Oh the Places You’ll... Find a Goat!

So I suppose this entry will be under the category of really strange things that have begun to seem normal. In other words, if you were to see such a thing back home it would end up in the local paper but here nobody bats an eye. There are too many examples to name so I’ll concentrate on one subcategory: strange places to find a goat.

Perhaps one of the first things you’ll notice when visiting Mozambique is the ubiquitous goat. There aren’t exactly as many goats as people, but it’s close. Any patch of green has a goat grazing on it, typically tied around the neck and attached to a tree or telephone pole. Other goats roam free, chased around by herd boys. In our school compound the goats provide a background chorus of bleating: “Baaaaaaaaaaah!” Like the hum of an air conditioner, it’s something my brain has learned to tune out.

The goats come in many shapes, sizes and colors. Some are cute, others not, but the baby goats are always adorable. It’s fun when a neighbor goat gets pregnant. Her belly swells until you look at her head-on and it looks like she swallowed a root beer barrel. Then one day you see a brand new, squeeky clean baby goat wobbling on its knobby legs with its shriveled umbilical cord still attached. When we first arrived at site a pair of twins was born and Valerie named them Merry and Pippin. The two hobbit goats had the sweet habit of curling up in the sun on our veranda.

So goats are part of the scenery, but even so there are sometimes when I say, “Now that is just not normal!” Mainly this has to do with goat transportation. In our first months at site we picked up on these oddities more readily. I remember my first month being shocked at the sight of a goat teetering at the top of a tall pile of water jugs hastily strapped to a trailer that was speeding in front of us on the highway. Since then I have seen many goats strapped to the roofs of chapas or otherwise precariously attached to moving vehicles.

Sometimes the goat is inside the vehicle. One of the girls got a ride in the back of a truck and nearly sat on a rice sack occupied by an unfortunate goat. Another of the girls got a ride in a VW hatchback and heard muffled cries from the rear. The poor volunteer didn’t know what to think until the driver said he was taking a goat to a party. Even Sean got his own goat-in-a-car experience when we were travelling by chapa. The driver pulled over at one point, picked up a goat and shoved it under the back seat next to Sean’s backpack. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll tie her down so she can’t chew your bag.”

Goat transportation doesn’t stop with cars. I’ve seen goats attached in all manners to bicycles. Sometimes there are two people and a goat on the same bike! Either the goat is strapped to the back and the second person is sitting on the cross bar, or the person is on the back and the goat is riding up front with its hooves draped over the handlebars. In any case, goat-by-bike transportation is always entertaining.

Sometimes you have to get the goats across the river. Goats aren’t good swimmers, so people put the goats on their heads and wade through the water themselves. Carrying your goat is perfectly acceptable. Often I’ll see people walking down the road with a goat over their shoulders.

My most recent goat story is from Jenna. She was walking through town and saw a man yelling at some kids with a herd of goats. It was their father telling them to turn the goats into the police station because they had been found grazing on his land. Later, Jenna saw the herd of goats in the police station compound waiting to be picked up. Apparently the owner of the goats will know to look in the “lost and found” for his misplaced herd.

There are probably other goat anecdotes that I’m forgetting but it all seems commonplace these days. It will be strange to return home to a place where goats are confined to petting zoos. I wonder what folks back home would think if I rode through town with a goat on my handlebars…