Lemonade: The Town of Namaacha

In a few short days I’ll be leaving Namaacha to begin my journey north towards Montepuez. As I’ve only got a few days left here, I thought it would be nice to reflect a little bit on the past two months and this quaint little town of 20,000 that I’ve been calling home.

From what I understand, Namaacha is a unique place. As I walk around my neighborhood, Villa Pouca inside of Bairro Frontera, I see the remnants of what look to be abandoned, colonial style vacation homes once inhabited by rich Portuguese ex-patriots. Superficially, they look deserted, run-down due to a lack of maintenance. But a closer look reveals that that these homes aren’t vacant, not one bit. In fact, they’ve been commandeered by local families…big ones.

The residents of Namaacha live in what we as American’s would perceive as impoverished conditions: having to obtain dirty water from oft-broken wells, burning trash, using pit latrines, and taking showers with a bucket. But the contradiction lies in the fact that many of the families here do all this while living in a home that is suited for a neighborhood in Bethesda. The once decadent houses are a subtle reminder that the Portuguese were once here in force. They tell a complicated story of colonization and cultural differences, all the while illustrating the hard-fought liberation of a country from the grasp of a withering foreign dictatorship.

Not all of these homes are dilapidated and broken. There are many that have been up kept and are still quite breath-taking. The engineer in me is ashamed to admit, but the structures themselves aren’t what impress me the most. What really blows me away is how the people have made us of the land. In my neighborhood, Barrio Frontera, many of the community members have turned their compounds into huge subsistence farms. Strawberries, Corn, Sugar Cane, Peanuts, Kale, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, beans and rice are all common crops being grown in the machamba’s (small farms) of Villa Pouco. The most amazing feature of my neighborhood though, and of Namaacha as a whole, is that nearly every single tree you encounter produces some sort of fruit. Mango trees are everywhere. I mean, you can’t throw a rock without hitting two or three. And when it’s not a mango tree, it’s some other tree that’s sprouting something else equally sweet and delicious. If I weren’t already full on bread and peanut butter every morning, I could pick lychees, limes, oranges, and papaya off the trees I pass along the way to school and eat them while I walked. On my way home, if my family needed some meat, I could robar one of the goats that I pass (they are tied up everywhere, and to everything), or grab one of the chickens that just walks around town.

Just like the vegetation that’s slowly over-taking the ruined colonial structures, the once repressed culture that defined Namaacha and Mozambique prior to and during its occupation is in the midst of a revival, revealing itself little by little each and every year. You can see it in the architecture of every newly constructed home. You hear it in the local tongues being spoken freely throughout town, and in place of the once-prevalent Portuguese language. You can smell it in enticing aroma that floats off the Piri-Piri Chicken and it makes your eyes and mouth water as its pungent scent dances its way into your nostrils. It reminds you of where you are, and it all screams Mozambique.

As much as I love it here though, I can’t wait to get out and see what the rest of this country has to offer. Namaacha is unique, I know this. But every volunteer that has come to help us out with training likes to remind us that it’s not really an accurate representation of what Mozambique is really like. If the North really is five to ten years behind the south (something that’s been told to me numerous times as well), I have a feeling that I’m about to find out how true that statement really is.

Here are some pictures of Namaacha: