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 17th, 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.
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