How To Drink Tea In Moz

Tea is a big deal in Mozambique. To tomar chá is one of the most important parts of the day, and over the past several weeks with my host family, several of the following rules on how to prepare and drink tea have become apparent to me:

1. When Mozambicans say "chá", they're not necessarily talking about actual tea, but any kind of hot beverage. For the first several weeks, for my daily chá my family mostly had me drinking a kind of hot chocolate called Milo, which I actually recognized from my time in Ghana two years ago. I guess both west and east African kids (and my friend Mollie) like their Milo.

Apparently this counts as tea

2. If you are drinking traditional bagged tea, only steep the bag for 10 seconds. Any longer is just weird- why would you do that?

3. Make sure you add at least three heaping tablespoons, or fill at least 1/8th the volume of your cup with sugar. Otherwise, it's not real tea- you may as well be drinking water.

4. When you drink it, make sure the water's hot enough to burn your mouth, or else (once again) it's not real tea, you may as well be drinking water.

5. ALWAYS eat bread with your tea, even if you've just finished eating a big meal and have already eaten three large rolls of bread. On rare occasions, biscuit cookies might be an acceptable substitute. Because to drink tea by itself is, of course, completely and utterly WRONG. And just plain weird.

6. And vice versa, you should always drink tea with your breakfast. You should never leave the house without having had any tea (and don't forget the bread!).

7. If you don't follow any of the rules above, your host family will regularly give you concerned and/or sympathetic looks and probably wonder how any Americans can function as working adults if they don't even know how to drink tea.

Enjoy!