The Journey Home

The road to Nauela is not a long one (cue that song from The Russians Are Coming “it’s a long road to…” when they’ve just gotten off the submarine and are walking along the beach) by Mozambican standards, but when it poured the night before and left mud pits, and a particularly pointy piece of charcoal from the sack you’re sitting on is digging into your right buttcheek, and that sack of flour that appears to have a hole in it is starting to slide on top of your foot, you feel every bump in the dirt road. And just when you thought they couldn’t possibly fit another person, here they are slowing down so someone else can squeeze in among the tangle of limbs and babies and chattering and chickens.

I don’t mind these cramped hour and forty minute rides (or much much longer, if you’re going any further. Be warned, there are no facilities on this vehicle). When I can stop paying attention to the corner of that wooden table - which is also hitching a ride, along with a stack of plastic chairs, buckets of various shapes and sizes, a broom and 2 pots (they’re with me) and 9 boxes of gin - to make sure it doesn’t gouge my eye out, there is a breathtaking (or maybe that was that last bump, which almost made you bite your tongue off) 294˚ view of mountains and valleys and mango trees.

I yell for the driver to let me off outside my house (door to door service – what more could I ask?); he doesn’t hear me because he’s in the part of the truck that is actually made for human beings, and I’m out in the wind in back, so someone reaches around and bangs on the side of his door. My neighbor calls my name and comes running, and takes my broom and pots for me as I try to get off the truck without landing on the ground in a horizontal position (usually by this time my feet and a good part of my legs are numb). I walk around to the back of my house to greet my family and receive comments about how dirty I am. I climb the stairs to my porch, wondering what someone dropped at some point to cause half of the second stair to be missing. The metal grate that serves as a screen door makes a familiar scraping sound as I pull it open. I kick aside the crunchy cockroach corpses that accumulated in my absence, and I’m home.

Animal poop

During training, we designed mini-lessons and presented them to each other for teaching practice. During one person’s lesson, a volunteer was teaching about the environment, and asked us to write on a small piece of paper examples of sources of contaminants of local water. So I wrote down “animal poop.” After the activity, I stuck the paper into my Portuguese-English dictionary, thinking (and I specifically remember thinking this), “Maybe I’ll look fondly back on this piece of paper in 40 years. Might as well save it.” Fast forward 3 months, one of my students stops by my house to return my Portuguese-English dictionary that I had lent to him, and he says inquisitively, “I found of piece of paper inside that said ‘animal poop.’ So I left it where it was.” I have no doubt that he looked up ‘poop’ in the dictionary, but I didn’t attempt to explain the story behind the 2x2” piece of paper, which is still in the dictionary and just as I am typing this I remembered that the dictionary is currently with my colleague who also teaches English. But this time when the dictionary is returned to me, I will be prepared to tell the story.

Please, sir, I want some more…water

A day in the life of my water bucket:

5:00am – wake up, stretch, dust off my…my lid (Jiminy Cricket)

5:02 – journey across the street to water pump, put in 20 liters of water (around 5:08, when the sun comes up, it’s too late. There’s suddenly a huge line at the pump)

5:14 – venture back across the street, balanced precariously on owner’s head. Slosh a little bit of water on her clothes just for fun.

5:17 – dump approximately 14 liters of water into the toilet to flush it. Think for a second about how if the toilet were a latrine, you would only need to carry half as much water. Then remember that latrines have cockroaches in them and walking outside in the dark in the rain to pee is not fun, and be thankful it’s an indoor toilet.

5:45 – bucket bath! With a little practice and the right pouring technique, you’ll almost feel like you’re standing under the Niagra setting in the shower. Not really.

6:04 – donate 3 liters to water filter for drinking water

6:47 – brush teeth

11:00 – boil some water to start cooking lunch (and dinner too, if you anticipate not feeling like lighting the charcoal 2 times in one day)

12:00 – get more water now if needed. Hardly anyone will be at the pump because it’s the hottest part of the day

5:55 – wash dishes before it gets dark

8:22 – if particularly dirty, another bucket bath. cold water, as usual (during training, my host family spoiled me by heating my water for me. None of that here! I always feel more alive, alert, awake and enthusiastic (thanks Mike) after a cold shower anyway). Get lots of rest for another busy day - if you're a water bucket, it's a rough life!

How to…Go Grocery Shopping in Mozambique for Dummies (or non-Mozambicans)

1. Weeks before: horde coins and small bills.
Whenever you have the chance to get change or break a big bill, do it.

2. Don’t keep a list of what you want. Chances are,
it won’t be there.

3. Hide money in various places on body, such as:
stuffed into shoes, sewn into waistband, concealed in bra, slid between toes,
wrapped around ear, jammed up left nostril, packed into bellybutton

4. Walk to market (like a farmer’s market but more
crowded) when you have 4-hour chunk of time. You’ll probably get held up to
chat with people along the way, and maybe even to eat a meal or two.

5. Once at the market: see something you want, ask
how much it costs per kilo/mound/chunk/bottle/item, in the local language if
you know how (they will be impressed, and also probably laugh - in a friendly
way)

6. Ask them to repeat themselves in Portuguese, if
you asked in the local language but didn’t understand the answer because “how
much is this?” was actually the only thing you knew how to say in the local
language

7. Amicably but persuasively suggest another price
that, if averaged with their projected price, would equal the price that you
actually want to pay

8. Repeat step 7 until an agreement is reached. If
you can’t reach one, start to walk away, and they may call you back and bring
the price down more

9. Receive your purchases, wait 10 minutes for them
to ask all their friends for change, and then proceed to the next booth

10. Walk
home with your purchases, and be prepared for people to ask you for the food
you’re carrying

(Steph’s
General Warning: markets get really slippery and muddy after it rains. Watch
where you step)

I can’t live without you…

...cookbooks. I never realized how
amazing recipes are until now. And limiting, sometimes. But overall, huge
time-savers. I thought I knew how to cook, but then I realized that I’m just
good at following directions.

I do some things backwards here - relative to the way I did
them in the US, at least. Like thinking, for example. And running. I always run
forwards here. Although if I ran backwards down a hill (like I do in the US
sometimes) the looks people give me probably wouldn’t be any stranger than the
ones I get now (“where are you running to?” not as in, “how many kilometers are
you attempting today?” more like, “where the heck could you be going that you
need to rush to and why would you be running if there’s no soccer ball in front
of you or rabid dog behind you?”

Anyway, back to backwardsness. I was actually referring to
cooking. In the US, here’s what would happen: 1) decision: what do I want to eat? 2) recipe: find one for the food I want to eat, and 3) shopping: buy the ingredients for it.

Here, the process looks more like this: 1) shopping: buy whatever food is in the
market that day, 2) recipe: look
through some recipes (we received a “You Can Make it in Mozambique” cookbook,
compiled by Peace Corps volunteers, which is amazing but slightly better suited
for sites where the people don’t grow everything they eat in their backyards.
Which is also amazing! Just takes some getting used to) then realize that there
is no recipe that combines crackers, hard boiled eggs, and bananas, and for the
recipes with at least one of those things, I’m missing at least 2/3 of the
ingredients. The cookbook helpfully suggests substitutions, but it’s like that
philosophical dilemma: if everything except for one thing is substituted, is the
product still the same thing? and 3) decision:
mix everything together and think, do I really want to eat this?

I always eat it.

“But how do you get out?”

When you reach the waiting area, use the index digit to
apply pressure to the round illuminated apparatus bearing the triangular
symbol. A beep indicates impending arrival. Enter between the parting panels
without dawdling on their track. During the ascent, eye contact and verbal
exchange may be discouraged or met with coldness. Refrain from passing gas
until your disembarkment is imminent.

Does the previous paragraph sound slightly nonsensical? If
so, mission accomplished. I’m trying to simulate what I imagine it feels like
for someone who has no electricity and whose house consists of four mud-brick
walls, a tin roof, and two rooms each the size of a medium bathroom, to try to
understand what it’s like to ride an elevator. The more I tried to explain how
you press a button and the moving box knows which floor you’re on and comes to
pick you up, and how it travels on cables up and down a hole in the middle of
the building, the more ridiculous it seemed. But my friend was still very
curious about it, and asked questions like, “how do you get off? Do you have to
jump?” after which we explained that it goes level with the floor so you can
just walk off. I didn’t even tell her yet about jumping when the elevator starts
to go down, or the reasons you shouldn’t fart when you’re in one with other
people. That will be for another day.

Something Tastes Fishy...

Dedicated to Bernard Newton

It started out like any other day. I was out of food in my
house, not a remarkably unusually situation, so I walked to the market. In stock:
potatoes, tomatoes, and dried fish. I bought some of each. Satisfied, since it
was a Sunday and I didn’t think the market would even be open, I returned home
and asked my foster family (a new family, different from my host family) how I
could cook the fish. They said, “where did you buy this?! That fish is not good
for eating. It will give you a rash.” They whisked away my dried fish and
brought out some of their dried fish, apparently superior, although it didn’t
look any different to my untrained eyeballs. They de-headed and de-scaled it
for me, and gave it to me along with instructions on how to cook it and a bit
extra to dine on the following day.

They turned out to be sardines, so salty
that I could still taste them in my throat after downing a pot of plain white rice.
Luckily my family had chosen that day to take pity on me and deliver me a bowl
of beans, as they do sometimes when they sense that my cooking is going to
result in a disaster. The next day, I gave the remaining fish back to my family
for them to enjoy. They laughed and said, “next time, buy fresh fish.”

I learn new things every day.

How Many Volts is a Culture Shock?

What does it feel like to have culture shock? Is it an electrical zap? Is it a chronic dull ringing? Is it like a gong banging around in your head? Does culture shock wear off gradually, or are you just left sizzled?

Culture shock is like that friend who creeps up on you from behind and taps you on one shoulder and you turn in the wrong direction, and then it does it again and you turn in the other direction, and the third time it happens you’re ready because you’ve learned their pattern, but the next time they change the pattern and trick you yet again. It makes me question things just when I thought I had it all figured out. I’m constantly comparing, noticing minute differences and asking why why why? And noticing the similarities as well, because sometimes those are just as surprising as the differences.

I don’t feel shocked. I feel like I’m in a constant state of inconsistency. Sometimes I am hopelessly confused, sometimes I can tackle anything, sometimes I think that I think I have found the meaning of life, sometimes I see myself as one grain of sand on a beach that never ends (that’s when I’m being dramatic), sometimes I am convinced I have discovered the secret to happiness (oh but I have!), sometimes I wish I had a punching bag. I miss home more than I have in the rest of my life put together.

Or maybe none of this is culture shock, and my mood just fluctuates because of the malaria pills I ingest every Friday at 1330 hours – which also give me crazy/eerily realistic dreams, among other side effects. This is the excuse I use for myself when I find myself in my house needing to force myself to go outside, and trying to remember why I shipped myself half a globe away from my comfort zone instead of just opening an ice cream shop like I had originally planned.

Getting asked a question in the local language and then, when I don’t understand, receiving laughter but no translation? 9 volts.

Walking through a market and hearing a chorus of “whitey! whitey!” from all around? 14 volts.

Having a quick trip to the market for onions turn into a 4-hour rendezvous because I stopped to say hi to my neighbors on the way and ended up sitting in a plastic chair in their yards chatting and eating cookies and holding baby bunnies that they are raising? Priceless.

The Craziest Year of My Life (so far): Memorable Moments

- Carrying a baby on my back in a capulana (a colorful multi-purpose cloth, more on this later)

- Reading a book out loud with my little sister

- The reappearance of my frisbee after I thought it was lost for good

- Cracking an egg into a pan and seeing a large fetus with bulging eyes pop out

- Defending, in Portuguese, the armpit as the most important body part (why? It maintains homeostasis and releases pheromones, of course)

- Cooking a delicious lemon zest cake with an improvised recipe and a dutch oven (a pot inside a pot with sand inside and heated over a charcoal stove)

- Climbing a mango tree and not having an allergic reaction to the bark

- Discovering that the house across the street from me bakes fresh bread every morning (now I just need to buy peanut butter) (explanation of blog title: pão = bread)

- Roasting freshly picked cashews (do you know what a cashew looks like as it is growing? I didn’t. Google it.)

- Having my first philosophical conversation in Portuguese

December 30, 2011: and they said, let there be light!

(...but only for 3 hours)

I write to you tonight not by candlelight, sunlight, wind-up flashlight, solar/battery powered lantern, or cell phone light, but computer light. This is one of three noteworthy events that took place today.

Let me tell you the story.

It began at 3:00 this morning when my cell phone alarm went off. I did not intend to wake up at this ungodly hour. I meant to wake up at 5:00, obviously a much more reasonable time to wake up in the middle of vacation, but I had forgotten to fix the clock on my phone and it got a little ahead of itself. I tucked the mosquito net back in and promptly fell back asleep and I think I dreamed that my friend sent me a text, because I no longer have the text and don’t remember deleting it. But I was so sure it happened. This is an interesting side effect of the malaria pills. More about that in a future post.

I was re-aroused from my slumber at the real 5:00 (although at 3:00, I guess it was 5:00 somewhere?), and was escorted to the bus station by my friend Leah, who(m) I was visiting, and her dog Chamossa, who usually likes to chase goats but this time was chased by the goats. Most of today was occupied by me transporting myself from Leah’s site to my site, which is quite a process, involving 4 different bus rides (2 hours, 4 hours, 1 hour, 0.5 hours) and a lot of bravery, since it was my first time traveling by myself in Africa. I would have liked to have conversed with the people who were sitting around me/on top of me/underneath me (apparently, being so squished together that you are interlocking legs with a stranger and your knee is jamming into their crotch for 2 hours does not automatically lead to friendship), but I was using up all my energy pretending to be brave that I didn’t have any left to start any philosophical conversations. That will be a goal for my next solo trip. Today my goal was just to arrive home.

The second monumental event of the day actually began last night when I witnessed someone light charcoal in less than two minutes without burning a plastic bag, which is the traditional method here. Perhaps I have not told you how much trouble I have had lighting charcoal. To give you some idea, I would estimate that the first two weeks at site, I spent about 16.4% of each day fighting to get it lit and then stay lit. This acquired skill is crucial to survival, because every meal that cannot be eaten raw (I should try making sushi) must be prepared on the charcoal stove. But after witnessing this miracle yesterday, I went home today and tried this new method for myself, and within 14 minutes, my entire 8 by 8 inch charcoal stove was ablaze! And no one was around to see it. I celebrated by making rice pudding for dinner. Actually, that was just the only food I had in the house.

Then, at around 18:24 hours, in the heat of the charcoal-lighting moment, something else was suddenly ablaze behind me. It was the electricity in my house! For years, it has been all wired up and ready to light people’s lives, but the town never turns on the electricity for some reason, and I just assumed the generator was broken. But alas, my bedroom light is shining for the first time since I first laid eyes on the darkness around it, and I am typing on my computer as it is being charged.

Dear reader, I have never appreciated electricity as much as I do now.

Let me tell you a secret: any of you can do what I’m doing. Living without electricity and running water is just something you get used to. However, I no longer want to be Laura Ingalls Wilder. Candles light up a room much more than I realized, but there’s nothing as bright as a ceiling light that turns on with a switch. Bucket baths save water and get you clean, but there’s nothing like a waterfall-like stream of water pounding on your skull. I resolve to not take these things for granted anymore.

For a day full of such ordinary things, it has been an extraordinary day.