Weird

I shake hands with a man a see around a lot. He is happy to see me and greets me in Shitswa, I stammer my response. He holds the handshake as we continue our greeting. How are you? How did you sleep? What are you doing right now? He begins to rub my hand. What are you buying in the market today? What are you doing this weekend? The stroking continues and his hands are callused and tough and that fact that I know this gives me the creeps. He's still petting my hand as I pull away, stifling an anglo-saxon impulse to scream "GETOFFA ME!!" and run away. The smile on his face never wavers.

And that's completely normal. The only thing different about it was how earnestly happy he was to shake my hand. I am still shaking it off when I leave the market. A group of women walk by carrying big baskets of fish, huge basins of water (water is really heavy fyi), bundles of wood, on their heads. On their heads! A little girl of maybe six follows the train with a baby tied to her back and just her mother's cell phone perched delicately on her own head. She's in obviously in training, but manages to wave at me without dropping either the infant or the phone. The women can do this for miles, all the while greeting everyone they pass and never spilling a drop. Men do it too, it's just more efficient to carry large amounts of weight that way. I saw a woman walking down the street with an unopened dvd player on her head. Another time with a bundle of machetes.

And nosepicking, my god! It's one of those things that isn't even on their radar. A kid will be asking a question in class and the whole time jamming his finger up to the second knuckle into his nostril, working it around to find the sneaky, hidden boogers.. A colleague, an adult, will be talking to you about nothing as he massages his brain through his nose, his finger nearly gone as he asks about your weekend. I earnestly hope they don't notice the look on my face. My boss in a meeting, a nun for christ's sake, with her whole hand in her nose. What is she hoping to find?

But I'm weird too. My teacher's smock, called a "bata", apparently got so dirty by Mozambican standards that a kid in class raised his hand and said more or less, "Teacher Colin, I don't want to offend you at all, but I mean come on."
"What?" I said, honestly confused, "What is it?"
"Your bata," he replied, "it's dirty." Mozambicans are very, very tidy people.
I had another conversation where several of my colleagues marvelled at my arm and leg hair (Mozambicans have very little and often no body hair at all). "It's so long!" they blurted incredulously, "It's...orange!"
"So are my eyelashes" I replied. At this they looked closely at my eyes for a moment and amazed, disbelieving laughter broke out.

Another wierd thing about me is that I have no native language. Or rather, my native language is my national language. Here, the native language is Shitswa and is representative of this and only a few other communities, spoken by less than a million people. One has a native language and learns the national language for things like business, travel and school. One's native language is representative of who he or she is, where he or she is from, a part of their identity. Language, literally the words you use to communicate, are specific to you and only a relatively few others relative to the country or the world at large. But me? My language is the most common language on earth, and so to a Mozambican part of my identity is just missing. It isn't a part of how I conceive of myself. That, I think, is the weirdest thing about me.