Well, I feel like enough time has safely passed that I can talk about it without opening any old ounds, so I would like to take this opportunity tell you about a wedding I went to last December. A wedding that traumatized me more than almost anything in Mozambique.
The wedding in hell. (If you read it in your Vincent Price voice it is waaaaay more ominous.)
I say wedding in hell, and not from, because that's how hot it was that day. But more on that later. The first thing you need to know is going to this wedding was not my first choice of how to spend my Saturday. My first choice was to stay far away from the outside, possibly in front of a fan the whole day sipping on a coke. There was a couple from our denomination, not even our own church, in the city that was getting married and since our driver had just worked the Saturday before, the lot of driving a truck full of wedding attendees fell to me.
I dressed in shorts, t-shirt, and flip-flops because I had absolutely no intention of going inside a hot building that day. As the driver it is your responsibility to stay with your car in Nampula. That way nobody steals your side-view mirrors, battery, or worse, the whole car. I picked up a group of people from our church and then went to the courthouse where the party (read: torture) was about to start.
In Mozambique, for a wedding to be official it needs to be done at the courthouse. Your pastor/rabbi/yoga instructor don't have any authority to recognize a marriage for the state. Most people never get married in the courthouse. Some folks will get married in the church (which is about as much as you need to do in my opinion). Most folks just start living together or knock somebody up and go with that. Even culturally, this happens before the step of sitting both families down and telling them of your intent to get married for the family elders to approve. Other times the family can semi-arrange a marriage for you, more like saying, “This is an option. Do you think she'll do fine?”
So we went off to the courthouse. After the courthouse as many people as unreasonably could piled into to the truck and we went of to their church. Once we were at the church. A tiny cement building with a hot tin roof is really when things started to get heated. As the sun crept up in the sky, the multitude of people packed in the church took turns going outside to faint from heat exhaustion. Seriously. Outside, the only source of shade was a solitary coconut tree. For future reference for anybody that might be wandering through a desert in the future: COCONUT TREES ARE HORRIBLE FOR SHADE. They're super tall and have really tiny palms. Me and the seven kids or so from the orphanage that weren't smart enough to stay home put a blanket out underneath the truck and camped out under the pickup for the duration of the ceremony.
That's when someone with a radio (yes, we are horrible people, leaving the wedding sitting underneath a truck listening to a radio) said that today is the hottest day of the year yet in Nampula with a temperature of 41°C (106°F). Just so you know, if you go into a hospital with a body temperature of that, they put you on ice so your brain doesn't fry itself! How hot was it? It was so hot that one lady left saying, “She's only my cousin. I'm going home to rest.” It was so hot that Victor, who was officiating the ceremony, LEFT AND WENT HOME HALFWAY THROUGH because it was too hot and told another pastor who was there to finish things up. Again, seriously.
But, this story wouldn't be worthy of showing up here if things didn't go from bad to worse. And then a little worse after that.
After the church ceremony ended (because it's Mozambique, so that means about three hours later) we got in the truck once again and went way down to the bottom of the bairro for the reception. By this point, our kids who were actually at the wedding I gave money to catch a bus home to the orphanage and get out of the heat, leaving me, Marta (other orphanage staff) and the truckload of weddingers (wedding attenders).
Wedding receptions are continually the most frustrating thing to partake in or be involved in. They involve the families all fighting over who is going to get to sit at a table, how close to the couple they are going to sit, and who is going to get served food first. After that, the MC will take about twenty minutes to introduce everybody and make sure everybody attending feels like the most important person in the room (hint: they're not).
For anybody not important enough to get invited in the gathering area, you are left to find a place to sit outside. This means mostly women and children. This is also the order that people are served food. People inside and at the important tables will get a pop, chicken, beef, french fries, rice, and wedding cake. Less important tables maybe get chicken, rice, and beans. Then if there is food left over the women outside will get rice and beans. Then if for some reason the people inside aren't still hungry the children will get fed. People are constantly infuriated on the rare occasion we host a reception at the orphanage because we serve children first, then the women waiting outside, which is culturally insulting and saying to the men inside that these children are more important than you.
If I could paint the picture of where the reception was being held: An atypically large house, about the size of a two car garage. Cement walls and tin roof. The front is an open porch where all the food is being dished out after it is cooked inside. Adjacent to the porch is an olive green, thick, heavy, military-grade tent. It is using the house as one side and the tent as the other three sides. For the top of the tent, providing shade, is a standard blue camping tent that is tied down on three sides to the tent and the fourth to the house. Inside are tables and chairs and place-settings for the family that will be chosen to sit inside the covering.
In case you kind of got lost there, what I have just described is a greenhouse. The wedding reception was inside a greenhouse on this, the hottest day of the year.
Realizing I was staring at a greenhouse, and realizing I would be invited in to sit at a table inside the aforementioned greenhouse, I quickly found a quiet little place and knelt down to pray. Marta saw me and asked if everything was okay. I said yes, I was just praying for strength and perseverance for when I have to go inside the hot tent. She started laughing. I told her to stop laughing, I was serious. At the reception I soon found a few familiar faces and started chatting up.
I spent a few minutes chatting up Mama Novitika and her husband. Mama is the other old lady splits the cooking duties with Mama Maria, coming and cooking three days a week for us at the orphanage. As we were talking we got invited by the person in charge of seating to enter the tent. As we rounded the corner into the tent you could literally feel the air start to stick to you. We three took the chairs closest to the only door. (This thing was probably not approved by the fire marshall, unless in Mozambique approval means it is a certified death trap, in which case this tent would get an A+ rating).
We sat there in the entrance for three minutes waiting for more people to file in. It was truly starting to feel hot as hell. Eventually, the seating-chart demon came in with a bunch more people and told me and Mama Novitika to go sit in the corner of the tent farthest from the door and closest to the bride and groom who, keep in mind, have never met before! There, I found at my table a slew of familiar faces. There was, of course, Mama Novitika and her husband, Victor's mom, and one of Victor's cousins. The first thing we did was grab napkins or anything we could and start fanning ourselves. Keep in mind that of those people I've mentioned, three are over sixty years old (except his cousin, who is about my age).
Then we had to wait for the seating-chart demon and his minions to seat all the others. Then as the place was full, the Master-of-Ceremonies demon decided to announce the presence and name every person in the room (about 80 or so of us). At this point my t-shirt was so soaked with sweat that it started dripping because it couldn't hold any more water. After the MC-demon had announced only five or so names, the best man decided that our time in hell was not going to end, ever, so he stood up and announced that the couple wishes for us to start eating, and starting dishing himself up.
At this point the bride was crying, probably from it being hotter than the surface of the sun! The groom had removed his jacket and tie. I looked down at a rather unappetizing plate of hot rice, hot beans, hot goat, and a glass of hot coca-cola. Even the coke was hot.
After five more minutes of that and nobody at our table touching anything but the goat, the best man started cursing and reached up try to tear down the tarp. He succeeded, but only a little. It really just kind of let the sun beam on us directly rather than letting the heat out. Keep in mind that right now it's about 2pm, the hottest part of the day.
At this point it was evident that people were suffering. The bride was still crying. Nobody at the head table had touched their food. My coke might have actually been boiling. Then, Mama Novitika's husband grabbed her purse and started shoveling the rest of his goat and french fries into her purse. Not a napkin, not a tupperware, just the purse. After shoveling the food, he stood up and said he was leaving. At this point, my attitude was 'cultural sensitivity be damned' so stood up, said, “Lead the way, Moses. I'm joining this exodus” and got in line with the other 8 people at our table that decided 30 minutes in hell was too much for us to bear.
Upon exiting the tent, the air was so much cooler and not torturous that I actually got chills for the first minute. Not five minutes after that was Marta, saying she didn't know why she stuck around so long in “the tent of suffering”. At that, we climbed in truck and headed for home. There was no happy ending. There is no moral to this story. No cute tag line. And that part about enough time having passed, I'm beginning to think not because all of a sudden I'm really bitter. So much for that. Maybe there is a moral: When it's 100+ degrees outside, stay inside!
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