There were many moments for thinking at Palma: what will happen today at Pundanhar? Even though small, in many aspects Palma is almost a city. Pundanhar instead is a village, an hour away from here by jeep.
It’s that village – remember the visit during the first mission – that improvised a disco to be just like a city.

The sun has not yet risen as I write. I’m an early bird and I take advantage of a few hours in the morning when everyone is still sleeping to do the best relaxing and stimulating therapy in the world: writing.

We begin by making the point of the situation: what’s classed as funny in Mozambique? Lots of things, but not the theatre! Not the theatre of the companies from Palma.
Here the theatre is used to send messages, so it’s educational, didactic. The death of comedy…

Maybe the local tradition is full of storytellers, moments of fun, maybe they appear during weddings and some other rituals and celebrations, but they are all things that we, for now, have not yet seen.

Years passed in Burkina Faso before I had the honour of being invited to a wedding. They made me sleep on the wedding bed, fresh and new: unthinkable for me to sleep on the floor.

Outside, dawn is breaking.

***

We have returned from Pundanhar and the sun is setting. It certainly has been a long day…

At Pundanhar we watch two performances: one by a group of schoolchildren, very young, and the other by a community group, made up of adults.

The kids proposed a performance, again, on the importance of instruction. School, homework returned with marks, the struggle between going to school/going to work, a protagonist who manages to go to Italy and study, what a coincidence!, learns English (in Italy?!?) and immediately finds a good job when he returns to his village.

Moral: it’s important to study and go to school.

The second performance is instead centred on a fraud, a swindle. A magic plant left by a father to his son, two people from the village who try to steal it, the father’s spirit that returns and punishes the thieves.

I believe the moral of this performance was inspired by Gigi Proietti’s famous story where you mustn’t annoy the Black Knight.

Comic scene (I noted it!): a woman in the audience, probably with some mental problems, arrived and started throwing abuse at the actors. The rest of the audience laughed. She apparently was the mother of one of the actresses who wanted to know what her daughter was doing in the midst of so many people.
It’s just that she interrupted the show to do it!

***
Pizza for dinner! Maybe prepared in our honour. I want the one with bacon and lobster. You try finding a bacon and lobster pizza in Italy, Iacopo takes the one with everything.

And then jokes about Montezuma’s revenge! (the travellers know what it’s about…)