It's life.

When life cannot merit an “ha de passar” because the chapa is just too slow or the laundry wont dry because it’s rainy season and now your clothes are moldy or you are just too convinced that malaria is coming to do some major battle with you, “é a vida” becomes much more pertinent than “ha de passar.”  E a vida means “It’s life” and it has insidiously invaded my vocabulary until it unintentionally became my trademark and one of my only jokes in Portuguese (for some reason, Mozambicans think it is SO FUNNY when I say this.  It gets them every single time).  For everything, from an early morning meeting starting 2 hours late and then lasting 3 (or more, because really, who counts after it hits the 3 hour mark) hours to a time where I have yet again proven just how exactly foreign and awkward I am, I can now just shrug and say “é a vida.”  
 

When I originally thought of the topic for this post, I was at a point in Peace Corps where I thought “What an easy going culture, this is definitely a helpful attitude for me as well.”  But in the past few months, the cliché of Peace Corps (the fact that we sit in our houses and stare at walls a lot and thus think about life) has caught up to me and I have realized that “E a vida” is much more than a simple acceptance.  There’s a fine line between acceptance of things we cannot change and things that we can.  And as many before me have learned, it takes talent to discern the difference.  And I don’t know how to do that yet.  
 

On one side, it’s good.  There are so many frustrations and injustices in life  – many already mentioned here.  Why spend what is generally life getting all stressed out about things that are considered, as bad as they are, so normal?  Because for many here, it’s a choice between worrying about the injustices in the school system and feeding a family.  So really, it could mean that Mozambicans have their priorities straight.   “E a vida” represents what could be argued as a necessary apathy, a symbol of a disenchanted fraction of Mozambican society who look at all the obstacles to maintaining a human life with dignity and say “We do what we can.” 

On the other hand, this “necessary apathy” could be considered just as insidious as “E a vida” has been in my vocabulary.  An easy thing to say that, whether it means to or not, maintains a problematic status quo.

So. The question remains – What do you accept, and what do you fight like hell to change?

We went to the beach last weekend, and there were lines of 
men and boys pulling in shrimp from the ocean.  (and the shrimp was really good).