We’re leaving Maputo
this morning, and unfortunately I spent most of the last days being extremely
annoyed about everything.
Biggest of all is the
position of women. You always see women carrying around heavy loads on their
heads and babies on their backs or sitting next to a table or on the ground
with different things to sell – men seem to be just hanging around, usually
drinking beer. Though it’s always men trying to sell you the tourist crap everywhere
in the city. There are no women working for ASSCODECHA, except in the kitchen.
There was one girl participating our hackathon. The men make jokes about
Chamanculo having so many more women than men that men can just sleep with
whoever they want until they’re 50 and then choose a 20-year-old girl to carry
them food. There are stories of men who have 50 children, all with different
women. The 20-year-old girls taking the English course I held all had children,
but most of them lived with their parents and didn’t have boyfriends, let alone
husbands. Not many seemed to be married, and in their language being married
and living together are kind of the same thing, so not many have any security
provided by laws concerning supporting them or the children.
At first I used to
wear the same clothes as I would wear in Finland during the summer – shorts
reaching mid-thigh. Everybody staring made me so uncomfortable that I stopped
and started to wear men’s shorts Perttu bought from a market but found them a
bit too tight for himself later. It didn’t make much of difference though. I’m so
fed up with men yelling at us at the streets and thinking that it’s ok to touch
us. “How are you doing, baby girl?”,
“Hey, give me one of the women!”, “Ask if she’d like some black man!”. Whenever
talking to someone, they immediately enquire if I have children and cannot
comprehend why I don’t. The men are
mostly interested in talking with men. When we went out one night to
Chamanculo, there was one single other woman near the bar, everyone else was
men.
It’s normal here to
have somebody to do your laundry, and most of us have had something washed
here. However there is one thing that they don’t wash – women’s underwear. They
are always returned separately, unwashed. No trouble with men’s underwear,
though. What the hell? Are women more filthy than men?
Girls here believe
that white men are their ticket to a happy life. White men don’t hit and they
participate in the housework.
Then there’s the
racism. Everything costs more, because we’re white. We visited the Inhaca
Island last weekend and we had rented a house through a local. When the owner
of the house found out that we were white, he wanted to charge us 50% more,
even though the price was agreed on earlier. We left there after the first
night and went to a hostel.
The standards are
unbelievable. We’re staying at the best hostel in town, and we have bed bugs
(despite regular poisonings), rats and for a week the owners dog barking
outside the window through the night so that we couldn’t sleep. One of the
other dogs regularly pees on the bathroom floor. There are no lockers and the
doors can’t be locked. No wifi either. There is only one electric slot per
room, so we’ve had to buy an extension cord to get our electronics charged. The
atmosphere is nice though, and nothing has been taken from the rooms even
though they are unlocked.
Maputo is located at
the sea, and the seafood is supposed to be abundant. They still ship most of
the stuff frozen from Angola, and everything is extremely overcooked. The food
is the same in every restaurant (unless you choose a different cuisine like
Indian or Chinese): a piece of overcooked protein (fish, prawns, chicken or
beef), overcooked rice and chips. As it’s quite evident that the food has not been
in the cold or otherwise properly handled before cooking, we’re actually quite
happy for that.
Then there’s everyone
trying to constantly rip you off, unbelievable noise level and heat, dangerous
infrastructure for pedestrians (and everything else), agreed times or other
things meaning nothing, the yes men who’ll answer yes to everything even if
they don’t have clue (“To Costa De Sol, do you know where that is?”, “Is this
machine-washable?”, “Can we have tables for the hackathon?”), lousy service, opportunistic
stealing, corruption, violence and so on. The police are the most dangerous
people to run into.
All that being said
we’ve had an excellent time here and people are very welcoming and happy. We’ve
also had some nice food prepared with love. The locals take care of us, the
coffee is good and sun’s always shining. There are nowhere near as much
mosquitoes as in Finland. Everyone dresses very nicely and clothes are washed
every day, even in the slum. We have 24-hour guarding at our hostel, and most
children return things that have been given to them. Bigger children take care
of smaller ones and carry the smallest ones around, and they hardly ever cry.
Culture shock is
something that practically everyone faces at some stage when getting to know a
new culture. It is important to recognize it, as it’s just a phase. Sometimes a
good night’s sleep, a good meal and a smile is all that it takes to get over
the worst part of it.
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