Don't Be Late For Dinner!

Despite our best intentions, we didn't make it to a Christmas church service this year. Instead, we were inescapably snared in the African time trap.

The trap was set a couple of days ago by my friend Mario, who was talking about his church's plans for an evening Christmas service followed by a social time afterwards. We don't have enough time to sit around and get to know one another, he said, and was really looking forward to creating such an opportunity this Christmas.

We offered our kitchen for Mario, his brother Dilson, and their cousin to come prepare some Christmas snacks. It would take two hours, they said, or three, tops. They arrived shortly after noon, and for hours we mixed, rolled and deep-fried samosas (or "xamussas"), spring rolls, chicken, french fries, and hamburgers (yes, deep fried!). Anything not deep-fried was smothered in mayonnaise.

Eight hours later, "some Christmas snacks" were finished, with a feast sufficient to feed the entire church of 40 people.

As we made the preparations, Laura battled to keep anything with meat or mayonnaise in the fridge. It was a cultural battle; a gargantuan battle between the fridge-people and the non-fridge people (the importance of keeping food in the fridge is lost on people who don't have electricity in their homes!). The battle ended in a draw.

My battle was more of an internal fight: an epic struggle to maintain bodily hydration. Our house, lacking air conditioning, strains under the African heat at the best of times; having the oven and several stove elements pumping additional heat into our cramped kitchen for hours made me crave running outside to roll in the Canadian Christmastime snow.

We can dream all we want. The snow isn't coming for Christmas.

Maputo was experiencing a communist-style run on soft drinks, forcing me to wait half an hour in the beating-down sun to exchange a crate of empties before the party. I fared better than Melvin, who was told that stores had run out of Coca-Cola and Pineapple Fanta.

The time trap tightened, with the tick-tick-tick of the clock growing louder and louder as the kitchen became hotter and hotter.

After 8 hours of sweating at the vegetable market, in the lineup for soft drinks, and in the kitchen, we were finished making the feast that would feed an entire church. Just in time, too: now past 8pm, the church had started their evening program two hours earlier. We loaded up the car and drove slowly to the church, weaving around potholes like we were in a battleground minefield, plates and platters of food balanced precariously in the passengers' hands, laps, and any other mostly-flat surface that could be found in the car.

The great virtue of the African time trap is that few people cared that we were so late, and even those few who did had their cares melt away at the sight of the feast. And an hour after we arrived, the evidence of our labour was reduced to crumbs on plates and smiles on faces.

Merry Christmas!