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.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
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
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
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