Calamidades at the Market

Shopping here is so much more interesting than shopping back home. With a hundred vendors crammed into a tiny market,every single one of them wanting to sell you something, it can be a bit hectic -- an incessant background noise of "Oi! Hey! Hello! Amiga! Friend! My friend! Dona! Sister! Look here! My sister!" Once you learn to drown that out, though, there's nothing so interesting as wandering around a large market, hand tightly grasped on your purse, smelling chamussas and bolo, seeing the vibrant colors exotic of fruits and vegetables imported from more fertile places, and passing row after row of fascinating calamidades.

Calamidades are second-hand clothes, sent from developed nations, that arrive in the boatload in Africa and are distributed in giant plastic-packaged cubes to various vendors. Some calamidades are just dumped on the floor, and you have to do the work yourself, looking for the nice skirt in a sea of old t-shirts, leopard-print overalls, and striped-neon leggings. The upside? These finds are rarely more than 10 meticais -- about 30 cents.

In other instances, the calamidades vendor will sort through piles, pick out a particular type of item -- puffy jackets, polo shirts, or jeans, for example -- and then hang them up on make-shift clothes-hangers in their "specialty store", and charge 50-100 mets per item. (About $1-3) While these are more expensive, you can usually find better quality items this way, and you don't have to wade through a hundred old t-shirts that say things like "Springfield County's 5th Annual Hog Cook-Off 5th Place Champions" or "Dr. Jeffries' Orthodontics Office's Team Teeth!"

Calamidades are fun because you find so much hilariously random stuff there. When Peace Corps volunteers go in a group together, we play a game to see who can spot apparel from their home state first. New York and California have it so easy. I got particularly excited on one occasion when I found a "2011 Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo" shirt. I went to that rodeo! I also saw a Texas Folklife Festival shirt once, and a Dallas Cowboys jersey.

Other gems include t-shirts of questionable repute, one memorable example being a shirt proclaiming "I'm Not a Gynecologist, But I Can Take A Look." People will buy these without knowing what they mean, which explains why my star student in night school regularly wears a shirt that says in big bold letters, "Harden The Fuck Up." I equate this behavior with whatever mentality causes Americans to get tattoos of Chinese characters they don't actually understand.

Some people make calamidades shopping into an art, like my good friend Anna, the Queen of Calamidades. She can spend hours looking through a dusty pile of clothing for that perfect item. I certainly don't have that kind of patience, but I've had a few brilliant finds: A large canvas Eddie Bauer bag that fits absolutely everything and makes me feel like a rugged awesome photographer for National Geographic ($10), a pair of yoga pants and a purple tunic that I bought offhandedly one day in Messica that have since turned into my most worn travel clothing ($4), and, most recently, a really awesome United Colors of Benetton canvas backpack that I take on all my short weekend trips ($7).

Mozambican markets simply are more fun to shop in than American chain stores. I used to get a rush from flicking through the newly discounted items in the 70% Off section in Target. I think those days are over. My advice: If you ever make it to Africa, make sure to go shopping in a real market at least once. It's hectic, it's loud, it's smelly, but it's fun.

Sandals imported from the Masai in Kenya and Tanzania.

The beadwork is all hand-sewn.

So many things to look at!

Egg pyramid!

Thumbs up for used shoes!