As Americans we love Halloween, we get to dress up, act strange (in some cases just stranger than normal), and of course free candy! This is a holiday that is not celebrated in Mozambique, but that was not going to stop us PCTs. I tried to describe the holiday to my family but they were very confused by the whole concept. Part of the problem is the name of Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve/All Saints’ Eve, as this translates into Day of the Saints, so my family was thinking it was a type of religious holiday, which is far from the truth these days. I was telling them that we dress up and receive candy as children, but as adults we tend to dress up and have a party. They then thought that we were to dress up as Saints, which is about the biggest contradiction of what most people usually dress as. They were completely perplexed by what we actually were doing and finally just chopped it up to us being strange Americans with strange traditions. Never the less they wanted us to have a good time and looked forward to seeing people dressed up.

We had decided on having the party at Casa Grande, since there is an extremely nice, large, open hut we could use. Then came down to what to wear, a number of people were planning group costumes. As I was discussing ideas with my PCT neighbor, she was going as Miss KFC, this is in fact a beauty contest that exists in Africa. We thought it would be funny for me to go as Mister KFC. We designed crowns, sashes and decided we would wear African clothing, for me this was a capulana tunic, which I borrowed from another PCT, and for her it was a capulana dress. My family really liked seeing me in a capulana tunic. I departed my house in the evening, meeting up with other PCTs along the way, making our way to Casa Grande. People had brought speakers and iPods to make sure the evening was in full American Halloween spirit.

The costumes were great. People were dress as Dr. Seuss characters, pirates, fairies, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, crazy soccer fans, ukelele players in coconut bras(both were guys), a group dressed as a cow and even Mcel and Vodacom street vendors (Mcel and Vodacom are the cell phone carriers here in Mozambique and you have to buy credit from them to make calls). One of the ukelele guy’s coconut bra broke so I took the coconuts. I started going around clacking the coconuts together and acting like I was riding a horse. Unfortunately, many people didn’t get the reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, this was a sad moment for me. But those that did get it thoroughly enjoyed me just randomly roaming around groups of people doing so. The evening came to a close at Casa Grande and moved to the nearest “social establishment,” but it was a great evening with lots of fun, laughs, and generally a very American time in a very not American country.