OHMYGOSHNEWYEARSEVE!!!

It is undoubtedly THE biggest day of the year in Mozambique. For those of you in America, it's like combining the revelry of the Fourth of July with the family togetherness of Christmas with the gastric joy of thanksgiving with thrilling roar of the Daytona 500 with the urgency of Sleep Country USA's It-Only-Happens-Twice-A-Year-Sale*. For those of you living in France it's like combining the patriotism of Bastille day with the pride of celebrating that one day in history when your army didn't surrender or give up.**

*Author's views of great American holidays may not reflect your own.

**Ooooh, burn.

New years is kind of the turning point for the year here. That makes sense, as it is a new year after all. With it, school will be a few short weeks from starting, the fiscal calendar rolls around, and everybody usually gets together to celebrate the fact that they've made it through one more year. That's no trivial thing here where life expectancy is in the high 40's and your country is statistically in the top ten every year for death.

For one group of people, ringing in the new year is literally all about celebrating the fact that you've made it through the previous one, often times at church or with people from church. For the other group of people, this year it means stocking up on booze Friday night and losing all control of everything till probably at least next Wednesday. As in Wednesday the 11th.

Luckily all my years of passing holidays in Seattle prepared me for ringing the new year in Nampula. Why is that? Well, the festivities this year turned a bit soggy.

As in rain.

We should have seen it coming that it would be a less than spectacular celebration. On Thursday I was doing the shopping for our dinner on January 1st and buying pop and chickens and potatoes. Due to draconian (and necessary) price controls pop and chicken I was able to buy without a problem. It did take us about 4 stops till we found a place that had cokes (the only pop here) but we were able to pay the normal 210 Meticais. Thanks to the price fixing laws, anybody selling cokes for more than 210 Meticais a case can be put in jail and have their store confiscated.

This doesn't always work, because the sellers can just pay the police in cokes to avoid jail time. Also, right now the coca-cola bottling plant in Sofala province unexpectedly shut down because the electric grid blew up in that district and that entire province is without new pop, resulting in prices quadrupling down there.

When we went to buy potatoes for making french fries we discovered a different side of the story. Because of speculation on the holiday season and anticipation that everybody would be buying potatoes prices in the market had almost tripled. The price of beans as well had nearly doubled. Everything gets more expensive, despite laws that are meant to prohibit this sort of speculation.

There are two things that happen whenever this type of price speculation happens. The first is that both sides call bluff. That may sound confusing, but let me explain it like this. Mozambicans love to talk big and make a big show and absolutely will not back down. And not always in a proud and courageous sense. For example, around this time of year all the vendors of produce show up in the market and decide that they are raising prices because demand for Christmas and New Years will obviously increase. What happens next is that people show up and find that vegetable oil, beans, rice, pineapples, garlic, chickens, goats, potatoes, sweet potatoes all cost twice as much as they did the week before. The vendors simply say, “Well, if you don't want to pay, you can go hungry and have a lousy holiday.” In response to this, the people say, “Well then, we just refuse to buy and tomorrow you will see the light and lower the prices when nobody is buying.”

Neither side backs down, both call the others bluff, and people pass the holidays eating plain old rice and beans while the vendors literally throw out mountains of rotten potatoes, mushy pineapple, moldy beans. (And then yesterday the Minister of Trade and Agriculture gets on the TV to announce that he is pleased with this years sales because when he---and his deputies, and television cameras---passed through one market to ask about prices they were all fair and normal and thus there have been no confirmed cases of speculation this year and the country gets a gold star for good behavior.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: So potatoes and oil cost three times as much so we just stuck with chicken and cokes for our special meal.

Another indication it might be a lousy new years was that, one New Years Eve, somebody had asked if the mahe'o was ready. Mahe'o is a mixture of water, sugar, and cornflour brewed to a boil and then left to sit several days to settle. It's kind of like a Mozambique version of a Roy Rogers or a Shirley Temple, and the kids love it. At that point, the shock had hit us that we had forgot to make mahe'o. Anybody familiar with living in Nampula should recognize that whatever air was left in our party balloon deflated right then and there. But alas, that was not the final nail in our festive coffin.

At about 6pm it started raining. On New Years Eve.

What was supposed to be an evening of music and dancing and watching movies projected on the wall of the dormitory turned into a cold, soggy, dripping evening in which most people had gone to bed at 8pm with the anticipation of waking up around 11pm to party. I went to bed with that in mind too. The thing is, when it does rain here, it gets cold. And to top it off, it rained in the evening here, so it was super cold (maybe only 70deg, but when we're topping out at 100+ everyday, that's dang cold). It sucked the life out of the party.

I'm not exactly sure how we entered the new years because I was still asleep. Apparently, about half of the kids were asleep in their beds, and of the half that stayed up, half of them fell asleep watching a movie in the cafeteria. If you can do the math, that means about a quarter of the kids passed the New Years awake.

The next day kids slept in late just because they could (even though hardly anybody passed the whole night). The day passed fairly calm, there was no big activity or excitement or amusement. Just a normal day. Except the rain continued. At about 2pm it started raining again, and then when it came time for an early dinner around 4pm everybody ran into the cafeteria, ate their food, and then ran back into the shelter of the dormitories. Much later, around nightfall, with most people in their beds, we huddled around the TV in Victor's living room to watch the nightly news and then, in the continuing rain, called it a night.

But in case you feel bad, the next day when the weather cleared up, we played soccer all day and watched movies all night. All was not lost, and life continues. It also helps that there's probably ten kids here that just don't understand what a new year is in the first place, they just think we're partying because we can (which, fundamentally speaking, is why we party).