there will be no waiting in line for the swings at recess here...

wanna see what's in his bucket?those are some HUGE crayfish, yo! and don't worry about eating them... seafood doesn't REALLY need to be refrigerated, i'm sure. it's only 80 degrees out.

26% milk fat! heavy on the 'food', light on the 'diet'.

this is raphael. he owns the shop that sells the milk powder, and he was jealous that i took a photo of his milk powder and not him. i fixed that. check out the rockin blue record player behind him!

painted store advertisements...

today i went to nampula general hospital to see the countertops for the new lab there, which apparently i needed to approve before they installed it in my aflatoxin lab... the lab was beautiful, but to get to the lab you had to wade through a hundred or so people waiting outside for blood tests. that alone was rough to see, but not nearly as hard as the fifty people on the other side of the hospital, holding their bloodwork results and sobbing - a huge crowd of people, all having just learned they'll die of aids in the next three years.

it was crushing.

refugee farmers getting ready...

for watermelon seeds!!

i promise i didn't adjust the color on this photo.

cardozo at the warehouse shared his lunch with me. i was happy to eat the cassava - it tasted like bananay-potato. i gratefully declined the fried fish head.

cashew=caju

little cashew trees, freshly grafted in the shade house built at a government agricultural seedling farm...

and once they're four years old, those little trees create the craziest looking fruit. you should really google that if you've never seen one.

if the government is successful in teaching farmers how to properly care for a cashew tree, which it seems, unfortunately, they often aren't, then they'll end up with lots of cashews! they come to the cashew shelling plant. this plant employs roughly 2,000 workers.

and there are LOTS of cashews to shell.
the urushiol in the shells is toxic and can eat away at fingers over time - they must be steamed before they are handled.
then they are cooled...

and then shelled in an enormous room with hundreds of men. these boys lose their fingers often. as soon as i walked in, the entire room broke out in grins and a lot of things that i think i am glad i couldn't understand.

the cashews are still unedible until they are dried in giant ovens for a day. the manager of the plant keeps his cost and environmental impact down by using the shells of the cashews to fuel all of the fires. he was very proud of his forward-thinking.

then this woman is sorting for quality...

and she's sorting for size.

it will take eight days for a cashew to be processed from the storeroom to the shipping room.

cashews are the highest paying crop Mozambique by far, but even at high prices for the farmer the majority of the cashew profits go to whoever is brave enough to drive a semi down roads/spots-of-flatness-between- the-potholes to take them to the ports.

This is Mombai. He speaks English, so I got to speak to him quite a bit while I was visiting the refugee camp outside Nampula.

Mombai left his home in the Congo in 1996, when he was going to school. I could not tell if he was Tutsi or if he just associated with Tutsi people, but nevertheless, the civil war pushed him out of his country. Sometimes walking, sometimes paying for rides, he finally got to the refugee camp in Tanzania with a large group of his neighbors and friends. After a few years, soldiers from the Congo arrived and forced his friends into becoming soldiers and return to Congo to fight. By this time, neither armies were better than the other - both were nothing better than thugs with big guns.

Mombai didn't want to be forced into fighting, so he escaped the camp and arrived in Mozambique in 2003. He is a shopkeeper here, and he is lucky to have his brother here with him since both of his parents were killed in the Tanzanian camp. Luck doesn't go far here, though - he is still at the bottom of the food chain. That 2 liter jug he is holding is for his rations, which were doled out today. He'll get that jug filled up with oil (this time he hopes they'll fill it to the handle, but they probably won't), a kilo and a half of corn meal, a sack of beans, some salt and maybe some soap if its available. This will have to last him for a month.

He is optimistic that he will be able to move to the States, since there have been some talk of opportunities for people in the camp. He hopes so, since there is really no other option for him - he cannot return to the Congo until it is peaceful, and he cannot be integrated into Mozambican society since it is illegal. For the time being, he'll stay in the camp, but he wishes for more complete health care, since the nurses in the camp are poorly trained and refugees are turned away from the hospital in town.

I shared some almonds with him. He had never tasted them. What a pitiful offering considering his circumstances. He asked me to tell some people in the United States about his story, one of 3,000 here.... so here I am, doing that.

this is Miro. his bike is super shiny and in perfect condition - take a look at that awesome little seat on the top tube for his ladies! this is what he says its for, anyway.

when someone here gets a significant sum of money, apparently they purchase two things - 1. a radio and 2. a bicycle. i hardly ever see a bike holding just one person - usually its one person and his wife and two kids, one person and a sixty pound bag of charcoal, one person and a 50 gallon oil drum. if you live in the countryside, don't have money for a bus and you don't own a bike then chances are you will probably not ever see the city in your whole life, even if you are only 45 minutes away.

one of the women brought their child back with them after lunch - she took a single look at me and let out the loudest bawling scream i've ever heard. my driver has told me that it's pretty common to tell children to go to sleep or else the white folks will come and kidnap them... she sat outside the warehouse alone for the next half an hour until i suppose the threat of me was outweighed by her need for her mama.

but even being petrified of me, look how sassy she is! you have to be tough to pull off a hair cut like that.

today i'm out in the co-op warehouse again, supervising these women shelling a gazillion peanuts.

fierce little thing

pao = bread

i have no idea how you get bougainvillea to do this... they were growing outside catholic university. catholics are pretty much magical, though, so i guess it is no surprise.

all twenty of those chickens on that poor little raleigh are very much alive.

all of the disabled folks i've seen around town have these awesome hand-pedal bikes.

baobab.

This crop is being grown on the government research fields, and it has the craziest looking fruit - they're big clusters of hairy pods. I've been told they're in the Eurycoma family, but I can't find it. It has such a bright reddish color that its used in lipstick and rouge, but it is also a super-concentrated anticoagulant and can kill a person. I didn't think that was such a great characteristic of a lipstick ingredient.

and here are its fruits - it's about the size of a walnut. each one of those fruits has the brightest orangy-red color you've ever seen on a plant.

here's how you approach the problem of a big tree shading your field - you just girdle it.