Cold plenty

The overlong silence is obviously due to long days and late nights wrestling the components of a mobile bank into line, followed by a total mental shutdown while on leave. Blog posts about launching a mobile bank will follow, when I can make time to sort through my notes and photos.

Australia was a blur of leafless oaks against grey skies and warm shops selling amazing combinations of edibles, like roast pumpkin bruschetta or white chocolate and mango muffins. When an academic friend of my mother's asked if my bank's agricultural lending supported organic producers, I knew I'd crossed a major mental divide somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Industrial farming hasn't made a big impact in Mozambique.

I may have elsewhere been sarcastic about headlines like "President declares struggle against poverty major goal of 2007" in the Mozambican daily newspaper. I take back any superior tone I used, having seen the Melbourne Age's front-page leader about opinion polls, with its accompanying article comparing the prime minister's suits with the opposition leader's suits.

I am now back in the land of warm winter sunshine, crumbling colonial architure and men who sit with their knees half a metre apart on crowded minibuses. If another overlong silence on this blog follows the one just finished, the reason may be that some innocent senhor going to work got wallopped by the silly mzungu who doesn't understand the way things work here and who is therefore explaining to the police. I remember, on my previous visit to Australia, restraining my laughter on a crowded bus when a fellow strap-hanger apologised to me for brushing against the back of my hand.

The prospect of all the piled-up work waiting for me did make me melancholy on the way home, but a lot of the melacholy evaporated when I found myself walking in sunny Maputo wearing a t-shirt, skirt and sandals. Southern Australia is in the grip of a severe winter. Much of my limited mental capacity was occupied with figuring out which glove went on which hand and how quickly I could make my way to the nearest warm interior. A respected teacher of Australian history, Dr Tony Stimson, once told me that Canberra is located in the frosty heights of the Great Dividing Range because our forebears believed that the Anglo-Saxon mind functioned best in a cold climate. Perhaps so, but now that I no longer have to stay within a two-metre radius of a heat source, I'm getting a lot more done.

My three-year-old nephew Toby with his Mozambican-made wire aeroplane, concentrating on connecting the battery that makes the propellors spin. The toy was a huge hit with him. I tried to teach him to say "Moçambique" when asked where the toy came from, but had to be content with "Africa".