The hair!! I did not know those darling little braids & artistically arranged ladies' braid we have seen so many Mozambicans wearing are mostly fake!! They buy extensions which are black as coal & perfectly matches their hair. Their own hair is usually very short & they braid the extension right onto their hair. It can take hours to do a whole head of those tiny, tiny braids. There are so many styles and so many tiny beads added in many ways.
It's a real time consumer for them. Every day I see girls with their head in someone's lap who is braiding or unbraiding their hair. I even worked on unbraiding today. I could hang pretty darn hard while holding the part closet to the head & the girl didn't flinch...I was pulling the fake part. After about 30 minutes, I'd taken out may 7 or 8 of the 100 or more she had.
Imagine about 60 girls needing this done about once a week!! Lots of girls pitch in...you'll see a 6 -7 year old doing a 4 -5 year old or a 12-13 yr old doing one of the caregivers. You even see the girls braiding extensions into their Barbie dolls' hair. Yup...white Barbies with blonde & black braids. They tried to do mine but the extensions slipped right out of my fine hair.
The things I never knew or thought about while admiring the Mozambicans' hair styles!
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