Home Again Home Again

It’s funny to think that a small town in Africa with which we had no connection at all previous to December 2009 feels so much like home now, but it does. During the last few days of our epic journey, hitching with various degrees of success and sleeping in random beds, our dreams took us not to America, but to our little African home. We finally got back the Thursday of Holy Week, after a last stop in an idyllic little border village with primitive rock art thousands of years old recently declared a World Heritage site. It was great getting home, except for all the drama. Romão lost one of our knives which he leant to a “friend” who turned out not to be his friend, so he’s feeling guilty about that. Plus he wants to go to the city to try and find his dad, who we thought was dead but apparently isn’t, so he’s feeling very emotional about that. Electricity cut the power to our house while we were gone. We had tried to pay our bills, but the first time the utility entered the wrong number code and credited our payment to our neighbor (who hasn’t paid us back), and each subsequent trip payment was unavailable for one reason or another, either power was out so they couldn’t access their records or the boss was out in the city or a virus had incapacitated their computers or one day the guard had no explanation at all, he just said try again tomorrow. So we were without power for Easter and for hosting our Peace Corps neighbor. Luckily Os is from a bush site that never has electricity, so he’s used to it, and we borrowed the keys from the computer lab and took our toaster oven down there to bake our special Easter cake with the carrots we bought in Malawi. We had an elaborate menu planned, but without power we settled for a more modest fare, just beans and rice cooked on our charcoal barbeque. We celebrated Good Friday with our community commemorating the 14 stages of the cross with a procession on the main highway into town under the hot tropical sun, kneeling on piles of chewed sugar cane and assorted town trash which litter that dirty road while minibus and big-rig traffic did their best to dodge the faithful congesting the street. After the commemoration of the Passion of Christ, we sat through an extra-long mass involving even more kneeling and kissing an image of the Holy Crucifix. Due to the power outage the Fathers cut the ceremony short as daylight expired. We returned home in the twilight dehydrated, hungry, and tired, but spiritually fulfilled.