Saturday, September 29, 2012

A Highly Anticipated Visit to Mozambique!

I have a Where’s Waldo calendar here in my room which I absolutely love.  If I’m ever bored or anxious I can peel it off the wall, and while I’ve already found Waldo in all 13 scenes, I can look for the elusive Odlaw, his black and yellow foil, Wanda, his weekend hook-up, Wizard Whitebeard, or the most challenging of all, his long-tailed dog, Woof.  On my calendar right below the red and white sea of Waldo look-alikes in July there’s been an event etched into the date July 25th that I’ve been anticipating for over a year—it reads, “July 25th, parents arrive.” 

I don’t know exactly when this happened, but sometime between high school and Peace Corps, visits from your parent became cool again.  I would’ve been horrified if my parents showed up to visit me on a school field trip in high school, but here in the Peace Corps, a visit from your parents is about as bad-ass as it gets, and trumps all other social gatherings.  It’s widely accepted that volunteers miss their parents here in Africa, and, maybe more importantly, that parents will pay for you and your friends to do cool shit that you wouldn’t have been able to do on your meager volunteer living allowance.  People will take advantage of their parents visiting to go on private game drives, rent beach cottages, fly to South Africa and drive around in chic rental cars instead of braving the horrific public transportation situation here in Moz.

When July 25th finally came around I was excited for the first leg of our journey to begin.  First my parents flew directly into Vilanculos, or Vil, a small beach town a few hours away from my site.  Hannah had been with me at my site and we hitch-hiked down to Vil together to meet them.  On our way down Hannah and I took the open-back chapa out of the mission to Muxungue, the first town on the way down to Vil.  There we tried to flag down a car headed to Vil.  After a while we got what we thought was a decent ride for our standards—a big open back truck transporting sacs of corn.  We hopped into the back and sat on the corn.  There was plenty of space for our legs to stretch out across the sacs and the few goats that were loaded in the back with us were relatively calm and didn’t smell too bad.  It was blisteringly hot with the sun cooking us along with the corn in the back of the truck, but with a capulana wrapped around our heads and some sunscreen to protect us from the sun’s rays, it was all-in-all not too bad of a ride.

 About an hour into the ride something peculiar happened—a private black SUV passed us and immediately slowed down in front of our truck.  The driver, a middle-aged black man appeared to be signaling for our truck to pull over.   I joked to Hannah that he was probably coming back to offer us a ride in his car.  We both laughed because that never happens; it’s commonly known among Moz15 that with our two accidents and constant road frustrations, Hannah and I have the worst hitch-hiking luck in our group, and there was probably a better chance that this man was coming to rob us than offer us a free ride.  Miraculously, though, the man got out of his car and started talking to us in his heavily-accented English.  He said, “You look like you are suffering!  Why don’t you come into my car and have some water and enjoy the air conditioning?  Are you also going to Vilanculos?”  We looked at him, baffled.  Is this really happening?  To us?  It seemed too good to be true.  One thing that happens in Mozambique is that everything is so fucked and so many people try to take advantage of you on a daily basis that even when someone does something nice for you, you are automatically suspicious of their intentions.   

I said, “How much?” thinking that maybe he saw white people and was going to offer us a ridiculous rate to drive us all the way into Vilanculos, but he waved me off with a flick of his wrist and said, “Please, get in.”  Well, we couldn’t argue with that, and, as nice as our corn sac seats had been, we were ready to get out of the sun. What he did next is something that I’ve never seen someone do while offering a ride, he proceeded to pay the driver of the corn truck for the entire distance that we had come until that point, and did so with a smile.  When we got into the car, we realized where all of this generosity was coming from—this man loved America.

He immediately turned around with an excited smile and asked where we were from.  When we said, “United States of America” his face lit up like a light bulb as he said, “I thought so!” and began reeling off all the cities and celebrities that he’d heard of from America and how much he wanted to visit all of them.  At one point he even said excitedly, “I weesh dat my gret gret grendfada was brought to America as a slave so dat I could be born as an American.”  That was kind of awkward, but we shrugged, “Yeah, us too!”  Another question he asked was whether we were friends with some of his favorite musicians and celebrities like 50 Cent, Jean Claude Van Damn, and Lil Wayne, who all live in America.  This isn’t a question I balk at anymore because I get it almost every day, but what made it especially cute was that he followed it up by saying, “Dese people must be so beezy becose I keep sending this facebook messages and emails to dem and dey never respond.  Why is dat, Mr. Ian.”  “I know, man, they don’t reply to me either.”  Before arriving in Vil, he stopped to buy us each bottles of water and packets of cookies and then dropped us off at the beach villa at which we were to meet my parents that afternoon.

Vilanculos was beautiful.  When we arrived my parents were already there at the beach villa.  Seeing their faces against the back drop of Mozambique, the two distant sides of my life coming together into one picture, was surreal. The veranda of the bamboo villa looked out onto the azure waters of the Indian Ocean and was shaded my coconut trees.  We spent the entire first day of their visit relaxing on the beach and walking around the town.  For lunch on day two we walked to a restaurant and they tried traditional a traditional Mozambican dish, matapa with prawns over xima.  More than the beautiful beach and the fresh seafood I think the most interesting thing for my parents during those first days in Vil was simply walking through the town and market and interacting with the local people – seeing women carrying vegetables and water on their heads and babies on their backs; men hawking sunglasses and sandals at the crowded market; the smell of fresh bread and salted dry fish wafting through the streets.  I realized that I had become desensitized to all of these novelties in my time here in Moz, but being there with my parents, I was able to experience the awe all over again with them.

On our third day in Vil we decided to take a snorkeling cruise to the nearby Macarangue Island.  We boarded a small sailboat, or dhow, in the morning with our local crew and headed out into the turquoise waves. The chef boiled water for tea on board and we were served a small breakfast in route to the island.  On the island we got our snorkeling gear and swam around the colorful reefs that skirted the edges of the island.  While I choked on salt water more times than I can remember, the reefs were beautiful and the brightly colored tropical fish that inhabited them dazzled us as they reflected off the sun.

After Vil, we hired a car and drove the four hours inland to my site, Mangunde.  Despite not having beaches or wildlife to stun us, this is the part of the trip that I was most excited and nervous about.  I wanted my family to meet my friends, colleagues and students and see the place that had filled me with so many experiences over the course of the past year and a half.   The trip to Mangunde turned out to be an overwhelming success.  On the first afternoon, I planned to have a party with a few colleagues and many of my most active students outside the mission at the rural house of my counter-part and friend, Alberto.  We all walked to Alberto’s house together that afternoon and my English students all hankered to get a chance to talk to my parents and use what broken English I had taught them to communicate.  When we arrived to the house my students surprised me by performing a few songs and a short theater skit they had prepared in English for the occasion.  Put on the spot, the four of us, mom, dad, Hannah and I, decided to also present a song that we had prepared in the car on the way in – “In the Jungle.”  It was a hit. 

Afterwards we ate rice with a goat that we killed for the occasion and danced around the fire until nighttime.  Seeing the reality of life and the pure poverty out in a rural homestead like Alberto’s was most assuredly eye-opening for my parents and to meet the students that I have worked so closely with over the past year and a half was definitely the highlight of my parents’ trip to Mozambique.

On our last day in Mangunde, I had class and was able to bring my parents into my English class for an interview with my students.  They had to learn how to speak slowly and choose their words wisely for any of my students to pick up anything and also got a taste for what the classrooms and general school system here in Mozambique is like.  In the evening we cooked another traditional Mozambican dish, couve, and my parents had to learn how to prepare it in the typical Mozambican way – my mom chopped the leafy greens into small slices and my dad cracked and grated the coconut to make the coconut milk.  I have to say that it was delicious – they did a great job for their first Mozambique meal.

After my site we drove up to Beira, the second largest city in Mozambique, and flew out to Johannesburg the next morning.  There the four of us met up with Hannah’s mom, who was just beginning her visit.  We drove to Kruger National Park together, about four hours outside of Johannesburg and found our lodge, a beautiful two story African-style house with a upstairs porch and pool overlooking the reserve.  It was idyllic and a perfect setting for the last leg of our adventure. 

We did an evening game drive on our first day, a full-day game drive on our second day (my birthday) and relaxed at the lodge on our third day.  Everything about it was glorious.  We saw every animal you could imagine (except the elusive leopard) and took it all in.  On our full day game drive we spotted dozens of giraffes, elephants, impala, nyala, kudu, rhinoceroses, hyenas, warthogs, and even saw about ten lions.  In one instance we were driving slowly past a site where we had been told a giraffe carcass was being fed on by a couple of young lions.  We went there and saw that the hyenas had already taken hold of the kill and the lions had fled just minutes earlier.  Fortunately for us, however, as we were driving away we spotted two lions trotted lazily in the grass off to the side of the road.  As we got closer we saw that they also approached us.  They seemed to not even notice us.  The two lions crossed the road in front of us and proceeded to walk along the road, only a few yards in front of us for five to ten minutes.  It was amazing to be so close to such a powerful and fabled creature and an untamed lion.  I felt that at any time it could decide to jump up into the car and tear us all to shreds.  Luckily for us, though, it didn’t and eventually wandered back into the bush. 

After our incredible wildlife experience it was time for me to say goodbye to my family.  I had been anticipating their visit for months and now it had already come to a close.  They dropped me off at the bus stop where I would catch a bus back to Maputo and another one up to my site and they continued on to Johannesburg where they would catch their flight later that evening.

All in all, it was a wonderful trip.  Yes, I did some cool shit that I wouldn’t have been able to do on my poor volunteer stipend, but more than that I got the chance to show the people I love the things that I’ve been passionate about for the last year and a half.  One of the difficulties of the Peace Corps experience I’ve heard is that you become deeply engrossed in your experience during your two years of service, and then you get back to the States and it seems that few people care or understand what you have been through.  I feel that now, having shared this experience with my family, that I’ve at least taken steps towards letting others understand the challenges we face here in Mozambique every day. 

One of the things that the Peace Corps teaches you in training is that there are three goals every PCV should strive to achieve in his or her Peace Corps service.  One is to promote the development of skills and resources in your country of service; another is to promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of other countries; and the third is to promote a better understanding of other countries and cultures on the part of other Americans.  If nothing else, I know that bringing my family here to Mozambique fulfilled my third goal as a volunteer—my family left here after only 12 days, but with an understanding of who Mozambicans are and what kind of conditions they deal with on a daily basis.  Mozambique is no longer just a shape on a map or a photo on facebook for my parents and I; it has a personality.  It is a live film in their minds and an on-going relationship in their hearts.  In my opinion, this is as valuable as any work we can do as PCVs.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Perspectives from the Top of Mozambique

After trudging through the discarded Mozambican landscape that separates Mangunde from our destination of Dombe, we were ready for a rest.  This was July, 2012, and five PCV friends, my trusty Mozambican counterpart and I had just walked 100 kilometers in two days from the comforts of our home in Mangunde to Dombe, a distant secondary school and home to two other PCVs.  On our journey we came across a degree of isolation that made our remote mission school seem like a nucleus of development—people who are forced to travel four hours on bicycle for the simple necessity of water.  We were also humbled by the generosity of Mozambicans who had few material possessions.  The sister of my counterpart, a poor farmer, opened her house to six white giants on just a few hours’ notice and offered us food and a place to spend the night. 

Three days later I decided that the blisters on my feet weren’t big enough so I took a four day hike up the tallest mountain in Mozambique.  If you look at a topographical map you’ll see that isn’t quite as impressive as it seems.  Nonetheless, this would be my first tallest-mountain-in-a-country and I felt like I was obligated to try it. 

I set off with another PCV, David, and we really had no idea what we were doing.  We had been told that to find Mt. Binga you have to take a chapa from Chimoio to Sussendenga, get off, and get on another chapa from Sussendenga to Rotanda, a border town with Zimbabwe.  Don’t go all the way to Rotanda though, we were warned, you must get off at the entrance to Chimanimani National Park, which is on the road to Rotanda, then walk 22 kilometers into the park and find Robat (or Robert, depending on how you pronounce it), there we would receive our next clue (I’ve been watching too much of the “Amazing Race” over here).

  We had packed our bags smartly with the only real packable food that you can buy here in Mozambique, cans of “Bom Amigo” tuna, bread that we squashed into our packs and some apples, which interestingly are exotic and expensive fruits here in Mozambique.  No matter how they’re dressed, two large white guys wandering around the busy chapa stop of Chimoio are going to turn some heads, but on this day it was ridiculous.  David and I had our backpacks and hiking gear on, and were stopping at the roadside stands buying large amounts of food.  I probably got asked for apples 10 times between the fruit stand and the chapa. Then a reasonably dressed man on the bus next to me who clearly had enough money to buy food and ride on buses leaned over and said, “I’m asking for your jacket.” And it’s like, “What?  No!  Go buy your own jacket you lazy piece of shit.”  “I’m asking for a tangerine.”  “I’m asking for 10 meticals.”  Sometimes I think people in Mozambique just beg out of pure boredom. 

Anyway, just getting to the chapa through the sea of solicitors was difficult enough. We made the first leg of our trip no problem.  Then we got to Sussendenga where we were supposed to catch a ride to this border town called Rotanda, a town which neither of us had ever heard of.  I bought some road peanuts (in my opinion the best on-the-go snack in Mozambique—moms roast, salt and pack the peanuts into little take-away plastic bags and their kids wander around the markets and the streets selling them for 1, 2, and 5 meticals per pouch) then we began looking for the elusive chapa to Rotanda.  Strangely, we asked a man at the bus-stop there and he replied, “You want to go to Rotanda?  Let’s go!”  He hopped in his pick-up truck, invited us to sit in the cab with him and before we knew it 15 passengers had materialized out of nowhere to fill the back of the truck as if they had been waiting for us to arrive all this time.

The road to Rotanda was dirt and after an hour or so we easily found the entrance to Chimanimani National Park on the side of the road.  We got out of the truck, thanked our driver and began walking into the park.  Now our challenge was to find the park gate four kilometers in from the road and then continue on to find Robat’s house 18 kilometers further down.  This was a strange experience.  Given the poor financial standing of the Mozambican government and its ostensible neglect of all public services like schools, roads, and hospitals, my expectations for a remote mountain post in a relatively unknown national park like this were very low.  I was expecting an unattended gate dangling half open with some broken chains hanging off of it and a faded sign marking the entrance to the park.  When we got to the park entrance, however, it was a hub of development.  A construction crew was fording a river to build a bridge and another crew was stacking cement blocks while building what appeared to be a welcome center.  At the same time park rangers in full uniform walked or drove their Land Rovers from one station to another within the entrance area.  We were baffled and, after spending almost two years in a broken and under-financed education system couldn’t help but think where all of this money is coming from and why it’s being spent on an isolated mountain post instead of the schools or roads that are in desperate need of funds. 

When we got to the check-in tent the ranger was delighted to see us.  He fastidiously arranged his papers and pulled out a sign-in book from inside the tent.  As he eagerly explained to me how to enter my name, nationality, and passport info in the book I couldn’t help but notice that last visitors to the park had come almost a month before.  Now I knew why he had been so excited to see us walking in.  Curiously, I asked him if it’s been a down year for some reason and he replied, “Oh no, sir, it’s been quite busy this year.”  I had to suppress a laugh at this.  And this is why Mozambique is so poor.  Here we are at a remote mountain post that you have to walk four kilometers just to get to which receives one visitor a month and there are more construction workers and rangers than I’ve ever seen in one place in Mozambique.  The ranger also knew about where we were headed and said jovially “Just continue on 18 kilometers and ask for Robat; he’ll take you up the mountain tomorrow.”

So we walked…and walked…and walked…

As the afternoon wore on the oppressive heat subsided and the afternoon sun faded into dusk.  After not too long, however, we pulled up to a small clearing of huts on our left and figured, based on our instructions, that this must be the house of our supposed guide, Robat.  Sure enough we turned into the clearing and a tall lanky man with a baseball cap and a goofy smile approached and greeted us on his bicycle.  We told him that we wanted to hike up Mt. Binga and that we had been told that he was the man to find.  Robat had guessed as much, as there’s not much else two wandering white guys would be doing in his village, so he showed us around his home. 

If I wasn’t tied to my family, friends, computer and all of the other material possessions I hold onto in life, Robat’s little compound tucked into a remote valley of the Chimanimani mountains on the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe would be about as perfect an existence as one could ask for.  His compound consisted of a large clearing with five or six stick and mud huts spotted around the outside.  The houses were beautifully painted with colorful African inscriptions and coated in a red terra cotta clay.  As we walked around, people, goats and chickens gamboled through the compound in the setting sun.  Just 50 yards down a wooded path one could find a pristine river flowing from the top of the distant mountain down and out of the valley.  The river water was crystal clear and painfully frigid.  As a backdrop to the calmly flowing ice water Mt. Binga and its neighboring peaks lifted ominously into the air and were glazed by the yellow rays of the setting sun.  After having recently hiked through the flat and desiccated land between Mangunde and Dombe and seeing people walking hours to simply fill up their water jugs, this existence seemed too good to be true.  Robat grew all of his crops there on the banks of the river and never had to worry about carrying water more than a few yards.

That evening we set up our tent and cooked some tuna and pasta that we had brought to feed ourselves for our upcoming journey.  Robat explained to us that the next day we would be hiking about six hours to the last base camp before the summit of Mt. Binga.  There we would spend the night and on the following day we would summit and make our way all the way back to the house.  As the evening wore on and Robat told us more about his life there in the valley the thermometer sank lower and lower towards freezing.  We knew were still in Africa, but that night it felt like the Arctic.  I put on one layer after another and continually found that it was never enough to keep me warm.  By the time I was ready to sleep I was wearing two t-shirts, a long sleeve shirt, my jacket, long underwear, pants, wool socks, hat and gloves and was tucked into my sleeping bag.  I was still cold. 

The next morning we woke up at dawn, downed some granola bars and set out for the base of Mt. Binga.  The hike was difficult but not grueling.  We stopped at a waterfall for lunch and continued steadily up the valley in order to reach the last base camp, our destination for the night.  We arrived just after midday and hunkered down there for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

The next day we again woke up at dawn for our big summit.  We left of things at the base camp and only carried the essentials up to the top.  The ascent was deceptively steep.  We walked along the face of a ridge that went steadily upwards.  Robat was a machine.  The soles of his cheap tennis shoes were tearing off, but his gangly legs never stopped pacing out the giant steps which propelled him forward.  Every once in a while he would look back and flash his goofy smile to see how we were doing. 

The summit of Mt. Binga came up very abruptly.  I was busy watching the soles of Robat’s feet in front of me, and suddenly I looked up to see that there was nothing left to climb.  I asked Robat, “Is this it?”  We had made it from the base camp to the summit in less than two hours and it seemed implausible, but he said, “Yes, this is it!” and we made our way up to the rock cairn that signaled the summit, the tallest point in Mozambique.  From the top we looked out at the panorama of peaks making up the Chimanimani range and Robat pointed out every one that he and his father before him had climbed and guided people up. It was incredible.  We looked out and saw where Mozambique crosses into Zimbabwe, and the little speck of white that was Robat’s clearing, where we would be eating dinner later that evening. 

The trip down the mountain was simple and relaxing.  After a day’s work we were back in Robat’s compound enjoying the sunset view from his picturesque compound and a hot meal.  I looked once more onto their compound, Robat’s wife giving a bath to one of their three kids in the clearing, the other two kids kicking around a ball of tightly bound plastic bags and his adult relatives cooking and sharing stories around the fire and couldn’t help but reflect on how different life can be for different people.  Robat’s wife, delicately washing the soap out of her son’s eyes, has no notion of what life for people like David and I is like.  If there is one thing I can be thankful for in my Peace Corps experience, it is that Peace Corps has given me an opportunity to see how other people live.  It sounds trite, but it is a simple privilege that very people in this world have ever had: to go outside your own culture and understand that there is more than one way to live and find happiness.  What you do with that perspective is up to you, but to be given that gift of perspective and the power to then decide your own path is the greatest gift that the Peace Corps offers.

The next day we said goodbye to Robat and his family and waked the 22km out of the park to the main road.  On our way out we saw the strangest thing.  There was a bus parked in a clearing a just off of the path.  As we walked by we looked over and saw a group of 20 or so white, college-age girls getting off the bus with their backpacks, putting sunscreen on and apparently preparing for a hiking trip.  The context of it all was so strange that we weren’t immediately sure what to do—go over and talk to them, wave from the path or simply forge ahead pretending we don’t see them.  To clarify, other than PCVs I’ve never seen a group of more than about four white people together at one time in Mozambique, and here we are in the middle of nowhere, Mozambique, hiking from a guy named Robat’s house to a road that nobody has ever heard of at a National Park that receives one visitor per month, and we see 20 white college-age girls all together at the same time.  While I was curious, they seemed to be on a mission, and may have been a little afraid of or scruffy appearance, so we decided to go with the distant wave. 

Once we got to the road, we waited to hitchhike back to Sussendenga where we would be able to find a mini-bus headed to Chimoio.  This road wasn’t exactly I-90.  In fact, in the first hour of waiting a grand total of zero cars went by.  We began to wonder if we might get stuck out here all day.  But, sure enough, after not too much longer and dump truck from the construction site came by on its way to Sussendenga and offered us a ride in the back of the truck.  Talk about scary rides.  We couldn’t see over the edges of the truck so all we could do was feel a sharp turn or a steep incline on the windy mountain road.  Every time the driver would accelerate into a sharp incline we felt our stomachs climb up our throats like on an amusement park ride minus the amusement. 

Despite the exciting finish, we arrived back in Chimoio that afternoon and I took a well-earned and much needed shower.  In just a few days I would be heading back down to Mangunde and getting ready to meet my parents in Vilanculos for their visit to Mozambique.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Well, Mozambique, it's been two years...

Two years ago I was frantically preparing for a vast and unknown adventure in Mozambique. I remember trying to pack my two bags and cursing the fact that there was a weight limit on the flight. In the weeks leading up to my September 29th departure I made about a hundred lists and went shopping almost every day to pick up a new gadget or article of clothing that I was sure would be irreplaceable during my Peace Corps experience.

Well here I am, a very short two years later, looking back on an experience that even after 100s of pages of blog I struggle to put into words. I didn’t use all of the “essential” things that I bought two years ago and realize now that I would have been fine with a few necessities packed down into one small bag. While my experience isn’t over yet, I still have over two months in Mozambique and one month travelling to India and Thailand before I arrive home around Christmas time, it is now the beginning of the end and I can feel the end date ominously hanging over me. I feel the compulsion to extract meaning from my experience and consolidate all of the challenges I’ve faced and the effort I’ve put in.

Last week all of the volunteers in my group (Moz 15) went down to Maputo, the capital city, for a mandatory close-of-service conference. There we heard from returned PCVs, talked about post-PC career options, the close-of-service process, and how to make sense of this experience that we’ve all just had. It was actually a very well-spent three days for all of us. Apart from getting to stay in a fancy hotel and take hot showers, it also got us thinking about our experiences and how we can look back on such an immense but ineffable time in our lives. It got me thinking, what have I learned in the past two years? What do I know now that I couldn’t have imagined two years ago? Sometimes it’s difficult to step back and take that perspective. We tend to get so tied up in our daily lives, the frustrations of working and living in Mozambique and the joys and difficulties of maintaining relationships with Mozambicans and other PCVs, but it’s important to be able to see the changes and all of the rich experiences that have benefited all of us PCVs throughout our service. In order to sort it all out in my head I decided to make a list of all the things that I’ve learned over the course of my two years here in Mozambique and I will present it to you now:
During my Peace Corps experience in Mozambique, I have learned…
  • First and foremost, that very few things make sense in this country…
  • That when someone says they will do something for you, there’s a good chance they won’t
  • That when someone says they will meet you at a certain time, they actually mean anytime from 30 minutes to 2 hours after the said time, or not at all
  • That when there is ceremony or event run by Mozambicans, the program will always read that the start time is 8 a.m., but the event will never start before 10 a.m.
  • That you cannot, under any circumstances, start an event before the chief arrives, even if he is three hours late
  • That no one seems to care or realize when an event or meeting begins late and that people think you’re acting irrationally when you just want to start something on time
  • That chapa driver are the scum of the earth – they will screw you over and try to squeeze as much money as they can out of you if you are organizing a group trip with them
  • Related to the previous theme, that I can get angry when a chapa driver tries to screw me over
  • That personal space does not exist
  • That I actually miss fast food
  • That I will never again complain about having to go put my clothes in the washing machine
  • That dish-washers, microwaves and toasters are amazing inventions
  • That I wouldn’t even know what to do with a stove that has four burners
  • How to pretend I'm cooking different things when I actually use the same ingredients for every meal
  • That you can repair anything with a plastic bag – bike tires, balls, water mains, electrical wires
  • That a soccer ball made out of bunched up plastic bags is not the same as a real ball
  • How to hold hands with other men for long periods of time without feeling uncomfortable
  • That nearly everyone actually believes in ghosts, curses and magic
  • That when you ask someone here how many times they’ve had malaria they assume you mean how many times this year
  • How to cut the egg sac of a parasitic worm out of people’s feet
  • How to take a malaria rapid-test with my eyes closed
  • That people use condoms for everything but sex
  • That you kill a pig by stabbing it in the heart from under its foreleg
  • That you kill a goat by slicing it’s throat and hanging it upside down
  • That a dried goat scrotum makes an excellent change purse
  • That you will offend respected guest if you don’t serve them the head of the goat
  • That you kill a rabbit by clubbing it over the head
  • That giant rat meat smells like rotting garbage
  • That I will miss fresh fruit and vegetables
  • That for two months out of the year people eat exclusively mangoes
  • That I can buy six huge pineapples for about $2, peel one and eat it whole like an apple
  • That I have a clinical addiction to cashews and it made me poor
  • How to defecate into a hole in the ground and prefer it to a toilet
  • That I took grass for granted in America
  • How to appreciate a good pattern of swept dust in someone’s front yard
  • How to recognize a dust storm coming and close all my doors and windows in 15 seconds
  • How to fit 60 students into back of flat-bed truck
  • That students spend more time planning where to hide their cheat-sheets than actually studying for a test
  • How to spot a cheat-sheet on anybody – under the chair, in the blouse, on the desk, written on their hands, written on their pants, up their sleeve, in their pencil box…
  • How to find gratification in failing students who cheat
  • How to wait…
  • How to avoid having a break down at the bank even though it seems like the only option
  • How to organize huge events without anything reliable to trust
  • How to walk across Chimoio with $5,000 worth of cash for a project and not get robbed
  • That I am never invisible in this country, even in my own house
  • That people are ungrateful
  • That people steal
  • That few people understand why we are in this country
  • That no matter how much time I spend in this country and how much it feels like home to me, I will always be white
  • That my garbage pile will never last more than a day outside because there are things in my garbage more valuable that any of some people’s possessions
  • That I will never truly understand what it’s like to be poor
  • That police in Mozambique are idiots
  • That people take justice into their own hands
  • That if you steal a lady’s purse on a chapa the community will chase you down and beat you before turning you in to the police
  • That corruption is insidious and impossible to confront
  • That men have caused every problem this country is facing
  • That women are blamed for every problem this country is facing
  • That the best spot in a chapa is one of the middle seats in the third row back (you don’t have to get out every time someone else wants to get out, and you’re not next to the window if it rolls in an accident)
  • To not sit in the front left side of a coach bus because you might get impaled by giant wooden rods if the bus hits a truck while trying to pass it in the middle of the night
  • That people die in this country
  • How to not talk about HIV/AIDS even when you know 1 in 5 people are dying of it
  • That there is only enough ARV medication in the country to give to the people that have advanced stages of AIDS and are already near death
  • That I’ve always taken my family for granted
  • That when someone grows up without a family that cares about them, they grow up without any idea of what is right or wrong or what is important
  • That as a teacher you can’t teach someone if they don’t want to learn
  • That most girls don’t believe in themselves
  • That students sleep with teachers regularly to get passing grades and the students are always blamed when they get caught
  • That I will never change the core beliefs of this country that are bringing it down from within
  • That despite all of this I love Mozambique
  • That a day on a white sandy beach with azure water makes me forget all if the problems Mozambique has
  • That there are people who care in this country
  • That for every 10 students who cheat and daydream in class there is one who learns and asks questions and wants to achieve something more in his or her life
  • That for every 10 girls that write themselves off as weak and subordinate there is one who realizes that she can do something more than just bare children and wash dishes in her life
  • That for every 10 people dying of AIDS there is one who takes care of him or herself and lives long enough to help spread the message of prevention
  • That my time in Mozambique was not wasted
  • That for every 10 people who see me and only think “white,” there is one who takes the time to get to know me and together we can make a difference in each other’s lives

This is my list. It’s a little bit like how my experience is floating around in my brain now. It’s difficult to put it all together into one coherent theme. You can only pick out a few strands at a time and analyze them individually. Just like a mosaic, I feel that eventually I will be able to step back and evaluate what this experience has meant to me on a larger level, but until then I have these shorts clips to look at, each one providing me with an aspect of life here in Mozambique that I will take back with me to the states. If I had made a list of expectations two years ago as I was packing my bags and getting ready to come to Mozambique, would it have looked like the list I just wrote? Not even close. That’s life though. You take what’s given to you and try to benefit from it as best you can, even if it’s nothing like what you expected.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post. It was interesting for me to write and forced me to think back on all of the varied experiences I’ve had here in Mozambique. I’m sure the list will grow as I remember more things and add new experiences over the next couple of months. Here at site, I’m getting ready for the end. Next weekend I am organizing the same regional English Theater competition that I organized last year, so that is consuming a lot of my time now, but I am looking forward to it. I still need to write about my family’s visit back in August and a number of things that have happened since then, so stay tuned and I will hopefully be writing more soon!