What's for dinner?

You know, there are few experiences in this life sweeter than seeing the terror on the faces of your fleeing students as they backpedal from a water balloon ambush.  If you´re a teacher, like me, who harbors a deep desire to publicly humiliate students then water balloon ambushes on the last day of school are a safe and sure-fire option.  We had four teachers up against about 50 students mulling around the soccer field.  Strictly speaking, we were outnumbered, but we had the element of surprise and advanced weaponry.  Plan A had been to set up heavy artillery shelling from our veranda, aiming the water bombs onto the soccer field 50 meters away using some resistance bands to jerry-rig a catapult.  After drawing blood and nailing ourselves with the first few misfires from our failed catapult, however, we realized we were drawing some unwanted attention from the students and therefore abandoned Plan A for a carefully drawn out Plan B: Operation Bull-Rush the field.  The students fled like gazelles evading a pride of hungry lions.  We prayed on the weak, took no hostages and made them regret all those times they knocked on our door at 5am to check out the soccer ball or charge their phones.  I´ll let your imaginations fill in the rest of the details, but it was a grisly scene to say the least.

What else have I been up to here other than shelling students with water balloons when not teaching?  Well, I´ve realized in the last couple of months that´s it´s been more and more difficult to pick out interesting things from my daily life that my vast readership would also find interesting.  After awhile, you get inured to and don´t even really notice the bizarre cultural stuff that would usually color a blog post and just focus on the stupid frustrating stuff that no one wants to hear you gripe about.  Therefore, there are still a few things that pass through my biased corneas and make even me look twice that I might chance to share now. 

The first thing which I  don´t think I´ll ever not find strange here is the affinity for eating rats and their close relatives.  Let me explain.  Between about March and November here is the dry season.  We saw hardly a drop of rain in 7 months, and everything got very dry.  Over the course of the dry months the high grass which fills in between the trees in the temperate forest turns to a dull yellow, the leaves on the trees brown and the earth hardens and cracks.  The streams, tributaries and small ponds dry up leaving only the widest rivers with water still flowing in them.  Around August the burning starts.  At first I though it was strange, the scent of smoke floating by and the horizon filled with haze for miles from the rising smoke.  After a month, however, it was strange to drive by a patch of yellow grass that hadn´t been charred and singed by a passing fire.  When I finally asked someone what was going on, I was told that the farmers were intentionally burning the fields and forests in order to hunt ratazana.  Hmm, I thought, ratazana?  Ratazana is nothing more than a giant, glorified rat.  Biologically speaking, I might actually put them in the weasel family as they kind of have beaverish teeth and a bushy tail, but I´ve found it best to just think of them as a giant rats the size of fat house cats.  Anyway, the farmers burn vast acres of grass and forest and wait for the ratazana to flee from the fire at which point they are waiting in ambush with bows and arrows and sling shots to pick off the rats.  I won´t go into the ecological consequences of such vast burns, but the whole event is a tragedy as it ruins the soil quality for long-term cultivation and destroys crucial habitats for other animal species.  My biggest qualm with it actually  is that it´s all done in order to nab a few smelly rats. 

Maybe some of you have seen the picture I posted a few months ago of me standing in front of my house holding one of these rats.  Well, that would be the first and last time I will eat ratazana.  While it had a nice meaty texture, I couldn´t avoid the smell of rotting garbage that emanated from the dark stew as I lifted chunks of meat to my mouth.  I got through about three bites and had to put the fork down and leave the room.  Now I just find it amusing when other people buy the rats.  A couple months ago I was sitting in a mini-bus waiting to leave from the city and, like usual there was a swarm of anxious vendors trying to reach the bus window to have a go at selling their daily booty to trapped passangers.  I´ve seen a fair amount of strange things try to be sold through a chapa window including, my favorite, a guy who was offering on-the-go through-the-window ear piercings, but I wasn´t ready for what I saw that day.  Before I saw it coming, someone had thrust a bird-cage full of live scurrying normal sized rats into my face.  I don´t remember the price, but I remember thinking, “what would I possibly do with a live rat if I bought one from his cage right now?”  Pocket it?  Eat it live?  Keep it as a pet.  It seemed to me a poorly planned business venture as I didn´t notice that he was offering to-go cages. 

On another occasion, I was riding on jammed open-back up to the city when we passed a roadside ratazana stand.  The way people often sell things here is just hold out chickens or dead ratazana as cars pass by and hope that they are enticed enough to pull off and make a purchase.  On this occasion, the ratazana must have piqued the driver´s interest because he screeched to a stop and proceeded to reverse the car for 50 meters on the national highway to talk to a caricature of a scrawny teenager with terribly bucked teeth who was offering up a fat rat, precooked and on a scure for drive by convenience.  I imagined that this is about the closest thing to a drive-thru you can get here in Mozambique.  When the driver asked in dialect how much the cooked rat would cost him, the vendor wheezed out a price of 150mets through his crooked grill.  To me, it sounded reasonable.  That´s about $5, no more than you would pay for a drive thru Whopper meal deal in the states, and we´re talking about at least a couple of pounds of rat meat, but all 20 people, who seemed amiable despite being packed like human sardines in the back of the pick up disagreed vociferously.  If you live here for even a week you learn to recognize the sound of Mozambican negotiatory disapproval instantaneously.  I can only describe the sound that comes out as a high-pitched “Sheeeee” followed by an “-eeeee” which is guttural and drawn out in accord with how strongly the speaker disagrees with the price-setter.  Well, on this occasion after audaciously asking the driver to pay 150mets for his rat on a stick, the open-back erupted with a collective “Sheee” signaling that only a fool would pay 150 mets for a cooked rat of that size.  It was too much for me at that point to not break out laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation.  While I was certainly the only college or even high school educated sardine in the back of that truck, I guess I was the only one there not savvy enough to know that only an idiot would pay 150mets for a charred rat of that size.  The driver shook his head and we sped off to pick up lunch at the next rat stand.

Enough about rats though.  Here in the present, a few clouds have finally rolled in and a morning drizzle has temporarily lifted the week´s oppressive heat and turned today into pure refreshing coolness.  Before I go eat some rat-less beans for lunch, I want to leave you with a Mozambican fable I heard a few days ago that, curiously, many people will swear actually happened:

Many years ago there was a poor fisherman who sought the curandeiro (traditional healer) in hopes of a treatment that would transform him into a wealthy landowner.  When he arrived at the curandeiro´s hut the curandeiro evaluated the poor fisherman by throwing down precious rocks to judge their scatter pattern on the dry earth inside his hut.  Before the fisherman was able to say anything, the curandeiro knew that his ambition was to become rich and already had a treatment ready.  Before prescribing the treatment, however, the curandeiro warned the fisherman that throughout the course of treatment, he will be tested by spirits and auspicious events, but that he must, above all, continue the course or all will be lost and he will suffer even more than he is now.  The fisherman greedily accepted, dreaming of finally becoming rich.  The curandeiro prepared a tonic from precious seeds and tranditional plants and the fisherman gulped it down when instructed. 

A week later the fisherman was becoming impatient.  He had yet to see any change in his wealth or success as a fisherman in the week since he had gone to see the curandeiro.  In fact, he thought, he had been catching even fewer fish than normal and made a mental note that he was going to visit the curandeiro to ask for his offering back.  That afternoon, however, he went to the river to pull up the bamboo trap that he had left in a spiraling eddy earlier that morning.  When he looked in the trap he was shocked to see a a stack of gold coins in the trap which would normally have been full of fish.  He staggered back and called his wife over to carry the trap out and bring it to the river bank.  She looked in and congratulated the fisherman on a great catch that day, noting the 8 large fish swimming around in the trap.  He came cautiously back and peered into trap, rubbing his eyes in surprise as he also saw 8 fish floating in the trap.  He picked the trap up and placed it on his back, preparing to carry it back to the house but noticed that it suddenly felt much heavier than he had ever felt in his many years of being a fisherman.  He lurched under the weight but reached the bank and dropped it in the sand.  To his shock and horror for the second time that day, he looked down and saw not a fish trap but this time a heavy wooden coffin stuck in the sand.  When he opened the lid of the coffin he saw not 8 floating fish but the body of a dead man staring up at him with glazed over eyes.  He stammered a curse in shock and slammed the lid shut, calling his wife over for a second time.  She came back and, to his dismay, she found a perfectly functional fish trap with 8 fish lying dead now up against the bamboo walls.  He could not utter a word and simply sat down on the sandy bank trying to process the events.  His wife took the fish inside and prepared dinner.

A week later the fisherman´s wife called him outside and instructed him to to climb the cashew tree in order to bring down the precious fruits because they would make a local beverage to celebrate their recent good luck at fishing.  The fisherman climbed the tree and began to throw the fruits down one by one.  To his horror, however, he looked into the branches of the thick tree and saw that all of the cashew fruits had transformed into thick and menacing snakes.  The agitated snakes began to hiss at and threated the fisherman.  The fisherman knew that snakes were sinister and auspicious signs of evil and in their presence he reeled back in horror.  This time, however, he remembered the curandeiro´s threat that he would be confronted by tests and evil things and resolved himself to face the insidious creatures and not flee from the tree.  The snakes did not take well to his proximity, however, and began to lunge at the fisherman with their venomous fangs.  One after the other connected and broke the fisherman´s callased skin.  The fisherman yelped out in pain and cursed himself for ever seeking out the curandeiro´s help.  In a desperate attempt to escape the maniacal snakes the fisherman leaped from the tree trying to grab the branch of a nearby mango tree.  One of the snakes bit his leg just as he pushed off, however, and his momentum was stunted.  He missed the mango tree by inches and went sprawling towards the hard dry ground below.  With a thud the fisherman slammed into the ground 10 meters below and died instantly. 

Later, the curandeiro visited the fisherman´s house, having heard about their unfortunate turn of events.  He mentioned to the grieving fisherman´s wife that the fisherman´s ancestors had a long tradition of seeking out the curandeiro for wealth and personal gain.  The curandeiro spoke warmly but with an air of detached righteousness, “your husband saw gold in his fish trap and did not realize that it was his own body that he was carrying out of the river in the casket.  A greedy man will kill himself with his own greed and a selfish man will have no one but himself to carry his own casket.” 

I like that story.  I hope you all are well and have learned a lesson today about greed and selfishness.  Until next time!

School's Out and I'm Back

Hello again, and Happy Halloween!  Welcome back to mangos, mozambique and me.  First of all, let me apologize to the angry mobs of people that have been anxiously awaiting my next blog post for the past two months or so.  Due to a number of circumstances out of my control and a hectic last couple of months here in Mozambique it has not been possible for me to keep in touch as well as I would like to.  Nonetheless, that is all water under the bridge.  If I ever manage to drag myself into the heat, across the field and to the hospital which has a shaky but functional internet, I´ll be able post this blog and all of you who have been holding your collective breathes for two months can breath easy again.  You may be asking, “so what has Ian been up to these last couple of months in Moz?” or you may not care at all and are about to tab out to ESPN.com, in either case, without further ado, as the sweat drips down my nose onto the keyboard, I´m about to tell you what´s been up in these sticky months of October and September.

Today is Monday, October 31, which means that three days ago, on the 29^th, I officially completed my first full school year as a teacher here in Mozambique.  The students finished up their exams and on Saturday had a mass exodus off of the mission to their homes (you´ll recall that I live at a mission school with no real town or civilization so most students come from the cities and stay in the boarding schools).  Students in exam years (12^th, 10^th and 7^th grades) will stay until the end of next week to study and then take the national exams to pass on to the next level, but other than that it is all over here in Mangunde.  It did´t feel as momentous as I had imagined it through all those hours sweating in the classroom with my bata (white labcoat-ish garment that all teachers are required to wear here), but nonetheless it was a very satisfying feeling to know that I had pushed through a whole school year in this, at times, frustrating and seemingly backwards education system.  Looking back, did I accomplish everything that I had imagined when I first arrived at school last December?  Did I eliminate corruption?  Stop cheating?  Get all my students to think creatively instead of just writing and memorizing?  Did I get my colleagues to show up to class on time and not abandon the school to hit the city for 4 day weekends every week?  Hmmm....maybe best not to ponder the answers to these questions. 

Somehow, when I got here in December I don´t remember exactly, but I kind of thought I would fix all of these crippling problems and see a different Mozambique when I flew out at the end of a righteous and productive two years of service.  I don´t want to confess that I´m completely jaded at this point, but I will say that a year in this school system makes you re-evaluate your goals and try to be a little more realistic about your accomplishments.  Did any of my students learn English, biology or computers this year?  For sure, loads of them know so much more now than they did a year ago, and it feels great to know that I at least was able to educate a few people.  Did they all learn English?  No chance.  Were there plenty of students who, after a year of English classes still didn´t know how to conjugate “to be” or who don´t know that the heart is part of the circulatory system?   Way more than I want to even think about.  What I´ve realized, however, is that when measuring your accomplishments in this context you can´t set your expectations too high.  That´s kind of depressing in itself, but it´s true.  If you come here thinking you are going to move mountains, and change cultures you came for the wrong purpose and are going to fail.  Once you make the realization that the best thing you can possibly do here is teach or inspire a few people to do more with their lives, go to university, learn a language, set an example for their community, you can start to make a difference and see the results of that difference in a very fulfilling way.  I would have never said this a year ago, but in my opinion, if you can influence that five percent of the population to do something special with their lives, you can forget about the other 95 percent and you´ve still succeeded.  In my classes of 60 students, there are maybe three to five students in each that are actually smart, hard-working, successful students.  They study, do their homework and pass their tests with ease.  I teach and they learn.  It all seemed so simple when I was in school back in the States – the teacher would teach and all of the students would learn.   But it just isn´t like that here.  I feel that I could teach until the cows come home and would not see much difference in the other 95 percent. Those three to five kids would soak up everything like sponges and the rest of the class would wallow and fail and never quite get past the verb “to be.”  So many students here don´t have the context, the family support, literacy, learned motivation, or study skills to just pick up and start succeeding.  It´s sad but it is true.  If this education system was full of good, creative and stimulating teachers and had books and resources starting in primary school up through 12^th grade the students would at least have the tools they needed in order to succeed if they put the effort in.  Those simply aren´t the conditions here though.  The primary school is nothing more than a chalkboard propped up against a tree outside and kids running around playing.  Anyway, all of this is not to say that Mozambique and Africa are a black hole in which no one will ever learn anything.  At the beginning of all of this I was meaning to make a positive point in saying that you really can make a positive difference here if you focus on the people that have the tools and motivation to do something more with their lives.  A perfect example of this amazing ability we have to make a difference in the lives on a few came last weekend when we put on the annual regional English Theater competition.

I was pretty nervous and excited about this event.  I was coordinating the event, which would take place in the regional capital of Chimoio.  There were to be 15 schools from all over the central region of the country each bringing a group of 8 students and 2 teachers who had each prepared 10 minute theater pieces in English.  Outside of the strain of trying to get my group prepared with their theater piece, I was also responsible for organizing all of the logistics of the competition.  To the untrained eye, this might not seem like a complicated task.  Let me assure you, however, that this was no walk in the park.  Between the shortcomings in transportation, communication and banking that this country suffers from, hosting 150 people for two nights in the city was a challenge.  Among the things that needed to be organized were transportation to and from the city for the 15 schools, lodging for two nights for everyone, meals for all participants, renting out the theater, getting prizes and dictionaries, having t-shirts made, and finding judges and dignitaries to attend the event.  The funding for the competition came for PEPFAR, which is a fund from the American government that often works with Peace Corps projects that are somehow related to AIDS relief.  I was working with a budget of about $10,000 to put on everything, which is a lot of money, especially here.  Again, you´re probably thinking, doesn´t sound too hard, just make a few phone calls and everything would pretty much take care of itself.  Hmmm...Not quite. 

In my opinion, banks in Mozambique are the earthly manifestation of Hell.  The nearest bank to my house here is 5 to 6 hours away.  In the month leading up to the competition I went to the bank four times and not once were there more than about 3 people attending and less that 100 people waiting in line.  Every time I went the computer system was down for at least an hour and I waited to be seen for at least 2 hours while other people cut in front of me and dispelled any notion of order or humanity that may have existed.  None of the $10,000 needed to put the competition on actually arrived in my bank account until the Friday that everyone was arriving.  The competition would take place on Saturday.  Try coordinating food, lodging and transportation with no money.  It sucks.  When I went to the bank on the Thursday before the Saturday event, I was told the the transfer of funds had still not come to my account, and due to normal delays, I would not see the money until the Monday after the event at the earliest.  I tried to contain myself but could not prevent the pencil from snapping in my hands when I heard this.  All of my planning would be for naught if there was no money.  The event would have to be postponed.  Due to a miracle later that day, however, I was able to talk to the national coordinator and she canceled the delaying transfer and put cash directly in my account so that it would be accessible the following day, just in time.  I breathed a sigh of relief and prepared to go to the bank on Friday, the day that all of the schools would be arriving.  When I showed up at the bank they informed me that the money was all there.  It was all could do not to jump up in celebration.  But before I could even ask to make a withdrawal, the banker told me that my account was an ATM account only and that I have a daily withdrawal limit of 4,000mts (about $150).  This would essentially mean that I could go to the ATM every day for a month and still not have the money that I was going to need later that afternoon.  I slumped in defeat.  The only thing we could do, the banker informed me, was find someone with a checking account, transfer the money to them, and then withdraw the cash.  Now renewed with optimism, I went searching for anyone in the city who would have a checking count at my same bank.  After a few phone calls, I was able to locate the cousin of one of the Peace Corps staff in Chimoio who could help us out.  We went to the bank together, waited, waited, and waited, but finally made a transfer and a withdrawal and I walked out of the bank with about 95,000mts on me in an envelope.  What I have found here is that, while things might get tense and may even seem hopeless at times, they always find a way of working out in the end. 

After the frustrating bank snafu everything could not have gone better.  The schools all arrived at the hotel, ate a dinner of chicken, rice and a salad, gourmet for their standards (at school they get served watery beans with rock hard xima for every lunch and dinner), practiced their theaters and got ready for the competition the following day.  The next day was probably the most fun day I´ve had here in Mozambique.  To see all of the organization and planning that you´ve done come together beautifully and make so many students happy is the best feeling I can imagine.  My group presented first and did a wonderful job.  They´d been talking about and anticipating this competition for months and seeing it all finally come together was special for them as well.  The theme of the competition was “Choose Your Future” and my group did a piece about two brothers who chose different paths in life.  One brother, Habibe, went to school and studied to become a successful priest while the other brother, Anthony, chose to start hanging out with the bad crowd, smoking, drinking and soliciting prostitutes.  Not surprisingly, Anthony contracted HIV and was later confronted by his brother and family as he regretted all of the poor decisions he´d made in his life.  They were brilliant and I was so proud of all of my students that day.  I was also extremely impressed with the overall level of English and theater that all of the schools presented.  It´s probably hard to imagine from the States people getting so excited about a puny little theater competition in Mozambique, but to these kids, this was the Super Bowl, it was the highlight of the year and they came to win and have a blast.  The amount of energy, enthusiasm and passion for English was palpable, and to hear them shouting out and gesturing their sometimes hilarious lines in accented and imperfect English was sometimes too much for me to contain my laughter.  After all of the schools had presented, and there were some seriously kick-ass theater pieces, everyone received t-shirts and dictionaries and we announced the awards for Best Actor, Best Actress, and the overall winning groups.  You could feel the tension in the room but at the same time it was beautiful to see how thankful and truly happy some of the students were to even get minor awards.  You would imagine that it wouldn´t be that thrilling to get an award for 3^rd best supporting actress, but the students reacted as happily as if they had just been given a million dollars, cheering and screaming and hugging their friends.  After the winning team was finally announced, my group got 5^th place, we put music on and everyone spontaneously began a dance party up on the stage.  Losers and winner alike flocked to the stage and danced like they had been friends their whole lives.  We put on “Wavin´ Flag” by K´naan which is an anthem here that everyone knows and loves and they went crazy flying around the stage in a euphoria, dancing and kicking in rhythm with the beat.  It was a moment that I will never forget and that I knew would never happen in the States.  It was pretty rewarding to know how much learning and preparation went into getting those students here, all of the hours spent studying lines, correcting scripts, imagining themselves holding the trophy in front of a crowd and thinking of accomplishing something that they never would have dreamed of.  It was humbling then, to realize that all of this, the emotions and the preparation, was put together and made possible by a few Peace Corps volunteers with an inspiration to create something bigger for a few students who deserve it and have been working their whole lives for this opportunity.

I´m going to to leave my blog post there for now.  I hope someday to put up some pictures and videos of the English Theater event so you all can see how truly magical it was.  Now that school is over, life for me will be much more relaxed and simple for the next couple of weeks while the remaining students prepare for national exams and I get ready to start some traveling in November – to Maputo, then South Africa, then home for the holidays.  As it has been so long since updating my blog, I have a lot more to talk about, and now that I finally have some time on my hands, I hope to keep updating more frequently in the next couple of weeks before I head home in December, so stay tuned...I hope that you are all enjoying the cool weather back in the states and that you save some some snow for me when I get there in about 6 weeks!

Cheers!

An American Illusion?

How nice it is to sit here with nothing to do, enjoying a relaxing Saturday afternoon.  I am under the shade of my veranda; I can smell garlic and lentils cooking in the kitchen and can hear the steel drums of Zimbabwean tunes dancing their way out from the speakers inside.  The sun is bright again, and people have sought refuge.  It’s midday and everyone in Mangunde is resting, leaving me with a disarming tranquility that is rarely found here on my usually bustling veranda.  On a normal day you cannot sit on my veranda without being bombarded with requests to check out soccer balls, magazines, or chess, to charge students’ phones or load memory cards with music.  Today, however, it is hot again, and the people are hiding out.  I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but as suddenly as the heat was replaced by the cool winter breeze back in April, the heat returned.  One day, just like that, it was hot.  I started to sweat, looked forward to cold showers again and pulled my fan out of storage.  With the heat came malaria.  In one day, I talked to 4 or 5 of my favorite students, all of whom had come down with malaria that day.  To give you an idea for how ubiquitous malaria really is here, I asked one of these students how many times he’s gotten malaria and he responded, “you mean, this year?”  It’s unavoidable.  A students who gets malaria goes to the hospital, disappears for a few days and then comes back.  No one blinks an eye.   Where is Marques?  Oh, he’s got malaria.  Ah, I see.   Next topic.  If I get it again.  Teacher, where were you?  Malaria.  Ah, I see.

The big news I wanted to tell you all about, though, is that I have finally made my travel plans for Christmas.  I’m coming home!  I’ll be in the states from December 15^th until January 5^th!  It’s not much time (3 weeks) but I’m pretty excited to come home, see my friends and family and experience a slice of the American culture for the first time in over a year.  Three weeks from now I’ll be coming up on one year here in Mozambique.  It’s pretty crazy.  I love Mozambique, but what I didn’t expect or even realize before coming here, is that I also love America.  It sounds really cheesy and patriotic, and trust me, I’m not the type to say that I love America, but when you are away from it for long enough, the conveniences of a functional society – rules, laws, effective transportation, roads, buses, stores, banks, lines instead masses of people pushing to be first, washing machines, etc. – become magical things that you can only dream about.  The amount of time that Peace Corps volunteers in Mozambique spend fantasizing about America is ridiculous – what if Mozambique had McDonald’s (I don’t even like McDonald’s, but the very thought of a cheeseburger with ketchup mustard and pickles and a large coke is just too much), what if Mozambique had good roads and real buses; what if at the banks here you could stand in an orderly line and not get cut by every shameless idiot who thinks they can just sneak into the front; what if just once I could sit in a chapa and not have every single person looking at me and talking about me.  We see America as this sort of paradise, which has none of the bad things we remember and all of the beautiful comforts that we crave – hot showers, running water, milk, chocolate, pizza, machines, internet, phone service…sounds like heaven.  I am anxious to see if it really is heaven.  I guess I’ve kind of forgotten by now. 

It’s interesting, for as much as us Americans here in Mozambique put America up on a pedestal, the Mozambicans have an even more grandiose version of what they think America is.  On weekends when I am here at school, I periodically show movies to the students in the boarding school.  These movies, along with the rap and R&B music they listen to is their only insight into what America is like.  The movies are often action movies with sweeping shots of New York City or Los Angeles and the kids always let out a collective gasp when they see the expansive sky-scrapers and 12 lane super-highways.  To them it all looks like a Sci-Fi movie.  They look at the shiny cars, impressive weapons and beautiful woman and dream of one day being an action hero or rap artist in America.  They ask, teacher, how much does it cost to arrive in America?  How do you get there?  I tell them that a ticket could cost $1,500 and they can’t even relate to that amount of money so they keep it in their mind as something they might like to do one day.  I don’t have the heart to tell them that 99.9% of them will never have the chance to see America.  This is a conversation I’ve probably had 200 times.  They then ask me if people speak Portuguese in America and whether I know 50 Cent, Lil’ Wayne, Eminem, Akon or Chris Brown.  Surely I have at least seen them pass by on the street, how big could America be?  What about Obama?  Jean Claude van Dam?  Jackie Chan?  I never know what to say.  Sometimes I say no, no, no, no, never seen him, no, don’t know him, sorry, and I see disappointment settle on their faces.  You mean even if I go all the way to America I won’t be able to communicate with anyone and probably won’t see Lil’ Wayne or Akon?  I can hear their dreams deflating inside them, vanishing into a big ball of smoke.  For them, America is not a tangible future or planned course of action like Africa was for me, America represents hope for something better, for something more exciting than a life working in the fields day after day.  Yes, it’s a pipe dream, a delusion; they don’t have a 5 year or 10 year plan for how they’re going to get to America, but it’s an escape, a chance to dream of something bigger and better.  So sometimes I lie to them.  I tell them yeah, 50 Cent is my buddy, we used to rap together; Eminem is my dawg; van Dam, yeah, my older brother; and Obama used to babysit for me and my sister.  Everyone has their own house with hot running water, washing machines and dryers (this gets them pretty confused), their own car.  Everyone has a computer and you can go the supermarket and buy any food you could ever imagine.  If you are poor, can’t work or disabled, the government will pay for everything.  The police aren’t corrupt.  There’s no malaria, no AIDS.  When I tell them all this they light up like Christmas trees.  America really is paradise.  I don’t have the heart to tell them that the real America is not everything they see in the movies; it has its dark sides too.  I think they have earned the right to keep America as their castle in the sky without me spoiling it.  Sometimes their poor grasp of reality is even too much for me to keep a straight face through.  For a week after I showed them Jurassic Park I had students asking me whether those types of animals exist in America.  Same thing happened with “I, Robot” – does everyone have their own personal robot in America?  Terminator, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, all were huge hits but provoked a similar reality-twisting confusion.  I usually tell them the truth that no, America is not controlled by robots and aliens have not yet proclaimed war against Earth, but in general I like to let them believe in something bigger than themselves.  Still my favorite response to an alien movie was, “Teacher, if aliens really haven’t come to Earth yet, then how did the movie know what they look like?”  I had to admit defeat there.  I don’t know how they knew. 

Alright, well that was my big news for the week.  Remember:  December 15^th to January 5^th.  I will probably be in Madison for awhile, but then plan on making a trip at some point to Minneapolis and also will probably go to my cabin up north for a bit.  Please let me know when you’ll be around so I can start making plans.  I’d love to see as many people as I can.  Take care!

Tangerine Jam and the Mountain Queen

Word to the wise, making jam out of tangerines is not as easy as the internet tells you.  I just finished painstakingly peeling 15 tangerines, first peeling off the skin and then laboring over each individual segment to get all of the pith, filaments and inner membranes off, along with the seeds.  After doing this, mixing in the sugar and then boiling it down, I came up with a grand product of one measly cup of jam.  I haven’t tasted it yet, so it may or may not be the most delicious cup of jam ever to exist in the world, but at least I know that it will be one of the most inefficient intakes of calories ever spent. 

Despite the culinary quagmire that was tangerine jam, I have to say that I have been pretty pleased with tangerine season here in Mozambique.  Just down the road from my house I can get 10 juicy tangerines for the equivalent of about 25 cents.  Not bad.  Back in January I could get 10 mangoes bursting with bountiful flavor for about 3 cents.  March was white and seedy watermelons, and June was the month of tiny but surprisingly tasty lemons.  I’m not very used to this whole “in-season” and “out-of-season” thing that happens here, considering that back in the states I can get almost any fruit or vegetable I want anytime I want throughout the year.  They’ll ship bananas in from Costa Rica, apples in from New Zealand, and oranges up from Florida, and we’ll show up at Copps pleased to see what we want right there in front of us 12 months a year.  As I sit here craving a mango but knowing that it will be another four months before those plump little fruits are dangling off the trees ready for me to pluck down, this idea of all fruits all the time seems pretty nice.  Of course, there are sacrifices that we make in order to eat bananas in Wisconsin in December.  Between their transcontinental flight and genetic alterations, the fruits we pick up at Copps are only a shadow of what Nature intended them to be, but that is the price of convenience.  If you want to eat real, juicy, flavorful fruit, and not the overripe, roided up, lab fruit that supermarkets offer, you have to come to Africa, where the fruit falls right off of the tree into your mouth.

All this is to say that I don’t mind waiting for my mangos and tangerines.  It makes it all the more exciting when that one special month comes around and you are buried in figs, or pineapples or cucumbers and you had forgotten how much you missed them.  Here’s the run-down, “A year in fruits,” that I have been able to surmise over the course of my ten months here in central Mozambique:

• December – The bang-bang month of litchi.  A peculiar dark-red, ping-pong sized fruit that is white, juicy and full of flavor on the inside.  As soon as it was here though, it was gone and I was left only to wonder what my Peace Corps service would be like in the next 12 months without litchi.
• January – We were literally buried in mangoes.  Everyone, their mothers and their dogs were selling big old buckets of mangoes that they carted around painstakingly on their heads.  At the price of less than a US cent per mango people were practically giving mangoes away, I think mostly just to lighten the load on their heads.
• February – Enter the not-surprisingly disappointing epoch of the fat seedy cucumbers and small non-sweet (and white on the inside) watermelons.  On the upside, though, you can never get sick of pineapples.  Central Mozambique is the pineapple capital of the world.  In January and February the streets are dense with stacks of pineapples that rise above my eye level and the trucks are loaded down by the ton.  The best thing you can do is get a veritable “pineapple cone” – imagine the idea of a cotton candy put in pineapple form.  Grab the stalk on top, flip it upside down and the vendor will peel the skin away so that you can eat the whole pineapple bite by bite as you walk around.
• March – corn, corn and corn with a side of okra. Grilled on the cob, boiled, or, usually, dried and ground into corn flour to make xima, a staple here that forms the carbohydrate base of every meal.
• April – Just like the fall back at home pumpkins and squash reign supreme, along with this strange woody pod that falls from a tree and is full of a pretty gross tasting chalky substance that people go crazy for.
• June – Hmm.  Lemons and peanuts anyone? 
• July – I never knew what figs looked like outside of a Fig Newton.  Now I know.  I prefer them in Newton form.
• August – More Newton-less figs, plus, finally…tangerines.  It’s a close call between August tangerines and February pineapples in the category of best overall fruit month.  And the Oscar goes to…tangerines.  I could eat a bag of 10 tangerines straight without growing weary of their juicy insides and citrusy bite.
• September, October and November – only time will tell.  My dream which is not going to happen is that all of the fields suddenly spring up with raspberries, blueberries and strawberries and then an ice cream truck selling Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, and, what the hell I’ll dream big, Choco Tacos too, decides to start running his routes past Mangunde. 

Like I said, it’s kind of exciting to show up at the market in whatever month and not know what you’re going to find.  Unfortunately, half of the time you find the market bustling with a grand total of about three people each with a bucket of figs and one dude on the side selling a sac of dried sardines.  On these days you languish home empty-handed, but every once in awhile you are surprised – someone had some extra potatoes, or tomatoes from their farm to sell, or there was one time someone actually slaughtered a bull and was selling beef by the kilo, what a day that was.  Meat is a tough delicacy to come by in these parts.  Chickens go for about three dollar a head, but then you have to kill them, and do all the jazz that goes along with preparing them.  This makes your meat options slightly less appealing.  Anyway, there it is, “A year in fruits.”  I have gotten used to it and enjoy the cycle and surprise.  While it would be nice to have a mango or a pineapple right now, I’m pretty happy with tangerines and figs right now and am sure that there will be a day when I show up to the market asking for tangerines only to get a puzzled look from the vendor be handed a mango.    

Now, onto the real story of the day.  I came into this blog post with the plans of telling you all the story of the Mysterious Mountain Queen of Namuli, but I got so distracted by that damn one cup of tangerine jam that I almost forgot.  Thus without further ado…

The tale began, as almost all tales in Mozambique begin, squeezed into the back on an open-back chapa.  I was with three other friends, all male and in their early twenties.  We had heard about a mountain in the northern province of Zambezia called Mt. Namuli.  The base of Namuli was a day’s walk away from the nearest town of Gurue and boasted the title of the second tallest mountain in all of Mozambique.   Now, as Mozambique is a relatively flat coastal country, this is not the most audacious claim in the world, but it was still an impressive enough title to get us into the back of that chapa heading in the direction of the mountain.  We had been asking around to find out how one goes about climbing Namuli and, through various sources we were able to piece together a patchwork plan of action.  We were told that, upon arriving in Gurue we must head out of the valley that Gurue sits in, through the surrounding hills and remote mountain villages on a winding path that would eventually lead us to the village of the Mountain Queen.  It would be a day’s journey to arrive in front of this mysterious and hallowed queen and we would have to bring a few offerings for her in order to buy our passage up the mountain.

The next morning before dawn, we left Gurue on our way to visit the queen.  The first hour or so of the hike was idyllic.  We strolled through gentle green hills with the rising sun angling into the valley and casting long shadows in the golden sunlight.  The path cut through Gurue’s famed tea plantations and we found ourselves surrounded on all sides by a green and verdant blanket of tea plants. 

Soon enough, we had worked our way through all of the tea plantations and began cutting a steep winding path that passed through a number of small villages.  At times, with the four of us scampering along on our way to see the queen of the mountain I couldn’t help but start humming “We’re Off to See the Wizard” and think of Dorothy blazing her way through jungles and flying monkeys on the way to the Emerald City.  As we passed through these tiny mountain villages on our way up to the village of the queen, to say that we made a scene would be an understatement.  We could hear the calls of ‘uzungu’ (‘foreigner/white person’) before we even arrived at a village.  I don’t know if the previous neighborhood was radioing ahead to the next ones, or they had an elaborate system of runners in place to pass the message, but they knew.  For at least a half an hour we were tailed by a gaggle of at least 20 kids.  Adults would call out from houses and teenagers would watch us from adjacent paths.

At one point just after we had left the limits of one of the villages, however, things got a little dicey.  You always have to be aware that when you are parading through a village with your fancy bags and shiny shoes, everyone is watching you.  Ten minutes or so after leaving one of the towns we noticed that there were a couple of teenagers who had been walking steadily behind us for a time.  They were carrying machetes and kept a good distance from us, not getting closer than 30 or 40 yards, but our sensors went off just a bit as we realized that in this context we were vulnerable.  We were on an isolated mountain path and had just trumpeted through a poor village with our wealth written on our sleeves.  It would not normally have been an unusual situation to see two teenage boys walking along the path with machetes as practically everyone in Mozambique has a machete and it, along with a hoe, is what they all bring to work in the field everyday.  The difference with these guys, however, was that they seemed to be peculiarly interested in us and would not let us out of their sites.  We sped up, they sped up; we slowed down, they slowed down.  I decided to stop at a nearby house to find out what was going on.  I asked a woman standing outside whether she knew those boys who were following us, and told her that I thought they were going to rob us.  Then she called them over, “João, Roberto, come over here.  Were you going to rob these men?”  It was a ridiculous situation.  They glanced at me furtively and laughed, embarrassed.  It was as casual as if I had just caught them trying to sneak a cookie out the cookie jar.  Somehow it didn’t seem like they understood that we were talking about armed robbery here.  There wasn’t much we could do though, so as a last resort, I offered to buy their machetes off of them.  It was a good try, but they declined my offer.  At this point, we had no choice but to carry on and hope for the best.  A couple minutes later, though, there they were again, trailing us.  This time we stopped at the house of a different family to see if the hooligans would pass us by.  They slowed down a bit, clearly a little confused and then proceeded to hide their machetes in their jackets, pass us by and then stop just around the next bend, waiting for us.  It was like a game of leap frog, but with machetes.  We were now quite sure of their intentions and had had enough of this horsing around with deadly weapons, so we offered to hire a nice man who lived in a nearby house to accompany us at least to the next village.  Chances were these punks would not try anything if we were with another local from the community.  We were right.  We passed by the thieves and continued on our way without anymore problems.  We had a greater task at hand – finding this elusive mountain queen.

All in all, it took us about 8 hours to wind our way through 30km of fertile valleys and green hills and arrive in Macunha, the infamous and unassailable village, no, I’ll even say kingdom, where the queen reigned.  None of us were entirely sure what to expect from this mysterious queen.  Maybe a palace?  A golden crown and a hen that laid golden eggs?  Maybe we were just delirious from the long walk, but we couldn’t help but dream of some ridiculous fantasy involving a seven course meal and soft warm beds when we would arrive in her spacious palace.  Well, we got the feeling that we were getting closer and closer to the center of this kingdom but hadn’t yet seen the spires of the palace or reached the mote and guards.  When we finally asked another peasant in the village they pointed us to a tiny little hut just over the next hill.  We were crestfallen.  I think our stomachs had been communicating with the naïve palace fantasies of chicken, pastries, potatoes and big steins of beer that were being conjured in our brains and had started to feel the pangs of hunger.  It was not to be.  This place was a shack at best.  Maybe 10 feet wide by 10 feet long made of crumbling bricks.  No electricity, and as we would later find out while choking on smoke all night, no chimney, just a fire burning in the middle of the floor.  At that point, though, we were still hopeful.  You can’t judge a palace by its meager exterior.  Surely its ornate throne and regal court servants were awaiting our arrival inside the hut walls.  Hmm.

When we arrived we were greeted by a fat woman who pulled out a floor mat and beckoned us to sit down in front of the house.  She apparently knew what we had come for.  I looked around for the throne, jesters and servants; nothing.  What kind of a fraud was this queen?  Finally, a group of people approached us and introduced themselves.  The leader presented himself as the queen’s son, the prince, if you will, who kind of controlled the purse around there.  He gave us the run-down.  The fat woman who put the mat down for us was the queen.  There are no servants, no knights, no damsels, and disappointingly, not even any jesters.  Damn; our stomachs growled.  “You brought the whiskey and flour, didn’t you?”  Shit.  This could be a problem, we were told.  The gods were going to need an offering whiskey and flour before anyone goes on the mountain.  If we didn’t present the offering, the queen, who seemed to moonlight as a sorceress sitting there on her righteous floor mat, would put a curse on us while we ascended and we might have been met with a blizzard on top of the mountain and die – her words, not mine, seriously.  We didn’t want to mess around with a curse of that magnitude, so, after consulting with the Prince, he told us that they conveniently sold flour and whiskey, actually the only two things that they did sold.  Perfect, we bought the offering and averted danger once again.

The next morning, when it was time to climb the mountain, we had to go through our initiation rites.  The queen dumped some flour on the ground outside and then started pouring whiskey over the whole thing.  We were trying to respect their culture and take it seriously, but it was hard when the night before, nearly all of us had though that the initiation circle – a couple of bricks stacked in a semi-circle outside the hut - was the latrine and almost relieved ourselves all over their sacred grounds.  Luckily we had decided to go a little further away from the house and avoided a foul-smelling morning ceremony.  It also didn’t help that the queen seemed to be just flinging the whiskey and flour around haphazardly.  It seemed like a joke, but be didn’t dare laugh.  We all said later that she was probably thinking to herself, “God these Americans will believe anything.”  What made it worse was that the queen was chatting with another old woman the entire time she was tossing flour and whiskey around in our supposed sacred mountain journey ritual.  I didn’t understand what they were saying, but they didn’t sound like supplications to the Gods for a safe passage.  I’m pretty sure they were just chatting about the weather, or gossiping about the latest goings-on in the mountain village.  In any case, we paid our money, she finished the ritual, and we headed off up the mountain.  I have to say, after all of that hubbub, I had kind of forgotten about the mountain itself.  It turned out to actually be a really hard climb.  It was steep!  It took us almost 4 hours to summit the mountain and there were times when the grade had to be at least 45 degrees.  The Prince who had welcomed us and also played the role of our guide up the mountain had made it seem like this was a walk in the park; everyone and their mother could do this hike in a few hours tops; we’d be back down by noon.  Haha, maybe for a mountain Sherpa like himself, but man, there were times when we were crawling up rock faces looking down these sharp drop-offs below us wondering whether we would ever make it.  One of our friends had to stop about half-way up because it was just too much to handle.  Nonetheless, we toiled away and scratched our way up to the top of Namuli and felt pretty gratified for it after it was all said and done.  Oh, and I forgot to say that we did this on my birthday!  So I popped a Jolly Rancher that I had been saving for the summit and we celebrated my birthday right there on the top of the second highest mountain in Mozambique.  After all of the trials and challenges that we had been through in the past couple of weeks, combined with the sheer challenge of climbing the mountain, it was a pretty rewarding way to celebrate 24! 

Okay, I’m going to leave it at that.  I can’t seem to avoid writing ridiculously long blog posts.  So I’m sorry about that, but I hope if you made it this far, either you are unemployed and don’t have anything better to do or you actually enjoy reading my stories, so I’m grateful for that.  I hope that life back in the states and all parts of the world is well.  I will try to post some photos soon of my trip and I hope to hear from all of you soon.  Take care!

To the Edge and Back

It’s good to be home.  Back where people treat me like family, speak a language I recognize, and see beyond the coins in my pocket.  I’m talking, of course, about my home of the past 8 months, Mangunde.  I guess it crept up on me unknowingly, this feeling of hominess here in a place so far from my real home.  I never thought I would regard this dry scrubby landscape and little mission miles removed from any discernable town as a place of comfort for me.  But after the past two weeks of ups and downs – beautiful beaches and verdant mountain slopes juxtaposed with the unavoidable realities of life on this continent like sickness, danger and everything in between – I have to say that I’m happy to be home.

Two weeks ago I finished my exams here at Mangunde, turned in my final grades to the office and set off on the dusty road out of the mission with my backpack loaded up and a grin on my face.  I was free.  The responsibilities of classes, exams and organizing group events for my clubs had all combined to weigh heavily on my shoulders over the past six months.  Now, as the tires kicked up a rich red dust from the road and obscured the fading view of the mission behind me, my stress and workload dissolved into the washed out picture with it.  Ahead of me lied only adventure.

The first stop on our trip was to climb Mt. Zembe, an impressive peak few miles outside of the city of Chimoio which forms a jutting backdrop in the cityscape.  From a distance the jagged rock faces and impossibly sharp summit make Zembe appear virtually unclimbable.  I was travelling with a group of 4 other volunteers and we set off early in the morning for the mountain.  We came prepared for a battle of epic proportions with Mother Nature: machetes in hand, gloves and sweaters for protection against the extreme mountain conditions that can befall one at altitudes such as this, and a sac of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for sustenance.  Oxygen tanks?  Ice axes?  Crampons?  We thought about it, but figured that our sheer will-power would get us through. 

We deboarded the chapa and there we were, no turning back now.  The only thing in front of us was Zembe with her spiked summit almost forming a sinister grin, daring us to continue on.  We asked a few local mountain savages what the best route to the top would be.  With a terrified tremor in their voices and looks of foreboding deep in their eyes they told us to go no further, for no man, woman or goat has ever conquered the great Zembe.  Maybe it was the grit and determination within us or maybe it was just plain foolishness but we forged on, eyes fixed on the summit of the great beast.  “Yes, we can,” we chanted, as we echoed the salient words of our youthful inspiration and climbed.  Step after step, mechanically, up, up and up, we were indefatigable.  We stopped halfway up the mountain to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we had prepared, and then we stop again 10 minutes later to catch our breathes, and then one more time; actually we stopped frequently to catch our breathes, but that didn’t distract us from the goal at hand and the mountain rising up in front of us.  We had been cutting through untamed bush for an hour.  Our arms were burning from the thorns, necks burning from the sun and legs fatigued from the sheer ascent.  I took my sweatshirt, hat and gloves off 10 minutes into the hike, for I had gravely misjudged the effect of altitude on temperature – it was still hot and I would now have to hike holding a sweatshirt in my hands, a setback I would later regret.  I checked my breathing.  The air was still moist and thick, no need for oxygen tanks yet.  We carried on into our tenuous ascent, now sated with peanut butter and jelly.  On one side, fatigue pulled us back down the slope into defeat, but on the other side, ambition and tenacity forced us to continue upward.  The weak fell behind, the strong pushed ahead; such is the fate of humanity.  An errant thought swept past my mind: we should have made more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  After another hour, we finally crawled one final rock face and emerged on the summit of great Zembe.  It was a momentous occasion.  The view was a bit hazy, and it was still hot on top, which made me curse my decision to bring the sweater again, but we were still pleased.  We shot the rope toting crossbow that we had brought up down off the mountain and it snagged a tree at the base of the mountain perfectly.  After tugging a few times to check the strength we clipped on the rope and zip-lined safely down to the base of the mountain.  Zembe was ours, we had done it.  The first leg of the journey was complete and successful!

Okay, we didn’t actually zip-line down the mountain, but we thought about it.  It also wasn’t the first time that anyone had ever climbed Mt. Zembe, but you have to include some things for dramatic effect.  After our trip to Zembe we decided to check out some local historical sites.  In a nearby town there were reportedly some world famous prehistoric rock paintings.  To get there we were told to find the old woman who grants people spiritual admission to the paintings.  The whole affair was a bit confusing because it turns out there are quite a few old women in Mozambique and the map we had just kind of had a big circle on in that said “old woman.”  After asking around a bit though, we located someone who was a woman and appeared to be quite old, so we thought that this was maybe the ticket.  When we said “rock paintings” though, she seemed as confused as we did.  She guided us to a floor mat in front of her house and we sat there in awkward silence with the woman for a solid 10 minutes wondering what exactly was going on.  She sat on her floor mat a few feet away from ours we just kind sat there for awhile, something you learn to do quite well after a year in Mozambique.  Then, as if struck by a sudden inspiration, she hobbled quickly into her hut and pulled out a big binder stuffed with old dusty photographs, school notebooks and receipts that were spilling out of the sides of the binder.  It seemed that this woman had kept every trivial document that she had ever received in her life.  She handed it to us expectantly and sat back down.  We paged through the binder and pointed at the old physics tests and bus receipts while she looked on.  Among the chaos, however, was a photo of the rock paintings that we were looking for.  While we were happy to peer into this woman’s life history, we also wanted to get on with our journey, so we quickly pointed to this photo of the paintings and she gave a knowing grunt as if this was all part of the plan.  Maybe she just doesn’t get that many visitors and was hoping for some company.  She pointed to the little hill above us and said, “500 meticais.”  We weren’t sure exactly what service we were paying for, and 500mts is kind of a lot of money (almost $15), but we gave her the bill reluctantly and headed off in the direction of her pointed finger.  Ten minutes later we were on top of the small hill peering expectantly and somewhat curiously at these “pre-historic” rock paintings.  I have to say, I can get lobster curry, a couple beers and a chocolate cake for less than 500mts, so I was expecting big things from these rock paintings.  I can’t say that I was blown away.  First of all, it was my impression that “pre-historic” meant a really, really long time ago, like before “history” even began.  No one could give us an actual date, and sadly the Mozambican department of tourism is a ways away from getting good plaques up at all their pre-historic sites, so the only thing I had to go on was an internet site that said the paintings were “pre-historic.”  I’m thinking that’s got to mean at least 2 or 3 thousand years ago, minimum.  I don’t know, maybe it was just my impression, but that paint was practically still wet.  The lines were perfectly straight and I didn’t see even a hint of fade in the red paint.  I mean, as far as rock paintings go, they weren’t bad, certainly better than I could do, but I was kind hoping for some real mind-blowing pre-historic history.  Instead, we got a nice chat with a senile woman along with a couple of cartoons and ended up 500mts poorer for it.  A bit of a letdown I have to say.  Feeling slightly disappointed but not discouraged we left the cave painting town and continued on our way.

A few days later I headed north, leaving my home province of Sofala and heading into the unknown lands of Zambezia and Nampula.  Looking out from America, the vast interstates spanning the Great Plains and winding through mountain ranges, the rest of the world has always seemed small to me.  Before arriving here, I only knew Mozambique by its size on a map, a small coastal country maybe the size of California with a little dot on the Southern tip indicating the capital of Maputo.  On a world map a little trip from the middle of the county to the mountainous area in the North seems like a walk in the park, a straight shot up the EN-1 for a few hours and surely we’d be there.  One thing I have learned in my time here, however, is that you do not travel on nice flat maps and on the bright red lines of supposed roads.  A half-inch on my world map took three days of toil – jamming into mini-buses, flagging down rides, and waiting.  Waiting for buses to fill up; waiting for broken down buses to limp their way into the city; waiting for a sympathetic ex-pat to give you a ride to the next city; waiting for the driver to tie the goats, mattresses furniture, and every other earthly possession that his passengers have to the top of the mini-bus; waiting for the goat owner to climb up to the roof of the bus to feed his terrified goat a couple shoots of grass at the stop.  Waiting.  Patience is something that most Mozambicans were blessed with or at least acquired after a lifetime of it.  I am not Mozambican.  I am trying to learn patience.  There are a lot of different ways to get to the same place in the country, each requiring their own forms of patience of courage.  Here is the rundown:

• Option #1 – Chapa.  A chapa is a 15 passenger van that runs as a bus service within cities and in between nearby towns.  At any given time half of the cars on the road are chapas running people from one place to the other.  The advantages: chapas are ubiquitous in Mozambique and you will almost always be able to find one going where you want to go.  That’s all.  The disadvantages are many: They are slow as molasses.  They always cram as many people as humanly possible into the cars.  I’ve counted as many as 25 to 30 people packed into a car that’s supposed to hold 15.  It’s like a game of Tetris trying to fit people together and still get the door to shut behind them.  They load cargo on the top so that between people and luggage the van is practically scrapping the pavement.  The driver will wait to until the chapa fills up before he leaves.  This means that you could be sitting in your cramped corner, sweating your balls off, knees jammed into the seat in front of you (apparently these cars were manufactured to serve people under 6’ tall) for an hour while he waits for one more passenger to complete the car.  There are absolutely no safety regulations on these cars – speedometers don’t work, engine is coughing up smoke, some need a push start, tires are bald and unchecked and most drivers either don’t give a shit or can’t do anything about it because they don’t have the money to make the repairs.    
• Option #2 – Hitch-hike.  This is the Rolls-Royce of African travel.  Sometimes you can get a ride in the front seat of a shiny new SUV or pick-up and cut half the time off of a would-be chapa trip.  Every once in a blue moon the car has AC and radio and the driver speaks English.  The disadvantages: if you think you’re going to be able to find one of these rides everyday, keep dreaming.  I’ve waited hours and let countless chapas pass by, all in hopes of a divine intervention that would bring one of these heavenly chariots to stop in front of me only to pass the whole day on the side of the road in fruitless desperation. 
• Outside of these there are a number of miscellaneous options all with their own faults – there are semi-trucks, coach buses, open bed trucks, flat-beds, bicycle carriers and your own two feet.  Some are fast and unreliable, others are slow but a sure bet.  Pick your poison.

On this particular trip north I was travelling with a friend of mine and we decided to mix it up, alternating between chapas and hitchhiking.  The first chapa we got on was an interesting affair.  The driver was friendly and eager to meet us, which is always a good start, but the chapa had a peculiar vibe to it; almost all of the passengers were kids and the woman in the seat next to me was making tuna sandwiches.  This isn’t normal chapa behavior.  They were heading to Quelimane though, which was on our route, so we jumped in.  We paid the driver up front and he proceeded to stop in every town to buy more and more food with the money that we paid him.  First there were sodas for all (except us), loaves of bread, fried chicken scures, fried fish, tuna cans, a giant bucket of tomatoes and potatoes and finally a freshly chopped off goat leg which he dangled off the driver’s side mirror for the remainder of the drive.  One by one we passed the snacks back to the kids and they gobbled everything up as if they had been starved for weeks.  The women to my right continued to prepare food for everyone while the man on my left was washing dishes right there in the moving car and tossing the dirty water out the window.  It was bizarre.  After talking to the driver a bit, however, I found out that this was no ordinary chapa; it was actually a church field trip that we had been crashing.  The pastor was driving, his wife was making the sandwiches, the altar boy was on dish duty and all the kids were in the back.  They were on their way home and had picked us up to cover their food expenses on the return trip.  It was a bit strange, but they were nice enough and even offered us a couple of tuna sandwiches for the road so we kindly accepted and continued on our way. 

Our next chapa ride was not quite as friendly, however.  After a few more rides we arrived in Nampula and boarded a chapa headed for Ilha de Moçambique, our would-be final destination for the next couple of days.  I didn’t take notice of the condition of the car before leaving because I was anxious to get out of the city and finally arrive at the beach we had been heading toward all this time, but if I had I would’ve seen balding tires, unmaintained and ready to burst.  The three of us (we picked up one more volunteer on the way) were in the back row of the chapa and the driver was gunning it pretty fast on the surprisingly smooth road.  At some point, 10 or 15 minutes in, one of my friends mentioned jokingly that they didn’t want to jinx it, but a few weeks earlier they had been on this very same road and saw a badly crumpled chapa on the side of the road.  After asking others she found out very matter-of-factly that many people had died.  It was slightly foreboding, but I didn’t think too much of it as it’s easy to think that you are untouchable in this country.  That was probably a dangerous thought because not 10 minutes later we heard a loud pop right under our feet where the left back tire was located.  The driver lost control of the car and swerved right into the oncoming lane of traffic (they drive on the left side of the road here).  At this point, everything kind of slowed down for me.  I was calm and helpless.  I watched the images slide past me in the window like a slow motion film.  There was a blue semi-truck approaching in the oncoming lane that we were now in direct line with.  It was right on top of us.  The driver desperately veered to the right, avoiding the approaching truck by God knows how much.  The driver over-corrected though and we fish-tailed to the left.  The mountains in the distance, road, and pedestrians blurred past me as the back of the chapa spun out and I peered intently out the window.  Sitting there in the back, eyes glazed on the smeared images, none of it seemed real.  Now sideways and still with momentum the out-of-control chapa charged off the side of the road down a small embankment and started to roll.  We did a complete flip and finally came to a stop face up with the roof smashed in and windows shattered.  I looked around and took in my surroundings.  My friends were still there next to me.  I felt my around my body for any missing limbs, pain, broken bones?  Nothing.  We climbed out the side window and I surveyed the damage.  The chapa was sunken into the ground and the roof was dented in from the roll.  I checked for the other passengers, but didn’t see anyone.  We happened to crash in the middle of a small settlement of stores and by the time I emerged from the wreck people from the surrounding building had run out and were encircling the spectacle.  I still couldn’t find anyone I recognized from inside the chapa.  They were all gone.  What happened to everyone?  I found out then that we had landed literally less than 100 yards away from a small hospital and everyone was already there.  We had been the last people to get out of the chapa.  We were also just a stone’s throw away from the police station and the officers were asking questions and trying to herd us in the direction of the hospital.  Both of my friends and I had come out remarkably unscathed.  With the exception of some cuts and bruises we didn’t have any significant injuries and were anxious to get away from there as soon as possible.  We picked up our bags and flagged down the first passing car we saw.  Before we could process it all, we were in the back of a pick-up flying down the same road we had just flew off of and the chapa that had crashed was a only an impression on our frail memories.  What had just happened?  It was a flash.  Did anyone get seriously injured or die?  I’m actually of glad I didn’t go into the hospital to find out for myself and see all of the other passengers.  I was told that no one was gravely injured, which was a relief to hear.  Maybe it was too soon, but I joked with my friend that she really shouldn’t have told us that story of the other chapa accident, and that I certainly was not going to pay the collector the 100mts for the ride because he didn’t even get us halfway to our destination.  Just like that it was a memory.  That night we arrived at another friend’s house and the next morning we were on the beach.  Such is life in this country.

Ilha de Moçambique is a tiny island in the north of Mozambique that was first colonized by the Portuguese in the 16^th century.  It was Mozambique’s first capital and has an impressive stone fortress laden with canons skirting one end of the island to protect the port from pirates and other colonial European invaders.  The sand on the beach is as white as a piece of paper and the water is a perfect turquoise.  The first night we spent at a small beach house across the bay on an isolated peninsula.  We had the beach completely to ourselves and it was pristine.  After the stress of school, travel and our accident it was the perfect antidote.  My preoccupations faded away into the sand and my stress was washed out with the azure tide.  The next day we took a small rickety sailboat captained by a few local fisherman to the actual island.  The island is like no place I have seen in Mozambique.  The streets are lined with plastered buildings painted in bright but fading colors.  Alleys twist and turn in between the buildings and as you look up you could imagine that you are strolling through the streets of Morocco or a small Portuguese village (not that I have been to either place).  We visited the museum, perused the shops and took a tour through the impressive fortress (where we learned that the origin of the name “Mozambique” was the name of two locals on the island – Mussa and Bique – when the Portuguese settlers first arrived) and we actually felt like we were on vacation.  Our hostel was a cozy colonial apartment with an open courtyard and a rooftop laden with roses and a view of the surrounding ocean.  Fresh seafood – lobster, crab, and shrimp – cooked in rich sauces with wine completed the picture.  It couldn’t get better than this.  We were in heaven.  That is, until I got malaria. 

Just when things were looking up, too.  I spent one of my precious three days on the island lying in bed sweating out a nasty fever and trying to fight off dehydration and a delirium that scrambled my words into nonsense.  It sucked and once again I was helpless.  I was able to find a pharmacy with the rights medications luckily, though, and I quickly started the drug regimen.  After a few hours on the anti-malarial meds I started to feel better and actually got my wits together enough to go out for a crab dinner that night.  I was not about to pass up my one opportunity to eat fresh seafood for this year.  For the next three days it was at night when the fevers and the cold sweats came the hardest.  I found myself pretty functional during the day, but I was soaking through shirts, sheets and pillowcases during the night.  I didn’t know one human could produce so much sweat.  We stayed at a friend’s house on the way back from the island and when I woke up in the morning it felt as if someone had dumped an entire bucket off water on the bed.  I felt like I was 10 years old again and had wet the bed at a sleep over.

The malaria eventually passed though and the memories of the car accident while still evocative faded away into the rest of the mosaic and here I am again, at home, and at school.  I don’t know how to sum up a blog post like this, but to say that while I enjoyed my romp through misfortune and bliss, I am happy to be in a place that I can call home for now.  I have students that know my name, and while I might not be the best English professor they’ve ever had, they have to at least pretend to like me.  It’s going to take awhile to recalibrate my scales to a quiet life back on the mission after such exploits, but I have a lot of goals and challenges to work through here in my final trimester of this year and I am exciting to see how it goes.  If I ever get around to writing another blog post after this marathon, I’ll be sure to tell you about the mysterious adventure of the Mountain Queen which I didn’t even get around to sharing in this post as well as some of the exciting things I’m doing back at site.  Thanks for listening and I hope that all is well back at home for everyone.  Take care!