Painting in Xai-Xai

Emily left Xai Xai for a REDES meeting in Maputo this past weekend, leaving me in charge of buying paint and painting the kitchen and living room of our house. Now, I can imagine that some of you, especially those of female persuasion are cringing slightly knowing that Emily left me, an admitted man, in charge of selecting the paint scheme and color that will adorn our house for two years. To that I say, your fears are groundless – I knew what I was doing. I also brought 2 other men along with me to help me choose the paint. Our friend Dan was down for a visit and quickly enlisted into the painting project along with Rustino, one of our friends who lives nearby.
We began the project on Friday and I had high hopes that we would be putting the finishing touches on the last wall by dinner time on Friday. This conservative estimate was thrown out the window almost immediately as we did not get into town to buy the painting supplies until after lunch and did not return with the paint until around 7 Friday night.
Paint supply procurement was interesting but uneventful. It was the purchasing of the paint that turned the whole outing into an adventure. The best way to buy paint here is to buy a couple gallons of white paint and then add little bottles of “tinter” until you have approximately the color your wife told you would match the pretty curtains she bought the second day we were at site. I even had a sample of the curtains with me and was feeling pretty confident.
The goal was to have a sand colored living room and maroon colored kitchen. Luck was with us because there was a bucket of approximately the correct color for the kitchen already mixed sitting out as if waiting for us. The sand color was not as easy. It took a long time to agree on the quality of white base paint that I was willing to pay for (paint is pretty expensive here, especially good paint). I quickly learned that to the people who were selling me the paint, their concept of a nice sand color is an ugly gray that would not in any circumstance look good on a wall. This was unfortunate because my ace in the hole had been that I had made sure I knew how to say sand in Portuguese before arriving at the paint store which was really the back of a trailer.
The next hour or so was spent trying to make a couple of primary colors do what wasn’t really physically possible. At one point we were mixing red yellow black and brown together hoping that the end result would look like Emily’s curtain sample. Out of desperation I jumped all over a color that was a definite improvement over the green brown and black that was the previous attempt. I think I liked it because it was so bright. Dan and Rustino quickly agreed that this was definitely the best color possible. Their opinion probably mostly being turned by the fact that we had already spent an hour or so matching paint. I held the sample next to the curtain and grimaced but said “Yeah, close enough” and the paint mixing began.
Now, it is one thing to mix a bit of paint together on a piece of cardboard. It is a lot harder to match that color in a ten gallon bucket of paint. For the next hour and a half I watched as more and more tinter was added and the paint color departed from the color sample we had agreed on as if it were an inverse correlation. My favorite part about the paint mixing was the guy who was holding the red tinter. Without much consultation with anyone else he would from time to time dump in a bunch of red. This would elicit a reaction from the woman who was stirring that the red was too strong and we needed yellow to balance it out. I alternated from hysterical laughing to extreme panic. When I finally called an end to this study in primary colors and decided to deal with what we had, I would call the color reminiscent of a dirty traffic cone but was not extremely displeased with the outcome.
Some of the advice for application and storage of the paint was lost in translation as the woman who was selling me the paint alternated between two local languages that I have not had the opportunity to pick up in my month here. Rustino speaks both of the languages and was still a bit confused: “She says you have to mix the paint with petrol”. And we would have, but the gas station had just closed. Rustino left Dan and I that night looking forward to helping us the next day.
In the middle of dinner that night Dan and I spontaneously broke out in laughter after it finally dawned on us that we would be painting the walls of the house the color of the paint that was in the bucket in the corner of the room. We kept laughing because there was nothing we could do. The paint was already purchased, we were committed.
The next day the paint was applied generously in 4 coats. It doesn’t look bad. Seriously. The contrast between the maroon in the kitchen and the orange living room inspires description such as “funhouse without the mirrors,” but what is important is that Emily likes it, or is very good at controlling her emotions.
The next improvement Dan and I are interested in now is lime green borders and a lime green stripe running at about eye level around the room.