Hannah, 14(ish) Months In

Our frog friend on our door grates. He/she had really cool red legs.

This Hannah often eats rocks, mixed in with the beans or rice or bread. (or sand or dirt or ants)

This Hannah often thinks she’s tan, but it’s really just the dust that comes from living far away from any cement infrastructure. 

This Hannah often trips over rocks embedded in the dirt road. Or falls in the holes in the really old “sidewalk” in the nearest city.  And subsequently…

This Hannah often gets laughed at by large groups of people.

This Hannah often does laundry, sometimes just to get the very stubborn dirt/dust combo out from under her nails. 

This Hannah often needs new clothes because Africa is where clothes come to die.  When buying these new clothes…

This Hannah often thinks that over $4 for any item of clothing is expensive and rethinks the purchase.

This Hannah often deludes herself into thinking that a hot bucket bath is as good as a hot shower.

 

So. These are some things that the Mozambican version of myself does.  Only time (and a triumphant return to the homeland) will tell if I will continue to eat rocks, be tan, and trip (okay I will definitely keep tripping over things).

AND WE'RE BACK.

Neighbor and Counterpart Benvindo (eyes closed, but fazer o que)

Rainy Season

Our very informal pre-school (this is our porch)

Sometimes we get student visitors (mostly when the school decides to have a big party)

Ilha de Mocambique.  Lots of Portuguese architecture, lots of post-apocalyptic Lisbon feeling

The People Picture Post

9th grade students

2 tea field besties, clearly showing some of the Mozambican "let's take a picture" famous style

What would Peace Corps be without a student playing the roommate's ukelele?

Lee, Blaine, me, and Amanda. Lee, PCV in the nearest city, Blaine, rando Zimbabwean agronomist, and Amanda, the roommate.

Neighbor picture

Kids after/during their song/dance/modeling performances

The host family!

Happy Father's Day, US! 

It's life.

When life cannot merit an “ha de passar” because the chapa is just too slow or the laundry wont dry because it’s rainy season and now your clothes are moldy or you are just too convinced that malaria is coming to do some major battle with you, “é a vida” becomes much more pertinent than “ha de passar.”  E a vida means “It’s life” and it has insidiously invaded my vocabulary until it unintentionally became my trademark and one of my only jokes in Portuguese (for some reason, Mozambicans think it is SO FUNNY when I say this.  It gets them every single time).  For everything, from an early morning meeting starting 2 hours late and then lasting 3 (or more, because really, who counts after it hits the 3 hour mark) hours to a time where I have yet again proven just how exactly foreign and awkward I am, I can now just shrug and say “é a vida.”  
 

When I originally thought of the topic for this post, I was at a point in Peace Corps where I thought “What an easy going culture, this is definitely a helpful attitude for me as well.”  But in the past few months, the cliché of Peace Corps (the fact that we sit in our houses and stare at walls a lot and thus think about life) has caught up to me and I have realized that “E a vida” is much more than a simple acceptance.  There’s a fine line between acceptance of things we cannot change and things that we can.  And as many before me have learned, it takes talent to discern the difference.  And I don’t know how to do that yet.  
 

On one side, it’s good.  There are so many frustrations and injustices in life  – many already mentioned here.  Why spend what is generally life getting all stressed out about things that are considered, as bad as they are, so normal?  Because for many here, it’s a choice between worrying about the injustices in the school system and feeding a family.  So really, it could mean that Mozambicans have their priorities straight.   “E a vida” represents what could be argued as a necessary apathy, a symbol of a disenchanted fraction of Mozambican society who look at all the obstacles to maintaining a human life with dignity and say “We do what we can.” 

On the other hand, this “necessary apathy” could be considered just as insidious as “E a vida” has been in my vocabulary.  An easy thing to say that, whether it means to or not, maintains a problematic status quo.

So. The question remains – What do you accept, and what do you fight like hell to change?

We went to the beach last weekend, and there were lines of 
men and boys pulling in shrimp from the ocean.  (and the shrimp was really good). 

 

This Too Shall Pass

2 weeks ago, I went on a surprise vacation.  As many of you know (thanks to my tendency to obsess) I had a mysterious foot problem throughout my time in Mozambique so far.  It was getting worse (swelling and pain) so I decided to talk to the peace corps doctors.  They ordered me for the nearest x ray machine that weekend – I asked off from work for a day, and planned to be gone for 4 days.

Well, it turns out that 10 is the new 4.  After a 12 hour chapa journey and x rays and a long, educational wait in the lab waiting room (AIDS is bad, according to posters) I had a verdict: I had a formerly broken 5^th metatarsal. This means that a week of daily physical therapy (which manifested itself as a foot massage and 10 minutes of ultrasound daily) would supposedly fix it.  Miracle of miracles, I think it’s actually better – which is good, because it took me 3 over-packed vans, 1 truck bed, and 15 hours to get home (a journey that should have taken 6 hours).  Despite the transportation, the week was nice.  A lot of volunteers passed through the peace corps office that week, and I was given a new best friend by peace corps – another guy who was there for the whole week of ultra-sounding as well.  It was also nice to eat meat (ALL OF THE GRILLED CHICKEN) and as I found real Oreos in a real grocery store, my faith in humanity was renewed.

Surprisingly, I waited calmly.  I only wished once that I had a functioning ipod and I didn’t take a book out to read.  This provoked a realization: It took me 6 months to get good at waiting.  Without knowing it, at some point in the past few months, I have surrendered and learned to (mostly) accept the things that I cannot change.  The world will turn, I may show up to dinner late or on time, I may get home before or after dark, I may fall off the back of a broken-down truck while the men try to push it forward.  And life goes on.  It’s a cliché in the Peace Corps:  You get good at being bored.  My level of patience and need to be constantly entertained is still in flux, so expect a progress report in the next 2 years.  But I can already report that the number of times I think “Ha de passar” (the Mozambican version of “This too shall pass”) has increased at least tenfold.  As it happens, that is exactly what the foot doctor told me about my newly reformed 5^th metatarsal.

The Second Picture Post - Illustrations of the Tea Field

I live next to The Great Valley (Land Before Time).  Fun fact: order to take this picture, I had to stand in the neighborhood trash pile in the middle of a cornfield.

Our house!

Sunrise over The Great Valley (taken by Amanda)

On the way to the Tea Field (taken by Amanda)

Sunset over The Great Valley (taken by Amanda)

The First Picture Post - Training

The training class as we swore-in to be official volunteers - Moz 19!

Some of the kids (especially the one with the pink sunglasses) who made me sad to leave training and my host family.

Peace Corps staff and volunteers with about half of the training class's boxes to move to our permanent homes. Take note of random black cord we are holding.  Mozambicans grab random objects to hold for pictures 90% of the time.

The mountains are Swaziland!

Two of my favorites of the 68 wonderful people with whom I started  PC Mozambique.  Our training class had dresses/shirts/vests/ties made out of the same material, hence our matching outfits. (see first picture as well)

My first Mozambican students - in practice school, training.  (taken by the always talented Rafael Hernandez)

On Life Logistics

The requested: How I spend my days.  Since coming to Mozambique, I would divide my time into 4 parts: The first 4 days in the chic Cardoso Hotel, PC training with my host family, being “at site” before school preparation really started, and being at site when there is actually work to do.

Hotel Cardoso: A hotel that is entirely too fancy to host 68 dirty, jet-lagged Peace Corps volunteers, yet hosted us anyway.  We lived in a magical land of never ending buffets and never ending conference sessions.

“Pre-Service Training:” A 10-week period that often felt like a glorified study abroad, where I spent mornings and afternoons Monday-Friday learning Portuguese and security/health/education tidbits, weekends learning how to do things without machines (laundry being the prime example), playing with my host siblings (ages 17, 13, 12, 11, 8) and playing with other volunteers. 

The tea field before the work:  As soon as we moved in, we commenced helping the school finish up final grades.  That work quickly ended and our new professor friends went back to their “zonas” to visit family for the holidays.  We spent a lot of time hitchhiking into our nearest city to grocery shop, visiting the Sisters who live here, and walking up and down the road.  Blog post to come about one or two of my more eventful walks up the road.

The tea field during the school year!: Classes “started” last week, but really started this week.  By “started,” I mean on the schedule only – most of the teachers did not show up, and anywhere from 0 to 10 students were in a class.  It was a nice way to ease into teaching, but today I showed up to 6 full classrooms of about 40 students each.  Numbers within the classes will change because students are still registering.  I teach both mornings and afternoons – so I wake up, go to school, come home for lunch, relaxation, and lesson planning, then go back to teach a full afternoon of ninth graders.  In between classes and during my breaks I’ve been able to meet and hang out with other teachers, who seem like a good group of people.  I also wear this really cool white thing that looks like a short-sleeved lab coat. 

The Tea Field

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The grand homecoming meal I had planned for myself has not yet become a reality. This is due to both availability and prices of my dream items.  Chocolate is both relatively expensive and often completely melted in stores, and cheese has been definitively put on my “special occasions” grocery list (also known as the “what we will buy when other volunteers come to visit so we can split really expensive things many different ways” list).  In my town specifically, we can buy light bulbs, eggs, pasta, and random African plants – which perpetuates the aforementioned alimentation issue.  There is a “city” about 15 km away which has more veggie options and milk!  My roommate Amanda and I have been managing a relatively balanced diet given the circumstances and thus, I am happy to report, I have been advancing in the alimentation challenge.

The tea field itself is a one road town that has dorms for the male and female students who come from far away to study at the school.  The school is a mission run by an awesome nun – she runs a tight ship for everyone and so rumor has it that our school is less plagued by some of the common problems here in Mozambique – professors sleeping with students, accepting bribes for grades, or just changing the grades of students because they want to.  We live in the professor’s neighborhood so we have been able to meet our coworkers/neighbors as we have moved in.  They have all been very nice, although a few particularly stand out as Mozambican rock stars:

1.     Herminio, gym teacher and all around school handyman who walked with us to buy 30 eggs for our house one day and has since started showing up on our porch just to hang out. 

2.     Cristina, the wife of a professor who has brought us food, helped us light our charcoal stove, and generally been a fountain of Mozambican/tea field knowledge

3.     Daniel, a student who helps keep our house standing and helps us arrive at the cutting edge of Mozambican youth culture by teaching us how to say “Mohawk” (the hair style) in Portuguese. 

4.     Sancho, math teacher and owner of the chickens from which we get our eggs.  He has also taken it upon himself to be our Mozambican social coordinator, which means we have already seen his band play in the city.

For Christmas, Amanda and I found a wonderful group of expats from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Brazil, and Portugal and feasted with them - we had absolutely fabulous meat and drinks and so Christmas 2012 is deemed a great success.  So far we’re settling in, and starting school matriculation this week, which is looking like it will usher in actual work and the start of the school year.  Happy 2013!