13/07/12

Yesterday, in the eight minutes it takes to walk from the main road to my house, I made two kids cry. And these are kids who see me on a daily basis, one is the grandson of my bread lady, the other is my neighbor. Just another day in the life of a PCV.


We are right in the middle of dry season now, and it is DUSTY. I am sure it doesn’t compare to other countries that aren’t blessed with our rainy season in addition to the dry season, but it’s still unpleasant here. All of our green trees and grass are not a little less vibrant in color, having been covered by a layer of brown dust. None of the roads other than the main one are paved, so anytime a car passes people shield their faces from the dust clouds that follow it. You can taste it on your teeth and lighter shades of clothing have to be washed after one wear.

I walked home at about 7:45pm a few nights ago and ran into two little kids (probably 5 and 7 years old) skipping down the street alone. “Hey, go home and eat dinner, I bet your mother is looking for you!” I chided them. “No we already ate!” responded the older one. “Well then what are you doing out?” I asked them. While I think that American kids could benefit from more freedom and less supervision, one thing that bothers me in Mozambique is how often I see (or hear, let’s be honest I’m usually home by then) kids out at night, and I wonder where their parents are and why they aren’t concerned. These two kids had been sent in search of their dad who was presumably at the bar, since he hadn’t come home for dinner.

Nick, our South African friend who lives in Swaziland (we stayed with him during Bushfire this year) came into Maptuo recently to do some banking. He told me that he had Google searched for a BCI bank in Namaacha, in hopes that he wouldn’t have to go all the way into Maputo city, but instead my blog came up.

12/07/12

Last week I traveled up to Zambezia to coordinate a malaria prevention “training of trainers” with PCVs and their counterparts from eight districts across Zambezia. Check out http://stompoutmalaria-mozambique.tumblr.com/ to read about it and see pictures!


This trip was my first time north of Inhambane province. Pause for a second, find a world map and really appreciate how huge Mozambique is (twice the length of California, I’ve been told). And since teachers’ schedules are quite rigorous, teaching for 9 months of the year and controlling and grading exams while not teaching, and my school was fairly strict (not letting me leave during breaks like many of my PCV colleagues’ schools did), I haven’t had much time to travel around the country. I unfortunately didn’t have time to fit much other travel into this trip, but it was great to at least get a glimpse of other parts of Mozambique. One thing that struck me is that it wasn’t as Islamic as I had expected, having learned that in Mozambique the south is predominantly Christian and the north is predominantly Muslim. And maybe part of this is due to the fact that the south in fact has, in my opinion, a large Muslim presence (I can actually hear the call to prayer as I write this, and both Inharrime and Namaacha have large mosques), and Zambezia certainly wasn’t Muslim the way Senegal was. What I thought was the coolest were all the bike taxis everywhere. For shorter distances (within Quelimane city, for example), rather than the chapas that are ubiquitous in the south, there are hundreds of bike taxis everywhere, where passengers sit on a cushion on the back rack. It makes trying to cross the street as a pedestrian terrifying, but I loved the idea of everyone on bikes, rather than piling into the hunks of metal chapas we have down here.

And, the BIG DIPPER is visible from Zambezia! Apparently it’s close enough to equator that it’s visible. (Again, take another look at a map and appreciate how long Mozambique is).

I caught the night flight back to Maputo, and as we rode our bike taxis in the dark calm of early evening on the tree-lined road to the airport it was almost idyllic. Then three men rode by on a motorcycle (yep, three), with the driver drinking beer out of the bottle as he drove. And then, killing his bottle, he chucked it to the side, a few feet in front of my bike taxi, so we had to swerve to avoid the shattering glass. I just shook my head.

10/07/12

Sorry my blogs have been sporadic recently, I have been on the run for a couple weeks now.


The newest group of future PCVs (they will swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers in August) is here in Namaacha living with host families and doing Pre-Service Training for ten weeks (just like I did almost three years ago). The last week of June was given a malaria focus*, with a session from the Peace Corps Medical Officer (PCMO), a session from the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) resident advisor (who I have been working with this year), and me, the Stomping Out Malaria in Africa team member for Mozambique. The PCMO session would cover a bit of the epidemiology of malaria, but focus primarily on the risk of malaria to them as PCVs and the precautions they should take to avoid getting malaria. The PMI session would focus on what is being done in Mozambique in the fight against malaria by different organizations and the national policies and prevention/treatment strategies. Then my session would give an introduction to the Stomping Out Malaria in Africa initiative, how they could be involved in the initiative, and how they could integrate malaria prevention into their sites and jobs. Since my session was last in the line-up, my plan was to sit in on the other two, so that I could know exactly what the trainees’ knowledge level was. After the PCMO’s session I casually asked who would be doing PMI’s session the following day, since I knew the resident advisor is on leave in the states. I was told, in an equally casually manner, that the PCMO would be filling in to do the session, but that she didn’t want to return to Namaacha (from Maputo) two days in a row, so the session had been switched to a different week. I panicked because my session would make ZERO sense without the trainees having learned the information from the PMI session. Since I attended the Stomp boot camp in February and have since read about every new article (or the abstract, let’s be honest) in malaria research and prevention practice worldwide, I feel fairly comfortable in the subject—so I suggested I give the morning PMI session, in addition to my afternoon session. All this happened at about 3pm the day before these sessions were to happen, and all I had from PMI was the powerpoint that she had planned to use, but none of her notes to go along with it, so I spent the next 8 hours preparing for my surprise session. The great news is that I think both sessions went well and a few trainees approached me afterwards to express their interest in working malaria prevention and ask additional questions about how they could become involved.



*Despite the fact that malaria is the #1 killer in Mozambique, accounting for 29% of deaths, it gets very little attention in comparison to HIV/AIDS. All of the Mozambique Health sector PCVs are funded by PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief), and are thus primarily HIV prevention volunteers. The most recent studies report that the HIV prevalence rate in Mozambique is 11.5%, so it absolutely should receive attention and funding for prevention/treatment activities, my problem is that it often does so at the expense of other health issues, such as malaria (again, the actual #1 killer in Mozambique), nutrition, STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections—during my Pre-Service Training the national prevalence was 79%!), and tuberculosis (which I have been exposed to since being here and one of my PCVs friends who recently closed her service tested positive for).

13/07/12

Sorry I haven't written in so long, all my traveling and work has been great, but I am still trying to catch up on  the work I fell behind on while doing it! The Ambassador is leaving Mozambique next week, here is (from the left) me, Anna, and Cameron at Peace Corps' goodbye party for her (sporting our capulana dresses!). I will update tomorrow!

03/07/12

            On Saturday I was buying samosas from my samosa lady when her friend said “estás a ver como tua branquinha está bonita?” Literal translation: do you see how your little white thing (brancinha is the diminutive of a female white thing) is pretty? I just smiled awkwardly—I still have no idea what a proper response in situations like this is…

            On Sunday our host mom sent my brother and sister to mass with me, this is them on the walk back.

            Off to Zambezia province for a workshop on malaria prevention!

30/06/12

            This bush hen landed on our fence this morning, just out of reach of the dog and sat there screeching/squawking (bush fens make the most terrible sound) until I chased it away.

           

 As I write this, there is a bird that accidentally flew into our house and is now trapped, so it’s flying back and forth in our common room in a panic. It is unbelievable how much a tiny little bird can poop and pee, and it’s pooping and peeing ALL OVER the common room. I guess it’s just one of those days. 

28/06/12

            Liz, Anna’s friend from home, is here visiting! A few days ago we went into Maputo so that we could leave early in the morning for the beach. We were standing at a bus stop in the city when I felt a gentle tug on my hair. I turned around and gave the woman standing behind me a quizzical look. “It looks like extensions, I wanted to see if it was” she explained to me. “Well that’s not a compliment!” was my response, even though she assured me repeatedly it was.

            We piled onto an over-stuffed chapa, the kind where you are more dependent on other people’s bodies to keep you upright, rather than your ability to grab handholds or maintain your balance. We were finally able to get Liz a seat, so we felt better after that, until the young man next to her took a picture of her with his phone. “Hey!” yelled Anna “what are you doing? You can’t take pictures of people you don’t know! Give me your phone, I’m erasing that!” She grabbed for his phone but he pulled it out of reach so we turned to the woman sitting next to him and asked her to monitor him to verify that he actually deleted the picture. The other woman sitting in their row started loudly scolding him about how rude and uncultured he had been. Then the man standing next to me started loudly scolding him and addressing the bus about how he had taken a picture of Liz and how rude he was. Within 30 seconds everyone on the bus was talking about it. The young man called for a stop and got off as everyone scolded him, and I wondered to myself whether he actually needed to get out there, or if he had been shamed into it.

            We went up to Casa de Mar for a few fantastic days at the beach with Mary and Des, the wonderful people who own it. (Check out www.casademar.co.za if you ever want to visit an amazing beach in Mozambique!) We got to spend time talking to them, reading, playing card games, and watching the sunrise—exactly how beach days should be spent (it’s “winter” here, so warm enough for swimsuits, but too cold to get in the water).

The sun rises within about 15 minutes here

You can almost see the sun moving, it's incredible

22/06/12

A few days ago I passed a group of men on my way home from the office. “Good afternoon” I greeted them, as I greet every person I walk past. “Good afternoon!” one of them said, leering at me, “you are very pretty!” I continued walking quickly by them. “Hey!” he yelled at me, his tone changing to reprimanding and angry, “when someone tells you you’re pretty, you say thank you!” Hmmm, so now you’re lecturing me on manners?
I ran into a few of the trainees yesterday and they said “we rode the chapa here with your friend, he kept saying he knew Anata.” I had no idea who they were talking about, so they elaborated “he’s the border police who climbed the mountain and took pictures with you.” I laughed, his memory is a little different from the version I remember. The way I remember it, I climbed the mountain with Andrea and got harassed by this guy and another border police when I was returning. Apparently he learned my name when he took my passport and remembered that I had said I climbed the mountain that day to take pictures. I laughed and wasn’t surprised slightly that we would recount the encounter and our relationship so differently, but the trainees seemed a little more put off and puzzled by this.

16/06/12

Last night Anna and I were in Maputo and we met up with some other PCVs who were also in town. We left the bar at around 10:30pm and went to the spot in front of the hotel there where taxis wait to split one home with Gracey, an RPCV (Returned PCV) from Moz who is back this summer with an internship with USAID. Where she is staying is very close, actually on the same road, as where we are staying, so although the taxi would make two stops, we knew that they shouldn’t charge us more than normal (and we have done this before). Per usual, we haggled with them before getting into any car, and actually getting out of the first taxi when he wouldn’t negotiate his price (since at this time of night it’s easier to just get taxis in front of this fairly posh hotel, it’s customary that they try to charge us a ridiculous price at first, but then we tell them no and what the normal price is, and they concede). One guy said he would take us for our price, so we got in and he drove us to where Gracey is staying. When we reminded him of the second address, he told us it would be an additional 50 Meticais to take us there. We began to argue with him, saying we wouldn’t pay more, since we had discussed the price prior to getting in the car. He was being a pretty big jerkoff, so eventually (after discussing with Anna that we were a couple blocks from where we were going and the road was well-lit and lined with guards) I threw the money at him and informed him that we would just walk. As we walked away from him, he got back in his car, drove up behind us, and hit me from behind with his car, knocking me on the ground. Either he only intended to scare me and didn’t actually mean to hit me, or he has done this before and is really good at it, because he hit me perfectly—he hit me enough that I fell down, but not hard enough or straight-on enough to hurt me. Then he sped away. Anna, a good friend, was primarily concerned with me on the ground, so in the aftermath she bent to take care of me, not try to get his license plate number. Of course as soon as I hit the ground I was incensed and all I cared about was getting his license plate number, but he sped away too quickly. Again, I am NOT hurt, I didn’t hit my head or anything. I landed on my butt and my back is a little sore, that’s it. That said, hitting someone with your car is ALWAYS an idiotic and unacceptable move. Immediately after it happened we called our Peace Corps Safety and Security Coordinator, Alfredo and he said that we would go back today to try to find the guy. When we arrived I recognized the driver whose taxi I had gotten out of last night because he wouldn’t lower his price (turns out I probably should have just forked over the extra 50 Mets…then I wouldn’t have gotten hit by a car), so Alfredo talked to him and another driver. Alfredo asked if he remembered us and when he did, asked the name of the guy who eventually took us. He then asked when he would be back at work next. Alfredo explained that this man had done something bad while he was out driving and he just wanted to talk to him. Alfredo was really good at this, he approached the topic very gently and slowly, because you would expect these guys’ first reaction to be to stand up for their buddy. Alfredo reminded them that having a guy like this driver do something bad would reflect negatively on all of the drivers and impact their business. They agreed with him, told us that the guy had never actually returned after he took us last night, agreed that he couldn’t do things like that, and told Alfredo when this guy would come back to work, as well as when the chief of the taxi drivers would be around. This will be Monday, so on Monday Alfredo will return to try to sort out the situation. I really appreciate Peace Corps’ support in this situation, Alfredo is not only always working hard to take care of us, but also demonstrates that he is good at what he does. Things like this blow my mind really. I was pissed at the taxi driver, but never in a million years would I be tempted to hit someone with my car out of anger, and it never crossed my mind that someone else would. In what world is that okay? Anna reflected afterwards that it’s likely the reason he reacted so strongly was that he couldn’t handle two women standing up to him. But again, because the phrase “I got hit by a car yesterday” seems to elicit a strong response from people, I want to stress the fact that I am not hurt!

15/06/12

Last Saturday I hiked up the “Three Points” mountain with Andrea, and Ecuadorian volunteer who lives with the sisters in town. The mountain is so named because the very top point marks where Mozambique, Swaziland, and South Africa all meet at Swaziland’s northeast corner. It was a beautiful day and, aside from the small run-in with the police on the way back, a great hike! Above picture: looking up the “mountain” (I’m from Illinois), the point we are hiking to is right in the middle. Above: Andrea hiking. The line/fence that starts on the right of the picture is the Mozambique/Swaziland border. Namaacha is to the left in the distance. Above: Me at the rock pile that marks where the three countries meet. Above: Andrea and me, with Namaacha in the background. Above: Behind me is the Swaziland (left) / South Africa (right) border. I am actually in South Africa in the picture I think.

13/06/12

I recently read Mountains Beyond Mountains, the story of the life of Dr. Paul Farmer, an incredible man who helped revolutionize the public health system worldwide, specifically, what things people accepted as dogma or possible. I heartily recommend it. There was one phrase from the book that stopped me in my tracks. At one point, frustrated with life in Haiti, Dr. Paul Farmer says: “Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floors, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.” And it was then that I realized that perhaps I have become too complacent with the way things are here in Mozambique, my very intimate 2.5 years experience with the developing world. Our water isn’t very clean. We usually just joke about it, and I posted a picture a few months back when it came out particularly dirty. In Mozambique there aren’t nearly enough health posts, especially the more rural you get. A lot of my neighbors don’t have tin roofs, and I just read a malaria study conducted in Zambezia province (central Mozambique) that found that 77% of the families had thatched roofs. Many of my neighbors don’t have cement floors. What really rattled me when I read this was that I had forgotten that I used to also consider these self-evident truths, but over time and through my experiences, I have come to accept a lower standard of reality. It hasn’t crossed my mind in a long time (many months? a couple years?) that people should have cement floors—having packed-mud floors here is just the way life is, just how all the kids run around barefoot and play with trash they fish out of trash pits. It’s shocking how drastically your world view can change. Now I am searching for some happy medium, because life here is simply life: there are good aspects and things that need to be improved. I know many happy people here and I often find comfort in how not-materialistic people here are, in comparison to America. But at the same time it’s good to be reminded that we can’t just accept things as they are, but should always aspire to at least minimal standard of living.

12/06/12

The other night the electricity went out. No huge surprise there, I lit a candle and finished my night routine by candle/flashlight. The next morning when I left for the office it still hadn’t returned. I noticed that our neighbors two houses uphill (who also own a little shop right by our houses) had power, though it seemed like everyone downhill (our house included) had lost power. I got back from the office in the early afternoon and, finding it was still out, went to talk to some of our neighbors. I asked two men I ran into and they confirmed that their power had also been out since the previous evening. They told me that they were working to get it back, so I shrugged and went home. About 30 minutes later one of the guys stopped by to ask if the electricity had returned—it hadn’t. Then another 30 minutes later it came back on, hurray! A little while later I went up to the little shop to buy some things for our house. The lady who owns the shop (our neighbor whose house had never lost power) and I were having trouble seeing and counting our money in the twilight, so I told her that the power had actually returned, so she could turn on the light. She shook her head and told me that power in her shop hadn’t returned yet, and flipped the switch on and off to demonstrate. So her house never lost power, our house lost it and regained it, and her shop lost it and hadn’t regained it yet—and all of these buildings are within a 50 meter radius. This is one of the things that I find most puzzling about Mozambique. In America sometimes things happen or don’t work, but it seems there is generally a tangible reason—a fallen tree took out the power line, a water pipe is broken, etc. But here in Mozambique sometimes things happen with no apparent cause— the electricity will go out in all the houses at a certain point on the hill and return to only some of them later, the electricity will go out and come back multiple times on a sunny day, the water will come out muddy brown some days and crystal clear other days, the internet in our office will go out and return multiple times.

Baby Anata and our host brother Aiton

11/06/12

A big welcome to Moz 18, the newest group of Peace Corps Trainees who arrived in country a little over a week ago. Despite a small mix-up with their arrival time at the airport and three of their colleagues going home already, they seem to be adjusting well. They live in Namaacha (where Anna and I live) during their ten-week Pre-Service Training, so we have run into them around town a few times. Thankfully, Namaacha is geographically huge and the area where they have their classes and most of them live is about two miles from our house. As much as it’s fun to see other Americans, learning how to do things on their own is a crucial part of their process of learning how to live and work in Mozambique, so I’m glad we aren’t always available to answer their questions. The downside: I have already noticed more people in town greeting me in attempted English, likely thinking I’m part of this new group. I ran into a bunch of them Saturday afternoon, after having gone to Maputo for the first time that day, to practice riding chapas, buy things (namely, phones), and eat some good food. When I saw them, they were incredibly excitement, trying to activate their phones, exchanging numbers, and making contact with family, friends, and significant others for possibly the first time since arriving. One of the trainees returned from talking on the phone with a big smile on his face. “Was your mom able to get through to you?” I asked. “Yes, it was so great to talk to her, she’s such a tiger mom, she’s so funny!” “What’s a tiger mom?” I asked. The two trainees I was talking with chuckled and gave me a look that mixed amusement with a tiny bit of pity, “oh, you weren’t there when this happened.” So they proceeded to explain the tiger mom phenomenon to me, yet another thing that happened since I left. This happens often. Anna and I constantly have to remind people that we’ve been gone from America since fall of 2009—a really long time.

The view from our front gate