May through June 2012 (Half way point reached!)

Japanese embassy visit:

Several Months ago I facilitated the communication between the small community NGO which I have been placed with and the foreign aid department of the Japanese embassy to Mozambique. The discussions ended with my org proposing the construction of two HIV/AIDS information centers. After a few months of deliberation a guy from the Japanese embassy came out to meet us to make a preliminary assessment as to whether or not the plan is realistic and worth funding.

The Japanese man spoke much better English than Portuguese so I helped with some of the communication. He actually had dual citizenship because he was born in the US while his parents were working there. So, after he graduated college he did Peace Corps El Salvador. So it was cool getting to talk with him and compare notes.

             My org was really good about contacting local government and community networks for the preliminary assessment. We spoke with several levels of local government and health care. Then we went to the proposed construction sites and spoke with the heads of households from families that lived close by. Almost none of these people spoke Portuguese. The heads of household would speak their local language, one person would translate that into Portuguese and then I would translate that into English. My supervisor at my org speaks a different local language so he was as lost as I was.

When we had finished with our last community meeting the neighborhood head asked the Japanese man to take a look at their closest health center. We went through some small, rough dirt roads until we arrived at a very large hospital complex. Most of the buildings were abandoned, only one was really in use. Even the building in use was in heavy disrepair, there were rats everywhere and a couple holes in the walls big enough for a child to walk through. There was no electricity and no running water, all the water was carried in from a well. There were two nurses that work there and one of them only works 3 days a week. There were two operating beds and two beds with mosquito nets over them that are used for pregnant women. Those 4 beds are the only furniture. All the surgical tools are kept in a bowl of water. They are cleaned with plain water, no money for soap and no money for any type of anti-septic. They basically just didn't have money for anything, there was one cupboard and it was almost completely empty. It basically seems that the only things they do have are left over equipment from the colonial era of the late 60s. Ironically this spot (were no one is educated enough to speak Portuguese and they have a heavily under resourced health center) is about 20 min drive from possibly the most expensive tourist town in Mozambique where there are very large and very extravagant resorts for wealthy tourists. When I went into the nice town it was like a whole other world. And then I went to “Beer Olympics”

-Beer Olympics:
For one weekend each year all the peace corps volunteers from all over Mozambique get together at a beach side hostel for what is officially known as “Beach Beer Olympics.” For some it is the greatest weekend of excitement out of the year. For others it is a worthless endeavor that embodies all the reasons for which they did NOT join peace corps. For the Peace Corps Mozambique HQ administration it is the shame of our presence as an active development and cultural exchange program. The idea is thus: everyone from all over the country joins up and rents out the whole hostel right next to the beach. Then we have a series of drinking game competitions where teams are divided between the North, central, or southern parts of Mozambique. The region that wins the most becomes the champion for the year and gets a trophy.

I had no idea what to really expect. There were lots of images of debauchery and loud drunken 20 somethings  running up and down the beach being obnoxious. In reality, the weekend was pretty tranquil. Each day by 10 am everyone was sitting in the water with beer in hand, that lasted all day with the exception of eating lunch. By the time the sun had gone down, everyone was so tired from drinking beer and sitting in the sun all day that most people went to sleep by 9 pm. Then they just got up in the morning and did the same thing promising themselves that they would stay out latter the next night and really go for it. The first night I think a 10th of the group stayed out late and the second night maybe a 5th. In the end it was almost disappointing how un debauchery the weekend was. But at the end of the weekend I was happy having been given the opportunity to chill out on the beach and relax with some friends for a couple days.

The good bye party
one weekend a group of friends all got together at the site of an outgoing volunteer couple. They had spent 2 and a half years in Mozambique together and lived in a small town as a school teacher and a community health promoter. They organized a big feast and party for all of their friends in Peace Corps and in their town. In truth, where they actually lived was on the grounds of a Methodist compound (where the school was also located). This compound was built by Germans so it looks like a small Bavarian village built on top of a hill in the middle of African bush landscape. All the buildings have high, A frame, tile roofs and stone walls and in the corner is a stone Gothic style chapel.

All the food was cooked out of giant metal pots that were cooked over wood fires. I helped cut potatoes before they were thrown in a giant pot of hot oil, they were quickly taken out so they could not get crispy, and then  placed to the side to cool down because Mozambiquans prefer fries to be soft and cool.

After the meal various members of the community gave going away gifts to the two exiting volunteers. This was the most touching part of the evening as everyone got up and sang the same song and then one by one each of the members of the community gave their gifts and said their goodbyes.Then everyone went back to the house of the couple and put on loud music and danced all together for several hours. There was a lot of “sura” (a wine made from the sap of coconut trees) and the Mozambiquans were loving it. The peace corps volunteers mostly just tried to keep it down, its a little foul tasting. One of the men from the community had too much sura and he was refusing to leave when the party was over. After some time of arguing, myself an another guy convinced him to leave, but ten min later he came back through the rickety side gate. Then after some more arguing we got him to leave and we built a barricade out of random pieces of wood and metal. At the least it would have made a lot of noise if anyone would have tried to get in again. Victory :)

Birthday BBQ and Film Festival

There is an English volunteer in my city as well. He is with basically the English version of the peace corps. He has been a really great friend over the past few months, so when it came to be his birthday I wanted to do something awesome. So I decided to make American style BBQ chicken for him. I had a grill previously made for my birthday, so we set that up in his backyard, a friend made some home made BBQ sauce and we had a legitimate BBQ feast amongst 10 or so people. Unfortunately I took the chicken out too soon at first and several people bit into some raw flesh...oops.

The next day we went to the Film festival that was taking place in town. There is a small, run down, one screen theater in town. The inside is all falling apart but back in the 60s it must have been a really cool art deco interior with geometric lamp chandeliers and broad designs along the walls. Once a year for the past 3 years there has been a three day film festival in town. They played only African made films and they are in Portuguese or have Portuguese subtitles. I learned a lot about an organization started by an Austrian musician and a UK couple. It is called “Positivo” and they do social change work through music, where the lyrics are in effect written by the population that is being targeted for behavior change. One example is high risk teenagers writing out why they felt uncomfortable taking the HIV test, then writing counter arguments to those reasons. Then the musicians make lyrics out of the counter arguments and then a song and then they give out the CDs for free to the teenagers in the area.

I was very proud of myself because I and a fellow Peace Corps volunteer gave a small presentation (in Portuguese) on the HIV prevalence in our Provence and the need for prevention and also reduction of stigma and acceptance of HIV positive people. It was a little awkwardly pulled off because audience participation is not really “a thing” in Mozambique and my Portuguese is also far from perfect. But it worked out in the end :)

Bush Fire

At the end of May every year there is a music festival at an out door venue in the middle of rural Swaziland. It is called “Bushfire.” It is a bit of a peace corps tradition to go down to Bushfire. Most years, peace corps volunteers from Swaziland, South Africa and Mozambique all meet up there. (However this year the South African peace corps volunteers were not allowed to come because there was a small chance of a national transit strike in Swaziland) It is a three day long festival of African Musicians and African arts. Its like cochela but all african and much smaller in scale. I got there by getting a ride in the back of a pickup truck from a friend. We left my city at 5:30 in the morning. A friend of mine and myself were in the bed of the pickup with a couple blankets and wearing winter hats. Its winter time now and with the wind chill it was like 40 degrees, which is colder than I have felt in over a year. So there we were freezing our asses off in the back of a pickup truck getting beaten up by the wind with the Mozambican landscape passing us by as the sun came up over the mists of the bush. It was uncomfortable but fun. By the time we got to our lunch break the sun was in full force and it was hot as hell in the back of the truck. We made good time and made it to a large city in the middle of Swaziland before dark. It was my first time leaving Mozambique since my arrival almost one year prior. Yay! I had been to Swaziland four and a half years ago when I was studying abroad in Durban. The country has become noticeably more wealthy. Or it could just be that Swaziland is a bit more developed than mozambique. I got a little jolt of culture shock when I went into the big supermarket and it was even more fancy than 80% of grocery stores in the US. I was even able to buy some cans of real Guinness! For the past year I have only been able to drink Mozambican bear (of which there are three brands) and one type of South African beer. I really miss good European and American beer. I miss that the most of anything. Good Mexican food is a close second. Finally we made it to the Area where Bushfire was taking place and to our camp site. We got there at 5:30 pm, so it was exactly a 12 hour journey. We stayed in a hostle in the middle of a wilderness park so one one night I saw a small pack of hyenas 30 feet from my tent! It was very cool but later I realized that is was probably not safe. It is Winter in Africa now and Swaziland is semi mountinus so it was surprisingly cold. At night I was wrapped up in a blanket, a sleeping bag, sweat pants and a sweat shirt. By the evening everyone was drinking cups of hot mulled wine. Ironically when you enter the venue you are encouraged to by “drink tickets” but these are only usable for beer and not hot wine (what a scam). In general the large out dour venue with lots of strange cement sculptures had a very cool vibe. At one point a few 20 foot puppets from Mozambique did a performance. They were made in my city so I kinda knew one of the puppeteers. All the peace corps volunteers were really excited about the food. There was Indian food, Sushi, Italian pasta and pizza, Mediterranean sandwiches etc... Ironically the music itself was nothing special. There were a few really good exceptions, but most of the bands were easy listening semi jazz semi rock. A lot of it was Swazi christian music groups (they are very popular there). In general it was a good time.

Trouble in the Office

One day I was told that the organization I am working with was going to hold a group meeting. I thought that this would be great because we could identify weaknesses and strengths and try and improve the organizational processes. What it really ended up being was a lot more immature. Apparently the maid that cleans the office in the mornings has been sneaking off to have sex with the guy that owns the store next dour when his wife is away. It has been a big topic of gossip around the neighborhood. So my boss decided that he needed to put an end to it because he felt it reflected poorly on the organization. So an hour long scolding of the maid commenced and I felt like shooting myself because of the awkwardness of the situation. But at the end of the meeting it came out that there was a lot of instances where people had been leaving the office without telling anyone and no one knows how it get in contact with them. So I proposed the creation of a sign out sheet. If someone one is leaving the office for a full day or more they write down when they will be leaving, where they are going and when they will return. They thought that was a great idea so I made one up and stuck it on the wall. If it actually gets used im going to step forward an claim having accomplished some organizational development. Go team Jack! In addition I downloaded some type learning software on their computer and made a folder of PDFs with information on possible future projects.

The woman who died from stre

One day I was sitting around on my porch. It was a spontaneous holiday that day. The new Mayor of the city was getting sworn in so the local government decided to announce a holiday. But the maid and the nurse who works with my organization did not know so they showed up for work anyways. Then the Gardener showed up at my house in the middle of the day with the Maid. They told me that the mother in law of the Gardener was not talking, that they were not sure if she was sick or just sad, so because I was a health volunteer I should go over there and see if there was anything wrong with her. I decided that I was highly unqualified for this responsibility. Thankfully the nurse was still in the office so I spoke with her and she decided to come with us. So we set off into the poor outskirts of town not 15 min walk from my house.

             The house we approached was made entirely of palm leaves. There were five young children standing around in tattered clothes. There was a small table, a pot and a metal stand over a fire pit for the cooking. This was more or less the entirety of this family's possessions. The nurse went inside the house to check on the woman. Two minutes later the nurse came out shaking her head. “Its very bad,very very bad, very serious. This is now my responsibility.” The woman was suffering from advanced hypertension which causes paralysis in random parts of the body. For her, it had caused her face to go stiff. The woman was unable to move her mouth or even blink. In general she was very weak. The nurse got one of the neighbors to take the grandchildren away and care for them that afternoon. She then told the Gardner to get some men from the neighborhood to get a door or plank of wood to carry the woman to the main road where she could get a bus to the hospital. She told me that if she got to the hospital they could take care of her and in time she would completely recover. She also told me that there was nothing really left to be done, that it was now in the hands of her neighborhood to get her to the hospital, so I might as well go back home. So I went home assuming that everything was going to be taken care of. Four hours later the Maid came around the office and told me that the woman had died of dehydration. Her mouth and eyes had apparently completely dried out and she had diarrhea as well. No one in the community wanted to help get her to the road because her illness scarred them. On top of that no one wanted to give the 14 MTZ (mozambiquan currency 1USD=28 MTZ) to pay for her bus ride from the main road to the hospital.
Later I found out the full story of this situation. The daughter of the dead woman was married to a man a couple years ago and had five children with him. Then he found out that she was having an affair with the Gardener at my office so he left her. When he left her the Gardener married her and she moved to his farm plot several miles away. But apparently Mozambiquans don't do stepchildren. So she left her five children to live with her mother (the woman that died). So the grandmother spent a year and a half taking care of her grandchildren struggling to survive with little to no resources. The stress of this lifestyle built up and physically manifested as hypertension (really really bad blood pressure), and untreated it turned into advanced hyper tension and that turned into face paralysis and death. I am not sure what ever happened to the children. There was some talk of them going to move in with an aunt or an uncle but it is possible that they have been sent to an orphanage. They may be the saddest part of this situation because they have effectively been abandoned.

Work

Work has been kind of slow. There is a woman who works in my office who makes arts and crafts and is trying to sell them. I am trying to see if there is any way I can help her expand her business. She is very smart and she is also teaching other women how to make the different crafts. I could see her shop as becoming a big woman's community empowerment project. Additionally, my org just got a very large project proposal accepted. They will be conducting HIV education focused on preventing the spread of the virus to young girls. I just finished up a small report covering what the curriculum should include and what learning tools should be used. I did a bunch of research first, wrote up a report in English and then translated it into Portuguese. It was a lot of work for a piece of paper with 20 bullet points but it was really fulfilling to have completed it and have something to show for my work. It felt a lot like the research and report writing I used to do in college and grad school. So it was cool to get to flex those mussels again. After peace corps I think I could see myself doing something along those lines and being happy (think tank or government research kind of thing). On another note. I am at the half way point of my service. I arrived in Mozambique over a year ago and I have one more year to go before I become a “normal American.” A person in peace corps training came up to my site for a few days to get an idea of things. Her group will start working in mid August. They will be with us for our second year and us with them for their first. Of the new people I met, they seemed pretty cool. So it will be fun to hang out with some new people over the next year.

too much time has gone by since my last post

December

·Christmas: Went to a beach called Linga Linga with 15 other volunteers. We basically had our own private tropical beach with a view of both the ocean and the bay. We cooked all of our meals over an open flame. We did a secret Santa present swap and generally we just hung out and enjoyed each others company

January

·New years was cool. I went to tofo beach with some friends, we hung out on the beach yet some more (I got two painful sun burns over the Christmas- new yeas period). On new years eve itself we went out to the beach with a huge crowd of people and listened to the typical Mozambique house music blasting from big speakers. Then when it hit midnight lots of people started to set off their own fire works all over the beach. It was really pretty but it also felt like a war zone because you never knew when one was going to go off right in front of your face. A lot of people were setting them off at low angles so they would explode only 3 feet above most people's heads. That was a little scary. In general it was a good way to kick off the new year. Life was good, everything in my life was more or less taken care of and going well. God hates it when that happens.

·The rest of january pretty much sucked.  I got a really bad fever of 102.75 for almost a week. My brother ended up in the hospital after falling 4 stories, there was a hurricane that hit northern Mozambique. There was also a bunch of other random crap that cumulatively made me feel like the rug had been pulled out from under me. This was definitely the hardest time for me to be living by myself out in the middle of nowhere. What got me through was my other Moz 16 friends who really had my back.

Febuary

·I went to Mapuo to take the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) to see what it was like and how I would do. I got a better idea of what to study for in preparing for this test. I did not pass but I came very very close and I did not do any studying. So I will take it again in a year and if (fingers crossed) I pass that time , then I will be able to take the oral exam in DC right when I get out of Peace corps in 2013.

·Also, a good friend from Training came to my town for a weekend. Myself and the other volunteer at my site showed him around and had a good time having drinks on the bay as we watched the sun set followed by eating a plate of two T-bone steaks, salad and fries for less than 5 USD.

March

-Early March started off with “Bro Summit.” There are not many guys in peace corps. I thinkin Mozambique about a forth or a third is male. So we had  big weekend for all the dudes to hang out with each other, talk shit, play video games, at pizza, involve ourselves in any number of competitions. Also we went swimming at night in a spot that had a bunch of bio luminescence. When I ran through the water it looked like I was a super hero :)

-My real birtday: I basically just ran around town with a few friends listening to music, drinking J&B on the rocks and eating all the nice Tourist food and I normally don't waste my money on (like a steak and blue cheese sandwich)

-My birthday Party was a big cook out in the sandy area outside my house. I invited 10 friends over and we all grille everything and ate over a table we pulled outside. I had a metal worker create a large rectangular grill. I dug a pit and had it rest over two cinder blocks and threw a bunch of charcole in the pit. I went to the Market and bought a large fish that had been caught that day. They gutted it and cut it up for me right there and I took the pieces back to my house in plastic bags. It was cooked in a butter, garlic, rosemarry,lemon sauce. We made potatoes and vegtables and all of it ened up getting cooked in the same sauce. It was great, real butter it difficult to get a hold of so it was a real treat. Everyone brought stuff and pitched in and it was a lot of fun. Also an expat friend brought over arugala and Sees candy and ice cream. That was pretty awesome..

-project design and management conference: All the Moz 16 volunteers who live in Southern Mozambique had our PDM conferencye at the end of the Month. It was really great to see some volunteers I had not seen in a while and for everyone to be together but in general the conference kinda sucked. It was really hot those days. The conference room had no AC, the water and power kept going in and out. My org sent me with a guy that does not consistently work with the org. He was great and he came up with a great idea for a project my org could do, but I did not know him very well and I have not really seen him since in order to follow up with his project idea. Honestly, most of what I have been doing has been helping some of the people in the office learn how to write up reports and forms using Word and Excel. I also got one person to write up a monthly schedule for the HIV home care project that is currently going on. She has consistently been writing up these monthly schedules for the past 5 months and it had really helped out around the office and helped the people doing the ome care visits. So, I feel really proud of myself for helping to initiate this new practice, but now there is not anything more for me to do because she has totally taken over 9which is the best posible outcome)

April

I went to a town called Panda in Southern Mozambique. It was really cool. It was a beautiful ride in with lots of wild flowers and a view of rolling hills on one side and a vast plain on the other. The area was hard hit by the war for independence and the civil war. One woman told me how one side durring the civil war would raid Panda. They burned down her school so then she learned how to shoot an AK47 and through grenades so the town could defend itself from the following raids. The town had electricity and running water befor independence but building the town back up had been long coming. Electricity should finally return back to the town within the next few months. There are a lot of old torn up colonial buildings. For some reason it is really beautiful to see some of these old bombed out colonial buildings all over grown with plants. The main road has some of these run down buildings and a growing number of new government buildings that have recently been put up in the past 5 years. Really, the current town center is now off of the main road where there is a large maze of market stores made of cement block buildings and reed shacks. People sell everything there and it is where the one restaurant is and a few simple bars. Somehow they are able to run refrigerators off of gas tanks, no electricity. I don't get it. 

I guess my plans now are just to focus on trying to get something back at square one with my org and trying to get some project started. I am going to try and stay at my site more and get to know some of my neighbors better. But honestly, I am probably going to break down and head up to central or northern Mozambique within the next couple months. The unknown areas, towns and cities are, for lack of a better phrase, calling to me. I also think I am going to take some more trips to the beach close by just to chill out every once and a while. The strange thing is that it is very stressful to not be doing much when you really do want to be doing and accomplishing something.

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.

A few short stories from Mozambique.

The Activistas (ActiveeSHtaSH)

The organization I am working with recently started a program for home based care of HIV positive people in several districts of my province. When someone tests as HIV positive they are added to a list that the hospital keeps for people that are to receive anti retroviral medications. The activistas are health advocates of sorts. They visit the people who have tested positive and count out their pills and help them make sure that all the propor medications are being taken regularly and in addition check up on the general state of the household. For example, if there is a child that is in need of food then the activista places the child on a vulnerable child food distribution program.

Recently my organization trained a group of about 30 activistas to begin this program.  I was observing several of the days of the training so they all have gotten to know me. Now every couple weeks they hold meetings in my office to hand in paper work and organize themselves into groups. I have spent time trying to learn different Gitonga words from them and singing and dancing to Mozambiquan songs. Mozambiquans are very energetic people so on one hand when I am actively trying to talk and joke around with them they are very happy, but if I am trying to read something or I just don’t feel like talking a lot they all think I am either sick or very angry. It is a very strange situation to be I when you have a group of people telling you to immediately go to the hospital because you do not feel like dancing today. But in general I feel very happy to have gotten so integrated with this group of 30 activistas. It is with them that I hope to learn the most and achieve the most over my next 22 months (I have now completed my second month at site). My time has mostly bee spent making observations about the org and the activistas and how I may be able to contribute to their success. However I recently realized that I have not yet just sat down with a group of activistas and asked them what their greatest challenges are in trying to help the HIV positive people they work with. I felt very silly having made scores upon scores of notes about my perceptions of what the greatest challenges are but I never just sat down and asked any of the activistas. SO this is my next goal. Wish me luck.

Home

A couple weeks ago I took a 6 hour journey up the coast to Vilankulo, a beautiful beach side large town. The town is in an area of rolling dunes filled with coconut trees right up against the ocean. At low tide a very large sandbar is above the water and you can walk over a huge area as if the ocean had just dried up. It is a very surreal experience. in the close distance there are several islands that make for a pretty view. They also block the rough ocean waves making it nice and calm swimming water. Also, this gives the water a wonderful bright blue color. I was never one that yearned to be relaxing on the beach in some exotic tropical location, but I have to admit, it was pretty nice.  Then when it was time to go I took my 6 hour journey back to my home and when I got to my city and started walking around I realized that things were starting to actually feel like home here. For a while I would step out of my house and look at ll the trees and houses and people that were around me and I felt that I was in a place that was very foreign and it makes you feel kinda small. But now I feel more and more that I am at some level connected to the rest of it. Now, when I look up at the stars that are totally different from the stars back home, it just doesn’t feel that intimidating anymore.

No electricity, no water and I think I smell a rat

Last weekend the electricity went out for 42 hours and when the electricity goes out so does the water. I had a large bucket of water and that was what would last be, but of course I never knew when the electricity would come back and therefore the running water. I spent most of my time reading because there was not a whole lot else to do ad the first day all I ate was raisins peanuts and crackers. I had some shrimp in the fridge that I was worried about going bad. I had dropped a significant amount of cash for these shrimp and I wanted to make the meal worth it but by lunch time on Sunday I was just worried about getting to eat them at all. my stove is electric so the only way for me to cook them was to build a fire, so I dug a pit in my year and filled it wit the various materials of a coconut tree and the whole thing went up in flames and burned itself out really really quickly. This was disappointing for two reasons, firstly, it meant that I was going to have to collect a lot more coconut tree material and use it more carefully in order to cook my shrimp. Secondly, this was a little surprising because many many people in this area build their entire houses out of coconut leaves. So basically my whole neighborhood is a tinderbox. Eventually got a fire going and cooked my shrimp, they ended up being a little dry but they were good enough to satisfy my hunger for something that was not peanuts, raisins and crackers. Ironically about 2 hours latter the electricity came back. I was so ecstatic to just be able to take a bucket bath! I was particularly interested in just getting everything in my house clean as well. I had had a rat a few days prior and I did not want another one to come into my house, attracted by any filth that accumulated.

A few nights prior I was woken up by the sound of some silver wear falling from my table. I turned on the light and saw a small but extremely fast rat dart from my table to the wall and then out under the tin roof, all in about 1.5 seconds. I locked down anything with a food sent but I could still hear the rat enter my house as soon as I got in bed, and then as soon as I turned on the light it disappeared again. After repeating this a few times I resigned myself to just go to sleep. The next day I bought a rat trap and set it out with a piece of tomato as bait. I remembered hearing the rat enter the house that night and thinking to myself, you are sooo F*&ked. I woke up the next morning thinking to myself, that’s funny I did not hear the rat trap slap. I went over to the trap and it was exactly as I left it the evening before except for one thing. The tomato was gone. So, I experimented with setting the rat trap supper supper sensitive (almost destroying my hand at one point), until I got to the point that I could set the trap so that it would go off if I dropped a small piece of paper on it. I set it with another piece of tomato (who knew that rats love tomato so much), and the whole day I was absolutely filled with the anticipation of the kill. I wanted to get this guy so bad by now. During my lunch break I went back to my house just to check on the rat trap, no dice rats usually don’t come out in the middle of the day. Then after work I took a bucket bath and when I came back inside, there it was, the rat trap bar had hit it exactly on the neck, a perfect kill. Right or wrong, I was very satisfied.

ps when I chose this backgroud it was a little bit ironic because it was so cliche tropical, but now I look at the palm trees in the background of this blog I I say to myself, "Hey thats like my site."

Highlights of the Past Month

Here are a few highlights of my past month and more or less my first month at site.

In the beginning of August my whole group had to say goodbye to our host families so we held a big party with lots of meat. We gave our host family members presents and they gave us neat capilanas (shirts for the guys). Then on the last night we packed up all our stuff and left our town at 6 in the morning as we waved goodbye to our host families and got on the big bus for Maputo.

We then had our swear in ceremony. Our group chose a capilana pattern that we would all make one piece of cloathng out of. A lot of the girls went all out taking the oportunity to live out their "project runway" fantasies of designing their own dresses. I just showed up at the tailor with a button up collared T-shirt in one hand and the capilana material in the other and asked the talor to just make me an identical of the t-shirt. Some of the other  guys had bow-ties mad (mad props).

So we all arrived at the house of the Ambassador of the US to Mozambique decked out in our capilana gear sitting in the hot sun on some plastic chairs , in the back yard overlooking the indian ocean, with a bout 100 people looking at us, most of whom we did not know. Most of us latter commented that it felt like graduation but sadly our families were not there. So then some people got up and spoke about their wishes for our future success  and finally the Ambasador came to the podium and had us repeat after her as we swore into the Peace Corps to become full fledged volunteers (woohoo!). Then we stood up and all sang our rendition of "Home." I forget the artist but its a good song and fairly recent and you should check it out and i will try to get a link to the video of our performance to my mom and on my facebook.  Then we stuffed our faces with lots of tasty orders before we were shuffled out and onto the bus to take us to our hotel. (Which had a very nice view of the whole city from my room, very cool) 

  All of the people that went up North left the next day so the night after the swear in we all had to say our sad goodbyes as our very united group was split in 2. Those of us who have site placements in the south had the weekend to explore Maputo and enjoy such things as gelato, expresso, thai food, indian food, and fresh lunch at the Maputo fish market which is a large open air fish market with restaurants attached that will sell you the fresh fish grilled and served with rice and hot sauce and salad.

We then had our supervisors conferance where we met the people that would be our organizational bosses for the next two years. The conference lasted two days and was in the hotel where we were staying. One of my friends described it as being like a blind date that lasts 2 days and you know your stuck with each other for the next 2 years. So it was a little odd at first but on the up side the food was very good at the hotel and fore some reason fancy places in Mozambique have the best chocolate moose ever.

Then I had my big drive up to my site. It took a while but it was very beautiful to see the landscape turn from the typical dry African bush  to a luch tropical setting with lots of Mango and coconut trees. We got there aty night and I did not have a materes to sleep on so my org placed me in a mozambiquan version of a hotel for the night. Unfortunatly on the way from my new home to the motel we got rear ended by a van but there was not serious damage. Then I got to the hotel at took a shower and then I realized that the wires attached to the small watter heater were touching the watter and I was getting a little electrocuted every time I touched the faucet. So I stopped taking a shower. Then my supervisor took me to a place to get some dinner. The woman behind the bar did not speak much portugese but she really liked me so she kept speaking in Bitonga to my supervisor and he was translating everything she said to me in portugese.  More or less she invited me to spend the night at her house because she thought it was really important for me to learn gitonga  and she promised me that  she was a good language teacher and I would learn really quickly. I told her that I was sorry but I need to focus on learning portugese right now. This was a very odd conversation to have using my new boss as the translator.

The next day I woke up and had a breakfast of cashew nuts, cake and overly sweet tea that was provided to me by the motel. This was a bad combo for my stomach for some reason and durring my trip into the city to buy everything I would need I ended up throwing up in the street in front of one of the shops. (to this day if I ever go back to that shop they people working there will start making fun of me, I guess that is a form of community integration).
All in all my city is very beautiful it has lots of run down but pretty buildings and an unbeatable naturallandscape. I live in the rural outskirts of the city (about 20 min bus ride) so it was very disorienting to go between a nice western style store or restaurant to houses with roofes made of palm leaves. Ingeneral it just took a while to feel ajusted. Just getting a rutine together for making sure yuo have enough time to do laundry, take a bath, wash dishes, cook your meals, clean your house, do all your shopping and be in the office several hours a day is very difficult. Its alot like cmping, everything just takes a long time to do. Also, I had rats at first but I killed them with rat poison (which is called "Medicine  for  rat killing" here). It was pretty gross placing the stiff little bodies of the ratts in plastic bags, even their tails were totally stiff.

My first week my organization introduced me to the neighborhood by holding a big community gathering where all the older men and women showed up to meet me. It was classic Peace Corps. I was sitting in a circle with all these people that live off the land and basically live the same way the people have lived here for the past few hundred years. They asked me random question and I answered and then they all sang a song and I went around shaking everyones hand and that was that. The other days my org took me around the city and introduced me to government and local NGO officials. A few days latter one of the men from the community that I had me invited me over for dinner. He is a little better off. He owns several markets around town and had a nice house for his family. We ate small fish (head and all) in a very spicy sauce and drank gin from a plasic bottle. After talking to him a while he told me that he grew up in germany and spoke german. i thought it was the gin talking. But then he broke out in fluent German. I was able t understand most of it from what I remembered of my college german classes. His father worked in East Germany when he was a boy, a little outside of Dresden. So his frist language is actually German and then he learned Portugese when his family moved back to Mozambique.

A couple weeks ago I went to the Tambila festval which is a Mozambiquan instument a lot like a zailaphone, but bigger. I staied at the house of an toehr peace corps volunteer. It was really cool becuase there wer about 15 to 20 volunteers all camped  in abd around her house.  I got to meet a lot of the volunteers that arrive almost a year ago that live in the southern region. They were all super cool and we all had a great time listening to the music, hanging out with a large group of japanese volunteers that have a similar program to peace corps and then going to a big open air dance club. This town was really beautiful as it overlooked a huge light aqua blue colored lagoon cerounded by bright green treas.

Last week I finally made it out to a big rural market I had been hearing about for some time. it is only on tuesdays and fridays and people from very distyant villages come here to sell their goods. I was told that if I wanted to get any seafood I would have to get there between 6 and 7 in the morning and it is a 40 min walk. So I woke up at 5:30 and started walking just as the sun was coming up. There was a thick and very creepy layer of fog coverng everything just about 15 feet in the air. It was very pretty to walk past all the little farm fields and coconut trees and reed houses as the sun was comming up,. Finally i got to the market which was a clasic, large outdoor African market filled with lots of fruit and vegtables for dirt chep prices. I made my way over to the sea food area. Most of it was very small shrimp and different form sof small dried fish. I was not down for that. But they did have a lot of clams and decent sized crab so I bought about 2or 3 pounds of crab for about 70 US cents. not bad. I recently bought a refridgerator with a small freezer (I know, posh corps right) so now I am able to keep frozen crab in my house all the time. I have pretty consistant electricity but I have to walk maybe150 feet to the closest watter faucet where I fill up my large watter bucket and carry it back to my house. Its not a bad deal at all considering the fact that a lot of other people in this country have to walk a long while to get to their clossest watter. The only anoying thig is that when the electricity goes out, so does the watter and when the electricity comes back, the watter takes a long time to get back.

Right now with my organization I am just doing observation until mid november when I will present my findings and define a role for myself and responsibilities in order to contribute to the long term sustainable improvement of the organization. I already have a few ideas but just in case wish me luck.