Benefits of Nosy Neighbors #2

I found myself in the bathroom yet again (seems to be a recurring theme, doesn’t it?), this time to take a bucket bath (something that should be recurring). The front door of my house was wide open, as it always is. In this community, it would be unfathomably rude to close the door while I was in the house, unless it’s bedtime.

Anyway, I had already sudsed up when I perceived – I wasn’t sure if I had actually seen it – a dark form move past a gaping hole in the door. My heart jumped. Do I calmly finish my bath, or put my towel on and investigate – and risk confronting a burglar in just my towel? Captain Underpants would have known what to do, but crime scenes in Mozambique are not his priority.

Snippets of my neighbors’ conversation floated into my bucketbathroom.

“murmur murmur went into the house!”

“mumble murmur tee hee”

“she’s taking a bath murmur”

“WHAT?” I yelled from my non-vantage point.

“A chicken just walked into your house!”

I saw a colorful form briefly flash through all the holes in my door, not just the ones low to the ground like the first shadow. I heard a small scuffle and then a loud, protesting squawking. The colors went by my door again, in the other direction, and the squawking diminished in volume.

I rinsed off my suds layer in peace.

Benefits of Nosy Neighbors #1

One day I went into the bathroom just like any other day. When I tried to leave again, I saw that something was wrong. The door latch, which is on the outside of the door for some reason (so you can play a prank on someone in the bathroom??), had slid over the hook when I closed the door. The door had locked itself, and the lock and I were on opposite sides of the door.

“SISINIA!” I bellowed through the crack in the door. Our houses sit facing each other, our porches separated by just ten feet of clay-dirt yard.

“WHAT IS IT?” Luckily Sisinia was standing outside her house.

“Come here! No, here! Inside the house! I’m here! Walk this way! Come to the bathroom door!” When I could see her through the cracks in the wood, I jiggled the door to show her my predicament.

She, like any good friend, burst out laughing.

“I am not going to let you out!”

Epilogue: She let me out. I was, after all, her sole provider of hot chocolate and tampons.

Frequently Asked Questions

Oh my gosh. Was it just amazing?

No. One volunteer described Peace Corps as “learning to manage a series of disappointments.” This is quite accurate.

So, how was it then?

How were the past two years of your life?

Well, what was it like?

Let’s sit down for a two-hour coffee, and I’ll tell you about the first day.

What are your plans for after?

Eat a toasted everything bagel with cream cheese.

Are you taking a COS (Close-of-Service) trip?

Yes! Since I just happen to be flying halfway across the world anyway, I’m going to stop in France to relearn Spanish with this awesome dude: 

then I’ll hop over to England to relearn English with this awesome dude:

 then I’ll be learning Italian with these awesome dudes:

Reflections'n'Stuff

On September 27th, 2013, the very first day of Peace Corps Steph, they asked us to complete the following sentence:

"I will feel successful as a volunteer when..."

and other similar questions that make some people reflect and other people roll their eyes.

I wrote:

I will feel successful as a volunteer when...
1. I can understand Portuguese
2. I feel comfortable in front of a class
3. I make a friend


Two years later, they are still asking us those same eye-rolling questions. But it's good to reflect sometimes, so I'll show you my answer to one of the most recent ones, which was:

"List your accomplishments and lessons learned."

Technical Difficulties

Dear my dear Readers,

Due to a couple small recent inconveniences such as "no electricity" and "last-minute travel plan changes" I now have only 19 minutes of charge left on my computer with no certainty as to when I'll be able to charge it again, thus interrupting the flow of blog posts that I had going.

Bear with me and check back again next week!

Estefania

Africa Moments

There are three distinct types of Africa Moments.

1. The How Did I Get Here Moment: You’re sitting in the back of a chapa, the wind is whipping your hair, and you’re thinking, how did I end up here? You start to reflect on your life, you want to ponder deep questions, meanwhile a chicken is sitting on your foot and there’s a large breast staring at you; its owner hasn’t put it back yet after the baby drank its fill. It’s a moment when you suddenly feel nostalgic for the present. 

2. The Volunteer Embarrassing Story Exchange Moment: You’re talking with other volunteers about the time you missed the hole in the pit latrine, or had such bad stomach problems that you pooped in your pants, and everyone sighs and shakes their head and says, “oh, Mozambique” or “oh, Peace Corps,” because they know it’s happened to them too, even if they don’t want to admit it.

3. The Improvise with What You’ve Got Moment: You’re helping your neighbor extend the power line from the street to their house by just exposing the wires and wrapping another wire around it. One Mozambican looks at the rickety and illegal set-up – which sometimes even includes vines - and turns to another and says, sometimes, in English, “This is Africa.”

Food Seasons

Last year I never made real guacamole, because avocado season begins right when tomato season ends. The chart below shows which foods you may find in Nauela, according to which month you decide to visit.

Mandioca (cassava root)

okra

salty dried fish

my new favorite food

unusual way for a fruit to grow

onions

2 mets each

mangoes

they're also good mixed with a spoonful of sugar

a rare taste of protein

partly satisfies my craving for raw vegetables

putting groceries away after my most
successful trip to the market ever.

If you are feeling lonely, always remember...

The following is a text I received from a colleague on Valentine’s Day (unedited, word for word, letter for letter):

I hope that you are going to enjoy alone. But it is not a bigger problem. One day you will be near of your best friendship. And best wishes for all things in your life.

So, Dear Readers, if you are out there reading this and feeling lonely, don’t worry, because the day will come when you will be near of your best friendship! 

Touching the Carvao

Filling the stove with charcoal (henceforth referred to in Portuguese, carvão) is the type of chore equivalent to washing the broiler pan, or picking the rotten parts off the lettuce. Whenever I cook with someone else, we argue over whose turn it is to touch the carvao. Every time you re-fill the stove, your hands end up looking like this:

Sandy Saturdays at Seven

"School activity" usually involves a few disgruntled students, and one or two quick-tempered teachers who bark out instructions. It's an activity scheduled for every other Saturday morning at 7:00am; all the students must show up and clean the school or weed the yard for a couple hours. It is not fun for anyone. I avoid it whenever I can.

But the tasks involved in constructing a library were such that 1,000 extra pairs of helping hands were of much use. Thus, many Saturday morning school activities were dedicated to the library. This worried me. The students dread activity - sometimes it's used as a punishment for late or disruptive students - and the teachers don't want to be put in charge of it. Wouldn't this be a bad way to start the library, with dread and obligation? Then, I imagined, after the library was finished, kids would associate the library with punishment, exhaustion, and working under the hot sun on an empty stomach.

I warily eyed the students on the first day of school activity. They looked tired and grumpy before even starting. Lots had shown up, but it was mandatory, after all. The director addressed the students.

"Today, everyone carries sand up from the river."

There was a collective groan.

"How many bucketfuls per person?" Someone had the courage to ask.

"Five buckets!" The top of the director's head barely comes up to my nose, but his word is the law.

Even bigger groans, and exclamations of "what!" "that's too much!" "sand is so heavy!" The director teased the students, saying each bucket had to be full to the top, and, wait a second, maybe it should be seven buckets per person? The students got bolder and cried out in protest. It was settled that each student would carry three buckets of sand from the river, to eventually be mixed with cement to build the library walls. The students went off to the river, dragging their feet and empty sacks behind them.

Twenty minutes later, the students started returning, each with a different recipient full of sand. One teacher was assigned to keep track of how many buckets each student deposited in the growing sand mountain. The students tried to trick the teacher and not fill up the buckets all the way, or say they had completed their three buckets, when they actually had done only two. I put my hand in my pockets to keep from throwing them up in exasperation.

Then I remembered the little black bag hanging over my shoulder. I took out the camera and aimed the lens at a nearby sand depositer.

The first few pictures went by unnoticed, but then a couple students started coming up to me to see the images in the small screen.

"Hey, there I am!"

"Wait, take one of me, too!"

"Oh my god, look how I came out in this one!"

"Over here, take one of me sitting here!"

"Teacher, teacher! Another one of me by myself!"

School activity was suddenly full of laughs and shouts and students almost knocking me over trying to see their pictures. Fingers reached out to touch the fancy machine. Kids struck either their sexiest or their toughest poses for me to capture. They jostled me in excitement. They called their friends over and posed again and again.

For twenty minutes, I was the Cool Teacher, and for the same twenty minutes, school activity was fun.  The students worked with renewed vigor, trying to show off for the camera.

We each need something to work for. Where does motivation come from? It can come from something as small as freezing a moment in time with a camera, but when it is present, it's everything.

The Clanger

This is our school bell:

photo taken by Steph H.

It’s made from the inner metal part of a gigantic tire. It hangs on wooden posts. When it’s time for class to end or begin, any nearby student is sent to grab the metal clanger (rhymes with hanger) and clang the bell a few times, which sounds something like this: 

CLANG! CLANG! C-CLANG!

But once in a while you get a musical clanger who clangs out a toneless but upbeat tune, which sounds something like this:

Rat-a-tat-CLANG!-tat-tat-clink-tat-CLANG!

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they clang the school bell.

photo also taken by the Other Steph

When was the last time you did something for the first time?

Before I stepped off the plane in Johannesburg two years and one month and one week ago, I had never been to Africa.

I had never been without electricity for more than two days at a time. I had never carried a bucket of water on my head. Lived in a house by myself. Used a pit latrine. Bought a banana. Eaten rice and beans with my hands.

I had never opened the door to step outside and greet the sunrise first thing every morning. I had never carried on a conversation about gender equality in Portuguese. Stood in front of fifty teenagers for 45 minutes, hundreds of times, with all their attention on me. Had fleas dug out of my foot.

Never craved pesto for 6 months straight. Started my own sports team. Felt more down. Ate rat meat. Gone to bed at 8:00 when I wasn’t sick. Stuck out so much. Washed an entire load of laundry by hand. Cooked something besides burgers or marshmallows over charcoal.

I had never tasted a cornmeal much patty.

And now, I have consumed approximately 428 of them.

Oh, the people you'll meet!

When you’re sharing an armrest with someone for a few hours, and you have to get up and let them by to pee several times, you can’t help but talk to them, so that their bladder-filling rate isn’t the only thing you know about them. That is how I met the prison-worker.

His prison is in Nampula City, and offers opportunities for the inmates to take secondary school classes, and join dance, theater, or music groups. All great ideas, but in reality much weaker than they could be, he explained, which led him to his question for me: Why can’t Peace Corps send volunteers to teach in the prisons?

I didn’t get into why PCVs don’t work in prisons – actually, I had never even considered the possibility – but it does bring up some interesting points. Would you work in a prison? Would you treat the inmates the same as other secondary school students? Would it align with Peace Corps’ objectives to send volunteers to prisons?

(reiterating disclaimer: these are completely my own ponderings, not speculating anything on behalf of Peace Corps itself)

Most jails that I’ve heard of in Mozambique are not as high-functioning as this one sounds. The jail in Nauela is literally just a place for tying people up while the police decide what to do with them. It’s an old building shaped like a castle that may have been something beautiful in colonial times, but now it’s all overgrown inside and has no roof. There is one small circular room where prisoners wait with their hands tied behind their backs, with just the dirt ground as the floor. So this conversation with the prison worker was all the more interesting.

He admired Peace Corps for its promotion of sustainability. He lamented that a group of Italians had started the prison music group and provided some instruments, but didn’t involve any Mozambicans in the planning, so when the Italians left, the prison community didn’t know how to move forward with the group. For every project we do as volunteers, we’re required to have counterparts, Mozambicans who co-lead the projects or groups, who can continue after we leave – and help us avoid cultural blunders.

We talked for much of the plane ride, sharing small bits about our completely different lives. He studied Rights and Law but likes science, and wanted to hear more about neuroscience, and needed to know whether I was psychologically analyzing him as we were speaking. He started teaching 6^th grade at 16, because at that time, no one in the country had degrees, and few even finished high school. He eventually found his way to the prison.

As we were sipping our Sprites on the rocks, he announced his new life decision.

“I’m going to quit my job,” he declared, “and become a volunteer.”

We are a compilation of everyone we meet. 

I miss you toooooooooo!

I was never really much of a misser (Mother and Father, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t love you!) but then this passage appeared in my journal, supposedly penned by me:

“Yesterday I was so happy to see Kessifia, I could barely contain my excitement. Actually I could contain it fine, but I couldn’t keep from smiling. She just looked so smiling and happy, and I was glad to see him. I missed her.  I don’t know how to explain what it means to miss someone, but I thought about him, and felt her absence, and felt like something was missing. It’s one of those things that you can’t really describe, you just feel it and know.”

*names and genders have been altered or made ambiguous to protect the writer’s feelings and the missed one’s privacy

So, it seems that I have started to miss things! Rather, I'm sure I always had, maybe I just recently recognized that an absence you feel you’re you’re not with someone means that, well, you miss them. Let’s just say Steph’s going through some Character Development.

Things I’ll miss about Mozambique:

No traffic jams

Getting enough sleep

Having an excuse to not check email for three weeks

Openback chapas

Bucket baths

Playing soccer with a bunch of funny little girls and sassy bigger girls

Having simple food choices

My benches

Jogging on a dirt road at 5am

Having freedom in my job – room for creativity, writing my own lessons, developing my own projects

No water or electricity bills

My cute house

A life free of tchotchkes

Things I won’t miss about Mozambique

Being called by my skin color

7:00 events starting at 10:30

Eating meat once every two months

Minibus chapas

Dump flush toilets

Having five food choices

My couch

Traveling along a dirt road at 5am

Being charged ten times the price of something because of my skin color

Hand-washing clothes

Dedicated to all the people I missed while in Mozambique. There are quite a few of you.

What is your favorite household amenity?

Lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy Jane.

She wants a drink of water so she

waits and waits and waits and waits and waits for it to rain.

~Shel Silverstein

You thought this whole time I didn’t have running water in my house. You were mistaken! Rather, I mislead you! Just take a look at this modern and slightly phallic-looking contraption:

Bed, Bath & Beyond would be itching to get their hands on this.

All you do is pour water in:

Screw on a cap with a specially cut hole in it:

And enjoy your complete hand-washing experience!

p.s. In case you were curious, our favorite household amenity is a toaster oven.

Escargot!

Whoever said we can’t eat fancily in Mozambique? I went to visit some friends several hours south, near the coast, and they introduced me to amejua, the local word for these little curly snails. 

Escargot, Moz-style! And they’re cheap – fifty cents for a big ole pile of ‘em!

To prepare:

First, boil your pot of snails.

Then, use a large pricker from a nearby pricker bush to pull out the boingy bodies. Don’t pull them out all the way to the end, or you’ll get their intestines full of their digested last meal.

Next, cook with tomatoes and onions, and eat with—no, not cornmeal mush patties— cassava mush patties! Yes, there are different types of mush patties! Cassava mush patties are much heavier – basically like wheat flour and water. Mapira mush patties are lighter and smoother than cornmeal mush patties. I ate half a cassava mush patty and couldn’t eat the other half…the only thing I’ve eaten in Mozambique and haven’t liked. The only thing I ate in Mexico and didn’t like was huitlacoche, a black pasty smear on your plate, made from corn fungus.

Amejua: Fun for the whole family!

Both Mexico and Mozambique have helped me fatten up my gastronomical comfort zone. And bodily blubber.

Mato-Off

Mato [mah’-too]

n. the bush;

“I live in the mato.”

adj. rural or in the middle of nowhere; out in the bush

“That site is really mato.”

On the scale of city to mato, my site is…mato! Surprise!

My very dear friend Lona also lives in a mato site, so we spent a lot of time at every Peace Corps gathering discussing which of us had the most mato site in Moz 17 (our group, the seventeenth Peace Corps Posse in Mozambique. Very original).

During our mid-service conference, we voted on superlatives: goofiest 17er (Mac), most changed (the other Steph), best host (Hoang), most chique dresser (Hoang), etc. And the category Lona and I were both going for was the coveted Most Mato Cred. All that week, we vied for the position, presented our arguments to other volunteers, bribed them for votes, tried to sabotage each other. It was brutal.

The day of the announcements came. We all floated anxiously in the pool with all our clothes on (see post "Malaria...Use Your Net or You'll Regret!"), waiting to hear the results. Steph or Lona? Who will it be?

“And, the winner for Most Mato Cred goes to…”

The apprehension was killing us.

“…oooh, it was a very close one.”

We couldn’t breathe.

“The runner up is…”

My skirt floated up to my waist in the water but I was too focused on the announcement to push it down again.

“Lona!”

Lona congratulated me and tried to drown me.

“And the first place winner is…”

I knew I was about to moon everyone when I sloshed out of the pool to claim my crayon-written certificate.

“…Tony Brown!”

We looked at each other in disbelief, and held it against him for the rest of his life.

Anyway, here is a very very subjective breakdown of the categories. The details in italics are considered more mato for that category. Judge for yourself:

Category	Lona	Steph
Weather	·         Hot and humid	·         Cool and fresh
Water	·         Someone gets water for her	·         Carries water on head
Electricity (neither have electricity in the town)	·         Never has electricity in house ·         Has solar panels at the school where she can charge her electronics, including computer	·         Does not have electricity at the school; nowhere to charge electronics except cellphone (neighbor’s solar panel, not big enough to charge computer) ·         Once every 4 months, the town generator is turned on
Toilet	·         Pit latrine (she wrote a song about how much she loves it)	·         Indoor bathroom – smells, takes a lot of water to flush
Transportation	·         One bus with seats and a roof at dawn, otherwise has to walk 5km to main road	·         Open-back pick-up truck, a few pass by each day
Food	·         No tomatoes	·         No eggs
Students	·         Lar students – board at the school, tend to come from higher income families	·         Mato students – tend to not know how to read
Nearest volunteers	·         30 minutes to 2 hours, paved road	·         1 hr 45 minutes, dirt road
Community	·         Town is poorer, more people who don’t speak Portuguese	·         Most people speak Portuguese

Post-script: After having finally visited Lona’s site, I must admit that Lona truly deserves the prize for most Mato Cred. She is one tough gal - congratulations Lona on making it through, and for the wonderful developments you initiated at your school!

And, just kidding Tony! You’re awesome! Note to my Readers: Tony survived alone at site (for the first year, then he got a sitemate), way off the beaten path, with no electricity, and no cell phone service (for the first year, then they put up a cell tower). No cell phone service, now that is something that neither Lona nor I can claim.

Lona and I in Lona's living room. Photo taken by Nooreen.

"This Doesn't Believe Myself" ~Marcus

Questions and Comments Directed Towards Me:

Do you buy your chicken live?

Are there black people in the US?

You’re eating bread without tea?

Do you know Justin Bieber?

How many children do you have?

Why are you not married?

Would your parents accept you went home with a Mozambican husband? (purely hypothetical)

What do I have to do to marry you?

Do you have a Mozambican boyfriend? 

“No.” 

Oh, are you racist?

In America, do you unplug your fridge in the winter?

Are you a man or a woman?

You’re getting pretty - you’re growing a bigger butt!

Why do you have pimples all over your face?

Mukunha, mukunha! (white person, white person!) 

Concepts that are somewhat difficult to explain, no matter how interested and curious the question-asker:

Building a snowman

Lakes freeze and you can walk on top of them

Why I believe that people landed on the moon

Not everyone in the US is rich

The US is one country

America is many countries

Supermarkets – they sell food even when it’s out of season

Jack-o-lanterns

Halloween

"He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."