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).