Hitchhiking, Portuguese Church Ladies and Rabbit Meat: 24 Hours in Mozambique [Part 4]

Part 4

While our coelho was being butchered and prepared we sipped on our fresh mango juice and tried to explain a little about ourselves. We found an atlas on their shelf and showed her where we each lived and worked in Uganda and also where we came from in the States. Then we flipped to a map of Portugal. One of them was from outside of Porto in the north and the other was from the capital, Lisbon. The driver and the one currently tending to us was named Mila, while the other, the butcher and cook, was named Conceicao. They each worked for a Portuguese Catholic missionary movement called “Missionario Boa Nova”, or, the “Missionaries of the Good News”. Mila had been in Mozambique for 10 years and had also previously served for several years in Brazil. Conceicao had been in Mozambique for 4 years and was soon to be returning to Portugal.

With the basic information taken care of and our reserve of Portuguese pretty well exhausted the inevitable awkward silence settled in. We quietly poured more juice, sipped on it slowly, glanced back and forth and casually smiled at each other, and intermittently let out a sigh of vague satisfaction. After a few minutes of this Mila got up and left the room, returning a few minutes later with a video camera in one hand and big smile on her face. She slowly untangled the cords and plugged the camera into the TV. With a remote in one hand she quickly scanned through some images of herself and Conceicao and what appeared to be another younger missionary what had been there some time ago. As the images crossed the screen she continued to talk and very likely tried explaining what we were seeing, apparently either oblivious to us not understanding her or simply indifferent. Finally she slowed the images down to real time and her face lit up as she watched the screen, letting out an occasional giggle. As the images on the TV first slowed my mind must still have been lingering in the travel fog of that day and of the preceding week. I couldn’t quite put together what I was looking at. It didn’t help that the video was a little disorienting with the camera pointed at the floor and no recognizable points of reference on the screen. What appeared to be two creatures were darting in and out of the frame, grappling with each other from time to time, forming an amorphous mass of hair when they collided. Mila was absolutely no help. She just stood a few feet from the TV, silently watching the action with a remote in one hand. I tried squinting and cocking my head and leaning forward. Was that a… cat? Really? Yes. Fair enough. Lots of people have videos of their cats. But what was that other animal? Was it… a monkey? It was. It was a monkey. In one instant of recognition of what we were looking at our evening and indeed our entire afternoon-long interaction with our new friends of the Missionario Boa Nova had descended into the absurd and the surreal. For 20 minutes that evening Amy and I sat silent and motionless in a room in the middle of northern Mozambique and watched a home video of a cat and a monkey wrestling. Life is wonderful.

We were eventually shaken out of our wrestling-cat-and-monkey-induced stupor when Conceicao came in from the back with dinner ready. One look at the serving plate was all it took to at long last translate “coelho”. Rabbit. Coelho means rabbit. Paulo Rabbit. Brer Coelho and the Tar Baby. Of course. This was infinitely better and more reassuring–though probably less interesting–than eating a bat or hyrax. And, more importantly, it was delicious. I had never eaten rabbit before—tender and kind of rubbery, just as you’d expect. We also had some apples, fresh salad and homemade bread. It was amazing to have a homemade meal for the first time in a long while. We were offered to watch more videos with Mila after dinner. I suspected it’d be more mesmerizing exotic-animal-on-domestic-animal wrestling but it turned out they had a fairly extensive collection of Portuguese-dubbed Disney cartoons. Instead, we declined and decided to go to sleep. In a way I think we both wanted to stay up to see what else might possibly happen with these Portuguese Mary Poppins’, full of mischief and surprises. But we also wanted to preserve our already immaculately weird and wonderful day. We were also completely exhausted.

The next morning as soon as we emerged from our room we were ushered to the kitchen table for breakfast. This time there was nothing mysterious about our meal – fresh bread again and delicious instant cappuccino. Afterwards we were eagerly given a tour of their house and compound. At the opposite end of the hallway with our bedroom Mila very proudly showed us their private chapel. Then, without any hesitation, she took us out the back door and into the previously and inexplicably off-limits backyard. She walked us around to see a separate kitchen, an outdoor brick oven for making bread, a garage-closet filled with batteries spitting out cords and plugs and wires leading to a series of solar panels on their roof, and, lastly, a collection of about 30 cages full of soft, sleeping, and red-eyed (and delicious) rabbits. The rest of the yard was like the secret garden, filled with untended plants and flowers and vines overtaking the house and outer walls. Our tour of the rear was admittedly anti-climactic and bewildering considering the efforts Mila and Conceicao had taken the night before to dissuade us from getting back there. Who truly knows the backyard secrets and habits of Portuguese church ladies? Certainly neither of us is any wiser after our stay.

Back in the house we collected our bags and started for the door when all four of us simultaneously scrambled for our cameras. We gathered around the “Missionario Boa Nova” sign in their sitting room and put our cameras on automatic, Amy and I looking like some sort of fairy tale American giants visiting the land of 5:8 scale Portuguese women.





Conceicao gave out two last hugs for us and we finally hopped into the car with Mila who was taking us to the next junction and a few kilometers down the road where we’d be able to catch a bus to Nampula. It felt good at last to have some vague idea of what was happening.

As we approached the intersection to be dropped off steam started rising from out of the hood of the car. After stopping in the middle of the median in the intersection Mila popped the hood and we noticed the tube from the radiator had become disconnected. Not knowing anything about cars I naturally offered to help. Mila was completely serene, declined my offer and just shrugged and walked away. Not only does she pick up strangers on the side of the road, cook rabbit for them and show weird videos, Mila also had apparently attained some kind of otherworldly Zen tranquility in the face of uncooperative and faulty auto mechanics.

We walked away from the hissing Kia and were immediately swarmed by chapa drivers offering to take us to Nampula. Mila stood her ground, though, and refused to put us on a chapa; instead, she was set on getting us on a safer and more efficient bus. As we were walking away from the car a number of terse but still playful words were quickly exchanged between Mila and the flock of chapa drivers before things suddenly hushed and other bystanders started hooting and whistling and laughing. I don’t know what she said but the chapa drivers all smiled and walked away, not saying anything at all to us the rest of our time there, only periodically giving us a sideways look and a smirk. It was like we were on a middle school playground and Mila was the girl who just schooled all the trash-talking boys on the basketball court and the whole school was around to see it.

We all sat down on the curb waiting for the next bus to arrive, Mila rightfully staking us out as her own and not trusting us to be able to take care of ourselves. Amy and Mila sat close to one another, while I was off to one side. We had long ago worn out our efforts with speaking Portuguese but Mila paid no mind. For 10 minutes or more she continued chattering uninterrupted to Amy without any acknowledgement what she understood a single word. Amy dutifully continued to smile and nod her head during all of the pauses. Finally a bus arrived. Hugs and kisses went all around and in one last gesture of infinite and unexpected generosity Mila paid for both of our tickets. Amy and I were both too dazed to offer any resistance. Mila pushed us onto the bus and as we were climbing the steps and looked back we saw her swallowed up in the sea of Mozambicans jockeying for position to enter or leave the bus or hawking their fresh fruit or bread to its passengers.

THE END