Another American escapes

Today - to spare you all further complaints about my workload - a photo from back in August, when I had the pleasure of attending one of life's great weddings. (It has taken me this long to track down the photos.) American Laura married her Australian boyfriend Mark at sunrise on the beach at Chimivane, about four hours' drive north of Maputo (or rather longer if you have to help push broken-down local vehicles out of the road along the way - all part of giving the numerous foreign visitors the authentic Mozambican experience).

Photo by my friend Minati Baro.

A local choir sang Shangana wedding hymns, whales broke the surface of the waves to see what the crowd of two-leggers was up to, and even this bitter confirmed bachelor teared up a little during the ceremony.

The wedding breakfast was an astonishing feat of organisation by Laura, who personally took care of details such as the sixty-plus champagne flutes from Ngwenya Glass in Swaziland. After the nerve-racking job of transporting them, she gave them all away to her guests. I must thank my boss Wesley and his wife Molly, who gave me the flute from the place setting of their three-year-old son Philip, so that I could take home a pair.

At about the same time, there was a discussion on one of my writing-based mailing lists about migration and U.S. isolationism. A Canadian-based U.S. citizen - who had previously lived in Scotland - complained about the unsympathic attitude of her stay-at-home fellow citizens. She quoted the statistic that at the height of the British empire, 15 million British citizens lived outside the British Isles. I don't have a date for that and thus have no way of knowing the British population at the time, but it's about 55 million now. The U.S.A. now has a population of about 400 million, and a mere 3 million of them live outside national borders.

That ties in with reports - well, complaints - I've heard from American friends here about "mission people", that is, American embassy staff. "Mission people" not only close their social events so that even other Americans can't attend, but have a curfew which pretty much prevents them attending outside social events. And it occurred to me that the Americans I know here - with the exception of Wesley and Molly, and with not a single "mission person" among them - are all either married to or living with non-Americans.

I prefer to report my observations rather than make sweeping statements about what this or that group of people are like - but I'm fairly sure that most of my readers are thinking what I'm thinking.