MOZAMBIQUE MYSTERIES
Lisa St Aubin De Terán
Virago, hbk, $65
Review by Sophie Fern
I am so envious of Lisa St Aubin De Terán. Surely if I had a surname so polysyllabic and exotic, I too, would have amazing adventures and be able to say - and this is the bit that makes me almost nauseous with jealousy - that I divide my time between Holland and Mozambique.
The book opens with Lisa and her partner, Dutch film maker Mees Van Deth, arriving in a village in Mozambique having left an outlying island later than they had been advised to.
When they told the villagers they wanted to walk on to the next village through the mangroves that evening, they thought the general reticence was due to people believing that there were bad spirits that lived in the mangroves.
The actual reason was that the tide was coming in and even such a short walk would be dangerous.
They end up, four of them, perched on a rock, Lisa with her laptop computer on her head to keep it from getting wet, drinking espresso from a flask and eating the cakes that Lisa had brought with her from Europe.
Despite this inauspicious start, Lisa decides that she has found her home. She decides to return and to do something to help out the local community.
This, she decides, will be to train the locals in tourism and gardening.
She buys a former army barracks and starts to renovate it.
Family members and volunteers come out from Europe and she has the help of the indomitable Morripa, whom Lisa describes as her local hero.
Things start to come together slowly, but with enough progress to make everyone feel that this new college of tourism and agriculture will make a substantial difference.
The book is full of the almost tangible warmth and colour that Lisa finds around her. She isn't so rosy-eyed, however, that she doesn't see the poverty and huge problems of inequality with which she is surrounded.
She is refreshingly un-cynical about what can be done and she really loves her work and the people with whom she lives.
This biographical snippet of the last few years of St Aubin de Terán's life is heartfelt and ultimately uplifting.
- Sophie Fern is a teaching fellow at Otago University.
