A Jolly Holiday

Well, first off. A hardy hello to you. I know, I've been a little bit absent as of late. Take heart knowing that it was not due to sickness or a national emergency or a fishing boat once again hooking the only fiber-optic line connected to the country and leaving everybody without internet and phone service. It was due to a horrid combination of me having quite a bit or work since getting back, and choosing my free time to finish a book I started reading rather then absorbed with writing, my former pastime. (Do not start "The Count of Monte Cristo" knowing that your flights are only 25 hours in total. It will take you waaaaay longer that that to finish it. Seriously.)

But, the good news is there should be pretty solid content up here about every other day or so for a couple weeks. I also have found the practice of writing 90% of a post thinking I'll finish the last ten percent another time resulted in about 12 unfinished stories, so those will be getting finished and put up here.

In the meantime, I thought today I would answer one of the most asked about questions I got. And that is how long the kids are in school. The easy answer would be "till it ends" which is both ambiguous, true, and shameful for those that understand how much kids are in school here. The school year run February to November. In that, there is one week after the first term and two weeks after the second term. We are in the final of three terms right now and it will end in about two weeks.

But apart from those breaks, we also have a variety of other days off during the year. Think of it this way.

Do you have a friend (or are you that friend) that will celebrate every single holiday, no matter how insignificant? I'm not talking about dressing up for Halloween at the workplace, wearing red white and blue for Independence Day, or playing Christmas music from his cubicle starting the Monday after thanksgiving.

I'm talking about obscure holidays. I mean, on the week leading up to President's Day does he go around humming “Hail to the Chief”? For St. Patrick's day does he dye his hair green? Does he carry a flag on Flag Day? Does he throw a ticker-tape parade for V-J day? For Columbus day, does he pass out blankets and pots? I'm talking about those kind of holidays.

In Mozambique, we celebrate just those kinds of holidays. And when I say we, I mean absolutely everybody. They are full on, everybody stay home, banks are closed kind of holidays. But wait, it gets better.

Most holidays are celebrated on the day. There are no floating holidays here that get moved to Monday or Fridays to give everybody a three-day weekend. Mozambique laughs in the concept of a three day weekend. Try six days, now you're getting somewhere.

You see, when a holiday lands on a Tuesday, that means school will be closed on a Tuesday. It also “implies” school will be closed on Monday. The implication is you can show up, but your teachers wont. The same logic applies for holidays on Thursdays. It means that Friday is just thrown in as a gimme. The worst will be if it is on Wednesday, as you can imagine. It depends on the enormity of the day in questions, but at the minimum, I can say with confidence that the kids' workload that week will range from “insubstantial” on one end to, “Recess. All day. Every day.” on the other side.

We are in the third-largest city in Mozambique. This also means that when a city-specific holiday is celebrated in one of two larger cities, people here refuse to work/go to school because the reasoning is, “If they are not working in [the other city] then I shouldn't have to either.

There are the normal range of important, large scale occasions that would make up your ten or so paid holidays a year: Independence Day, Armed Forces Day, Peace Accord Day, a second Peace Accord Day, May Day (leftover from communism, officially called international worker's day), Christmas, New Years, Christmas.

Apart from this, there are also what I consider “second-tier” holidays. Ones with sort of vague importance that were adopted for the sole reason of giving people more holidays. They include: a day marking the first battle of the revolution, teacher's day, childrens day, womans day, Nampula day. All these include a day off of work/school and are fixed to a specific day, meaning the possibility of a three, four, or eight-day weekend.

Then there are the duplicates. These are days that are celebrated as a second-tier holiday, but are then repeated later in the year. The reason for repeating is there the second-tier holidays are chosen as a Mozambique-specific date. Then they are repeated on an international basis. For example, there is a day celebrating Mozambican children, and then the UN picks an arbitrary date as well to celebrate children. This date, being different from the date Mozambique picked, is then too celebrated. The duplicates include: Mozambican teachers day, international teachers day, mozambican women's day, international women's day, african teacher's day, mozambican children's day, african children's day, international children's day. The ones involving children are especially popular here at the orphanage.

Then there are what I consider the “seriously?” days. These are the days that the kids have come home from school not knowing there was a holiday, but secretly the teachers all conspired to take the day off and these are the reasons they gave: anniversary of the school, anniversary of the school getting electricity, anniversary of the school getting water, anniversary of the other school getting electricity and water and since they aren't studying we won't either, Maputo founders day, Beira founders day, the President's birthday, his wife's birthday.

If, after adding those days all up, it doesn't seem like the kids are spending all the much time in school, you'd be right. There are a lot. And you'd have to remember to include the bonus days when the holiday is on a Tue/Wed/Thursday. Oh, and if it happened on a Sat/Sun it means you also get Friday on Monday off from school.

That doesn't even include the full week they just gave off for teacher's day. Mozambican Teachers day is a fixed day and fell on a Friday this year. Still, every day of the week was taken off by the teachers. It's not like the week fit some strategic importance either, like the end of the term. There are three weeks to go in the term. They just wanted a break.

And as the people here say, “Mozambicans just like our holidays a lot, I guess.”