My work cont.

So here is a quick rundown of what has been happening in my organization and in my head since I finished with my fist home visits.

First I came to realize that the whole first 2 months at site I was making lots of notes about problems I perceived and solutions I could provide to them. By the end of October I realized that this was totally the wrong approach. It is ironic because I knew from the start that the way that aid agencies and orgs have made big mistakes in the past is when some guy from the west shows up, thinks he knows better than everyone else and then creates a project based on his own assumptions rather than the self identified needs for those in the community. So after doing a lot of thinking and reading (particularly two very good books which I recommend. "Mountains beyond Mountains" and "Pathologies of Power", the first is a biography of a Man named Paul Farmer and the second is a book written by Paul Farmer) I decided that I needed to start from the beginning by conducting a community needs assessment or CNA. Basically it is just a tool to figure out what the biggest problems are for a group of people. But I had a lot of questions about the details and how to go about it as there are many different types of CNAs. Most importantly, would the CNA be for my activistas, the neighborhood in general that the office was located in, or directly for the HIV positive people that my org already was providing services to? Thankfully I had my reconnect meeting coming up, so when I arrived in Maputo I had a list of questions to ask my Peace Corps supervisor. After a really good session of sitting down with her I decided that I would focus the CNA on the individuals that were living with HIV in the surrounding neighborhoods in which my organization operated.

After a lot of time spent back at site trying to get something off the ground and a lot of frustration, I held a couple in prompt to CNA with all the activistas after one of their normal meetings. I asked them if there was one problem that their "patients" had in their lives that was common amongst all of them and was very serious. The answer was the same amongst all of them. The people in our area who are HIV positive don’t have enough food to eat and also don’t have money to pay for transportation to go to the hospital to pick up their antiretrovirals or even to get to the hospital if they have a serious health problem. I realized that CNAs are really more important for outsiders to understand what is going on in a community than the people themselves. The activistas knew what the main problem was and have for some time. First I focused on food. I said to myself, ok we have Identified the problem and now I have to figure out a solution. At first I was really excited about developing some form of food security project, but then the real world happened.

My org got a surprise visit from one of its large American donor organizations. They got all the activistas together and held a big meeting that was for me very awkward. It was very hierarchical and obviously intimidated the activistas, therefore it was not very useful in my personal opinion as an independent observer. Next, a couple of the activistas took some of the representatives from the donor org on some home visits and I went with one group. This was a very depressing experience for two reasons. First, the people we visited were living very hard lives. The first person was a very sweet soft spoken 10 year old boy who was blind in one eye and also HIV positive. The second was a single mother of two who was working 3 house cleaning jobs and barely making enough money to feed her children. The third was a man who was extremely skinny and suffering from something that cased him to walk with a serious limp. The second reason this was all so depressing was because I realized that the plots of land that these people lived on were very very small. They had no chance of being able to grow any significant amount of food in the small patch of sand that their entire family called home.

So I was back at square one, I knew that food was a big problem, especially because HIV positive people need to eat more calories than uninfected people. (Also the antiretroviral drugs hurt peoples stomachs when they are not taken with food, so it is very common that people will not take their meds when they do not have food. This causes an individual to take their meds irregularly which in the long run is even worse than not taking them at all because it increases the chances of creating a drug resistant strain of HIV, which puts the individual and possibly other in much greater risk.) However, I had no clue as to what the solution was and this was extremely frustrating for me so I reached out to some people at the Maputo peace corps office and had some good conversations with them. The country director just so happened to stop by that week for a routine visit, so it was good to run things by him. He validated my frustrations, validated the fact that I live in a very rural spot and also validated that I was doing good work, he also gave me some cheese and dark chocolate from Maputo, so that was very cool. Also I talked the whole thing over with my mom and that helped me get everything organized in my brain. Basically the end result was me realizing that it was my responsibility to help my org find a solution and improve itself but it was the responsibility of the org to actually find the solution, implement a program and “help the people.” This was a big relief as it took the responsibility of having to "save" the whole community of HIV positive people in my area off my shoulders and gave me a better perspective of what my role should be over my period of time here. So I came to the conclusion that my main responsibilities were that of a teacher and a question asker.

I have started out just teaching things that people told me they wanted to learn and then moved on to asking questions about problems and then asking if people wanted me to teach them something I thought could help them. I started giving computer classes to people in the office and a few have really gone from 0 to 100 (well maybe 75 but 75 is 100 in Mozambique). I sat down and helped a colleague make a December calendar of events for the acvtivistas. Right now in the office everything is organized by word of mouth and there is no official calendar or any list of upcoming meetings or activities in the office. So helping people in the office get calendars up has been a small but important project that they have really responded to. I felt really proud when my colleague came into the office one morning and put up a calendar she made on her own the day after I taught her how to do it. I also gave a class to some colleagues and activistas on how to conduct a CNA so that in the future they could go out and do it on their own. So at the next activista meeting they did a CNA with all the activistas (it was basically the same thing I had done and we got the same answers but this time they were doing it, which is the whole point, so that was good.) After everyone had spoken I raised the question as to what they thought the solution should be. I also asked a lot of random questions about stuff that I thought may be possible solutions, and it probably all seemed like stupid questions to them  but it got them thinking about what things could work and what things could not work. By the end of the meeting they decided that the best thing to do would be to organize all their "patients" into groups according to what neighborhood they lived in so they would not have to travel far to see each other. Each group would have an income generating project that they would work on together. Each group would have a project that was best suited to their skills, resources, and abilities. So hypothetically one group in a more urban area would make clothes while some in a more rural area would grow pineapples, and another would raise pigs etc...

So that is more or less where I am: trying to keep them at the lead, finding the solutions on their own. Now I need to just keep asking them questions about how they think it would be best to more forward and what are the next steps. So that is my plan. I think....

Other stuff cont. (dont worry there are no more stories about killing things)

At the end of october I went down to Maputo for the Moz 16 “reconnect” meeting. After being at site for about 3 months everyone in a Peace Corps group reunites for an additional week of training and reflection on our individual site placement situations. The primary goal is to come out of reconnect with a solid idea of what your role in your organization will be. These long sessions took up most of our time, usually 8 in the morning till 6 in the evening.

It was really really good for everyone to see each other again. Everyone in our group gets along sooo well and we all just love each other to death. It is ridiculous and was to cute, but true. So part of reconnect was just all of us running around hanging out with each other and laughing a lot. In addition, we ate a lot. A lot! We took full advantage of the fact that the hotel provided us with free buffets for each meal of the day. This was a welcome relief to the normal diet of rice and beans for dinner and bread and peanut butter for lunch and breakfast. It just so happened that the first day of our conference was also Halloween. Only a few people dressed up that evening. I had the best costume. I dressed up as our country director (the person who is in charge of all Mozambique Peace Corps activities). I still do not know if he has seen the pictures but when he does I think he will have a good laugh. He is a good guy.

On the Thursday of that week we were given some “down time.” We got out of our session at 4 instead of 6. So I walked downtown and accomplished my two main goals. First eat some gelato at one of the two gelato places in Maputo and also all Moz. Check. Two, buy a Portuguese novel that I could begin reading to improve my language skills and vocab. Check, but it cost $40 USD because in Moz novels are apparently luxury items that are imported from Portugal that only the wealthy elite buy, lame.

After getting down with some gelato and novel, I met up with some other volunteers for a beer and some pizza before heading back to the hotel. Upon arriving at the hotel some of the other volunteers suggested we go to the carnival that was two blocks away. A carnival with rides and games and beer in the middle of Maputo at night? That sounds like the right mix between a bad idea and a really good idea. So I went with them to check it out. Unfortunately they were just closing everything down as we got there but we walked around anyways. If you think walking around an empty carnival is a surreal experience, try walking around an empty carnival in the middle of a large third world city. So then we walked home and on the way found a hip little bar/dance place close to our hotel.

The next night was our final night, after having snacks and wine at the country director’s apartment overlooking the Indian Ocean (nice) we all went to the hip bar. It was very interesting to so the wealthier young Maputo scene. It is very ethnically diverse, white, black, Indian, and people of various mixed ethnic backgrounds. There were a lot of ex-pats as well, South African on vacation or who owed businesses n Moz, European and American tourists and transplants. People that were in country for a year or so for work, and others just kinda bumbling around that found themselves in Maputo, Mozambique of all places. Some of the music was American pop, some was popular Mozambique techno. It was our last chance to all be together for another 6 months. So we danced and laughed and all gave each other big hugs goodbye. The next day I took the long bus ride back to my home and got back late and tired, and when I opened my door I saw that my living room floor had lots of lizard poop on it. I was too tired to do much so I just swept it all out, went into my outhouse/showering area and poured a bucket of water over my body, dried off and went to sleep knowing that the next day I would have to thoroughly clean my whole house. And I did, but that really is not much of an interesting story.

Two of the volunteers who are placed in the north took the opportunity to travel up to my city and hang out for a couple days. It was really awesome to hang out with them because they are both absolutely hilarious and really good guys. Unfortunately they had been having a rough time adjusting to the towns they are living in so it was good for them to get some R&R and hang out with some of us in the south. So we did our best to get them some nice western style food and hang out at a couple tourist sports. One evening we all had dinner at a volunteer’s house in the middle of town and when I showed up they were both passed out on the couches and bright red. They had spent toooo much time at the beach and were in a miserable state. But on the up side the food was really good.

In the middle of November I went to visit another volunteer in a town in a more inland, dry part of the country. Getting there required me to take a 3 hour trip on a really really really bad dirt road away from the national highway. The scenery was nice, all really typical African bush, very green, lots of butterflies, reed huts every once and a while, large Baobab trees and oh ya… land mines. Mozambique was basically in a state of war from 1968 to 1994 and there are still a lot of land mines laying around. But the good news is that most of the fields are clearly marked. So on my chapa ride through the bush every once and a while you would see a whole row of sticks along the side of the road that had been painted red and white and some had animal skulls on top. This is how you know where not to take a bathroom break.

Eventually the road just ends at a small roundabout and you look over and you are in the middle of what looks like an old west town except it is in Africa and all the buildings are made of cement instead of wood, but same basic layout. One main strip of road filled with general stores, bars, hair cutting places, hardware, and then a central market place. The rest is surrounded by bush and cattle farms. Normally, they get 3 hours of electricity a day. When I was there, there was none at all. It was really hot there and I look at that as being the official start of my first African summer, because when I returned to my site it started getting really hot here too.  So the down side of that is that it is just terribly hot right now and no air conditioning anywhere. The up side is that its Mango season :-)mmmmmmm ya! I eat one or two mangos a day now. And let me tell you. That is pretty awesome, and I can get 4 for about 40 cents.

The next week I took a trip down to Xai Xai where a bunch of volunteers from Moz 16 met up because it was one volunteer’s birthday. Originally I was not going to go because I had been away from my site the week before, but I had a very stressful week at work (I will cover that in “my work cont.” post) so I decided, to hell with it, im going to have a couple beers with some friends and…drum roll….eat at the Indian restaurant there. Yes, there are plenty of Indians in my town but not a single one has decided to start an indian restaurant and since Indian food is my favorite I went straight there before I even said hi to any of my friends. It was soooooooooooo good. I ate lamb curry. I think this mostly rice and beans diet I have been living with has seriously changed the amount of meat I can eat because I was really full after eating about a half of what I normally could eat. But I still ate it all and washed it down with a chai tea. That was an amazing lunch. Then we all hung out on the beach followed by getting together and making ginger black bean tacos for dinner. It was just a really nice time to hang out and talk with some good people and eat good food. I am becoming more and more aware that my general attitude is very dependent on the quality of food I eat and how much I eat.    

So on the food theme: the following weekend was thanksgiving! We held thanksgiving at the house of a volunteer that lives in the center of my town because she has a full stove and oven, and place for people to sleep. Basically I arrived just before 11 in the morning and we started snacking and then people just went up to the stove in shifts. Some people had bought a large plastic jug of cheap wine and some spices. They wanted to make mulled wine because it reminded them of autumn but were not totally sure how to make it. As it so happens, I love making German mulled wine, so I took it on and spent a solid 3 hours making one batch after another of mulled wine. It was good, and now we know the best thing to do with the nasty cheap wine they sell allover the place here but no one wants to drink. As the day went on we continued making one course after another.  Some people would make some stuff and then we would eat it and then other people would make other stuff and then we would eat that, We did not get to the main course of deep fried chicken, garlic rosemary mashed potatoes (made by yours truly), mac and cheese and cranberry sauce until like 7:30 at night. Then we had pumpkin ice cream with ginger cookies. I was so full I was only able to eat half my desert and that was sad because the pumpkin ice cream and ginger cookies were home made and really amazing.

The following weekend I went back up to Vilankulo, really it is my favorite beach I have ever been to. It is just gorgeous. Though the two highlights were really unrelated to the beach. When I first arrived I had lunch with a friend at a cute little café that reminded me a lot of beach side cafes in smaller towns on the coast between LA and Monterey. It was really cool to sit down and have a nice bowl of pasta with vegetables and feta cheese and then enjoy an espresso and then read a few articles in a recent news magazine. It just kinda took me back home for a bit. Like as if I were living a normal American life again. It was a good two hours.

The next day I went to the sending off party for a volunteer who is apart of the last group of volunteers to be sent home of the group that arrived in 2009. It was an interesting experience to be one of the new people who has a solid 19 months left saying goodbye to someone who has completed their two years. It also made me think about what it will be like for me when I am on the opposite end of the peace corps time line. I am sure it will be very strange to look back on a completed 2 years of living and working in Mozambique.  I really do not have any clue what my thoughts and feelings will be 19 months from now. I just know that I will probably be hoping I have a job lined up for when I go back home.

Work and other stuff

My work (why I flew half way around the world)

In mid October I went on a couple home visits with an activista. It was the first time I was able to see the on the ground work that my organization was involved in and what in effect I was there to support. We visited two homes. The first was the home of a woman who was extremely skinny and elderly. The activista had a good relationship with her ad they talked about general family happenings and the activista then moved on to making sure that the woman had been taking her anti retrovirals. We then gave her a kit of health supplies (soap, condoms, bleach for water purification, and a health handbook with lots of different information about preventing disease). This kit was a part of a USAID project to dispense these health info booklets along with some basic supplies. There was a young boy living with the woman, I am still not sure if he was her son or not as she seemed much too old to have give birth to him but she could have been younger than her appearance, so the activista registered him in a program for vulnerable children so he could receive some food since his care taker was obviously burdened with the task of caring for herself. The second home we visited was relatively uneventful and the individual was fairly healthy. I did lean that the neighborhood next to mine was occupied primarily by people from another part of the province and they moved there a few years ago when there was a large flood and some nuns built 60 houses for these people so the neighborhood is now called “sesenta casas.” Apparently the whole area that I live in (the outskirts of the city) has only recently been built within the past 5 years. Before that it was all just coconut and cashew trees. That would explain why my house is in such a rural area but at the same time close to the city.

The next day I went on a trip with the same activista to a school where she gives weekly classes on health and HIV prevention. The school was kinda out in the bush and was very simple. it was maybe 4 large reed huts with palm leaf roofs and all the children sat on the ground as the teachers stood in front of the class with a blackboard. I was much more of a distraction than a help as all the kids wanted to do was just stare at the white guy. SO I played two games with them that are linked with teaching HIV prevention and education and it all went fairly well. Then the teachers invited me to the 10 year anniversary party of the school, I said I would be happy to, they said great and that because I was not a student I would have to pay about $10 USD to attend the party (what?!?!, I could go to a fancy restaurant in the city and have a nice meal with that much money). Sensing some strange scheme to get money out of the American I told them that I would get back to them.

Other stuff

I had some interesting run ins with wild life in October. Of course there is another rat story: One night I woke up to hear my rat trap go off, when I checked it there was no rat but three whiskers attached to it. The rat had just barely avoided death. I think I set the trap too sensitive. SO I reset it but found no rat the next morning. The following night, just as I was settling into bed I saw the rat trying to claw its way into my plastic chest where I keep things like pasta and beans and rice. I realized that the rat had learned not to take the tasty food sitting on the rat trap. I then realized that this rat would never be killed by the rat trap and I had to kill it any way I could or accept it as a new room mate for some time. So, as it was occupied with trying to claw through plastic, I gently got out of my bed and grabbed the broom next to me. I crouched down and snuck up behind the rat very, very quietly. Then I lifted the broomstick and quickly brought it down on the rat’s body. I had thought that the rat would try to run, but I must have broken some bones or something. So I smacked it a couple more time to put it out of its misery. Then as I started to slide it away with the stick and towards the door it woke up and started coughing blood. SO I guess I didn’t kill it I guess I just knocked it out, so I slid it out of my house as quickly as I could as is was convulsing and spitting up blood on my floor. Finally I got it on the veranda where a few more well placed smacks to the head finished it off. Oh how I yern for the days when the most disgusting animal killing experience I had to deal with was sawing off the head of a chicken.

My other wild life I have had to deal with has been scorpions which I have encountered in my bathroom twice now but thankfully (knock on wood) no stings as I was able to scare them away with rocks. Also I had a flea plant a sac of eggs in one of my toe. I had no clue what it was, just a half bubble of dead skin raised from my toe and all the skin around it was numb. The peace corps Dr. I talked to over the phone told me that any Mozambiquan house wife would know how to remove it with a needle. So I went to a Mozambiquan hose wife and she showed up at my house not with a needle but a twig that had been sharpened to a point. I took out a needle and was like “This would be better right, nice, clean, sanitary needle that I washed in bleach?” “No.” she replied, the pointy stick was in her mind obviously the better option, so I washed the pointy stick in bleach and let her go at my toe with it. So she tore off the dead skin and revealed a large sack filled with black puss and then she pulled it out with a dirty, sandy piece of plastic. Then I poured bleach over the crater in my toe. good times.