I was walking down the street towards what I call home now, thinking about a couple of points. It was dusk, with a thin mist hovering three feet above the ground everywhere. A cool evening, but nothing abnormal. As I looked around, I saw people entering houses, waiting for the night, meeting up with family they haven'd seen in days, weeks or months. Fires burned in yards, and around those fires were conversations about what happened today and the typical reactions ("Liar!", "You're crazy!") So the points that were swimming around in my head were the idea of "family day" and the Changana definition of home. As marked in the official calendar, December 25th here is "family day" instead of Christmas, in order to be non-denominational. But it's another example of Western influence. It assumes that you don't spend enough time with your family, but even the most estranged families here make time for each other once a year aside from the mandated December 25th. It just seems silly to me that people accept "family day" as a norm.
More to the positive side of things, but still along the same lines, I've been thinking about what home means. In different contexts, my home is alternately Mozambique, Cleveland and Connecticut. So which is it? Where do I live? In Changana, the word for "to live" (in this sense) is "kutsama" which also means "to sit". So now, I live in Mozambique. But this definition allows for plenty of change - you can always choose to sit somewhere else. As I was thinking it might be nice to "sit" in the south and teach at a school in the States that was in analagous condition to this one here. Yet another idea.
Peace
John
