The Great Northern Adventure, the un-making of this American, and ceremonial wailing

Written on December 19, 2011

Ahem. Hi, everyone.

So it’s been... almost three months since I last blogged?? Whoops. Please forgive my long silence. My excuses are as follows: I was studying for the GRE, which I took in November; I was traveling for almost three weeks around Thanksgiving; and Mabote hasn’t had electricity in two months, so it’s a rare occasion when I have a charged laptop. As I type this I’m keeping an eye on the battery meter and racing it to 7%, when my computer will beep and go dark.

So, beyond apologies and excuses… Merry Christmas! I hope you’re spending it surrounded by your loved ones and feasting on delicious food. Like last year, I will be hanging out at the beach in Vilankulo with some other volunteers. The house where we’re staying has beds/couch for six or seven, and there are nine of us staying there. So should be cozy, but fun!

The most interesting thing I can report on is my big – no, epic – trip north in November. First I spent two days traveling by chapa down to Maputo (the capital) for the GRE, and then I flew up to the northern provinces to spend Thanksgiving with friends who live up there in the wild west of Niassa province (bordering Malawi) and the final frontier of Cabo Delgado province (bordering Tanzania). It was the longest I’ve been away from Mabote since I arrived, and also the first time I’ve been north of Inhambane province (where I live), which is in southern Mozambique.

And man, that’s where they keep the beautiful landscapes! Sure, the beaches of Inhambane look like a Corona commercial and all, but the north has mountains! We took a twelve hour train ride through the most gorgeous scenery I’ve seen in Mozambique. The mountains are called inselbergs and they look prehistoric, like they should have dinosaurs roaming around in front of them. There are some photos in my new facebook album: The Great Northern Adventure (though they really don’t do the landscapes justice)

In addition to beautiful scenery, there are some other Thanksgiving shots, including me and a chicken I’m holding simultaneously freaking out. We killed and ate said chicken for Thanksgiving dinner and it was my job to do the killing, but I couldn’t bring myself do it in the end. I was afraid of a repeat of the time when I was four and my dad made me clean a fish at the lake and I cried my way through it. That sort of thing is slightly more embarrassing when you’re no longer four. I did, however, help pluck and clean it. I’m getting more Mozambican all the time.

Also while up north, my second* biggest Mozambique fear was realized: I had a gastro-intestinal emergency while on public transport. I’ll spare you the details, but I owe my friends Nathan and Jama a goat dinner for taking care of me. My consolation is that it happened so far from home, so I never have to see all those strangers again who witnessed my roadside vomiting and other things. I blame a dirty mango.

Anyway. I’ve been back in Mabote for just over two weeks now, and since I’ve been back things feel different. The trip was like a symbolic divider between Years 1 and 2 (also quite literal since the halfway point of my time in Mabote was right around Thanksgiving). Now that I’m solidly in Year 2, the idea of me leaving Mabote has suddenly gone from seeming theoretical and so far away that I might as well not think about it, to seeming tangible and real.

And that has made everything else clearer to me. Like the fact that what’s most important about this experience is the personal relationships I have with people and what we learn from each other. Not to downplay projects and productivity, but there’s nothing like the realization of, “Holy crap I only have eleven months left – which is only like three months American time – to ‘do’ something” to make you realize what’s realistic.

Confession: I secretly harbored hopes of doing Big Things in the Peace Corps. I thought I’d come in and be able to use the advantages and experiences I’ve had in my life to spot easy wins and take advantage of them. But there aren’t any easy wins here. There are a lot of things that need doing, but none of them are easy. I can only hope that during the next year I will be able to keep contributing in small ways, even as I continue to climb this steep learning curve and attempt to get below the surface of a culture that is still so foreign to me.

So in light of my newfound realization that people matter most, in the last couple of weeks I’ve been hanging out with neighbors more and making up more excuses to passear around town. Passear is an oft-used word in Mozambican Portuguese that there’s really no equivalent for in English. It means: to walk around aimlessly with the intent to see what’s going on and socialize. That’s probably not exactly what the dictionary says but that’s what people here mean when they say it.

And passear-ing is like the #1 Mozambican pastime. Or perhaps #2, behind conversar-ing. To conversar is to idly make conversation, which often means actually saying nothing at all for long periods of time. But just the act of sitting there and being together, idly talking – or sometimes not – is conversar-ing. Obviously I am at a distinct disadvantage in conversar-ing since most of the conversas here happen in Chitswa, but I can zone out like a champ when they’re all speaking Chitswa and then chime in and ask some inane question in Portuguese when there’s a lull. (I’m no good at small talk in English either, but at least now I have an excuse.)

Things have also been pretty dead at the association and around Mabote in general as Christmas and New Years (the “festas”) get closer, so it’s been as good a time as any to not attempt any productivity whatsoever and instead passear, conversar, and just generally let go and stop being so American. I also had a better verandah built on my house and have been spending hours at a time sitting out there reading or playing the guitar. And with no electricity at all I do more cooking during the day and go to bed at like 7:30 or 8:00. In short, I’m savoring the simple and embracing the slow. Like I said, I’m getting more Mozambican all the time.

One of the advantages of more conversar-ing and passear-ing is that you get the news and gossip sooner. The Saturday before last I was sitting in my yard with a few neighbors and heard that the son of one of my closest colleagues had died in a well-digging accident the day before. I was really shocked and sad to hear that so I called a friend of mine who’s a member of the association and within two hours, we were sitting at my colleague’s son’s house participating in the grieving ceremonies.

I’d been to several funerals before, but usually I don’t find out right away so I’ve only been to the later ceremonies when people have known for a few days. This first ceremony was very different from the quiet, rather boring, ceremonies I’d been to before. When I got there, all the men where on one side – some sitting in all of the available chairs – and all the women were on the other, sitting on the ground on mats, or many lying down with their heads and bodies completely covered with capulanas (multicolored wax fabric).

I sat down with the women and for about an hour and a half we just sat there in total silence. Then a woman entered the yard who was visibly distraught and crying and that set off all the other women into ceremonial crying – more like wailing. I sat there surrounded by the wailing and, even though I’d never even met my colleague’s son, I had to struggle not to start crying myself because it was so powerful. I had heard of ceremonial crying but for some reason had expected it to be more, well… ceremonial. But it felt very real and inconsolably sad. The woman who had started off the crying was lying right beside me on a mat and was thrashing around, wailing, as other women held her.

Afterward, my friend who had gone with me asked how it compared to funerals I was used to in the U.S. I tried to explain how a lot of times we try and keep our emotions in and are embarrassed to cry in front of other people, even at funerals. He just listened and tried to understand, but I couldn’t help thinking that their way is healthier: to just let loose and be supported by your family and friends.

Well. I didn’t mean to make this post a downer. It is my Christmas post after all. But being Christmas, I think the image of being surrounded by family and friends – even if it’s for support during a hard time – is an appropriate one.

My battery meter is now at 11% and falling so I better wrap it up.

For New Year’s, I will be heading down to the biggest New Year’s party in southern Moz in the beach town of Tofo (one of the Corona commercial beaches) and camping on the beach there for a few days with some friends. Rough life, I know… never feel too sorry for me out here “roughing it” in Africa. I’ve heard that some of those poor suckers doing Peace Corps in landlocked African countries call us “posh corps”. :)

Boas festas to you all!

Love,
Julie

*For the record, my first biggest Mozambique fear is that a camel spider will touch and/or bite me.

What do I know?

Written on September 26, 2011

Hey y’all,

Happy almost fall! It’s been more than six weeks since I’ve written anything new, so I decided to take a break from my GRE studying – which is what occupies most of my free time these days – and attempt to say something coherent despite the fact that my brain hurts from relearning how to factor equations and drilling myself on the upper end of the multiplication tables. (Where’s Number Munchers when you need it?)

It must be beginning to turn all cool and crisp there about now, at least in New York. I know that because I remember it was just barely starting to hint at fall when I left last year. I’ve been thinking a lot about this time last year in the past few days, because it was one year ago today that I moved out of my apartment in Brooklyn. And on Thursday of this week, it will be my one year anniversary of arriving in Mozambique! That is so weird.

Also, the new group of health volunteers arrived in June and they’re looking at us like we Know Stuff. At first that just seemed ridiculous. “I’ve been here like five minutes longer than you,” I told a new friend of mine from that group. But having spent a little more time with a few of them (and my friend having pointed out that eight months is actually kind of a long time), I’m suddenly realizing that I’m not fresh off the plane anymore…. and what’s more, maybe I actually do Know Stuff!

I remember when I first got to Mabote, I felt completely overwhelmed and the two years in front of me seemed like an eternity. In those first few weeks and months, sometimes even the simplest tasks seemed confusing and impossible. (Perhaps in this blog I failed to mention all my near-meltdowns and existential crises??) Anyway, I remember longing for “one day” when I would wake up and realize that I actually spoke Portuguese, and knew what was going on, and had a real life here.

I know now that it will never be as ideal as I imagined it being, and I will spend my entire two years trying to actually speak Portuguese (well), and figuring out what’s going on and how I can contribute, and building a “real” life here. But despite the inevitable gap between expectations and reality, lately I have been feeling like that “one day” which seemed so far away has actually arrived. “I DO Know Stuff!” I realized. “Woohoooo!! Look at me! Livin’ the dream!” Or something along those lines.

Then one day last week I had a planning meeting scheduled with a couple of people at my association for a food security project we’re hoping to do (teaching people to plant and maintain vegetable gardens at home year-round). A colleague and I started planning it at a Peace Corps project design conference a couple months ago but it had been a few weeks since we’d touched base about it.

I was feeling like the project was lacking direction. What exactly was the problem we were trying to solve? What was our strategy? That’s what I wanted us to clarify, so I spent a couple of hours the day before thinking it through and preparing for the meeting.

I thought it might help if we spent some time analyzing and thinking critically about the situation we were trying to resolve. Something I’ve become convinced of in my time here is that critical thinking is actually a learned skill, not something any of us are born knowing how to do. “Why do you think it’s like that?” “What do you think about this, and why?”

Those seemingly simple questions are hard to know how to answer if you’ve never been asked “why” before. Or if you’re used to being told what to do and made to feel stupid if you dare ask a question. Or if you’re told that there’s only one right way to do everything and that different is bad. Things are rapidly changing, but the vestiges of colonial oppression still loom large, and the rote memorization style of teaching in the schools certainly doesn’t help anything.

So as I prepared for the meeting, I picked out a couple of simple analysis tools to use with them. One is the problem tree, where you draw a tree and write the problem you want to analyze on the trunk. Then you fill in the roots, which are the causes of the problem, and the branches, which are the consequences. The other is the seasonal calendar, where you go through a cyclical period of time like a calendar year, school year, etc. and note when specific things happen in order to analyze and plan.

I had the meeting pictured in my head… me facilitating this analysis and brainstorming session, them walking away feeling all empowered and confident in their ability to analyze and problem solve. It was a beautiful vision of world peace and friendship*… let me tell ya.

That was the plan anyway. But then despite my attempts to explain the benefits of taking the time to think through the problem and our strategy, they weren’t too enthused and seemed to be wondering why we couldn’t just plan the project already. But they humored me and patiently answered my questions about when the fields are planted, and when the rains come, and how long the harvested crops last.

Then as we were looking at the gap on the calendar between the time when the crops from the fields and seasonal vegetable gardens start to run out, and the time when next year’s harvest is ready, I wrote in all caps “TIME OF HUNGER”. They corrected me by saying that hunger exists all year round, but that this was just the time when it was most widespread. “We’re activistas, so we can get food in the shops and pay at the end of the month when our subsidies (from our donor) arrive, but other people aren’t activistas so they go to bed hungry. Lots of people go to bed hungry.”

It may sound obvious, but that moment was the first time it really hit me what we were talking about. We were talking about people in Mabote, in 3 de Fevereiro (my neighborhood) – people who I know and that probably live within 100 feet of my house – going to bed hungry.

And meanwhile, the food I have in my house would probably look like a grocery store to a lot of them. I suddenly felt very self-conscious. Here I was, having spent a couple of hours planning and with my problem tree and seasonal calendar thinking I was going to come in and teach them something. But I’ve never known hunger. They didn’t always have their activista subsidy, and at any time our donor could pull out and they’d no longer have it. They don’t need me to help them locate hunger on a calendar… they know it very well.

It did seem to spark one new idea, which was that my colleague suggested that we should do the trainings in February or March even though that’s the end of the rainy season and only one or two months before the time of year when people plant their seasonal vegetable gardens anyway. The reason was that he said we’d never get people to try something new during the peak time when they were working in the fields. And he thought that once they saw that they had extra income from selling their produce when no one else’s was ready yet, that they’d want to keep it going all year. I hope he’s right.

After we were done with the things on my meeting agenda and I felt sufficiently humbled, I stopped trying to lead the meeting and just let them plan, only interrupting every now and then to ask what I hope were helpful questions.

In short, my meeting did not go as planned. I left feeling like I had learned much more than they had, and like I had been naïve and maybe even arrogant to have been thinking of this as “my” project. What do I know about hunger? Or agriculture? Or how things work here?

As far as me Knowing Stuff, I think one of the main things I know now that I didn’t know a year ago is how much I don’t know. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything to contribute, but it does mean I need to know my limits and appreciate that I am not in a good position to be leading anything here. But that’s the whole point, anyway, isn’t it? For THEM to be leading. So when I put my ego aside, I can see now that it was actually a pretty successful meeting.

Anyway, the power has long since gone out so I’m off to bed. Last day in Mabote tomorrow before heading to Vilankulo for the weekend! Lately I’ve been leaving Mabote about every 2-3 weeks, which seems more doable now that I feel at home here and have gotten somewhat used to the harrowing trip down the very long dirt road. (Though I can’t promise more frequent blog updates.)

Speaking of Vilankulo, my friend Camila is losing her house in the CARE compound on the beach – my home away from home – so we’re all in preemptive mourning (especially her) and wondering what her next house will be like. I’m guessing not right on the beach… sigh.

Step on a crunchy leaf for me, if you happen to be near one.

Julie

*I invoke “world peace and friendship” because, believe it or not, that is actually Peace Corps’ stated mission. I know… it sounds like something that should be pulled out of a hat at a beauty pageant. But you have to put in the context of the Kennedy Camelot era.

Things that go “moo” in the night

Written on August 10, 2011

Hey everyone,

Happy end of summer! I hope it’s starting to cool down in your corner of the world.

I’ve been back in Mabote from my two weeks of travel for a little over a week now, which is usually how long it takes me to get back into the swing of things. This time though, I had more than usual to recover from. For one thing, the pick-up truck I rode back in on was also carrying a giant drum of gasoline, which turned out not to be very well sealed. It sloshed all over my bags so I had to give everything I was carrying a good hand washing.

In addition to being travel weary, I also came down with a pretty intense stomach bug on the last day of the conference. I spent an extra night recovering in Maputo but it was hardly restful. There was some confusion with the hotel reservation and I ended up sleeping in the bedroom of the hotel owners which also doubled as storage space. And there was no private bathroom (as in, they walked in on me).

It’s too bad I was sick during my extra day in Maputo because I didn’t end up getting to hang out there before the conference either because Mozambique’s discount airline, LAM (stands for Late and Maybe), canceled my flight. So instead of my big city get-away, I spent another day and a half in Vilankulo, staring out at the ocean from my friend Camila’s backyard and trying not to be a brat about the fact that I was “stuck” at this beach-front paradise.

But despite those “oh yeah, I live in Mozambique” annoyances, it was still a good trip. When I visited my friend Anne’s town, Fidel Castro, we spent a day hanging out at nearby Xai-Xai beach and the other day at a lobolo (bride price ceremony). It seemed pretty much like a Mozambican wedding reception without the wedding, except of course for the part when they laid out all of the goods the groom’s family was offering to the bride’s family. That included new clothes, shoes, household items and cash (maybe somewhere between $100-200, which is a lot of money here).

I was interested to hear that the price was higher than it otherwise would have been because the bride and groom already had a kid together. I’m not sure whether the higher price was due to the groom’s family now having to “pay” for both the bride and the kid, or whether it was because merely having the kid was evidence that the bride was fertile, which is a big deal here. I’ve heard that women are sometimes encouraged to have at least one baby when they’re young and unmarried to prove that they’re fertile and make them more attractive for marriage. (How’s that for the opposite of Western wisdom?)

I wasn’t sure beforehand how the ceremony would seem to me; I was worried it might feel like the bride was being bought, like a commodity, and that I’d spend the day angry. But it didn’t feel like that at all; it just seemed all in good fun, with the bride taking a very active part. She seemed proud, inspecting and showing off all the loot. And really, is it any weirder than some of our traditions? Like, for example, the tradition that the bride’s family pays for the wedding. What is that, homage to the dowry? And isn’t a dowry in essence the exact opposite of a bride price… a groom price? Is that any better?

Anyway, I think my favorite thing about Anne’s house is that her outhouse has a mother hen and chicks roosting in it every night. It was pretty amusing trying to hover over the latrine while being eyed by the nervous mother about a foot away, as the baby chicks peered out from underneath her protective bulk, curious to see what was happening. If you stayed in there for more than about one minute she got increasingly agitated and started squawking at you to hurry it up.

The morning I left it was about 4am and the chicks were already starting to mill about. Not having them protected underneath her, she was more nervous than usual and suddenly charged me. I had a moment of panic before I remembered that I was the bigger animal and shooed her out. Nothing like getting into a pissing contest with a mother hen… literally.

Speaking of close encounters with farm animals, they seem to be after me lately. I know that sounds paranoid, but judge for yourself…

So on Sunday afternoon I was doing some cleaning when suddenly a frantic chicken came tearing into my house through the slightly ajar door. My new neighbor had bought it in the market and its feet were loosely tied, but that didn’t keep it from getting away from her, hopping like mad. It took us a good five minutes to get a hold of it and escort it back outside. (Well, she got a hold of it; I tried to push it toward her with a broom.) It was a good neighborly bonding activity, anyway.

But what’s weird is that this week I’ve had not just one, but TWO farm animal home invasions. The second one happened last night. I woke up to find that my house was surrounded by a herd of cattle. Maybe that doesn’t sound as scary as it felt at the time, but keep in mind that my walls are made of reeds and my bed is right against the wall. So even when you’re inside with the door closed, it doesn’t really feel like there’s much of a barrier between you and the outside. Plus I was still half asleep and I’d just taken my malaria prophylaxis the day before, which gives me night terrors.

So I wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of hooves stomping all around me and the vague sound of large bodies moving. I just lie there with my heart pounding, afraid to move, trying to make sense of what was happening. I think that went on for about two or three minutes (so, forever in my panicked state) and at one point it sounded like one of them was right outside my door stomping on the concrete of my porch.

After the herd moved off and I had calmed down, I got out of bed and opened the door just a crack to shine my flashlight outside. I didn’t see anything, except for solid (well, liquid) proof that one of them had indeed been right outside my door. It had emptied its bucket-sized bladder onto the porch. The concrete is slightly tilted and has a raised border, so there was this giant pool of urine, trapped with no hope of draining.

I guess it could have been worse… in those first startled and sleep-addled moments, I had irrational visions of a burglar on horseback with a machete coming through my wall. (Gotta love that malaria prophylaxis.)

So those are my farm animal adventures from this week, and it’s only Wednesday.

But it’s good to be back in Mabote… it finally feels like I have a little life carved out for myself here. My tomato plants are sprouting tomatoes, and I’m still trying – unsuccessfully so far – to grow a pumpkin in time for Thanksgiving. I’m also feeling pretty busy at work, which is to say that I’ve learned to stop expecting my “job” to remotely resemble a Western workplace. So my feeling busy/productive is probably due to some combination of me having more realistic expectations, and also learning how things get done here (i.e. just because things don’t happen like I might expect them to, doesn’t mean they’re not going to happen).

It’s been hard for me to strike a balance between pushing too hard and inevitably driving myself crazy, or just deciding that it’s not worth it and checking out. So for the moment, I’m managing to keep pushing but be equally okay with plans falling through multiple times or not being able to see any progress for weeks at a time. Because at the end of the day, sometimes I have to just appreciate this experience for the rich cultural exchange that it is… to be able spend the day dancing and singing with my colleagues at the association, and call it a workday. What could be more awesome than that, anyway? I’m sure someday I’ll look back on this and wonder why I couldn’t just relax and enjoy it. So that’s what I’m trying to do, one day at a time.

But seeing as how I’m supposed to be a community health volunteer, yet find myself mostly doing organizational development-type stuff, I started thinking that maybe I should do something more directly related to HIV. After all, the HIV situation in this country (and the whole region of southern Africa) is nothing short of an emergency, even though it feels more like an ER waiting room than a fire fight in progress.

Mozambique has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world: officially ~12% of the population, though it’s estimated to be as high as 15-25% in some areas. So I’ve started talking to the district education service about helping support their student HIV/sexual health activist groups. So I hope that works out.

Well that’s the news from here. What about from there? I love getting emails from home, even if takes me forever to respond. (And I will respond!)

Hitahonana ni chikate, (until later, in Chitswa)
Julie

Babel babel babel

Written July 11, 2011

Hey everybody,

Tudo bem? (Everything well?) Seems like I just posted a blog, but I’ll be coming out of Internet hiding early this month because next week I’m headed to a conference in the town of Boane, just outside Maputo (the capital).

I feel like it’s nothing but conferences these days. I just attended another one the last couple of weeks here in Mabote. Our donor organization and some other outside partners were training fifteen new home-based care volunteers for our association. I asked to sit in, but by about day three (out of twelve) I was kicking myself for that. It’s not that I didn’t get anything out of it, but it was hardly worth it to have to sit through session after session where they mainly spoke in Chitswa (or, in the trainers’ cases, Changana and Chopi, but they’re close enough to be able to communicate with each other). By day six I had come down with a cold that turned out to be quite debilitating, so I had to miss a few days. The timing was uncanny, I tell ya.

So in case you were wondering how my Chitswa is coming, there’s your answer… it’s not really. After a couple months of beating my head against the wall, I think I can say with some certainty that this is one language barrier I will not be overcoming. As it turns out, learning Chitswa is nothing like learning Portuguese. I think I’ve mentioned before that Chitswa isn’t really a written language. But in addition to the lack of written materials, the other challenge I’m finding is that no one knows how to explain the grammar. Even having a tutor just turned out to be frustrating (for both of us, I think) and unhelpful.

People will just say to me, “This is how you ask for water, ‘babel babel babel.’ And this is how you ask someone how they’re feeling, ‘babel babel babel.’” And that “babel babel” part is actually made up of really long and hard-to-pronounce words. Like, for example, today is July 11th. The word for eleven? Khumeniyinwe. The word for July? Malatacikwinyani. And I can’t just memorize a bunch of sounds for everything I might want to say… I need rules! Patterns!

Having recently started teaching English, I can commiserate with people not knowing the rules of their native language. “It just is!” I want to say sometimes. “That’s not right because it sounds wrong!” When I first started, I didn’t think I’d need a book. After all, it’s my language… I know it in my bones. But as I’m now seeing, that can be both a blessing and a handicap when you’re trying to teach it. So even though it drives me crazy that no one can explain Chitswa to me… I get it. They don’t even have books or rules they learned in school to rely upon. Like me with English, they just know it in their bones.

People often tell me that Chitswa is easier than Portuguese and that I’ll pick it up in no time (though they say that less and less these days…). One Sunday several months ago I was at church with my friend and colleague, Amina. The service, of course, was all in Chitswa. She translated for me for about the first ten minutes and then stopped. I assumed she got tired and I didn’t mind at all. But then an hour or so later she turns to me and asks, “Do you understand?” I was confused at first, wondering if they started speaking Portuguese after I’d zoned out. But they hadn’t, so I told her, “Of course not, they’re speaking Chitswa!” She looks at me, kind of perplexed, and says, “Open your ears!!” As if it were that easy.

I feel bad that my Chitswa isn’t getting much better because I know it would mean so much to people if I could speak more of their language – their real language. When Mozambique chose Portuguese as their official language after independence from Portugal in 1975, it was a pragmatic decision. They needed a language to unite them as a country, to start to form a national identity. I’m told that up to that point, and even after, many people identified more with their ethnic/language group – some of which cross national borders – than with this outline on a map called Mozambique.

Now, it seems like there’s a divide between more educated, cosmopolitan Mozambicans from larger towns and cities who speak Portuguese on a daily basis, and the large number of rural farmers who, if they speak any, only speak enough to get by. Just how little Portuguese many people in Mabote speak was driven home to me during the training these last two weeks. It actually started off in Portuguese but then it became clear that most people just weren’t following, even though one of the requirements to be a home-based care volunteer was that they could speak Portuguese.

But if you’re a subsistence farmer barely getting by and an international NGO says they want to pay you a monthly subsidy to work in the community, but only if you can speak Portuguese, then you obviously aren’t going to write “barely speaks Portuguese” at the top of your resume. People don’t like to admit they don’t speak Portuguese very well because they feel like they’re supposed to know it, even though many people here, especially women, haven’t had much of an opportunity to learn. It’s like there’s shame in only speaking Chitswa, which is sad to me. Why should someone have to feel ashamed for speaking their own language?

In fact, my closest volunteer neighbor, Mandy, told me that a friend of hers in Makwakwa has decided that she doesn’t want her baby to speak Chitswa at all, only Portuguese. In reality, if she stays here, it will be impossible to keep her daughter from learning Chitswa from other people. But it just goes to show how local languages are sometimes looked down upon.

As much as it’s inconvenient for me as an English-speaker to have to attempt to learn two new languages to live in Mozambique, and – from a practical standpoint – as inefficient as it is for one country to have so many different languages, I hope they hold on to their local languages even as globalization and development spread. It’s hard for me to imagine a Mozambique without them; it seems like such an important part of their cultural heritage.

And I don’t see why there’s not room for multiple languages. Even with the burgeoning demand for English, I can easily imagine Mozambicans speaking their local language, Portuguese and, if they want to, English (some already do). As it is now, students study English and French in school in addition to Portuguese. One thing that I’ve been impressed with here is their comfort with, and even thirst for, being exposed to other languages.

I’ve seen people keep their cell phones in English even when there’s a Portuguese option, and I’ve also seen people watch movies in Chinese, with English subtitles. One of my host families in Namaacha was doing that one night and they seemed to be enjoying the movie so much, laughing and carrying on, that I started to wonder if, somehow, they actually spoke some Chinese. When I asked, my host mom said, “No, but listen to how funny they sound!!” And then she tried to imitate someone speaking Chinese and everyone cracked up, especially me. So wrong, but the irony of someone whose primary language is Changana – as “funny-sounding” as it gets to my ears – doing an impression of someone speaking Chinese… priceless.

When it comes to openness to foreign languages, I like their attitude. We could use some of that in the U.S., where some people seem to think that the influx of Spanish is something to be feared and stamped out. (Did you catch the “This is Alabama; we speak English” ad from last year’s gubernatorial race?) People here just don’t get it when I tell them that before I came here, I pretty much only spoke English. “But besides English, what else did you speak?” “Just English.” “Not even French? And what about your local language… what do you speak with your grandmother?” “Just English.” They just look at me weird, not quite believing.

Anyway, I hope you’re all enjoying your summers and having some fun. I’m excited to be hanging out for a couple days in Maputo before the conference. Whenever I spend time in Maputo, it feels almost like I’m on a little vacation back to my old life… eating in restaurants, taking hot showers, and maybe most of all, that glorious feeling that I used to take for granted of being anonymous... i.e. no one gawking at me or calling me mulungu.

And the feeling of being on vacation is amplified because the city is a convergence of so many diverse influences that you don’t quite know where you are. It’s a port city and some parts are beautiful and feel almost Mediterranean. Yet there’s also plenty of communist-era square concrete architecture that makes you feel like you’re in Eastern Europe. And on top of that you never really forget you’re in Africa, with the aggressive street vendors and taking chapas (jam-packed minibuses) as public transport.

Incidentally, being in Maputo also makes me feel like my Portuguese sucks, whereas in Mabote I sometimes get lulled into thinking that I’m practically fluent. Just goes to show, again, the rural-urban language barrier. And I’m pretty sure if I arrived in Lisbon or Rio de Janeiro tomorrow, I’d be totally floundering.

After the conference I’m going to visit my friend Anne’s town, Fidel Castro, in Gaza province. (Yes, that’s actually the name of her town.) She’s invited me to go with her to a traditional lobolo (bride price) ceremony. Should be interesting!

Fica bem, (Stay well)
Julie

Give me your shoes.

Written on June 8, 2011

Hey everyone,

Happy summer! Wow, I can’t believe it’s already June. Any fun summer plans? Since it’s technically not summer here, I guess my “winter” plans include another conference in Maputo in July and, hopefully, the Timbilas (xylophone) music festival in August down in Zavala, the “killing chickens on the beach” town I visited in March.

But I think today’s a pretty exciting day: it marks my six month anniversary of arriving in Mabote! Hard to believe I’m officially a quarter of the way through. It definitely hasn’t been an easy transition, but at the end of the day, I’m really glad I’m here.

Having been here six months, I feel like I’m finally getting over – or at least getting some perspective on – things that used to really bother me. Like, for instance, what happened to me in the market today.

There’s a common phrase in Mozambique that I probably hear at least once a day: estou a pedir. Literally, “I’m asking for…” but it feels more like “give me that.” People – often kids, but not always – ask me for all kinds of things: the mangos I just bought, the hat off my head, the shoes off my feet, the capulanas I use as curtains, even my photos of friends and family, and especially money.

When I say no, they just don’t understand. People seem confused and disappointed. “Why won’t she share what she has with me?” they wonder. “It’s not like she can’t spare it… everyone knows all white people are rich,” goes the mentality. Well, today in the market a woman got pretty feisty with me, seemingly indignant at the injustice of it… me not sharing. I have no idea what she was saying as she clutched my hand and berated me in Chitswa, but it couldn’t have been good.

I’d say my feelings about all of this have gone through several stages. First I was just shocked. Internal dialogue: “Are you seriously asking me for my shoes? What am I going to do, give them to you and walk home barefoot??” And then there was anger. “NO, you cannot have my curtains! ... Why? Because they’re MINE and there’s this thing called personal property!!” And there have been days when I didn’t even want to leave my house because I just couldn’t deal with people staring at me, calling me mulungu, and asking me for things.

But then one day a while back, I was talking about all of this with a colleague from our donor organization, a Mozambican guy about my age who lives in Vilankulos. He worked his way to where he is with the help of a scholarship and vocational training he received after being orphaned at a young age. He told me that when he was a kid, he thought the same thing that most of the kids (and plenty of adults) around Mabote seem to think. And that is, to paraphrase him: that all white people are rich, that they know more than black Africans do, and that they’re here to give us things. He added, with a smirk, “after all, Jesus Christ is white.”

Another white Peace Corps volunteer told a story during training about something that happened once when he was way out in a remote area doing home visits with one of his organization’s activistas (home-based care providers). When they showed up to one man’s house, the man started getting agitated and upset, going on and on about something in the local language having to do with the Peace Corps volunteer.

After a while, the activista told him that the man was upset because he thought that he, the volunteer, was Jesus Christ’s brother, and didn’t understand why a son of God would come all the way to his house and not bring him anything. Several of the churches that I’ve been to here have those cheesy Jesus portraits on the wall with the long flowy hair, the beard, the white skin with the angelic glow. If that was the only white person you saw on a regular basis, you can see how you might get confused.

My colleague from Vilankulos went on to talk about how, after independence in 1975, most of the white people who came here were teachers, doctors, aid workers, or other professionals. They were filling the gaps left when most of the Portuguese fled after independence, leaving behind a largely uneducated population with very few professionals.

Even before Independence, I read that Catholic and Protestant missionaries ran most of the schools in existence. My colleague said that when black Mozambicans first started becoming teachers, some of the students balked, saying, “How can you teach me anything? You look just like me.”

And then there are white South Africans. Those who have the money to take their holidays on Mozambique’s beaches generally aren’t doing anything to counteract the “rich white people” stereotype. They tear through Mabote in their sport vehicles and go inflate prices in Vilankulos where, even if they pay 50% more than what something should cost, it’s still cheaper than in South Africa, so they’re not too worried about it.

My colleague said that he knows of at least one restaurant that keeps two menus, one for white people and one for everyone else. And according to him, as recently as 2004 there were stores in Vilankulos with signs in the window prohibiting black people from entering. “They ended Apartheid and brought it here,” he said.

After that conversation, and others like it, things started to make more sense. It’s just logical. How can I blame or get mad at someone for assuming that I’m rich and am here to give handouts when that’s what experience has taught them? If you’ve never seen a white person who wasn’t seemingly rich, why would you believe they exist?

My colleague said that he didn’t really understand until he visited Belgium. When he saw his first homeless person there, he was dumbfounded. “Look at that man, he’s so poor… and yet, he’s white!”

He suggested that when people ask me for things, I should stop and talk to them and open up a dialogue to help them understand who I am and what I’m doing here (and what I’m not doing here) and to challenge their stereotypes about white people.

It was good advice, and I try to follow it when I can. Of course, when the person doesn’t speak any Portuguese, like the woman in the market today, it’s a lot harder. But even so, having a better understanding of why people do the things they do helps keep me from getting all bent out of shape about it.

That’s not to say that I handle it perfectly now, or that I don’t still have conflicted feelings. After all, some of the things I say to people for simplicity’s sake, like “I’m not rich, and I have to eat too” or “I can’t give you my shoes because then what will I wear?” are not entirely true. Maybe not even remotely true, from their perspective, if they really knew how many pairs of shoes are in my closet or how much money is in my bank account.

While I’m not rich by developed world standards, and my Peace Corps stipend doesn’t even meet the minimum bar to file taxes in the U.S., it’s still a lot more money than most people in Mabote have. And if I gave someone my shoes, I would be able to get along without that pair, or just replace them.

But I haven’t yet figured out a simple and kid-friendly way to say, “I’m not giving you money (or shoes, bread, etc.) because it’s not sustainable. I won’t always be here and I want to promote self-sufficiency, not create more dependency. And though I do have some extra money, I can’t afford to give away money to every needy person in town, and how would I choose?” That’s just a mouthful.

And I can already see the blank stares on their faces as they look at this “rich white person” making a bunch of excuses for why she won’t help them. It’s a lot easier to just try to convince them that I’m not rich, even though compared to them, I am.

And even after all of my logic, I still have to ask myself, “What kind of person looks at a malnourished child and won’t give him a banana?” I mean, for god’s sake, my cat looks better-fed than some of the neighborhood kids do. I’ve seen my colleagues at the association give away bread or cashews to needy kids, and they have less than I do. In a lot of ways, sharing and communal living is just the way it is here. And am I not a member of this community?

So as you can see, I do a lot of arguing with myself in my head. But in the end, I think I have to stick to my logic about wanting my impact here to be sustainable, even if it does feel crappy sometimes.

Anyway, on a more cheerful note before I sign off, happy fourth of July! Okay, so it’s not the fourth of July yet, as I write this, but it probably will be by the time I can post it. Some of us are thinking about having a good ‘ole American fourth of July party in Vilankulos… that is if we get ourselves organized in time and if the Chinese “Wal-Mart” has any fireworks.

Mozambique’s Independence Day is actually pretty close to ours, on June 25. I’m sure there will be a day-long program of festivities here in Mabote; there have been a lot of those lately for various commemorations and holidays. On Nurses’ Day a few weeks ago I was actually in the parade along with my association’s activistas. It was a funny feeling to be marching behind soldiers wearing communist-looking uniform and carrying AK47s while singing old war songs. I felt like we were marching off to join the revolution. Viva a revolução!

I didn’t yell that, but I kind of wanted to. Anyway, be safe with the bottle rockets and beer!

Até logo,
Julie

Mozambican weddings aren’t for sissies.

Written on April 30, 2011

Hello again!

I can’t believe I’m writing another blog post the day after I wrote the last one, when I usually only write one a month. But man, what a wedding I went to today! I think it deserves its own blog post. If the BBC is to be believed, the royal wedding yesterday was quite the media frenzy, so maybe you’re all sick of wedding talk. But I promise it’s more interesting than the royal wedding… at least I think so.

My former colleague at the association, Joalina, got married today, and I was not at all prepared for the all-day marathon it turned out to be. It started at eight in the morning and was still going when I finally left just before dark, and I heard that it continued the next day. It seemed like half the town was invited, and even though I don’t know Joalina that well, I was one of the few to get an actual paper invitation. (A perk of being the resident mulungu.)

The first ceremony was at the district registry office, which is near my house. I could hear the singing as I was getting ready, so I knew that weddings must be one of the few occasions in Mozambique when things start on time. I walked over and as we waited for the ceremony to begin, there was singing, dancing, stomping, clapping, undulating, all things celebratory and Mozambican.

The men were in suits and the women were mostly wearing outfits made out of capulanas (waxy fabric with colorful designs) or in western-style shirts with a capulana wrapped around their waist and many with equally colorful headscarves done up more ornately than usual. The bride wore a traditional western wedding dress and a veil. It was obvious that everyone was wearing the nicest clothes they owned. I was no exception – I wore my capulana dress from our swear-in ceremony at the American ambassador’s house.

The legal ceremony at the registry was in Portuguese, so it was the only point during the day when I knew what was going on, as everything from there on out was in Chitswa. There was a government representative there to officiate and, reading from the official script, he told us all that weddings were not to happen in churches, only at the registry. You pray and get baptized at church, but you get married at the registry, says he.

I knew we were headed directly to the church for the religious ceremony afterward, because that’s what my invitation said, so I was surprised to hear that. Then he said we were going to have a moment of silence to think about and appreciate the Republic of Mozambique, or something along those lines. I couldn’t help but think that it seemed like we were in a church at that moment – the church of the Republic of Mozambique.

After the legal ceremony was over, we piled into several trucks and rode in a procession across town to commit the sin of having a wedding in a church, singing all the way. I was in the back of a pick-up truck with at least 20 other people and we were all standing up, holding on to each other tightly like one big mass of bodies. I wasn’t on the edge and we were going slowly, but it was still scary, especially when we hit some low-hanging branches. As we bumped along, I tried to just pretend I was on a subway car at rush hour. I turned quite a few heads as we rode through town, as people did a double take to see if it was really me singing in Chitswa (sort of) with all the wedding-goers in the back of the pick-up.

After the church ceremony, we went back to their house and I thought we were going to eat next. It was around lunchtime and I was hungry. Some of the women had literally been up all night cooking and, sitting over fires around the yard, I could see giant vats of rice, xima (like a dryer version of grits), beef in a brown sauce, and maheu (a mildly sour drink with a corn meal base… it’s good, tastes like apple sauce).

But then I was told we were doing gifts first. There was a large make-shift tent set up in the middle of the yard and underneath was a table for the bride and groom and their two attendants (whose main job it was to dab the sweat from the bride’s and groom’s faces with a handkerchief all day). Surrounding the table was a semicircle of chairs for a select few people who appeared to be family or close friends. Everyone else gathered around, spilling out of the covered area into the hot midday sun and there was lots more singing, dancing, rhythms and general merriment.

To my embarrassment, they came and found me where I was standing in the back and pulled me up to the front and plopped me down in a chair right next to the table of the bride and groom. I wasn’t in the semicircle but a little in front of it, as if I wasn’t conspicuous enough already. Even though I thought I had no business being up there at the front, I knew there was no way I could refuse since that would just be rude. And besides, I was glad to be out of the sun and with a front-row view of the festivities.

So then began the gift giving. I was astounded at the organization and planning that had gone into the orchestration of the gift giving (see previous post for why this is noteworthy). There was an MC with a megaphone, and he had a printed list (where in Mabote can you even print anything??) of various groups – churches, associations, families, etc. – and began calling them one by one. As they were called, the group would make their way to the table, dancing and singing with their gifts in their hands, and make their offerings to the bride and groom. Then the gifts were passed to another side table where they were catalogued and put away. Then the next group was called.

This was a lot of fun to watch and after getting over the shock of practically being made an honorary member of the wedding party, I was having a great time. And I found it really amusing that the bride and groom, in typical Mozambican fashion, did not crack a smile the entire time (even at the ceremonies or in their photos). Though the guests were all smiles and laughter and song and dance, the bride and groom looked like they were being sentenced to death. If I didn’t know any better, I would have wondered who was forcing them to get married. But in Mozambique, it’s customary not to smile at important occasions and in photos because it shows that you are giving the occasion the proper respect.

I even got my own dance group to crowd around me when it was my turn, and I attempted to follow along with them as I presented my gift to the bride and groom (a set of metal mixing bowls with plastic lids). So like I said, I was having a great time… at least for the first 30 or 45 minutes of it. But then the singing and dancing and gift giving kept going, and going for another two or three hours.

We were all starting to bake in the hot sun, even under the tarp, and having to breathe the dust kicked up by the dancers’ feet, and I was feeling so hungry and thirsty that my hands were shaking. I looked at my cell phone clock and it was approaching 4pm and I hadn’t eaten since before 8 that morning (and neither had most of the others). I told myself I’d give it 20 more minutes and then I was going to make a break for it. I knew there would definitely be no sneaking about it, for obvious reasons. But I was almost past the point of caring if it was rude – I was hungry!

Thankfully, though, the gift giving finally came to a close and, as always, the women of my association took care of me. They knew I was hungry without me even saying anything and told me to go sit down on a grass mat and they came back with a plate of food and a spoon, and a cup of maheu. As always, I felt so high maintenance, with them doting on me and even hunting down a spoon when no one else was using silverware. But I was too hungry to even try to tell them I’d wait my turn, no special treatment, like I usually do when they try to pamper me.

I spent the rest of the late afternoon sitting on the grass mat playing with babies while their moms ate, and trying to make small talk with the moms. As I sat there and took in the scene around me, I tried to imagine how it would have seemed to me seven months ago before I came here… so foreign and exotic. But today, it just seemed normal. I was comfortable, and in some handicapped way, I felt like I belonged there.

So that was my first Mozambican wedding. I’m not sure I’d want to go to another one, but I’m glad I had the experience nonetheless.

Tchau for now,
Julie

When gardens grow faster than meetings happen

Written on April 29, 2011

Hey everyone,

Guipelile, mu vu kuile? That’s Chitswa for good evening, how are you? (Pronounced: gee-peh-LEE-leh, moo voo-KEE-leh, in case you were wondering).

So as you can tell from my greeting, I’ve decided that, even though my Portuguese still needs work, I want to try and learn some of the local language to better understand what’s going on around me. Because the thing is, most people at work and around town only speak Portuguese if they’re talking directly to me. Otherwise they speak Chitswa to one another, and a lot of people don’t speak much Portuguese at all. It’s not really a written language so it’s hard to find resource materials. But I have a rough manual that Peace Corps pieced together and a tutor lined up who is going to trade me Chitswa for English... so we’ll see!

But language is not the only challenge on my mind these days. To be honest, there are parts of my work and life here that are hard to talk about in a blog because they’re complicated and I don’t want to be negative or pass judgment on things I’m still struggling to understand. But I wouldn’t be doing this experience justice if I didn’t try to talk about these challenges, because they’re some of the central issues I deal with on a daily basis.

Like what? Well, the way my last two weeks went is one example. Ever since I got back from the conference in Maputo, I’ve been raring to go. It’s like something clicked and I realized, with a shock, that I’ve been here in Mabote for almost five months—nearly a quarter of the way through my two years! There are a lot of things that I want to do here and it suddenly seems like there’s just not enough time to do it all.

Why not? Two years is a long time, right? Maybe you’ve heard this adage: what takes an hour in the U.S. takes a day in Africa; what takes a day in the U.S. takes a month in Africa; and what takes a month in the U.S. takes a year in Africa. I had heard this before I came here, but I thought it must be an exaggeration.

But based on my short experience here, it’s not too far from the truth. The main problem I keep hitting up against is people’s tendency not to plan ahead. It’s not that they don’t get things done – god knows my colleagues at the association would put me to shame if you compared the amount of work we do in a day.

But a lot of people I know here seem to just decide what to do next at each moment. And if they do make plans, there’s a good chance something else will come up and whatever they had planned will start late, or just won’t happen that day. One reason for this is that to them, people always trump plans. That’s great if you’re the person interrupting someone’s plans because you need something, but it’s not so great if you’re the person they made plans with who is now sitting and waiting.

If we’re in a meeting and their phone rings, they answer it and have their conversation. If we’re in the middle of doing something and a neighbor walks up and asks to borrow our scale, but it’s locked inside the storage room and we don’t have the key, they will wander off to go help them find another scale to borrow from the neighboring association. And they may not come back for an hour, probably because they’re sitting and visiting.

One colleague in particular is the queen of this type of thing. When I got back from the conference I asked her if we could sit down and check-in about some things we left off on before I went to Maputo and make a plan for moving ahead. How long would it take in the U.S. to schedule and have one meeting? Maybe a day or two, right? Well, it took us two weeks. It didn’t happen until today and the meeting fell through four times. That is, I sat at the association waiting on her for a several hours, usually by myself in the yard, four different times.

But to be fair, I know it’s not just cultural tendencies. I can’t ignore the very real obstacles they are up against that I just don’t have to deal with. For one thing, there’s a lot more illness and death in their lives. Two of the four times our meeting fell through, it was at least partially because my colleague was sick and had to go to the hospital to get medicine. It wasn’t anything serious, but there are no private pharmacies in Mabote so if you even want something as basic as Tylenol you have to go to the hospital.

And the association was quieter than usual this week (which was why I was sitting around by myself) because, of the three most active members, two of them had a death or serious illness in their family. Not only that, but another member had to be taken to the hospital in the provincial capital, Inhambane City, this week because she’s having a complication from a chronic illness. She accidentally took some of the office keys with her so we were partially locked out. All these things happening at the same time and hampering our ability to get work done is not a coincidence – it’s just the reality of life here.

They also just do a whole lot; it’s common for people to have multiple professions or ways of providing for their family. The colleague I’ve been trying to meet with, for example, has three jobs: home-based care with our association, cashew processing with another association, and she’s a vender at the market. She also goes to school at night (8th grade); is involved in her church and the Mozambican organization of young people; is a single mom of a toddler; and then of course there are the daily tasks of life here like farming, cooking over firewood, and carrying water.

So maybe what looks to me like running around like a chicken with its head cut off is an understandable response to all of the demands of their lives. Because one thing is clear to me: life here is uncertain and closer to the edge. It seems like the mentality is: why worry about next week when it’s enough just to get through this one?

And besides, by next week, anything could happen. Not just personal things, but it’s typical to find out about important deadlines and events from our donor organization or the government just a few days in advance. And it doesn’t seem to phase my colleagues at all. They just scramble to pull things together, and in the meantime anything we had planned falls by the wayside.

So the end result of all of this is that by the end of the month, my calendar looks like a tic-tac-toe board with X’s crossing out the things we had planned that didn’t happen for one reason or another. And me understanding it somewhat doesn’t make it any less maddening when I’m sitting there by myself waiting to see if the colleague in question is ever going to show up to a meeting we agreed upon. No… when it happens on a regular basis I can’t just excuse it away, blaming it on cultural differences or poverty.

Or rather, it is due to both cultural differences and the consequences of poverty, but that doesn’t make it “right”, for lack of a better word. And I don’t think I’d be doing them any favors by not pointing out that it’s counterproductive. I’m not saying that my culture is always “right”, either, and I spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out when to adapt to their way of doing things, and when try to get them to adapt to my way of doing things (not necessarily in this situation, but just in general). When am I helping them develop, and when am I just imposing my culture or ignoring realities?

There are no easy answers, and sometimes I feel like a dog chasing its tail.

But we did finally have our meeting today! I thought it went well; we talked about these problems with planning and communication and have some ideas of things we can do that might help. For one thing, we’re going to get some chalk paint in Vilankulos and make a chalkboard calendar on the wall to better track things and hold people accountable for showing up to meetings (I would say “on time” but that’s probably wishful thinking). It’s a start, anyway. And after the week I had, it felt like a major victory.

One of the things that keeps me sane at times like these is finding other ways of keeping busy. This week I sort of joined a soccer team at the primary school with a few of the teachers and some of the students – all ages, since a lot of adults go to primary school at night, but it’s mostly teenage girls who play. My English class also started, and I take great pleasure in showing up early and starting exactly at 6:15pm, the time we agreed upon, even if there are only two people there at the beginning. This is English class and we’re on American time, damnit! I told them that and they all laughed, but they still don’t show up on time…

And since machamba (small farming) season is coming to a close along with the rainy season and it’s now horta-planting time (vegetable gardens), I started one of my own last week at the association. Even if it took two weeks to have one meeting, at least my plants are growing! It’s something visible happening, and some days I need that.

That’s all for now. I’m off to bed. Big wedding to go to tomorrow.

Salani kwatzi, (goodbye in Chitswa)
Julie

P.S. Some of you are probably thinking how wonderfully ironic it is that I, who have been chronically late all my life, am complaining about other people making me wait. I officially apologize to anyone I ever left waiting on me (um, everyone I know). Maybe this experience will cure me of my lateness problem. You can remind me later that I said that…

Killing chickens on the beach and other weekend adventures

Written on March 21, 2011

Hi everyone,

Happy spring! I have to admit that I’ve lost track of when Easter is, but I do know that it’s Cadbury cream egg season. If you’re lucky enough to be anywhere near a Duane Reade or Walgreens, please eat a cream egg for me. If chocolate isn’t your thing, I hope you’re at least enjoying the flowers blooming and the leaves sprouting. It’s starting to be a little less hot here, especially in the mornings and evenings, and people say “winter” is coming. I will be interested to see whether 50 degrees really will feel as cold to me as any New York winter after having made it through my first African summer.

Well, is it just me, or is there more than the usual amount of news-worthy things going on in the world? I finally got a short wave radio that works (with the help of some wire I duct taped to the inside of my roof) and am now addicted to the BBC. After more than three months of listening mostly to bad dance music* on Rádio Comunitário de Mabote, it’s pretty amazing to get regular updates about the situation in Japan and all of the political happenings in North Africa and the Middle East.

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami affected me more personally than it otherwise might have because the weekend before it happened, I had spent all day Saturday hanging out with a bunch of people from Japan in my friend Angela’s town, Zavala/Quissico. It was the birthday of her friend Sota, a Japanese volunteer who also lives there, and some of his friends were there to celebrate.

The day started off with eight Japanese, four Americans and three Mozambicans packed into a rented pickup truck with four live chickens, several pounds of fresh fish and a good many cases of beer. After 30 minutes or so of dodging low-hanging branches and trying not to fall out as we navigated the rutted, dirt road, we pulled up to the edge of a steep cliff that led down to this gorgeous, secluded beach. We carried our cookout supplies – squawking chickens and all – down by foot and set up camp for the day.

When the time came, I couldn’t bring myself to help kill the chickens… I felt bad for them, after having somewhat bonded in the pickup truck. The Mozambicans did the chicken killing that day, and the Japanese did the plucking and cooking. The Americans? We helped with the eating, and that’s about it. Much to my woodsman father’s shame, I have no idea what to do with meat that’s not already pre-killed, cut and wrapped in styrofoam and cellophane. But at some point before I leave here, I’m going to have to force myself to kill a chicken, lest I be a hypocritical meat eater.

I wondered beforehand how the day would go, with this random mix of people from three different continents. But it turned out to be a lot of fun, with everyone mingling and mostly sticking to Portuguese, our only common language. I had to laugh at us: this group of Japanese and Americans, talking like Mozambicans (or trying to).

There was one awkward moment, though. Later that night when we were all hanging out back in town, I asked one of the guys where he was from in Japan. I figured I probably wouldn’t know it, but was just making conversation. Well, turns out he’s from Hiroshima. That possibility had not crossed my mind and it was a startling realization. I couldn’t think of what to say, so ended up just looking down and mumbling, “I know it.” Angela and the other two Americans, Anne and Megan, started giggling at my awkward response and it was contagious… to us, in that inappropriate/nervous laughter sort of way (and let’s face it, the beers didn’t help).

Not one of my best moments, clearly. After we got ourselves under control, Angela managed to apologize and, thankfully, the moment passed. Anne told me later that she had asked him the same question a few minutes before I did, but had played it off by telling him – in her jovial, Anne sort of way – how her family had still been in Ireland back then. Unfortunately, I had no such ‘out’ handy.

Another memorable anecdote from our cross cultural birthday party was when one of the Mozambicans said that if he looked really closely, he could tell the difference between white people and Japanese people. Then he turned to one of the Japanese guys and said, “You’re not white?” as if he just wanted to make sure he had it straight. “No!” the Japanese guy laughed, “I’m yellow!” Then the Mozambican guy looked even more confused and the rest of us were pretty amused.

Believe it or not, I’ve been called Chinese before by kids in Mabote who, like our friends that day, don’t see the racial difference between me and the Chinese guys they’ve seen working on the road. But at least “muchina!” is a break from being called “mulungu!” all the time.

As we rode back from our secluded beach at sunset, Anne and I were talking about how cool it is that this is what we can do with our weekends here: hang out in some pretty exotic places, where you never know who you might meet. Another weekend back in February, some of us went snorkeling off of the Bazaruto Archipelago, a national marine park near Vilankulos. I’ve heard it said that getting Mozambique is like winning the Peace Corps lottery, and I can’t deny that it has its perks.

So come visit me!

Let’s see… what else? Things are still bumping along here in Mabote. Sadly, my pet spider Toby has left my outhouse in search or buggier skies. But I love having Wena the cat around, not just for company but for the added benefit of keeping the critter populations under control. He prefers eating bugs, spiders, lizards and the occasional small snake to my canned tuna… the good little bush cat that he is.

As far as productivity goes, one new development is that a friend of mine has organized a group of people who want me to help them learn/improve their English. There are about 15 or 20 them, mostly NGO and healthcare workers, plus the English teacher at the primary school.

It’s not something I would have imagined myself doing, but English is in high demand here. It helps people get jobs and move up the ranks in international aid and development organizations and opens up opportunities in the tourist industry and in South Africa. We’re planning to start in April, so many adventures in language ahead, I’m sure.

Today is March 21 and I don’t think I’ll be able to post this until mid April when I’m in Maputo for a conference. We’re coming together to debrief our first four months at our sites and I’ll be staying in the same hotel I was in right after I got to Mozambique in September. So I’ll have free wireless! For five days! Not to mention 24/7 power, running water, good food, a pool, and a lot of people I haven’t seen since December. I even get to fly from Vilankulos rather than suffering on chapas for two days. I cannot wait!

Love and chocolate eggs and spring colors,
Julie

*Re: the bad dance music. Has the song Stereo Love (aka the accordion song) made it to the States? I think it must be Eastern European or Scandinavian. Though annoying and repetitive at first listen, I can almost guarantee that you will be dancing and singing it by the twentieth listen. Just sayin.

White person hair, 20 questions and watermelon

Written on February 22, 2011

Hey everybody,

How goes it? Still freezing? Thought so. Still hot here. I’m realizing that I’ve started to adopt the Mozambican habit of starting all conversations by commenting on the weather…

So, what else? Anyone watch the Superbowl? Believe it or not, I watched it live from here! Well, not here exactly (I’m sitting in my hut in Mabote at the moment) but from a gas station in the town of Massinga – about 4 hours away. This is no ordinary gas station, clearly, since for reasons I don’t understand it has satellite TV. Leave it to Americans to somehow sniff out what I would bet is one of the only publicly accessible satellite TVs in the whole country – at least north of Maputo. So there we were, 20-odd Peace Corps volunteers spending the night in a gas station convenience store, middle school lock-in style (the game was from 2am – 6am our time).

In other updates, there’s a new kitten in my life. Sadly, he’s not really mine; he kind of belongs to the whole quintal (yard/compound) plus the adjoining one. I think what he does is shop around for the best meal, charming us all in the process… pretty savvy for a kitten, but I suppose that’s why he’s still alive when we don’t exactly have Meow Mix for sale in the market. He has the pathetic cry and the contented purr combo down to a science, even convincing me to open my last can of tuna yesterday. So seeing as how he’s not really mine to name, I’ve just started calling him Wena (“you” in Chitswa). He also answers to Kitty Pants. For those of you who share my love of cats, I’ll add some photos to my Mabote facebook album. I’ll also add some of Toby, my pet spider who lives in the outhouse. I’m starting a menagerie it seems.

But enough about animals. What about the people I spend my time with? Things are actually starting to pick up on the work front, thank god. I don’t know how much longer I could have just sat around twiddling my thumbs (err, building relationships). Last week I helped them do an organizational SWOT analysis and today we started talking (during a visit from our donor organization) about designing a monitoring and evaluation mechanism for their home-based care work. There’s a lot I could say about the challenges and the rewards of being involved in this type of work in this type of setting – and in a foreign language for us all. But I think I will save that story for another day, when it becomes more of a story. But suffice it to say I’m learning a lot, and I’m feeling like I’m in exactly the right place and am excited for the work ahead.

But there’s so much more to life here than work. I think my small, day-to-day interactions with people are what I am enjoying the most and also learning a lot from.

Like…

I was walking to the market the other day and to get there from my house, I cut through the primary school. There are always tons of kids milling around and I obviously get a lot of attention. Thankfully, the shouts of “mulungu! mulungu!” are slowly turning to “Tia Julia!” (Auntie Julia). Most of them are intensely curious about me and I usually get a few who follow me all the way down the road to the commercial area of town, whispering and giggling behind me. The other day was no exception, with a group of three pre-teen girls about two paces behind me. I turned around and started trying to talk to them as we walked; they were shy but enjoyed the attention.

To backtrack a little, people here, especially kids, have a fascination with white people’s hair – more than my skin, it’s my hair that is so foreign to them. So one of these girls plucks up the courage to, ever so slyly, reach out and touch my ponytail, trying to do it behind my back so that I wouldn’t notice. Well of course I did. At first I wasn’t sure what to do. What do you say when a stranger pokes you like a science experiment? So without a word, I just reached out and touched her hair right back. Well, it was a rare perfectly timed come-back of sorts (that never happens to me… I usually think of what I should have done or said on the way home). They exploded into laughter and seemed to get it… “Oh, she’s just like us, she just has a different kind of hair.”

Then there was Monday when I showed up to work for a meeting with my boss, Teresa, and another colleague, a guy who’s my age and who I’ve become friends with. Teresa wasn’t there yet so as he and I waited, we started speaking English so that he could practice. He’s very motivated to improve his English, having already learned some in primary and secondary school. I decided to teach him 20 questions in English, the game where one person thinks of a famous person and the other can ask 20 yes-or-no questions to try and guess who it is. Simple, right?

So I thought. The thing about playing 20 questions, especially when the two people playing aren’t from the same country, is that first, you have to both know who the famous person is. I was as shocked that he didn’t know that Barrack Obama was the president of the United States as he was that I didn’t know who some world-famous Mozambican runner was. Note: He had heard of Barrack Obama. (In the market right now you can buy flip flops with the American flag and President Obama’s face.) He was just fuzzy on the specifics. Second, the strategy behind the game is to first ask general questions to narrow it down, like figuring out what continent the famous person is from. Therein lies the second problem: you have to know some basic geography.

I fully realize that I’m living in a country where a huge chunk* of the population – especially women and people over a certain age – didn’t get to finish or even attend school due to harsh living conditions and colonial and civil war, and the fact that there just weren’t, and still aren’t, enough schools to go around. Even now, school attendance and graduation rates are low and quality is, shall we say, spotty.

I have heard stories from education volunteers about widespread cheating and grade inflation/changing – spurred on by No Child Left Behind style repercussions for schools whose students don’t perform well. And the most common teaching method here, like in many parts of the world, is rote memorization. Also, I recently saw a primary school geography book with a map of Africa that was wrong – not outdated, just plain wrong (unless they’ve moved Eritrea and Djibouti inland and both are now landlocked).

But even though I knew all of this, I still didn’t fully grasp what it meant. In our game of 20 questions, he thought that being from the United States meant that the person could still be Brazilian. Because Brazil is in America – South America. And who is the president of South America? he asked. And he didn’t know that France was in Europe – I discovered this after asking if his person was from every single continent only to be told “no” seven times.

This is a smart guy who wants to become a lawyer, speaks good Portuguese, and finished high school – already considered educated. And yet, playing 20 questions turned out to be pretty hard. I was left with a new appreciation for the advantages I’ve had in my life, and wondering how much of what I’ve accomplished had anything at all to do with me, and how much was just handed to me, pre-packaged in the form of access, means and expectations.

After 30 minutes, we gave up on our game and instead I started drawing a giant (misshapen) map of the world in the sand with a stick, trying to explain how North America and South America are continents, and that the United States of America is a country in North America, and Brazil is a country in South America. And that even though they are both located on continents with the word “America” in the name, they are actually not close. When you put it all together like that, you can see how it would be confusing…

And then there was today, when I shared a watermelon freshly harvested from the machamba with Mamá Marta and Mamá Tanieta, the president and another founding member of my association. They were surprised that we also had watermelon in the U.S., and I showed them how we eat it: cut into slices. Then they showed me how they eat it: break it open with your fist (which works surprisingly well) and scoop out the insides with your hands, leaving a neat bowl behind. They also just call it the equivalent of “melon”. So I explained that we call it “melon of water,” which they thought was strange.

I thought about trying to explain how we have seedless watermelon, but then I realized I have no idea how we get the seeds out and I knew they’d want to know, given that they are all farmers and life here is deeply rooted in agriculture. I had it narrowed down to genetic modification or some kind of laparoscopic watermelon surgery machine. Both possibilities seemed too hard to explain so I didn’t bring it up. Looking back, I wish I had. Just the look on their faces as they pondered how and why we’d grow watermelons without seeds would have been worth it.

This is the stuff of everyday life here, where even the smallest encounters can end up being fodder for discovery.

Okay, I’m off to bed. The power went out over an hour and a half ago and I’m sitting under my mosquito net in the dark, and it’s way past my bedtime. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post this, but hopefully it’ll be in just a week and a half when I go down to Zavala/Quissico, my friend Angela’s site in the very southern end of Inhambane province (I’m in the northern part). I’m told there’s a lagoon! But I don’t know if there’s internet. Fingers crossed.

Tchau,
Julie

*Huge chunk = I don’t have any current statistics (and don’t have Google handy) but a government report I have saved on my computer with census data from 1997 says that at that time my district had a 19% literacy rate (13% among women and 9% among people over 45). And only 20% had attended or were attending primary school. I’m sure it’s better now, but I don’t know by how much.

Also, Mabote only has school until the 10th grade. I hear there are plans in the works to change that, but right now if people want to finish high school they usually go to Mapinhane, 3 hours away; Maxixe, 5 or 6 hours away; or the provincial capital, Inhambane City, which is even farther.

P.S. Sorry, longest post ever, I know… but just wanted to add that all this talk about the Mozambican healthcare and educations systems is making me feel like I’m pretending to be some kind of expert, which I’m obviously not. So I added a “personal disclaimer” to my blog (top right).

Swatting flies and telling lies

Written on January 25, 2011:

Hey everyone,

Well I’m still here! By the time you’re reading this, it’s been almost six weeks since I was last online, and I can tell because my running list of “things to google when online next” has spilled onto two pages. I never realized how accustomed I’d become to having the answers to my every last ponderance right at my fingertips… I am just dying to know how far short waves go (cause where is the French radio coming from?) and whether the fruit of the cashew is considered poisonous in other parts of the world (seeing as how most of the Americans here seem to be allergic).

Anyway. I wrote another blog entry earlier this month which I’ll post at the same time (below this one) but today is January 25 so it’ll still be a little while before I’m in Vilankulos again.

So I guess it’s pretty much the dead of winter up there in the northern hemisphere. Hard to imagine as I sit here sweating, and tanner than I’ve ever been in my life (which isn’t saying much)… though the modest dress code here is giving me ridiculous tan lines that will probably take years to get rid of. I hope you’re all making it through the winter, cozy by a fire somewhere in thick socks. I’m also curious to hear whether the state of Alabama produced the football national champions two years in a row (War Tide?).

I was just re-reading what I wrote at Christmas and appreciating how different Mabote feels to me now that I’ve settled in a little more. For one thing, I’ve had the chance to visit some of the more rural locales outside town, and Mabote “sede” (the town itself, as opposed to the whole district of Mabote) practically seems like a metropolis in comparison… even if it is “out there” by paved road standards.

We had a big day last Monday: following several days of pruning and preparation, the governor of the province of Inhambane arrived in Mabote. He and other government officials made lively speeches outlining how we will soon be a bastion of development and technology, drinking cold beer and eating ice cream in our air conditioned houses. (I can’t wait!)

It was fun to see the local dances, and there was also lots of singing and fist pumping. (Mabote hoy-ay! Inhambane hoy-ay! Presidente Guebuza hoy-ay!) My boss, Teresa, and I hitched a ride and followed the caravan to the next town in our district, the town of Mussengue, to sell the association’s cashew products: nuts, jam, syrup, brandy.

As we rode shotgun in the front of an industrial flatbed truck bumping along tiny sand roads through the real mato (bush), Teresa told me how our town has the only hospital in the district, but that the other towns have health posts stocked with basic things. She also said that in a lot of places in Moz there might not be a hospital for 70 km.

When I was in the town of Makwakwe this weekend, where my closest Peace Corps neighbor, Mandy, teaches at the secondary school, I saw what I think must have been a health post like Teresa was talking about. But it looked more like a tool shed painted white with a red cross on the front and Mandy said she’s never seen it open. So like I said, I’m learning to appreciate living at the bustling crossroads of Mabote sede.

Our association has several activistas (home based care providers) in Mussengue and the nearby town of Tessolo, and as we drove, Teresa went on to tell me how hard it is for the people there to get to the hospital. They have to either get a ride with someone with a car (I don’t know anyone with a car except NGOs or the government) or have money for a chapa (minibuses or pick-up trucks that serve as public transport). People living with HIV/AIDS, like a lot of our association’s patients, have to come in to the hospital to get their ARVs (anti-retroviral medications) so it’s a hard situation, to say the least. A lot of people just don’t come and die in their homes.

The first time I was in Mussengue was the week before last when I tagged along on some check-in visits to patients’ homes with a couple of activistas and a supervisor/nurse from our donor organization, International Relief and Development (IRD). I’m still amazed at people’s openness to having visitors show up at their house here – especially when they’re sick. In one family’s house, we ducked into a small mud hut when it started to pour down rain. I had been told that both the husband and wife were HIV positive, but that only he was on ARVs, and she hadn’t been to the hospital in a while.

I listened as one of the activistas translated for the supervising nurse from IRD because he’s from another area of Mozambique and doesn’t speak Chitswa. He was trying to get the man to commit to taking his wife to the hospital with him when he goes in for his next batch of ARVs. The man explained that he didn’t have money for (her) transportation, but that he would try. I just listened and tried not to judge – he doesn’t seem like a bad person, but why can he find the money to get himself on treatment but not his wife?

But in less depressing news, I can report that I’ve been pretty impressed with our hospital. Don’t get me wrong, compared to UAB, the state-of-the-art medical center where I worked in college, it’s like a country clinic. But when I had to go in to get a re-fill of the prescription drug from my medical kit that I used up during the worst of my cashew allergy, I was in and out in less than 30 minutes and only paid 5 meticais (about 13 cents) for the whole visit, including the prescription.

From what I can gather there are two doctors, one who runs the hospital and another who treats patients. I also go there every week with someone from my association because we meet with technicians, nurses and other activistas as part of the ARV committee. They discuss patients who are starting ARVs or who have missed doses or abandoned treatment so that they can make a treatment plan, or so that the home-based care activistas can follow-up with them.

So all in all, there’s a huge problem of access, and I’m sure the facilities are hit or miss (I heard stories during training of hospitals running out of ARVs) but it’s not all bad news. I see a lot of committed health workers and community activists doing good work with limited resources. I hope in my two years here I can play some part in helping them do more.

Wow, didn’t really mean to go on about the healthcare system in Mozambique… hope I didn’t just bore or depress you all. But I assure you that it’s more interesting than the topic of “what I do everyday” which is what I had been planning to write about. But just so I don’t leave you in suspense, I’ll sum it up for you: lots of sitting. Peace Corps calls it “building relationships” but I essentially sit around at my association a lot of the time, swatting flies and telling lies. Which is to say that I’m finally learning how to small talk, and learning to slow down and just enjoy people’s company. We laugh a lot, and one of my favorite topics of conversation is when they start asking me questions about the U.S. Favorite questions so far: Are there black people there? And do they speak Portuguese? Also: You don't have capalanas in the U.S.?? Well, do you have blankets?

I’m also sewing a messenger bag out of a plastic feed bag and a capalana. And I’m gathering materials to start my compost pile and vegetable garden (I’m hoping it will segue into a nutritional education project but first I have to not screw it up… and I usually kill houseplants). I’ve also named the spider who lives in my outhouse and we have regular check-ins. His name is Toby. And I photograph any interesting critters I come upon (see frog at top). Haha, am I losing it?? I hope not, but you’ll have to forgive me if, when I get back, I am easily entertained and overwhelmed by too much activity.

That’s all for now. I fell asleep last night when I was writing this so now it’s the next morning and I have to go take a bucket bath and get ready for the big day of sitting that I have ahead of me. Maybe we’ll even get what I used to think of as “real” work done. Wish me luck!

Julie

P.S. In case you’re wondering about whether I adopted the kitten I mentioned at the end of my last post… no. No, I didn’t. In fact I’m suspicious that my neighbors eat cats and I haven’t seen him lately. When I asked a Mozambican friend of mine about it he said it’s possible… some people here think cats are “good meat.” That’s one type of bush meat I will not be trying.

I make one terrible Mozambican

Written on January 8, 2011:

Hey y’all,

It’s January 8th and I’m writing this from my cute little hut in Mabote, so I won’t be able to post it for a few weeks. By the time you’re reading this, it’s probably a little late, but I hope you all had a good New Year’s in NYC, Birmingham, Montgomery, Orange Beach, Davis, Denver, Denton, Tahoe, Champaign or wherever you celebrated.

I had a pretty tame New Year’s Eve (sadly, parties in Mabote don’t hold a candle to the ones in Namaacha). But I spent New Year’s Day eating and hanging out with neighbors and colleagues. In honor of my New Year’s resolution to be fearless, I ate the grilled caterpillar I was served at my neighbor’s house. It wasn’t bad. If I didn’t know what it was, I would have just thought it was some kind of grilled vegetable: tough and chewy on the outside and potato-y on the inside. (green potato) And speaking of eating noteworthy things, I also tried the grilled gazelle from a roadside stand on my way back to Mabote from Vilanculos after Christmas. It was delicious.

But I have a confession to make, which you may have already suspected: aside from eating caterpillar and bush meat, I make a really terrible Mozambican.

First of all, I’m the Mozambican equivalent of a 98 pound weakling… and let’s face it, I’m not much more than that by American standards (insisting that I’m “scrappy” only gets me so far). I made a show of helping my host family carry water during training, but what I may have failed to mention is that I was huffing and puffing and spilling it all over the place, all while resisting their attempts to make me stop helping… not something I want to do everyday for the next two years. So I pay my 18-year-old neighbor, Anabela, to do it for me, and when she’s not around she gets her little 8-year-old nieces to do it. That’s right, I’m being put to shame by 8-year-olds!

One day I was watching Anabela carry a giant jerry can of water on her head the way all the women do here, and stupidly asked, “It doesn’t hurt?” I thought, since they’ve been doing it since they were six, they must have developed neck muscles like the Incredible Hulk and the equivalent of a titanium plate on the top of their heads. Well, apparently not. “Of course it hurts!” she replied. (Duh.)

They all treat me like I’m a delicate flower that might shrivel up and die if I do any heavy lifting, or if I don’t sit down in a chair in the shade to rest, or go home to eat when all of them are just drinking tea or munching on cashews. One day this week I was sitting with Teresa, my boss, on the ground under a shady tree shelling cashews, something you see women doing all the time here. After they roast them in the fire, they’re all black and charred and you have to hit them against a rock with a heavy stick and pry out the nut inside. It’s slow and messy work; after three hours I only had a small pile of (mostly broken) cashews, and my fingers were coated in thick, black soot. Teresa, who never wanted me to dirty myself in the first place, gushed over what a good job I was doing. Meanwhile, her pile was much bigger and had a lot more whole cashews.

Anyway, as we were sitting there, a pickup truck full of people rode past and all started pointing and laughing at me (more than the usual amount). “They’ve never seen a white woman shell cashews before,” Teresa laughed. Well, they may not ever see it again, because not only are my hands now warped and peeling from being chemically burned from the soot, but apparently just handling cashews exacerbated my recently-developed cashew allergy and I’ve once again broken out in an itchy rash all over my body. Eh-pah!*

So, compared to women in Mabote, who get up at 4 or 5 most mornings to go work in the fields, and who spend the better part of the rest of their day pounding grain, carrying water, killing chickens, and cooking over firewood in the yard, I have to admit that a delicate flower is exactly what I am, no doubt about it.

In addition to being a weakling, which I’m forgiven for, I’m also a loaner because I like to spend time alone at home sometimes. There’s a group of little kids in the neighborhood whose new favorite game is What’s the mulungu doing now? (I’m the mulungu.) My windows, which have to stay open during the day to let the light and the breeze in, are the perfect, kid-level height. I’ll be lying on my bed reading, or crouching over the stove making beans and rice, or folding my clothes, and all of a sudden I hear giggling and whispering and look up to see seven or eight pairs of eyes just watching me, giddy with anticipation to see what I’m going to do next.

Following Peace Corps advice that playing with kids is a good “integration” activity, in the beginning I tried throwing the frisbee around with them, but given that most of them don’t speak Portuguese (they speak Chitswa) that got old, at least for me, pretty fast. The next few times they came around I lent them the frisbee to play with in front of my hut, but eventually they tired of that and went back to just watching me go about my business. Here I am folding a shirt! And now I’m boiling water! Then I thought, maybe if I just ignore them they will start feeling as awkward as I do right now and go away.

Nope. I’m learning that the concept of awkward does not translate culturally. To them, you don’t necessarily need to talk to be with other people, because they spend all of their time with other people. (Aren’t you scared?? people here ask me when they find out that I live alone.) They really are adorable kids, but this morning I just couldn’t take it anymore and told them – as nicely as I could – that no, I don’t want to play right now, I want to rest. And furthermore, sometimes when I’m at home I like to be alone, like right now. They ran off and of course I immediately felt like a terrible person, but 6-year-olds are not the boss of me!

And it’s not just the 6-year-olds. Here people will just walk up to your house at any time and yell licença! (like permission) and keep yelling it at 3 second intervals until you come out. In a lot of ways, it’s really nice to be part of a community that doesn’t need a reason or an appointment to talk to each other, and who spends a good chunk of their day wishing each other a good day, and asking how did you sleep, and how are you?

It’s a far cry from the fancy subdivision we moved to when I was in fourth grade, where the most regular interaction we had with our neighbors was usually a wave and a smile as we drove past, right before hitting the button on the automatic garage door opener. But the American in me just wants my privacy sometimes, to just sit here and drink my coffee and read my book in peace. I’ve heard other volunteers who have been here longer say that they will sometimes pretend they’re not home, but they must not live in a one room hut with a (usually open) window directly next to the door.

So like I said, I make one terrible Mozambican. But I’m learning that I just have to try and own the fact that I’m a freak here (thanks, Esther, right on) and stop feeling bad about it. And thankfully, real Mozambicans are incredibly generous and accommodating. Não há problema! (no problem) or Não faz mal! (it doesn’t matter) they always say. After two years here I still won’t be Mozambican, but maybe I’ll be a little less American.

That’s all for now. I have to go kill all the bugs that flew in as I stood on the porch talking to neighbors who came yelling licença! twice during the writing of this letter. And a kitten also slipped in through the crack in the door… if he’s still in here somewhere I’m going to take it as a sign that he wants a new mommy. Stay tuned.

Julie

*Eh-pah! is one of my favorite Mozambican phrases… it’s means, roughly: Ohh man! But it’s all in the tone of voice and facial expression (I’ll have to show you when I get back.)