Beautiful Things in an Unjust World

Something I love about Mozambique is how Mozambicans love the water.

There are a lot of people who only see the a river or the sea as a place to fish, to wash their clothes, to bend over with their backs facing up toward the glinting sun as they pick oysters off the rocks, to collect water to drink and boil and bathe in.

But Mozambique is different. It was one of the first things I noticed when I first arrived here, and it’s one of the things that makes me fall in love with it all over again, like I am now.

Mozambique and I had a fight recently. And by that, I mean, I was burnout and stressed out and discouraged by what I was seeing around me. I had one of those weeks where I dealt with it all: a string of robberies and home invasions in our sleepy town, harassment from drunks, too many bribes to count. One of those weeks where even just burning my tongue on a plate of beans in the market felt like it would put me over the edge. On one of these days I decided to get into bed at 2 p.m. and didn’t leave until the evening, after which I promptly walked into a fight where a man was hitting a woman and the police stood on the side, standing nonchalantly with their hands in their pockets. I turned around and went back home.

Something aesthetic-travel blogs and filtered Instagram pages don’t prepare you for when you think about living in a developing country is that you’re moving to a place where there really is very little justice. There just isn’t. It’s a place where corruption spreads to the streets like mold, creeping into the lives of people who are just trying to get by and feed their families. The home robberies that have increased in frequency, where the crooks run free and, when they are caught and brought to the police station, they bribe their way out and flee. When men who reek of liquor hit their wives and girlfriends and the policemen stand on the side, making idle chitchat. Where young mothers with HIV and without access to medication come down with malaria. Where people suffer from illnesses that would be so easily treated somewhere else.

Moving to a country in Africa is not always elephants and coconut trees. It’s opening yourself up to the harsh realities of wild corruption. It’s knowing that if someone does cause you some form of harm, the most justice you might see is your friends running into the bush wielding baseball bats and coming back empty handed. And I think this has really settled on my shoulders and my mind this week: there is not always justice in an unjust world.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t, also, a lot of beauty to be found.

After a testing few days I knew I had to makeup with Mozambique. I went down to the ocean just before sunset and jumped into the water, turquoise and clear. I wrapped myself in my oversized towel and sat on the sand for awhile, and watched the exquisite world around me.

Three Mozambican girls in their soaked school clothes were screaming with absolute joy, enormous smiles on their faces, as they held hands and jumped into the whitewash of the waves. Holding their noses, smacking their hands on the surface, running to the safety of the sand before leaping back into the ocean.

Behind me, a group of young local boys played soccer along the shoreline, and just down the beach I saw a couple of teenagers jogging with their surfboards in tow. As they passed me, they smiled and waved, and that was all.

One of the first things I ever fell in love with in Mozambique were the colors (the first thing I ever wrote about it in my notebook was: everything here is bathed in turquoise and gold and emerald green). Just as it was this afternoon.

And the other thing, the second thing I really fell in love with here, was how Mozambicans love the water. Just as they did this afternoon. Just as they do every afternoon, when I’m not too blinded to see it.

There are a lot of beautiful things in this unjust world.