Revenge of the Headless Chicken

I spent a day as a Mozambican woman. Which is to say- cooking, cooking, and cooking. My next door neighbor threw a party for her niece's 1st birthday and all the neighborhood women convened to peel vegetables, defeather chickens, fry potatoes, etc, etc.
I started off my Saturday morning at the escolhina where Ir. Monica had called a parents meeting. Not surprisingly, only 5 out of 15 parents showed up. Ir Monica eventually started the 9am meeting at 945, and then because the parents present couldn't reach a consensus about an issue she presented, she called another meeting next week, in the hopes that the other parents will deign to come. Way to reward the ones who already came the first time, who will just have to sit through it all again.
I left the meeting and found a group of neighbors (the same women I had passed by earlier each returning with 25 L jug of water on her head) sitting under the shade of my mafora tree, peeling a mountain of potatoes. I pulled up a chair to sit with them and was immediately asked where my knife was. Not super thrilled about the prospect of spending my Saturday peeling a million potatoes I probably wasn't even going to eat, I explained to them that in America, we sometimes cook and eat potatoes with the skins on. They stared at me in disbelief. 'How?' they asked. I said 'Well, the same way we are doing right now! Just without peeling the potato first. The skin is really the only part with nutrients anyway.' 'But you don't do that with this kind of potato, right?' They insisted. 'Yes, you use this kind of potato too,' I said. The women shuddered as they imagined eating french fries with the skins on.
I ended up spending the day with them, helping them cook for what seemed like 100 people. Rice, spaghetti, xima, beans, potato salad, cabbage salad, grilled chicken... The smoke from the firewood stung my eyes and made me cry so I was excused from the frying and grilling and relegated to the prep work. I learned how to fold chamosas, which are kind of like African potstickers and definitely one of my favorite foods here: Pork and onion filling inside a triangle of thin dough, deep fried, amazing with piripiri (hot sauce). It's a good thing I secretly ate a bunch off the platter while cooking, because by the time I got to them later at the party there were none left.
We also made about 5 different types of salad tossed with mayonnaise. Other than simple oil and vinegar, Mozambicans just don't use have salad dressings. The potato salad, after being tossed with mayonnaise, was then absolutely coated with a top layer of more mayonnaise, to the point where it just looked like a mound of mayo. Interesting.
At some point I noticed that someone had gone out and bought more chickens (I had witnessed one of the women slaughtering at least 10 earlier that morning), all of whom were now huddled together in a mass of fluffy white feathers. These chickens, genetically altered and sold for human consumption, look and act very different from your regular barnyard chicken. They don't have a fully developed brain (which is probably why they don't try to peck your eye out when you pick them up to slit their throat), reach full size much more quickly, and are essentially sterile- generating dependence on the companies that sell them.
'We got more chickens?' I asked. 'Yes,' an elderly lady replied slyly, 'They're for you to kill.' I knew she was teasing, and I also knew she didn't believe I would do it so I shrugged and asked for a knife.
One lady held the body and wings of the chicken while I grabbed the head and cut the throat. The knife, as I feared, was rather dull. I sawed at the neck of the chicken for a while, thinking 'Oh my God, this isn't working.....' while the other woman encouraged me to use more force. I pushed down harder and finally felt the bone give away and the head dropped to the ground, eyes closed. My partner tossed the body off to the side, where it continued to convulse and tremor. We went to work on the next chicken.
After about the 5th chicken (there were 7 in total), the sand behind us was just a battlefield of headless feathered corpses, a few still flapping wings and kicking legs. I was sawing on another neck when suddenly one of the beheaded chickens got up (not unusual, the phrase 'like a chicken with its head cut off' is accurate, but prior to this the chickens I saw who had managed to get to their feet stumbled only a couple of feet before collapsing again) and ran towards me. I was startled but couldn't stop what I was doing so I tried to sidestep the rogue zombie. I was horrified when it turned and came back towards me, jumping against my leg several times even as I danced around trying to avoid getting blood on my jeans. Finally, another lady stepped in and wrestled my attacker away, throwing it far off into the sand where it struggled a few seconds before becoming motionless. Later, I noticed that its exertions had made it the bloodiest of the bunch; while the others had bled cleanly and only around the neck area, the feathers of my nemesis had become red instead of white. And my jeans were speckled here and there with its blood. Even so, chicken later that evening never tasted better.
In the afternoon, a man stopped by the house, apparently a relative of my neighbor. He sat outside on a chair and beckoned for me to sit in the chair next to him. One of the women brought him a plate of food. As he ate, he complained (first attempting to talk to me in bad english, until I sharply told him to just speak to me in Portuguese) that he was so hungry, he hadn't eaten all day, he had been at the bar. Then he tried to show me a text message. 'They need me to go to church early tomorrow morning. How am I supposed to drink tonight,' he complained. I couldn't help but roll my eyes. Wah, wah. Life is so rough for these Mozambican men.
After cooking, (or rather, after I was tired of cooking, because the other women continued long after) I excused myself to go take a bath. I smelled of smoke and sweat and oil.
I was sitting inside my house journaling when I heard the women shouting my name. 'Mana Vivienne, aren't you coming? Hurry! The car is leaving!' I grabbed my purse, feeling a little disoriented and a little panicked. It wasn't until we were driving away that I realized I had forgotten to feed my dogs, who were sitting side by side at the edge of the yard looking at me mournfully.
The car took us straight to the party in Chibuto, where they had rented a big room for the party. We were at least an hour late but still, practically nobody was there yet. Some music was playing but everyone was sitting awkwardly and silently in their chairs.
People began to drizzle in, and I noticed that they were all wearing suits, collared shirts , cocktail dresses, and heels. I had thrown on one of my capulana dresses, forgotten my earrings, and still had on bath flipflops. I'd also not brought a present for the birthday girl. Oops.
It didn't stop me from taking a plate of food and a beer. Humans of all cultures, it seems, react to buffets of food the same way: clamoring to grab a plate, utensils, (multiple even, for their friends and family), jostling each other in line for food. Our day's work vanished in about 10 minutes.
I sat behind a pregnant woman drinking a beer. She had been one of the ones cooking with us during the day. 'You shouldn't hang out with the nuns so much,' she had said. 'You should hang out with me and have real conversations. And we can go to clubs together and drink and dance.'
Now, I watch her down her second beer. I tap her and say in a friendly tone,' You're drinking while pregnant?' She nods happily and waves her beer at me. 'Um, don't you know that your baby could be born-' She cuts me off saying dismissively, 'It's not a problem.'
I sit back, unsure of what to do while she throws back her beer. After a few minutes I tell her, in a half joking tone, that her baby will be an alcoholic. She just laughs. There's nothing I can do so I drop the subject.
Meanwhile the children, all wearing those ridiculous cone party hats, are dancing to the music which, and I'm not sure if it's just the beer kicking in, seems to be getting louder and louder. One 4 or 5 year old girl wearing pink plastic sunglasses is just going all out shimmying with her hands on her hips. She's good, too, as much as I hate to admit a toddler could show me up.
Suddenly, the grown ups are on the dance floor too, having eaten and drank their share. I sip my beer, deciding I'll participate in the dancing after. Except that right as I'm ready to go, I see everyone is drifting out the doors. Just as fast as the dance floor fills, it clears, having hosted maybe 15 minutes of dancing. I guess something else is true of parties in any culture: people come mainly for the food and beverages and once the supply has been depleted, they quickly lose interest.
I stayed behind to clean up with the cooking crew. The music kept going however, and intermittently all the remaining women (and some of the remaining men, sitting around getting drunk on alcohol they had brought) would jump on the dance floor, a strange little after party.
My friend stubbed her toe, ripping the big toenail off. She said it didn't really hurt, but it looked bloody and horrific. I'd probably be crying in her situation. The only person who agreed to cut off the rest of the toenail, which was standing up at a 90 degree angle, was a drunk guy who happened to have a pair of nail clippers and would occasionally pour some beer over her toe to clean it. Note to self: don't stub toe in Africa.
The remainder of the night was spent warding off other drunk guys who either wanted my number or wanted to practice their poor English with me. I'm pretty sure every one of them told me, slurring, that he could give me a ride home. A lot of winners, that's for sure.
I'm very glad that I am American... And that Kevin is coming in less than two days.