Xara

“So Anna and Anna, you’ll coordinate the northern regional meeting?”

“Yeah, but Anna, what’s the budget for each region?  Our transportation is gonna eat up a lot.”

            That’s what our REDES board meetings would sound like if we hadn’t eliminated the confusion and started going by our last names.  There are currently four Annas in Peace Corps Mozambique and three of us are on the REDES executive board.  That doesn’t even include some of the Hannahs who have found it simpler to go by Ana at their sites rather than try to get the locals to pronounce the H. 

            Never in my life have I been around so many “namesakes.”  Namesake is such a strange word.  We never use it, and according to Merriam Webster, it applies more to people that are named after someone else than to people who just cooincidentally share the same name.  I am a namesake in the sense that I am the fourth Anna on my mother’s side (specifically named for my great-great grandmother, Anna Isabel Fisher Franke) but I would feel strange calling my fellow volunteer Annas my “namesakes.”

            However, in Mozambique, where it is perfectly acceptable to address someone by their relationship to you, Amigo/a, Vezinho/a (neighbor), Cunhado/a (catch-all familial relation, official or unofficial), there are half a dozen people who greet me as Xará (shah-RAH), the Portuguese word for namesake. Among these are my neighbor, Ana Paula and even Isabel, a secretary at my school who has seen my middle name on some paperwork.  Having almost 400 students, I was bound to have some xarás in the classroom, as well. One of which I noticed even took to spelling her name with two n’s as I do. 

            So here’s a shout out to my Xarás, American and Mozambican!