My biology class on the first day of school.  I had them pose in front of the board to take a picture for my Mom's 60th birthday!!  Happy Birthday Mom!

Back To School!!

Hello again! 

Sorry that it has been so long since my last update.  A lot has happened in the past few weeks and it has taken all of my energy just to keep up with life here!  While I can’t possibly write about everything that has happened, I will do my best to give you a glimpse into my life here at Mangunde now that school has started. 

         

A couple weeks after being back from my holiday travels, students began to matriculate here at school.  I could tell that the much-promised image of a campus cheia with students was coming to fruition.  Every afternoon when the heat began to subside around 4p, students would begin to congregate around the soccer field right across from my house and undertake the big event of the day: bola (soccer).  I think that with an unlimited supply of soccer balls, our students would literally play soccer all day.  Before the school year began, they would come to the house to ask for our ball beginning at around 7am and would not turn the ball in until after dark.  They live for soccer.  It’s pretty awesome because the games are a ton of fun to play in every afternoon, and can get pretty intense.  I’ve learned that people don’t take competition lightly here at Mangunde. 

On the 17^th of this month the official school year began…well, sort of.  As you find out pretty quickly here, things don’t always happen when they are planned.  We did have the opening ceremony on the 17^th though, during which the professors were introduced and a few tardy local administrators gave speeches to ring in the school year.  Of course, despite the fact that school was supposed to start the next day, no one had had the foresight to make a schedule yet – it would not be an easy task, considering there are 1,500 students, spread across 7 grades, with 45 teachers and 20 some disciplines to be pieced together.  Instead of working the day before the opening, however, the Ped Director (the one responsible for the schedule-making) decided to take a few of us into town (the one an hour away) to molhar a garganta um puoco, as he put it!  When we got there, the director handed the server a 1,000Mt bill, and 4 rounds later (you also find out here that going out for just one beer is considered a waste of a beer) I realized that the schedule was probably going to have to wait until the next day. 

Well the next day we got started on the schedule in the evening with the hopes of beginning school the following day…hmm, optimistic?  Maybe.  Well, a few hours later people were getting tired of nothing fitting together well (maybe because we have enough teachers for a school about half this size and you are trying to give some teacher 40+ hours of teaching a week!).  I was wondering what we were going to do about this little problem we had of too few teachers.  A few solutions soon were presented.  The cause of the problem seemed obvious to me so I went ahead and said, “well, maybe you could find a few new teachers to lessen the load.”  Thinking that this was a brilliant idea, the Ped Director went ahead and added 3 or 4 new professor profiles to the computer program that we were using to make the schedule and started dumping classes onto the poor, at this point imaginary, professors.  We had solved the problem; the computer program was happily dispersing different grades and disciplines among a breadth of different professors!!  Until, that is, Tim and I wearily informed them that they would have to actually hire new professors for this plan to work.  It turns out that, until you find him, “new professor 1” can’t actually teach any classes.  Anyway, the next solution we came up with was equally brilliant – cancel school tomorrow and try this scheduling thing again with a fresh head of steam and a good night’s sleep the next day.  Pode ser.  Well, predictably, there we sat the following morning with the same problems we were having the night before. We were able to shuffle a few things around to make the schedule marginally functional, but as I write now, two weeks into school “New professor 1,” “2,” and “3” still have a full load on the schedule and remain entirely imaginary.  While our adaptação of a solution did allow us to start school that week, the sad reality is that there are no teachers for a grade of chemistry, a couple grades of math, some phy ed and more.

Anyway, discussing the many shortcomings of the Mozambican education is a different story for a different day.  Today I want to focus on some of the highlights of a pretty exciting first 2 weeks of school for me.  Even the schedule-making was a roller coaster ride for me because I didn’t yet know what grades or disciplines I would be teaching.  As we shuffled classes around I got bumped from Chem to Bio to Phy Ed to Engish and then some, but when the dust finally settled, I was left with a pretty sweet schedule and course-load that I couldn’t have designed better myself – I am teaching all of 9^th grade English, 3 classes of 8^th grade biology and 2 classes of 8^th grade chemistry.  Their classes only meet twice a week, which leaves me with about 22 teaching hours a week, half of which is English and half of which is bio or chem.

I have to say, somewhat surprisingly, when it came time to dive in, head first, to my first class, with 40 some kids (there should eventually be about 50-60 in each class when more students arrive) I was pretty excited.  Ever since I got my Peace Corps nomination as a teacher in sub-Saharan Africa some 12 months ago now, I had been looking towards this moment with mixed feelings – excitement, yes, but it was definitely laced with some anxiety and uncertainty.  I have never taught a class formally before, especially not one in a classroom with up to 100 students in a language I didn’t yet know.  I had nightmares of getting in front of my class on the first day and totally losing control, conceding any chance I had of ever gaining the students’ respect and effectively ruining the next two years of teaching for me!  Well, I am happy to say that my nightmare did not, in fact, come to fruition on my first day of school.  I found myself remarkably relaxed and even, perhaps, enjoyed myself a bit.

After having spent the past month and a half biding my time at site with all the students on vacation and only a few other professors and health workers whom I didn’t know around to remind me that Mangunde still had at least a resting pulse, I was very ready to get back to school (I never thought I’d say those words).  I was ready to have a purpose and direction finally. The first couple of months at site had been tough because I hadn’t actually done anything yet and I didn’t know anyone yet!  It was a weird, sort of unsettled existence.  I came here to teach and develop community projects and all that jazz the Peace Corps goes on about, but I hadn’t actually done ANYTHING productive for anyone yet.  What was I doing here?  I had some fun starting my garden, playing guitar and walking around the villages, but that’s not what I’m here to do.  Therefore, when the first day of school rolled around, I was ready to get to work, even if it meant facing the hundred evil, trouble-making 15 year olds that had haunted my anxieties.  Well, let me say, they were and have been nothing but an absolute delight these first two weeks.  There have definitely been challenges that I will have to work through, but the first couple weeks of class have been a blast! 

It has been fun getting to know my new students whom, while they are technically in 8^th and 9^th grade, are most assuredly different from most 8^th and 9^th graders you would find back at Memorial High in Madison.  For one, the students could be anywhere from 14 to 30 years old.  I’ve found here that it is not uncommon at all to have high school students well into their twenties here.  The other day I even met a 7^th grader who was married with a family and well into his forties.  There are many reasons for this age discrepancy, but mostly it’s just due to the reality of life here in Mozambique.  School is not a priority for many people.  They may have to stay at home and help on the family farm, help take care of a sibling, or may just not have the 450Mts it cost to matriculate for the trimester (about $10).  For those reasons, kids drop out at an alarming rate.  You will notice that by the end of the first or second trimester, class sizes will have diminished markedly because some students, especially females because they are usually the first to go if the family needs an extra person at home, will simply stop coming.  Then, when they have the time or money to go back to school a few years later, they might be 20 or 25.  The other factor causing such a wide range of ages is, frankly, how many people fail every year.  It’s pretty alarming in itself.  You need a 10 or better (on a scale of 1 – 20) in every discipline to pass on to the next grade.  While a 50% sounds like a piece of cake to us, it often seems like a mountain to climb for many struggling students.  Often, students aren’t fluent in Portuguese (the language all of the classes are taught in), can’t read well, don’t have any study skills, and miss a lot of class every year due to reasons they might not be able to control.  Facing those difficulties, students are usually ecstatic about an 11 or 12, even though I have to remind myself that this still translates to roughly a D in our grading system.  Anyway, all of this is to say that it is perfectly normal, but a little strange to have students in my classes that are older than me.  One of the things I did in my first lesson was ask if the students had any questions for me – about anything, personal life, where I come from, what the class is going to be like, etc.  In every class the first two questions were, “How old are you?” and “Are you married?”  I had to actually think about how I was going to answer these questions before hand, because I knew they would come.  Answering truthfully – I’m 23 and unmarried – could be dangerous for a variety of reasons.  There could be respect issues with having students knowing they’re older than me, and saying that you are unmarried at the old age of 23 here is just asking for female students to seize the opportunity to make things very uncomfortable throughout the year (again, it is not uncommon at all, although it is technically forbidden, for male professors to have relationships with female students).  I, however, decided that I had never been a very good liar and I might as well tell the truth and be ready to handle the fallout.  That said, the classes definitely gasped a bit when I said that I was only 23 and still have not found a bride.  Maybe I’m just reading into it too much, but since then it has seemed like the female students have been extra eager to erase the board for me and carry my notebooks into class.  It should be an interesting storyline to follow this year.

It has been fun to start to get to know some of the students already, but has also been funny to see how painfully shy some of the other students are.  On the first day of all my classes I wanted to learn some names and break the ice so I had them go around the room, say their name and then say their favorite animal.  In most of my classes this went relatively smoothly – well, I couldn’t ever hear their names so I just smiled and nodded, and there were a few girls who blanked on their favorite animal, but for the most part this exercise was a success.  In one class, though, I made an off-hand joke that choosing the right animal would be an extremely important part of their grade this year.  I assumed the people didn’t take me seriously, but I swear I went through the first 10 people and not one of them could think of their favorite animal.  They would stand up, say their name, and then just look down sheepishly insisting that they didn’t have a favorite animal, apparently afraid to give me the wrong animal.  Well, I finally had to ensure them that it really doesn’t matter what animal you choose, as long as you choose something.  Mental note: sarcasm does not work in Mozambique. 

Here’s another example of something that I was sure would be a riot in class but totally bombed.  I was giving examples of different living organisms in my biology class and brought in a plant, an insect, a rock and was going to use a student as the fourth example.  I started with having the students make some basic scientific observations of each thing with the intent of having them eventually figure out that everything but the rock was living and required air, water and nutrients to survive.  I even got the cutest puny little 14 year old named Vasco to be the example human.  We started by observing if the rock, insect and plant had any smell, whether we eat them or not, what flavor they might have and so on…I was sure, however, that it would be hilarious when I asked if Vasco had a smell, or what he tasted like, but when I went over and sniffed Vasco, asking the class if he smelled, the kids just looked at me earnestly and confused wondering why Teacher would suggest such a ridiculous thing. 

It’s hard to describe, but I always get a good laugh inside about how seriously they take me and how sincerely they answer some of the more obvious questions I give to them.  In that particular example, I got to describing the rock and began asking questions like, “do rock’s need air to live?”  “What would happen if the rock stayed out in the sun all day and never drank any water?”  “Would the rock respond to its environment by getting up and moving to the shade if it’s too hot?”  What I thought would be a funny little joke turned into a point of contention, “no, no, no, Teacher…the rock cannot move, it does not have legs!” 

Teaching has been the focus of my adventures for the last couple of weeks and is sure to provide me with my more challenges and experiences in the coming years, but I have had a life outside of the classroom too here at Mangunde.  There are plenty of other things to talk about like our school-wide lip-syncing show on Sunday, my excursion to play guitar in the villages and trying to get accustomed to a steady diet of beans, rice and the mystery green stew that we eat on a daily basis.  I will, however, leave those interesting stories for another day because it is late.  For as much sleep as I had been getting when there was nothing to do here, I’ve found that I’m my old college self again when it comes to planning lessons and have not been getting much sleep lately.  Therefore, good night and I hope to write sooner rather than later next time!!

PS. Packer’s are in the Super Bowl!! C’mon!!! 

 sunset behind my house!

 Homemade pizza from my dutch oven..

My bike..after many creative repairs..

filling up the water jugs in the morning!

Bikes, Condoms and Homemade Pizza

Hello again!  I hope that this message finds you all in good health and spirits.  I have spent the last week or so reacquainting myself with life back at site.  At times it has been empowering and rewarding, and at times it has definitely been trying to readjust to life alone at Mangunde.  After the whirlwind of travel, reuniting with Peace Corps friends, and good food, it is an interesting challenge to recalibrate the scales and find fulfillment in daily life here.

Life here at Mangunde has definitely changed a bit since I left it a few weeks ago.  For one, Gracinda, the maid who had been living in the house with her infant son and niece has been on holiday and has not yet returned.  This left me with the house to myself.  While Gracinda is a wonderful person and a dependable maid, I can’t pretend that I wasn’t a little excited when I got back to find an empty house.  Since I arrived in Mangunde, one thing that I felt I had been missing out on was the opportunity to live independently in Africa – cook for myself, cart water, do laundry, keep a clean house – because Gracinda expected to do all of these chores for the house.  It sounds strange, but with nothing else to do during the day, small but tangible accomplishments like making a meal from scratch or doing your laundry can really bolster your spirits.  Thus, for the past week I have turned domestic and it’s actually been quite exciting! 

To me, eating is one of the great joys in life.  By association then, cooking good food that I’m excited to eat is also a very satisfying task.  Combine that with the unique challenge of cooking with a serious deficiency in ingredients and appliances and you have a fun project to keep the day interesting!  My cooking prospects were definitely aided by the fact that I returned from holiday with one life-changing and tremendously uplifting appliance: a fridge.  The first thing I did when I got home was pull the little college-sized mini fridge out of the box, crank it up to freezer level and chock if full of water from my filter.  Let me tell you, I quaffed down that first nalgene full of ice cold water as if I had been slowly wilting in the desert for a week.  It was heavenly!  In addition to cold water, having a fridge also opened up my cooking playbook to include using dairy products and to storing sauces, leftovers and veggies for longer!  On my first day back, after the bread that I wanted to bake, yet again, didn’t rise (I think there’s a problem with my yeast) I decided to salvage the dough and have a go at making pizza.  It was a stunning success.  I cooked up a little pizza sauce with tomatoes, garlic, onions, basil and oregano and concocted a makeshift pizza pan out of the lid of pot.  I spread the dough over the lid, added my sauce, and sliced some mozzarella cheese over the top before dropping it into the dutch oven that I had conjured up.  I’ve used this dutch oven a number of times since the pizza – to make garlic bread and toasted sandwiches and it’s pretty brilliant.  By heating the big pot from the bottom, and elevating the inner cooking pot with some rocks you create a nice convection current that acts just like an oven.  The pizza turned out beautifully and, kind of depressingly, was one of my proudest moments at site this week :)  Other things that I have proudly cooked have been mashed potatoes, chili, peanut curry and fettuccini alfredo.  I’ve also started making yogurt and, the other day, made a big batch of mango jam.  The way I see it, while I might be overfeeding myself right now, I have to take advantage of my solitude because Gracinda will probably take over the cooking reins when she gets back in a few days.

         

Another goody that I returned from holiday with was a brand new shiny bicycle.  I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with a bike here, but it’s exciting to have the option of mobility.  On my first day back, I took by bike out for a beautiful sunset stroll through the villages around Mangunde.  As the wind blew through my hair I sped past little clusters of huts, women outside preparing dinner on carvão, and kids leading bands of goats back to the house.  I watched as heads turned curiously and eyes followed me until I was out of site.  It was a serene moment.  As I spend more time here at Mangunde, I am hoping that I will be able to interact more with life out in the villages.  I think a day will come when I know these people and can relate to them, but for now, as I don’t speak a word of Ndau and they generally do not speak Portuguese, I am only a passing interest.  It is amazing how important language is in understanding and relating to a culture.

A few days later I had another little adventure with my bike.  I noticed that my tire was a little flat, so I decided I would go ahead a fill it up with this little hand pump I had.  No problem, right?  An hour later, my bike was disassembled into about 20 pieces on my veranda with 10 Mozambicans trying to get their hands in there and fix the problem.   What happened, you may ask?  Well, when I took the cap off of the tire, the whole thing deflated and refused to inflate again.  It turned out to be a faulty nozzle that the air wouldn’t pass through.  To make a long story short, I had to take the whole wheel off, which meant taking the brakes, kickstand, chain, and carrier off.  Yeah, this is no sleek Trek with a super-light frame and quick release wheels.  This thing is a metal clunker.  Every part on it is metal and they are all held together with nuts and bolts.  Once I essentially disassembled the whole bike I began to realize that I would eventually have to put it all back together again…hmm.  That’s where the hoard of Mozambicans comes in.  If I know anything about Mozambican men it’s that they love to fix things.  When they see a disassembled bike on a veranda and a confused looking mulungu they prey upon the opportunity to show of their ingenuity.  While Mozambique, and Mangunde in particular, does not lack creativity and problem-solving skills, it does lack basic resources like spare tubes, nozzles, tools, nuts and bolts.  Therefore, the following resources were used to repair a bike that, to begin with, really only needed a couple of pumps of air: a condom, cooking oil, twigs from a tree, a plastic bag, and 10 people with 20 hands and 10 different ideas of how to blow up a tire.  Amazingly, after a number of failed attempts to shore up the faulty nozzle, the most effective solution turned out to be the condom.  It was a little confusing at first because the 11 year old who had taken control of the repair team asked me, “Teacher, tem um preservativo?”  It seemed a little out of context, so I didn’t immediately follow, but after he mimed it, it became clear that he actually was asking for a preservativo or condom.  Apparently he had used these for bike repairs before and expertly ripped the condom into little shreds and began wrapping them around the porous nozzle.  Once we got the bike all back together (or I should say, once they got the bike back together because another thing I’ve found out somewhat frustratingly is that Mozambicans will not let you do anything for yourself if they think they can do it better) the creative condom repair actually held the air in the tire…for about a day.  

I have come to learn that creative adaptation or adaptação as they call it here is something that Mozambicans have gotten very used to.  Fixing things with no new resources other than discarded plastic bags and trash is a veritable right of passage.  I’ve seen people repair water mains, electric connections, bikes and scooters with nothing more than discarded plastic bags and a little creativity.  I think there is a show called Junkyard Warriors or something on TV in the states.  I think if you brought a team of Mozambicans in to compete on that show, they would do quite well. 

I found it particularly interesting that they thought of using a condom to fix the air valve.  Since all of the international efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, Mozambicans have become very accustomed to being inundated with free condoms.  It is clear that not all Mozambicans have yet accepted the idea of using the condoms during sex to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS, but at least we now know that all of those latex resources are not being completely wasted.  On world AIDS day, which was in early December during our training in Namacha, I went out into the market with a group of other volunteers toting a sac of about 200 condoms with the intent to distribute them to anyone interested and show them how to use the condoms if necessary.  Our effort seemed to be taken very well.  Only a few people were embarrassed to talk to us about sex and condom use and we were able to unload our whole sac of condoms in about an hour.  Some teenagers genuinely wanted demonstrations on how to use them (for which we used a fake penis that definitely got a few laughs), others just wanted handfuls of them, and still others argued with us about not needing to use them at all.  

I won’t get into the whole dialogue of condom use to prevent AIDS in Africa, but it was definitely interesting to hear some of the myths and real reasons that people give for not using condoms.  A common myth that people here believe is that HIV came from whites in America and that condoms, which also come from America, are already infected with the virus.  One more legitimate but equally dangerous reason that people gave us for not using condoms was that they trust their significant other.  Why would they use a condom if they were in an exclusive relationship with a significant other whom they knew was not sleeping around?  If they wanted to use a condom then their partner would be suspicious of them sleeping with other people.  We came across this excuse many times, and I found it difficult to think of a good way to persuade these people to use condoms.  The reality is that, while people may trust their significant others, statistics show that they should not.  What people neglect to take into account is that while their boyfriend or girlfriend may not be currently sleeping with another person, there’s a good chance that they had slept with someone in the past and may have come into contact with HIV at some point.  The idea of sexual networks and empowering men and women to insist on condom use has been a challenge for many HIV/AIDS advocates here in Mozambique and Africa.  There is obviously much more to the topic of HIV/AIDS transmission and many layers of cultural complexity that have led to the currently devastating epidemic.  Hopefully, as I continue to live here, I will learn more about the triumphs and challenges of AIDS prevention and bring some of the numbers to life.

Right now I think the HIV prevalence rate for Mozambicans (15-49) is around 12%, but in certain demographics, especially young women, the prevalence reaches 20-30%.  Maybe if people were as good at wrapping themselves up as they were at wrapping up my bike tire, then we might not have the same HIV epidemic that we do now; conversely, if condoms were as good at stopping air from escaping a tire as they are with stopping STDs from being transmitted, I might have a working bicycle right now.  As is stands now, however, AIDS is still a problem in sub-Saharan Africa and I still have a flat tire in my bike, unfortunately.  So it goes.

Well, I’m going to leave my blog post at that for now.  The first day of classes is set to start on Monday, the 17^th, one week from today, and by walking around the school grounds, or just watching from my front veranda, you can definitely tell that things are beginning to happen here in Mangunde.  It will be exciting to see how things unfold and classes are selected.  I still have not been told what subjects, grades or hours I will be teaching come next week.  My roommate, Tim, who has been teaching here at Mangunde for a year already, should be arriving here from his holiday vacations later today, so I am looking forward to hearing how he likes our site and what kind of interesting things he has been doing here for the past year. 

In addition, kids are beginning to arrive for school and the promise that I have been receiving that this place is going to fill up when school starts is finally coming to fruition.  It is a mixed blessing.  Before coming here I had been warned that once school starts and kids arrive at school, I will essentially have no privacy, as students will come up to my house at all hours and ask for help, or simply sit and watch you do whatever you may be doing.  At first, I wasn’t too worried about it.  Now I get it.  Whereas a few weeks ago I could easily sit on my veranda with my guitar for hours without disturbance, the past few days I have not had more than 30 seconds alone with my guitar before an eager kid would come up to me a start asking for things.  Estou a pedir caneta?  Estou a pedir agua?  I swear, they must think I have an endless cistern of water and a tree that grows pens with the amount of times my peaceful guitar sessions on the veranda have been interrupted by little boys asking for pens and water.  It is definitely something I’m going to have to get used to and set boundaries for as I figure out my place here in Mangunde.  I’m looking forward to school starting, though, and having some new challenges to work towards as I take on the task of teaching in Mozambique.

I hope you all have a great week!  Take care.

Fast Food Nation

I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday break and are excited, as I am, to see what 2011 will hold in store for us!  Sorry that it has been awhile since my last update, but it has been a busy last couple of weeks for me here in Mozambique.  I hit the road (literally the one road) for Christmas and got my first glimpse of life outside of Mangunde.  Due to complications with our visas, our holiday travel was restricted to in province (for me, Sofala); therefore, I hopped on a mission jeep (the only way to leave Mangunde, because it’s a 45 minute drive to the main road) and headed first for Beira, the second largest city in Mozambique.

As we made the 4 hour trek into Beira, I could feel the world slowly reappearing in front of me.  Even though I had only been at Mangunde for 2 weeks, I swear it felt like 2 months.  It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the past two weeks getting acquainted with Mangunde, but you simply have to leave every once in awhile to remind yourself what civilization looks like.  The sun was lowering on the horizon, coating the vast green landscape with a golden hue and I could not have been happier as we neared Beira.  We drove past towns and villages with roadside vegetable stands – buckets of mangoes, pineapples, cashews, tomatoes, cucumbers, even litchi.  I never thought a stack of tomatoes could make my jaw drop like that, but I was in awe.  This is commerce, capitalism, people, products, money being exchanged.  It seems trite, but it was truly a glorious thing after experiencing the veritable famine that is Mangunde.  When you have to spend a whole day looking for a ride and driving an hour and a half into Muxungue, the nearest town, to get a tomato, a silly little vegetable stand passed by on the side of the road feels divine.   I didn’t realize how isolated I had been in Mangunde until I began to reenter civilization that day. 

It got better though.  My destination for that night was actually Dondo, a small town outside of Beira (think the Burnsville of Minneapolis without all the chains restaurants, roads, houses, etc.) where another PCV is living.  I got off the jeep, and realized I had no idea where her house was.  It didn’t matter though, I was on a cloud and could not wipe a smile off my face. I looked around in awe – to my right was a sorveteria (ice cream stand), past that I could smell someone selling grilled frango (chicken), vendors wearing their yellow vests were selling mCell credit, and it was cheia de people…everywhere.  Being that there is really nothing to buy at my site, I was loaded with meticais that I was anxious to spend on as much food that I can’t get at site.  I started with ice cream, followed it up with fried chicken and only then did I call my friend to meet up.

As refreshing as all of these new sensory experiences were for me, there was one which trumped even the ice cream.  As far as I had been able to investigate thus far, no one in Mangunde owns a fridge.  When you have been sweating all day from the oppressive heat, or have just finished a run in the morning, sucking down a liter of luke warm water is about the least appealing option one could entertain.  Luke warm soda and beer is even worse, by the way. Until the ice cream, I had not touched anything cooler than room temperature for what felt like a lifetime (I guess it was only 2 weeks, but still).  Naomi, David and I found a restaurant on the outside of town and I ordered a cold preta and a meio frango.  It was divine.

Ok, enough fantasizing about food.  The next day we headed together to Gorongosa, a small town where a few other PCVs live which is on the outskirts of the famous Gorongosa National Park.  Apparently, before the civil war Gorongosa was burgeoning with diverse wildlife – elephants, lions, gazelles, rhinos, birds, you name it – and rivaled some of the other famous parks of Southern Africa like Kruger and Serengeti.  Unfortunately, during the civil war, the park could not be maintained and was forced to shut down for something like 20 years.  Without regulation, and with the violence and pressure on the locals to survive, the wildlife population was gravely damaged during the war.  People poached the animals heavily for bush-meat and took over crucial habitats for subsistence farming.  All of this led to the sad reality that, when the war ended and the park was surveyed in the mid-90’s they found it virtually empty, a ghostly shadow of what it had been in its heyday.  The positive spin on Gorongosa is that it is slowly being revived.  The Mozambican government, in partnership with philanthropists and NGOs is trying desperately to repopulate the park.  While it is still only a vestige of what it once was, you can apparently see wildlife starting to poke their heads out of the forest again.  It will take decades to restore fully, but it is an interesting story to follow as the government tries to regain a vital economic moneymaker like a marquee wildlife park.  It’s another topic for another day, but it is also fascinating to follow the complicated cultural and geographic barriers to restoring a wildlife sanctuary.  One quickly finds that it is not enough simply to truck a bunch of elephants in and let them roam.  You need to also convince the local populations to leave the park grounds and leave the wildlife alone.  This means building new towns, schools, etc. and finding local support. 

Anyway, sorry, none of this was really relevant to my Christmas vacation In Gorongosa because we didn’t even enter the park.  Hopefully it was interesting nonetheless.  When we arrived at the PCV’s (Brian and Jordan’s) house we were quickly regaled with food and entertainment.  There were about 12 volunteers from my group (Moz 15) and last years group (Moz 14) that got together.  We played cards, shared stories, watched movies, and ate and ate and ate…I think the theme of this blogpost is going to be food.  Highlights were: fiesta night with chips and nacho cheese dip, pancakes, a Christmas cookie decorating competition, and stockings filled with gross Mozambican candy…but the hand-sewn stockings were touching.  You don’t really appreciate chips and nacho cheese dip until you have to roll out the dough, cut and fry the chips yourself and make the cheese dip from scratch.  I will never again complain about spending $3 on a bag of chips and $4 on a jar of salsa.

After our fabulous festivities I headed back to Mangunde..and here I am, again.  Back at home.  In my time away from site, I covered a lot of miles, however, and had many interesting experiences with the very well-serviced “public transportation” of Mozambique.  Generally people get around on chapas, which are ubiquitous on Mozambican roads and are essentially 16* passenger vans which are on the verge of total breakdown and are loaded with up to 25 people easily.  Sometimes you watch a chapa drive by and you can’t help but laugh.  The cobrador, which is the guy that sits in the back and collects people’s money, might be hanging out of the sliding door precariously while there might be 7 people packed into the first row face to face, essentially straddling each other.  What is really funny is when you are looking for a ride and you flag down one of these pavement-scraping chapas and they actually stop.  The way the cobrador encourages you to subir you would think that the chapa was empty, when in fact there may be 20 people stuffed in there liked sardines. 

On one particular occasion, a chapa stopped for us that was straight up chock-a-block with passengers.  Looking in the window, I felt like you would see heads poking up from under arms and between legs.  It was like a circus.  The cobrador, however, eagerly rearranged half of the chapa, insisting on fitting us in but causing an uproar of “Eh pa!”’s and “Ah..nada! No ha espaco para o muzungue!!”from the other passengers.  I have to give him credit, however, he got us in there.  I was crouching on some kind of console with my leg bent under me uncomfortably (how long is this ride?) with my knees planted into the stomach of the nice woman across from me and our mouths about 6 inches apart.  I felt like if I moved at all she would have a pretty good case for sexual assault against me.  That’s actually pretty typical though, and it could’ve been worse, that ride was only about an hour.

On another more harrowing 5 hour chapa ride, my friend and I actually reserved seats a day in advance.  Safe, right?  This was a slightly bigger chapa that resembled a minibus.  Surely, we thought, we’ll have a nice comfortable ride in a padded seat.  We got to our seats nice and early, excited to relax into a nice long journey, maybe put the earbuds in and get a little shut-eye en route.  So naïve.  First, the cobrador told us that the seats we reserved were not, in fact, the window and the aisle seat as we had been told, but instead the middle two seats, infamously known as the jump seats.  The jump seats are essentially the aisle.  After everyone has filed into the chapa, they swing down these poorly padded boards with pitiful back rests which stretch between the real seats and function as makeshift benches for their lucky occupants.  Hooray us!  As if sticking us in the jump seats wasn’t enough, however, this entrepreneurial cobrador decided to put one more on us by continuing to sell tickets for the chapa after it was already fully booked.  We were sitting comfortably in our jump seats hoping to leave asap when the cobrador told us to make room for the mother and two children that he just sold tickets to.  What fun!  So we squirmed and nuzzled closer together than we ever though we'd be and made room for another family in or snug row.  It turns out that it didn’t really matter that our tickets said seats 9 and 10 on them, because I was currently sitting on about a third of seat 8 and a quarter of seat 9, while David was wedged onto fraction of seat 8 with a small child essentially in his lap for the 5 hours ride.  It's funny to look back on, but was really quite uncomfortable at the time.  And then, just when I was getting ready to try to relax as best I could given the circumstances - I had my little travel pillow out and my head jammed up against the seat in front of me -  the guy who took my window seat from the beginning pulls his phone out and proceeds to use it as a speaker to play obnoxious Mozambican dance music for what turned out to be the next 3 hours.  Apparently, this gentlemen thought that it was his duty to provide the musical entertainment for the whole chapa at 4 in the morning.  So much for trying to getting some sleep on the road.  Maybe it's a cultural thing, because a few minutes later, another guys two rows back started playing different music loudly and unabashedly on his phone.  So now we had two dueling cell phones providing us with a nice clash of Akon and mozambican reggaeton for the majority of the ride.  Hasn't anyone heard of headphones here?

Chapa riding isn’t all torture and discomfort though.  My favorite part of traveling through Mozambique on chapas is the beautiful display of capitalism and commerce that can be found at any of the many chapa stops on the road.  It's really a site to behold.  Every couple of towns, the chapa will stop to let people off, get gas, or simply have a break – there’s no schedule so the motorista is sort of on his own clock.  If he’s thirsty, he’ll stop the chapa and make everyone wait while he sips down a Coke at a roadside banca or if he has to pee he’ll pull over in a grass field and hop out casually while other passangers who have to pee find ways to jump out of windows and relieve themselves as well.  Anyway, whenever the chapa makes these frequent stops, it takes about 3 seconds for vendors on the road to identify their new potential buyers.  I'm convinced that you can literally buy anything through the window of a chapa...anything.  My favorite window purchase: a cold Coke and bag of cashews.  I never thought I would enjoy coke and cashews at 6am – I know it sounds disgusting, right?  At home I would never consider drinking a soda before 11, but here, all conception of time or flavor preference defers to the mighty trump of coldness.  My thirst for refrescos at dawn is also helped by the fact that I've been sweating uncomfortably in a half jump seat since 4am.  I don't even really drink Coke at home, but here it is an elixir, plain and simple.  And they use real sugar too, not that awful corn syrup that is unavoidable when use shop at grocery stores in the states.  Anyway, the beauty of the chapa window vendors is that if you don’t see the items you want readily available, you can simply yell out the window, “castanhos!” and there will be a frenetic chain of vendors screaming for the castanho guy to get his ass over to that window and you'll have your cashews in 10 seconds flat as the chapa pulls away onto the road.  It's amazing!

I have yet to try one particular drive by delicacy, but I’ve seen kids selling little to go Ziplocs of soggy French fries and grilled chicken.  I think that is just the ultimate.  It’s like a little McDonalds chicken nugget meal right here in Mozambique.  Maybe someday.

Okay.  Well, that was a longer post than I thought I was getting into.  So if any of you have made it this far, thanks for sticking with me!  I’ll post again soon about how life is treating me back here at site as we get ready for school to start in a little more than a week! 

Take care!