To market, to market

Yesterday Jon and I were officially placed as the leaders of the kitchen on base. We got to meet all 12 of the workers, learn about the kinds of problems and issues we may have to deal with, and then they prayed over us to place us spiritually as the authorities over that part of the base. Every day, our base feeds the 35 kids, 70 pastors-in-training in the Bible school, the 5 missionaries, and several workers. That afternoon, Tiago, the Mozambican head over the kitchen, needed to do his weekly shopping run for the base, so we decided to tag along this time and see what all goes into shopping for 100+ people.

Jon and I piled into one of the big "camions" (large, flat-bed trucks) with Tiago, kitchen-worker Jeremias, pastor Luis, missionary Julie, and driver Ricardo and made our 45-minute journey into Beira. The scenery going by reveals a variety of small, rural towns, fields with women working in them (you rarely see men in the fields), mud huts with thatched roofs, concrete huts with metal roofs, giant 12-foot-tall termite mounds, coconut palm trees, mango trees (which just went out of season), papaya trees, and tiny little bamboo-structure shops selling a few odds and ends by the side of the road. As we draw closer to Beira, which with over 1 million people is the second largest city in Mozambique, you begin seeing 2-6 storey tall concrete apartment buildings with winding spiral staircases and bars over all windows. Beira is the main shipping port for central Mozambique and all of Zimbabwe, and when that country was in its prime, Beira thrived as well. Zimbabwe's economy has been in the sewer for a while now, which has hurt Beira's economy somewhat as well, but that's digressing from my account of the shopping day…

Our first stop was a bulk food store where we picked up sack after sack of rice, corn, and sugar. Tiago tried to get fish at this stop too, but that particular merchant was clean out of fish that day. He didn't seem worried though, he would know of other merchants. Next we stopped at a propane store where we swapped out our empty 5-foot tall tank for a full one. They said they go through one and a half of those tanks every week, so next week they will need to bring both tanks in. We stopped again, this time to pick up two 4-foot long boxes of frozen fish from a shop that wasn't out. Julie, the missionary who does food distribution for the orphans living in villages, also did a bit of shopping with us to get 528 liters of oil for her trip next week. We picked up said oil at a big warehouse that had the oddest assortment of goods we had ever seen—part of the store had hi-def TVs, computers, printers, refrigerators, and A/C units, while the other part had pallets of sugar, juice, oil, and the only Pepsi products we have seen in a country ruled by Coca-Cola.

Our next stop was the huge Beira market, where the real African experience started. Just Jon, Tiago, and I went in while the rest guarded the truck from thieves. The market is a tight, winding network of stalls, some big and official and made of concrete (from Beira's golden days), but most made of whatever scraps of metal, wood, and bamboo people could find and throw together. The narrow dirt walkways are shaded with opened canvas bags, which was a mercy because it was a VERY hot day. A 2-foot deep foul-smelling ditch winds through the market with wooden pallets slapped over it to make bridges. The shops are together loosely by category—most of the tomato sellers are together, the onion merchants, and so on. I had to hold my breath when we passed the dried fish section. As we walked through the sellers would grab a few of their wares to show us and call out, "Amiga! Tomate!" or "Amiga! Cebola!" Occasionally a merchant would know a bit of English and call out, "Sista'! Hello sista'! Carrots!" Most of the merchants were men, and most of the shoppers were women, so they tended to try to get my attention more so than Jon's or Tiago's. Our first stop was right inside the market where we got 80 kilos of beans, 12 kilos of onions, and 2 kilos of garlic, all weighed in sacks from a spring-scale dangling from the rickety shop ceiling. We could tell that our presence was giving Tiago a hard time, because the merchants automatically made the prices go up when they saw our skin color and he would have to bat them back down to what he knew was the correct price. He does this every week, so he would know. We walked on, some shops were selling a variety of common items like the little packs of laundry detergent and toothpaste, while others had oil in recycled soda and water bottles, and others had bulk tea and spices in huge canvas sacks. A large, friendly lady named Louisa sold us our 11 kilos of tomatoes. Most of the shops didn't have their own plastic bags for buyers to carry their purchases, so many times after merchants would make a sale they would start shouting, "Plasticu! Plasticu!" to get someone to bring them a bag from another shop. At each stop Tiago paid for the goods then asked the shop keepers to hold on to them until we were done with all of the shopping and we would pick it up on our way out. On we plunged, deeper into the labyrinthine market, finding the 7 kilos of carrots, 20 heads of cabbage, and 30 coconuts we needed, but not the bell peppers—the market was fresh out of peppers for the day. Tiago got the help of a few adolescent boys to pick up the goods as we wound our way back to the entrance, stopping again at each shop where we had made a purchase to claim it.

Ironically, our last stop was Shoprite, the only western-style grocery store in Beira. The contrast of walking straight from the hot, bustling, smelly market into the air-conditioned convenience of the store was almost jarring. Tiago said Shoprite had the cheapest dishwashing detergent in town, and he would know.