Xai Xai Beach: A Negotiation

“Hello. My friend. You want necklace? I make you good price, special price for you, my friend.”

The kid looked about nine or ten, one of a pair of little boys, taking two steps to my one as we walked along the sand. He was dangling a string of seashells on a loop of fishing line and he had about six more of them around his neck. This was exactly why I didn’t want to leave the hotel room earlier. I looked at his necklace. I couldn’t think of a single reason I’d ever want to buy it, other than to make him go away.

“Did you see me come out of the hotel?” I said, with the amused know-it-all smirk I resort to in these situations, as if I’m playing straight man for an imagined audience. It makes me feel smart. Well, sort of. Really, I don’t know what else to do. I try to play it along and pretend I’m in control. “You were watching me the whole way, weren’t you? Just waiting. You see, I know the game, I’m no sucker”. He wasn’t convinced, I guess, or he didn’t understand. Either way, he just kept trotting along beside me, holding up his shells and grinning as though we’d just made friends.

“You remember this place. Xai Xai beach necklace. I make you special price.”

I kept walking. I knew this was going to happen. I could see them from the porch of my room, hanging around, swarming the tourist vehicles when they drove up. I just wanted to be alone. This was the end of my third week in Mozambique, nearing the end of my ninth month away from home, and I was tired. I was tired of having to face everything new, of trying to figure out who I was in a new culture, a new set of people, a new language. I felt like I’d just barely figured myself out in Afghanistan and arriving in Maputo was like suddenly losing my balance again. I couldn’t even figure out which way to look when crossing the street. I didn’t know how to beg someone’s pardon when I banged into him trying to walk past on the wrong side of the sidewalk. I could feel all of it piling up inside my chest, little pieces of stress and shock and panic, and I just wanted to get away. I just wanted a walk on the beach with no company but my own thoughts and the ocean. But looking out the hotel window, I knew I’d have to run the gauntlet of these under aged hawkers.

They say that when you go travelling to new and strange places you find yourself. In familiar places, you know what to do; you can be what you call “yourself,” which is mostly a well-rehearsed act in a predictable environment. Going somewhere else is like, having learned your lines for a role in the school play, you are suddenly told you are the lead on Broadway, and the curtain is going up. What you discover, when you discover yourself, is the “you” that’s left after they take all your lines away. The trouble was that I had a script for a walk up the beach, but none for this kid and his friend, which made them the enemy in my mind. They were going to steal my time, and then, if they wore me down, my money as well. And if I caved too easily, or paid too much, they’d tell their friends and for the rest of the weekend I’d be a target for the sale of innumerable shell trinkets. So my imagination went.

I kept walking, saying no and shaking my head, hoping they’d drop off. They didn’t. They showed every sign of walking the whole beach with me if that’s where I was going. I thought about just buying the stupid necklace and getting on with being alone. I fingered the money in my pocket, but something inside wouldn’t let me. I gave up on my plans for unwinding and resigned myself to having an experience instead. “Alright. Ok. What’s your name?” I asked the one waving the shells around.

“My name is Busman,” he said.

“BUS-MAN?”

“Yes. Boosmahn,” he said again, slowing it down for me. I still didn’t get it.

“And him?” I asked, moving on.

“My name … Joseph,” the other one said. His English wasn’t as good.

“Ok, Joseph, and Busman, the thing is, I don’t want your necklaces.”

Busman wasn’t even close to being convinced. “You buy one, you help me, you give your sister, your mother, you take one and remember this place, beautiful place. Xai Xai beach.” I shook my head and tried to keep the amused smirk in place. He switched gears and winningly tried small talk. “This first time you come Xai Xai beach?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You stay at the hotel, ok.”

I wished I had a different answer. It seemed so soft, so normal. Yes, I was staying at the hotel and eating at the restaurant, like a common tourist. At least I’d journeyed here by local method, among the people - twenty-five of them to be exact - all of us wedged into a sagging minivan held together by the optimism of the driver and running on crossed fingers. I wish I was an adventurous person, but I’m not. I’m just worried that the story of me is too boring. I have a complex about it. I squish into the minivan because it makes the story better, but I worry too much to be a real adventurer. When people aren’t looking, I do obvious, safe things like stay at the first hotel and eat at the closest restaurant, even though my Lonely Planet condescendingly remarks that: “Self-caterers can buy fish on the beach and arrange for the hotel to grill it.” They make it sound as if you’d have to be seriously dim to not be able to handle such a simple thing, but to me it sounds like a treacherous set of worrisome unknowns. First, buying the fish. From whom, in what language, for what price, what if you pay too much, and what is the price of fish anyway? Because it’s not written anywhere, so I guess you just have to know, and I don’t. Then, what kind of fish? I don’t know anything about fish. What if the guy sells me an inedible throwback for the price of a blue marlin? (If a blue marlin isn’t expensive, or isn’t even a fish, that just proves my point: what do I know about fish?) And getting the hotel to grill it? You just walk up and they know the drill? Have you ever been in these places? There is no drill. There’s just a whole lot of hand signals and mime, with no guarantees except that I’ll feel stupid. So I banished the smug travel guide to the bottom of my pack, booked in at the Complexo Touristico and hid in my room the whole afternoon screwing up the nerve to walk past a bunch of little kids with shells.

“Yes, the hotel,” I told Busman.

“You stay there alone?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have girlfriend?”

“No, just me,” I said. ”But thanks a lot for bringing it up.”

“You want, I get girlfriend for you. I have sister. I get my sister for you?”

“What? No. I don’t want your sister. What are you talking about?”

“Why you don’t want girlfriend?”

“Well, uh … I don’t know. How old are you?”

“I am twelve years old.”

“Look, you’re way too young to be giving away your sister.”

“Ok, you want necklace? I give you special price.” He grinned at me. He was cheeky and good-natured and persistent. Suddenly I realized I liked him.

“All right, punk,” I said. “How much?”

His grin got bigger. “Twenty thousand Meticais.” It was only about a dollar but it sounded like a lot. The Lonely Planet confidently asserts that souvenir vendors will give a price of two to five times the amount they can accept. I guess it knows this the same way it knows about the fish. In any case, I felt that bartering with Busman was going to be half the fun of this.

“Too much,” I said and, feeling frisky, I repeated it in Portuguese. “Muito carro!”

“You speak Portuguese?” he said.

“No, just that,” I said. “What will you do with twenty thousand?”

“We buy a pen and books for school.” He had all the angles down. We bartered back and forth, and in between I asked other things and learned that his father was a farmer and was away, he had three brothers and four sisters, he was in fourth grade, and he’d learned English from South Africans at the campground by the hotel. He asked me where I was from and I told him. We joked about things that came up, how cold it was in Canada, Joseph’s t-shirt being on backwards. The beach got less interesting down at the end, so I turned around and we started walking back. By that time the price was down to ten thousand, or fifteen if I bought two. We came to a log and sat down. I looked out to sea and Joseph and Busman perched up on a knothole and looked expectant.

“You’re really going to buy a pen?” I said at last.

After the deal was done and they’d started walking away, Busman suddenly came back holding out a small shell bracelet. “A present,” he said. “For you.” Then he ran to catch up to Joseph.

The two little boys disappeared along the path into the dunes, their thin-as-stick silhouettes fading in the sunset. I sat on the log for awhile watching the ocean roll in before walking slowly back to the hotel. Halfway there, I realized I’d left the necklace on the log. I almost went back for it, but in the end I just left it there.

Jamila

Something about the girl that comes to meet us says that she is a fighter, so I like her instantly. She’s young and slight, but her walk across the yard past the hanging shirts and the old lady pounding maize is slow, deliberate, and arthritic. There is no hesitation, no hanging back as she comes up and greets each one of us with the traditional Mozambican kiss on both cheeks before she slowly folds her small frame back down on the woven mat under the shade of a tree. She chats easily with us. Her eyes are sharp and alive. She has a shy smile that comes often, sometimes even in spite of herself. She says she’s been sick for the last two years. Her name is Jamila, she’s only 23, and what “sick” means is that she has AIDS.

Jamila says she has not been lucky. Her boyfriend left her 5 years ago when she was pregnant with their son, Kevin Clair, who now lives with his father’s family. The boyfriend went back to South Africa and she hasn’t seen him since. Jamila has been living with her mother and cousins. Then two years ago she became sick. She had pains in her chest, she felt cold and she was coughing without stopping. It got so bad, she says, that she thought she would die. Some care volunteers from World Relief convinced her to go to Caramel Hospital for treatment. Caramel is a hospital known for testing and treating AIDS patients. Most people see going to Caramel as an admission that they are infected with HIV. People are afraid to even go there, for fear of what they might be told. Here the stigma of AIDS is so frightening that your own family might disown you if they find out you are infected. So few people know what causes the disease and how it’s transmitted; they just try to avoid contact altogether. They don’t even like to talk about it. Even now Jamila is conscious of the stigma of AIDS. She tells us she was treated for tuberculosis at Caramel. Since then she has felt better, but her health has ups and downs. At the beginning of this year she spent two months in the hospital being treated for malaria.

For someone who feels so unlucky, Jamila smiles a lot. I ask her what makes her happy. She is shy about responding. After some encouragement she says that she does feel sad, but she tries not to stay that way, because she knows it would not be good for her to be both sad and sick together. She is happy when people visit her, because it helps her not to feel so alone. Her mother-in-law visits her and looks after her, and so do the neighbours who know she is sick. The volunteer who brought us, Maria, lives close enough to come over every day. There is obvious affection between the two women. Jamila says she really likes Maria’s visits. She says that without her, she would still be very sick, she wouldn’t go to the hospital, and she wouldn’t have any encouragement. She is a Muslim, but since becoming sick she hasn’t been to the mosque, and they don’t come to see her, she says. When Maria comes over she prays with Jamila and encourages her.

Everything about Jamila seems bright. She has just started back at school in Grade 7, after a five-year interruption because of her pregnancy and illness. Before she became pregnant her father wanted her to be an accountant. Now she looks at the ground and says she doesn’t hope too much, because of her age. Sometimes the way she looks off into the distance while we’re talking breaks my heart. I wonder what she is looking at. The cruelty of it is enough to make the whole world sag. She could do so much, this girl. She is far too alive to have her life attacked by such a disease and it’s a wonder she smiles at all, let alone as much as she does. I’ve always known the world is not fair; walking away from my visit with Jamila, I feel it for the first time. What is happening to her is wrong, a thing to rage against with all power. But what kind of power will it take? I wonder, feeling moved and helpless. We leave Jamila with a prayer that seems to me to thud against the clouds, and with Maria, who has sat the whole time beside her with her own gentle smile. And maybe that’s what power it takes when you’re still young, abandoned by a man, and sick with a disease that would make people shun you if they knew. Prayers to hammer the sky with and someone like Maria with enough love in her to come and sit next to you and smile like that. Like you matter.