gave him two dresses (folded up so he couldn’t tell we hadn’t given him a third), jumped in the truck and drove off. Some people are just evil.

I’m sorry, I haven’t really painted an accurate picture of this guys personality but he was seriously a bast*rd.

Moḉambique!

So, on the day that we were ‘almost arrested’ we stopped by a place on the road coming back from soup kitchen called Lituba Lodge. We were chatting to the owner, a guy who has lived in Swaziland for 15 years but is from Lester, England – and he was telling us how he needed to go to Mozambique to replenish his stock of seafood. As we have been wanting to go to Mozambique since getting to Swaziland we were delighted when he said that we were welcome to come along with him for the day if we were interested in seeing Maputo! Obviously we said yes we were, and so we found ourselves leaving hostel at the ridiculous time of 5:00am on Saturday morning to begin our trip to Mozambique.

Mozambique is a filty, dirty, hot, smelly and rubbish filled city, but it has an intense history which makes it an amazing place to visit. For 15 years the Mozambican population were victims of the Cold War; one million people died from fighting and starvation and over 5 million civilians were displaced. The country was speckled with landmines and many people became amputees during the time of the war; the landmines remain a legacy from the war and there are still hundreds of live landmines that continue to plague the people of Mozambique.
Mozambique finally came to peace in 1990 with the end of the cold war and the crumbling of apartheid in South Africa; but even on a day trip to Maputo you can clearly see that it is a country fighting to develop again and break away from its past and write itself a new and brighter future. Unfortunately the war scars are still fresh; you can see the amputees and victims of the war begging on the roads by traffic lights when the cars stop. Dirty ragged clothes hang off their wiry tired bodies, hurting eyes bore into you as  you sit impatiently in your air conditioned car, and you avert your own eyes while hoping for the lights to change so you can speed off and forget the torment you have just seen...

Even today Mozambique isn’t really at peace; corrupt police officers walk around with rifles strapped to their hips, their hands teasing the hilt, they make it obvious to all that they have no hesitations about using them. We experienced their corruption first hand; the Mozambican police officers are infamous for slapping outrageous fines on people (especially tourists) for things that you don’t even understand. Two officers stopped our car and tried to fine us 5,000Mt (Meticais is the currency of Mozambique) because the driver didn’t have a seatbelt on; firstly it’s not even a massive offence, secondly it is due a fine but 5,000Mt is pushing it, thirdly the officer didn’t know what he was talking about as he was shaking and unsure of himself while his partner just stood by. No fine was paid because if you know the right things to say you can pretty much talk yourself of anything.

Despite the run in with the police (again) we had an amazing day! We saw Maputo’s central train station which was designed by Eiffel himself; most of you will be more familiar with is work displayed in Paris, a little structure called the Eiffel Tower... those same cross over metal bars can be found all the way down here in Mozambique, amazing! 

Eiffel's famous style!

Next we head to central market; a crowded, dingy, buzzing hub of businesses and people who are buying, selling, haggling, cooking and basically doing everything to get by. We try a strange looking local fruit called ‘Atta’, which we have now learned was an Artichoke (I was thinking an artichoke was an anchovy, but I now stand corrected) and the sight of my camera offended one man so much that he started shouting at me in Portuguese and quite violently came at me with a flying hand to push my camera away. Wasn’t even taking a photo with it, over the top reaction or what.
Being in central market with two Swazi’s (who came along for the trip as well) felt really strange as we were now all out of our comfort zones; normally in a situation like this in Swaziland you would just get the Swazi’s to speak Siswati to the stall owners if you wanted anything, but now we were all in the same position; not understanding the language and not having the faintest clue what was going on. I was also surprised by the lack of English speakers in Mozambique; in Swaziland you are taught English from 3 years old so everyone speaks it, but in Mozambique we were getting a lot of blank stares...

'Atta'

It looks disgusting, but it was really nice! Tasted like a mix of marula, litchi and watermelon. 

After central market we hit the fish market! Not normally one of my favourite places due to the smell and all the dead fish everywhere, but because this market was open air it wasn’t quite as repellent as the Indoor Market back in Darlington. I cannot stand that place. 

So we walked around and chose our lunch; a bag full of very alive clams still squirting water over everyone, one large feisty crab and some large prawns. We then carried our own mini aquarium like children carry their ‘goldfish-in-a-bag’ at fun fairs around the corner of the fish market to ‘Costa Dol Sol’, Mozambique’s best seafood restaurant. It doesn’t look like much with the plastic garden furniture sitting on the sandy floor, old food sacks strung together as shelter and half of Mozambique’s population trying to sell you tourist junk at your table... but hell, they know how to cook seafood. 

Obviously you’ve already paid for your food at the market, so you only pay the restaurant for actually cooking the food, and all the side dishes. I’ve never been adventurous with seafood, the furthest I’ve gone is fish finger sandwiches and a good old battered fish wrapped in newspaper from the greasy chippy on the corner. So I took on the saying of ‘when in Rome’ and jumped on the Maputo seafood lovers’ bandwagon.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the food; I didn’t gag on the clams, the crab tasted lovely and I was even sucking the mush out of the prawns heads (not sure if that’s brains or what, but I really don’t want to know), and I touched it all with my hands! Touching it with my hands doesn’t sound like a massive achievement, but if you knew me before I came out to Africa you would know that I wouldn’t have been able to do that. You should see me now, ripping meat and bones apart every day with my hands! However I still haven’t faced raw chicken. 

Anyway, now I’m off subject. The seafood was great and I’m definitely going to be more daring with my menu choices from now on, maybe get rice instead of chips... hahaaaa, joking.

A little more sightseeing of Maputo led us to a buildings ruin on the beach; the story is from the film Blood Diamond. I film I haven’t seen, but apparently in the film a bar blows up... That bar was built on Maputo beach solely for the reason it was going to be blown up in the film, however I have also been led to believe that in the film it isn’t actually Mozambique where it is meant to be ‘set’ but that’s where it happened! What a waste of a fully functioning bar. So if you are familiar with Blood Diamond, I’ve been there.

To finish the day off we had a swim in the Indian Ocean, a little sunbathe and waited for 1:30mins for the worst pizza you have ever tasted in your life.  

I’m having a great time in Africa; hope you’re having fun too!

Kate xx

P.S. Name of the blog is another Aunty Rose special, check out the ‘Aunty Rose’ post for the whole thing!