Three to Get Deadly

In the past few weeks, there has been a trifecta of holidays and celebrations, two of them Mozambican and one of them American. Let’s start with Mozambique.

June 25 is Independence Day for Mozambique. Mozambican Independence day is celebrated as a whole very much like our own independence: let the alcohol flow freely. So I was relatively confident I wanted to see as few Mozambicans as possible on that day (for some reason, alcohol makes everyone think they can speak English…), and should stow away somewhere. So naturally, I spent the night in Nampula, the second largest city in Mozambique…. Fortunately I was with five other Americans, so we had a nice calm dinner of hamburgers and soda, and then hunkered down for as calm a night as possible. And we survived with no haltingly painful attempts at English conversations.

Then came July 2: Dia de Nametil. This is the celebration of my town’s beginning. Nametil has been official for 52 years and counting. If anything, this is a bigger party than Independence Day. Our sleepy little town was bustling with folks arriving for the festivities. Adam and I hid away in our house for most of the day, doing a lot of grading and generally trying to be inconspicuous. We did a good job of this, and survived with a minimum of gawking strangers and obnoxious comments from the more inebriated public.

Two holidays down, only on left to survive. Our own independence day. This one nearly killed us, but not in the usual manner of excess sun, chronic overeating of brats and hamburger, alcohol consumption, or fireworks. On our beloved summer holiday, Adam and I graded for a combined total of 26 hours. I with chemistry exams and periodic tables, him with IT and biology exams. By 8 PM, both of us more closely resembled zombies than bilingual science teachers. The three holidays weren’t as deadly as we had feared, but the grading made up for them. However, we have emerged from the other side, and have completed to trimesters of teaching in Mozambique.