The good, the bad and the ugly of life in Africa

10/24/12

I want to make sure I document those moments I’m overwhelmed with emotion, be them feelings of gratitude for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or feelings of pure insanity wondering how anyone in their right mind would opt voluntarily to do what I’m doing. So here goes:

Those moments to cherish

Those things I could happily live without

Bathing outside in the open during the cool dawn hours with the wind blowing through the reed walls and the sunlight streaming through the leaves above. LOVE waking up to that J The satisfaction (albeit neck ache) of carrying 20L of water on your head alongside all the other neighborhood women back home from the next closest running water spigot. Everyone here gets a real kick out of my determination to do it myself, even though I spill half of it on myself by the time I’ve returned home. Going to the market each day to pick up fresh local fruits, vegetables, legumes and grains to make my meals from scratch. I also love knowing my favorite vendors by name and chit chatting with them everyday; wish life was still like that back in the states. MANGOS!  And papayas and banana trees galore!!! Since all the fruits are picked off the trees there’re way more fresh and delicious. The sense of security I feel with so many neighbors so close around me – power in numbers! Although most of the time terrifying, there are certain aspects about traveling in a developing country I admit I find quite exhilarating. Like sitting on top of sacks of rice and beans for hours on the back of an open-back pick-up truck while we climb up and down dirt roads winding through the forests of palm trees, mango trees and cashew trees. Or climbing into a little boat to get to a major city because there are no bridges. I oftentimes wonder if rollercoasters will still give me a thrill after the rides I’ve already been on during these first 5 months. The reed-walled home is growing on me. I love feeling the wind when it blows outside, or waking to the pitter-patter of rain on my tin roof when it sprinkles. It’s very relaxing and earthy. Cooking without smoke detectors  10 mets, or the equivalent of 35 cents (give or take on the exchange rate) will get me a huge bag of mangoes  I find myself eating a steady 3 per day (at least.) Mmmmmmmhmmmmm gotta love mango season!

The occasional worm or bug crawling up your foot / leg while you’re outside bathing or using the bathroom. Freaks me out every time. When the water goes out, you forgot to hoard up earlier, and you don’t know when it’ll come back on… = no fun The lack of quick & easy meals… My go-to easy meals are popcorn (where I pop the kernels in oil over a flame in a pot) or pancakes (made from scratch and no measuring utensils.) Soon with the mango season starting I have a feeling those will creep up to #1. More fresh and naturally ripened fruits are not part of our diet back in the states so the extra acidity in them does a number on your teeth here. I have an ominous tooth ache that I’m afraid will become my first cavity L The lack of peace and quiet with so many neighbors so close around me. My favorite days are Sundays when everyone is at church… Transportation here scares the living bageesus out of me. Not going to go into details because I know there are people that love me that read this blog and I don’t want to worry them, but know that I do all I can to lower my risks of danger. ANTS. I hate hate HATE ants and they’re everywhere. I just can’t seem to get rid of them, no matter what chemical cocktail I buy at the store, or how often I sweep and scrub my house clean, or the fact that every single piece of food is wrapped in at least one plastic bag and then hung from the ceiling not touching the floor or walls… They’re still in my tea kettle (where I only boil water!), on my lufa (which at most has soap scrubs), on my clean sheets (not the ones on my bed, the dang ones I washed and stored away), in my books, … just everywhere. 70 degree nights and 90 degree days (and that’s just in the shade, afraid to take the thermometer outside, might just melt.) (Seriously, I bathe and am already sweating by the time I’m dressed again.) the loud bangs of falling mangoes onto my tin roof while I try to sleep. Not even ear plugs can stop me from jumping every time one of those suckers slams down up above.

Ok, that’s all I have for the time being, but now that I’ve started the list it’ll be easier to add on to it whenever a new love/hate moment pops into my mind.

Hope you enjoyed reading about the joys and tribulations of my life in Mozambique!

The Adventures of Pip

10/23/12

Some of you may recall that I had mentioned a few posts ago that my neighbor’s cat had given birth to 3 kittens, and that one of these kittens had been promised a home with yours truly. Well, at long last the time had finally come for my neighbors to get rid of the little rascals so they called me over to pick up my new child. I never really had a choice in which kitten I would adopt (which was probably a good thing considering my debilitating indecisive nature). You see, between the 3 kittens there were 2 white ones and one little black one…  I was given the little black ball of fur.

That first night was rough. I know that the first night a new kitten or puppy is taken away from the only home they’d ever known and their family is supposed to be hard, but I’d vastly underestimated how much more difficult it would be when you live next door to the kitten’s first home. Needless to say that within the first hour of bringing my new baby girl home (at least I think the kittens a she….) her mother heard her crying and stationed herself on the other side of my reed walls. Hour. After. Hour. I had to watch this poor baby kitty cry her eyes out for her mama who was just out of reach wailing for her baby on the other side of my porous walls. I tried to return the kitten to my neighbors but they refused to take her back so quickly, wanting me to wait a few days before I make up my mind. I spent a good deal of that first night (and the following few ones afterwards) trying to calm her down but those high pitched squeaking cries of hers never waned. I have rarely in my life felt like a villain, but that night was one of those nights I could imagine myself in a Cruella Deville get-up crackling evilly.

Anyways, you know that saying: “if you can’t beat them join them”? By Day #2 I went against everyone’s warnings and let mama cat come in to be gloriously reunited with her stolen baby. Touching eh? Except, sadly, the moment the mama ran into my house and spotted the bowls of milk, shrimp + rice, dry kitten food, etc. lying on the floor, well, I guess you can say her priorities changed. Instead of running to the kittens rescue she made a B-line for the food, and (yea it gets worse) when the lil’ baby came to her mama herself she was rudely hissed at and swatted away. Big mama became territorial. To make matters worse, the neighbor’s cat decided right then and there that I was her new best friend and put on her cat-charm full force: purring, rubbing against my legs, trying to get me to pet her and jumping to sit on my lap, etc. Now I’m not saying that I’m prejudice against older cats and only like kittens, no no no. It was just that I was still seeing this whole debacle through the lens of a Disney movie starring my poor baby. Now, not only has the evil human stolen the poor little kitten out of the safe warm confines of her home, she’s (inadvertently since I really didn’t mean to do this!) turned the kitten’s sole rescuer against her. HER OWN MOTHER! I sat there petting mama cat while poor baby kitten watched from the adjoined room, and every time the kitten would crawl over to her mama the heartless feline would hiss her away. Heartbreaking, I know.

Anyways, that dry cat food for kittens was pretty darn $$ (about a day’s salary) so eventually I stopped feeding mama Cat, which was fine by me now that I knew she was crying outside my door for the food in little pip squeak’s bowls and not to console her terrified baby. I gladly took over the mama role with the baby kitten, and by the end of the 1^st week little miss meowmers was eating dry food, using her kitty litter box, and purring when I pet her (which is still kind of hard because her entire body can fit in 1 hand.)

It’s been a whole 2 weeks now and Pip (short for Pip Squeak) and I are just 2 peas in a pod – except maybe our sleeping schedules, still need to work on syncing those up. I’ll post a picture of her on the blog as soon as I can get her to sit still long enough to take one J

Ate o proximo!

E & P

ps: Here's a quick video of Pip :)

Photos!

minha casa:

mural we painted:

Upbeat updates

I am happy to announce that my reading speed has decreased! Yes, I am finally now busy enough to NOT have time to read a book a day :)

My English club has been absolutely awesome – we started with about 8 people and are now no less than 19 dedicated and enthusiastic members! We range from ages 12 to 36 and meet 6 hours a week. We’ve created a wonderful environment of learning and laughter; we sing, play games, read aloud… everyone helps one another, everyone actively participates in grammar lessons, and a lot of students even come to class with their own ideas for activities! I still lead the sessions, but I’m so happy that we have a much more “group-effort” feel instead of the typical formal classroom environment. And already I occasionally hear my English Club members yell out greetings to me in English when I’m walking through town!

My Portuguese and Citswa tutors are equally amazing. They are both professors in town and are really friendly, knowledgeable and eager for me to learn. They are also, despite me telling them I could only pay for 1 tutor at a time, adamant about both being present for every session (so I basically have 2 professors tutoring me private lessons for the price of one!) We’ve discussed my learning styles, decided on the lesson plans, and I meet with them 3 hours a week and do homework compositions and notecards on my free days. Anyone who knows how much of a dork I am with learning languages could guess that I’m in heaven :)

Hrm, what else, oh the mural I did last weekend turned out wonderful! It was for two REDES groups (Raparigas em desenvolvimento, educacao e saude – girls in development, education and health) and was held in a local secondary school in a town in my province. There were about 30 young girls who participated ranging from ages 11 to 15, 7 of us Peace Corps Volunteers to supervise the event, and the day was filled with games, songs, a guest speaker, the mural painting and activities to make jewelry. In the beginning of the day we had a brain-storming session with the girls on what they wanted the theme of the mural to be, I sketched some ideas on a blackboard for their opinions, and then I was given free artistic reign to design the mural while they worked on sewing earrings from capulana scraps. After I’d drawn the outlines of the shapes and messages in marker, the girls came out and painted everything in while we supervised and helped in with some of the trickier parts. As a final touch I asked all the girls to stick their hands into a color and put their hand print on the wall so they could always come back and know they’d helped create it. All and all it was a great success! I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect going in since the event was being held by two veteran PCVs and I was merely asked to help out, but I’m really very happy with the way it turned out!

This weekend I’m going to another nearby town to help paint a library my friend has built for her town. Okay, it wasn’t exactly “built” but she was able to have the project approved by her town’s administration, they let her use an old building near the primary school for the project, she applied for and received a grant of money for the books (not to mention personally fundraised a hefty amount of funds for books herself), and is now getting ready to put on the finishing touches for her library project! I’m so excited for her and to be able to help out, I can only hope that 1 or 2 years from now I’ll be working on a project of equal grandeur!

Also I’m finally starting to find some direction at work… While I still have no job description, I’ve succeeded to complain enough to my coworkers that we’ve decided that while I wait for a job description to materialize that we’d schedule 2 monthly palestra events (a palestra is a mix between a meeting and a training led by 1 person) with me and our 49 CD activistas (CD = Cuidados Domiciliares = home-based-care). So basically I’ll have free reign to discuss the importance of using condoms, having mosquito nets, maintaining a healthy diet, food sustainability, vertical transmission, TARVs, and all of rest of the health information I learned during training with my organization’s activistas in hopes that they then transfer the message to our 265 clients. I practiced by trying to explain what exactly HIV is to our accountant, and even though he’s a university graduate and probably understands me more than anyone else at our organization, it was pretty rough trying to explain what an immune system is in Portuguese. So yeah, a little nervous on how these palestras will go with our activistas, many of which have probably not finished secondary school…. First one’s on October 10^th, I’ll let you know how it goes!

To wrap up this blog post which is getting much too long for its own good, I’m finally making some traction on getting cement inside my house! Assuming nothing falls through (which is a pretty big assumption) I should be able to schedule the work in the next coming weeks! (this is to say nothing of getting a door on the bathing area or latrine, but my eyes on small accomplishments!

Missing my friends and family dearly, as always

Em

Garden Cheerleaders

After a month and a half of growing seeds in egg cartons, yes, I finally started my garden!

My South African friend who lives in my village had given me 5 big bags of manure, peat, straw, coconut shell mulch and wood chips (I used some to start a compost and the rest to put into the garden itself) while my Japanese friend in town had given me a bunch of lemon grass and sweet potatoes to put around my bern (a bern is the outer perimeter of a garden – good ol’ PST!) This past Tuesday was a national holiday so I took my day off to buckle down and start digging up the beds and whatnot. It’s a good thing we learned about perma-gardening in training because if I hadn’t done the famous “double dig” I would have missed all the treasure I dug up. Turns out the spot I’d chosen for my garden (let me clarify, the ONLY empty area in the quintal) is also coincidentally the location of the most recent garbage pit. My bounty included a lovely range from clothes hangers to polyester hair extensions…

The highlight of my day however wasn’t the occasional plastic bottle cap but the fact that within 2 minutes of my gardening I heard muffled giggles and turned around to see 3 of my neighbor’s children up in a tree watching me from the other side of our fence. Now, try to imagine this: 1. The place I’d chosen for my garden so happened to be in the far end of the quintal so these children were no less than 10-15 feet away from me, high up in a mango tree, leaning over a rickety old reed fence. 2. I don’t own a shovel so I was at the moment digging up trenches with a tin can. 3. I’m the only white female in the village. Haha, so yeah, I cracked up when I saw them all giggling up there and waved to them in good humor since I realized, yes, this was funny.

I’d assumed that after a few minutes of watching me they’d get bored and go off to play, but alas, 10, 15,… 30 minutes later they were not only still holding ground (or well, you know what I mean) but had tripled in numbers to include now 5 children up in the tree and 4 kids that had climbed up the fence and had their eyes peering over the top. Far from being annoyed, I honestly felt a little bad that watching some white girl dig holes in the ground was the most interesting thing they could be doing on their day off from school. So instead of shooing them away, I finally decided to put them to use! One was sent on the mission to find me a decent shovel (in a belated attempt to save any back muscles I may not have yet pulled by this point), another was given the important task of occasionally going inside to tell me the time, and the remaining children were burdened with entertaining me J

We sang songs together (after a few Portuguese songs one of the older kids ran inside the nearest house and within a few minutes out blasted Abba, Bob Marley and Michael Jackson from it), we discussed our favorite fruits (a topic that came up quite naturally sine the mango tree some of them were sitting in is currently budding baby mangoes), and I probably asked them to repeat their names no less than 3 separate times since more and more children kept on magically appearing. Eventually they lost all pretenses, climbed over the fence, and sat by the edge of the garden on the ground watching me as if I were a captivating TV show. At one point some of the more annoying kids in the neighborhood came by and started throwing rocks into my garden to bother me… not realizing now that I had acquired a posy, the culprits were immediately besieged with a wave of angry yelling from my new friends.

The hours slipped by and before I realized it I was late for a lunch date I was supposed to have with a friend in a nearby town. I bid my audience a quick farewell, hauled the remaining bags of mulch and whatnot back to my veranda, quickly changed out of my manure-covered clothes, and was running outside to lock the door when I realized my entire fan-club was standing outside my door. I assumed they hadn’t understood me when I said I needed to go and I was about to explain again why I must leave both them and my garden half-finished, but then I realized that the kids in the middle of the group were hiding something behind their back. Looking up bashfully, the children presented me with a big papaya and thanked me for spending the day with them.

Yeah. “Adorable” doesn’t even cut it.

All and all, I didn’t finish my garden but now when I walk down the dirt path home from work I occasionally am assaulted with a mob of children running to come hug me. All for letting them watch me garden J

PS: I decided to play hooky on Friday and stay home in the morning to finish up potting my seedlings and, lo-and-behold, magically within the first 2 minutes again I heard the familiar ruffle of tree branches and looked up to see my friends grinning widely from up in the mango tree