On a roll

Man, I got such a positive reaction from my last blog post – thank you guys! It's great to know that people actually read these things :)

And so, thus empowered from your emails and messages, (and because I currently have internet credit and am postponing packing) I'll write another for y'all!

Yesterday was a slow day since it was one of the weeks when I don't go out into the field to visit my OVC activists. In the morning the vovo (granma) who helps me with my house cleaning popped in (we tried to make a schedule for her to come on the same days at the same time every week but it didn't stick). I used to have young girls help me with washing laundry, carrying water, and washing the house but after the first or second payday they'd split

SIDENOTE:

a gecko just plopped down from the ceiling and Pippin had flown off my lap and had it in his paws before I could even realize what was happening. The only proof of the event is a wriggling gecko tail on the floor (actually no, Pippin is now carrying his prize from his mouth into a corner of the house... poor gecko!) Last week a similar event had happened when he leaped off my lap to catch one on the wall. Only difference was that time the gecko had been on the wall right above my big 20 liter bucket where I keep my water and, unfortunately, I'd forgotten to put the top on it. Mister meowmers was literally inundated up to his ears and jumped a mile high to get out! I was still ringing out his tail out a half hour later, and I'd also found a wriggling gecko tail floating in my drinking/ washing/ everything water - blegh! But back to this victim at-hand, I guess the poor thing is still alive because Pippin's chasing something around. No need to have cat toys in Mozambique when there's reptiles, rodents, and big bugs galore!

Anyways, so yeah the young girls would split which would stink but it seems pretty normal here. The vovo doesn't speak Portuguese and she's this frail little old woman but she's my neighbor's granma and needs the money so I don't want to deny her the job. I do however feel horrible having her do the housework so I inevitably end up spending those mornings she shows up at home as well helping out where I can. And let me justify myself a little here: washing your clothes by hand every week SUCKS. I learned how to do it and suffered through it the first few months here at site though it would seriously take me all day to do 1 week's worth of clothing and I would always have my hands covered in band aids the following day.

Eew, there's the crunch-crunch. Guess Pippin got tired with his playmate, buh-bye mister gecko.

But yeah yeah delicate prissy-girl hands, I've heard it, but you know what? it's true. These women have spent their entire lives washing clothes by hand, working in their farms, making all their ground flours by hand with huge mortar and pistols... So yeah, they got the hand-washing thing down a little better than I do

annnnnnnd there goes Pippin throwing up the gecko in the middle of the house. Lovely. Yep, you go outside and play kitty, just leave me to clean that up. Thanks.

Where was I? Anyways yeah so I helped vovo wash my floors (she does that once a month) and then she washed some sheets and brought me some water while I finished cleaning up the house. Spent the rest of the morning at the office helping a colleague research a homework project for his nephew online and then listen to some mozambican music while I made friendship bracelets for a guard at the prison and a lady at a corner store down the street. After work and before heading home I took my ritual afternoon stroll around town. I always have to stop at the same fruit and veggie stands, talk with the same mothers and grandmothers, say hello to my friends at the bakery... it's funny, even though most days I don't even buy anything if I don't go and say hello for a day or 2 I'll get called on the phone and chastised up the wazoo for disappearing. Earlier this week the women by the bus station selling bananas and cashews to travelers yelled at me for abandoning them all week so I had to apologize and explain that the bananas in my house were ripe so I hadn't thought to visit; my bad!

And speaking of bananas, I headed home that afternoon (I live about a 15min walk from the main road) and taught my neighbors how to make banana bread with all the bananas we had in our yard. It came out a bit condensed, but I don't know if banana bread can really ever be light and fluffy so I told them it was supposed to be that way (?)

This morning only 3 activists showed up for my Wednesday Health & English lessons but 3 is better than 0 any day. This week we did child malnutrition and the letters of the Alphabet complete with the ABC song and a game of hangman. Last week we did vertical transmission prevention, personal pronouns and the verb to be. Funny mixtures right? That took all morning so afterward me and a friend went to the shop in town where I can print out papers and make copies – I wanted to print out fliers for our English club that officially starts up again next week and make photocopies of a few medical sheets for my OVC activists in the field next week.

At home I had a pineapple a friend had given me last friday; all week I'd been cutting off slices for me and the kids in the neighborhood but there was still half of the darn fruit and I'm traveling tomorrow so after lunch I decided to make a pineapple upside down cake. It's funny how the kids just magically appear at my front door when they smell a hint of bolo (cake). One little 3 year old named Batista just came in and sat at my table waiting for the cake to finish.

Actually, Batista deserves his own paragraph. Besides my cat, Batista spends the most time with me. I don't know where he comes from or much about him at all really because he doesn't speak yet (hasn't even actually reached 3 years but is is close enough to it that the other kids say he's 3). Every morning he silently shows up standing at my door and follows me around as I get ready for the day, and the same thing every afternoon. I usually give him a fruit or veggie to snack on because I'm afraid his late speech development may be due to a lack of vitamins in his diet. He usually plays with a starwars toy car a friend had sent me in a care package last year and a GI-Joe figurine a fellow PCV gave me. I do have a few Japanese cartoons I got from my friend in town so at times I'll put that on for him while I work. The other day we pulled out the esteira and sat out on the verandah and snacked on roasted peanuts. Today I read out-loud to him in English from a book on the history of TFA (good thing he couldn't understand). Batista, Pippin & me. We're a happy family.

The cake came out me and Batista sat at the table and ate spoon fulls of hot pineapple gooieness from empty jam jars. Not missing a beat, after our first few bites two 5 years-olds came in and demanded some as well, though after a taste declared it wasn't as good as the one I'd made yesterday so I kicked the punks out. Sheesh!

This evening I had a JUNTOS meeting and even though we hung out for 2 hours only 4 of us were there the whole time while 3 others came and went. Seeing as we weren't being all that productive due to the low attendance, instead I sat Fyra down on my computer to type up an article she'd written by hand about sanitation and trash situation in town. Sent the photographer of the group, Inocente, out into town with my friend's camera to gather some pics for the website. Then I took the remainder kid, Amilton, into town with me to help me post the English Club fliers and to knock out my daily salutation rounds. After exchanging music and talking about a theater piece the kids want to write we headed out into the dusk. Some kids came home with me to eat some of the pineapple cake (they didn't like it either, maybe Mozambicans don't like pineapple upside down cake? Can't possibly be my cooking!) and take some more of my English music and look at pictures I have of New York City.

And that leads me back to the present. I mentioned procrastinating packing early; I'm traveling to Swaziland tomorrow for a music festival there called Bushfire. Ironically this weekend will be the first time I'm leaving the country and also my 1 year anniversary here (I arrived last year on my May 31^st). Funny how things fall like that. It doesn't feel like a year's gone by, though life here doesn't seem all that special or weird any more either. Just... normal.

Okay, should probably go pack up & prepare for hitchhiking and camping for 5 days in another country...

Night!

Ups & Downs

I swear, my friends and family must think they're talking to 2 different Emily's over here. One week I'll gloat and beam about all the wonderful projects I'm working on, then the next week I'll rant about how impossible it is to get anything off the ground and how the only thing I'm accomplishing here is catching up on my reading and perfecting the art of baking without an oven or measuring utensils. One day I can't stand another minute of the corruption, lies, and unreliability, and then the next day I'm on cloud nine daydreaming about staying here forever.... No, I didn't bump my head or become bipolar. I can say that with some confidence since my friends and family who are themselves returned peace corps volunteers (RPCV's) tell me they experienced the same roller coaster of very high highs and utterly low lows. Of course, knowing that I'm not crazy or alone doesn't make the ride any easier to stomach. It's the faith (or sometimes desperate hope) that even when nobody shows up for my meetings, all the projects we were working fall apart, and I've hit another brick wall with bureaucratic red tape, lies, or corruption that yes, despite the very steep fall, if I stick with the ride and don't give up and get off then sooner or later things will turn around again.

I recently had one of those steep dips. In the beginning of this year I'd sent a few letters back to the states with laundry lists of all the awesome new projects I was starting:

• a new food distribution project for our OVC's (orphans and vulnerable children) that I was trying to set up with a contact that worked for a private company.
• a clothing project for our OVC's where some friends of my mother's back in the states wanted to donate dresses for our girls and from there we could teach the recipients how to recreate the dresses for themselves for their own clothing needs and also to sell.
• my English Club had almost 30 participants and we were getting ready for a Peace Corps national competition of English Theater where the students had to write and perform a play in English in relation to a theme (like HIV/AIDS, women rights, or choosing your own future);
• I was starting up a youth group called JUNTOS in my town and the kids showed great enthusiasm and interest of performing songs and dances, theater, and starting a newspaper in town to move behavior change in topics like HIV/AIDS stigma, domestic violence, alcoholism, etc...
• I was approached by another international organization to work with my district hospital and the several HIV/AIDS service providers in town to create a GAAC program which would create small groups of 2-6 HIV-positive individuals in the remote rural communities where once a month 1 rotating member of the group would travel to the district hospital to pick up the ARV medications for the rest of the group.
• my primary organization that I was originally sent to assist was promising to finally start utilizing my skills, to start implementing my organizational recommendations, to aid me in finishing our CNA (community needs assessment) and to sit down with me in order to learn how to plan and implement a successful community development project.

It looked like I was finally going to start working! Ah, ignorant bliss....

As you can probably tell from the subtle foreshadowing, things didn't fall out as planned.

• The food distribution and the clothing projects are still an open possibility and the members involved still show interest but we're no closer to implementation than we were back in March.
• The English Club hit a wall of red tape and we had to move location several times until the club was officially canceled by the local government (evidently the school board was afraid being held liable in case anything happened to a white girl or young students on school property at night despite the countless letters and phone calls I made explaining our club's autonomy.)
• My youth group JUNTOS, which was so full of optimism and vigor, little by little lost its steam. A fellow peace corps volunteer (PCV) in a near-by town and I had planned a full day of activities for our two groups. Despite having planned the weekend trip weeks in advance, the night before our trip my fellow facilitator called me to let me know that every one of our kids had called him stating other last-minute things they had to do. I felt horrible having to call my fellow PCV in the nearby town and tell him with my tail between my legs that my group was going to be a no-show. After that first let-down our attendance rate plummeted.
• The said other international organization had promised a training session for my hospital staff to introduce them to the GAAC project but last minute they rain-checked the training once, twice, and then on the 3^rd time they indefinitely canceled the training. Some of the staff in my hospital were able to get the training eventually but not as many as we'd expected. Then when it came time to start implementing the project I felt like I'd brought to life the phrase “herding cats.” The hospital is so horribly under-staffed and overwhelmed that getting all the necessary people together in the same room once a week was nothing short of a miracle. That's not even taking into consideration a little thing we Moz PCV's like to call the “chefe-mentality,” meaning that nothing can happen without the person designated to be the “chefe” (or boss), who in of himself tends to always magically be way too busy and important to come to the meetings. The result of course is that nothing ever gets done.
• And, no shock here, nothing ever actually changed with my primary organization. Let me clarify though that it's not that my organization doesn't need me or want to work with me, quite the contrary, but that in reality they are so busy “chasing the money” that it's hard to get their attention for more than occasional spurts. My organization has an international donor that mandates projects and requirements that takes up 99% of my activists time and energy. It's not that this international donor organization doesn't have good intentions, but it's counteractive to community development for a small-scale social aid organization like the one I'm assigned to to blindly do everything a foreign organization tells it to do instead of looking to its own community's needs and addressing the problems that actually exist. Also, it hurts long-term human capital development when my organization only follows orders coming from above instead of learning how to research, choose, implement, and evaluate its own projects. Not to mention that these big international donor organizations never seem to have any consideration for my small grass-roots organization's time; at least once a week the president of my organization will receive a call the morning-of informing her that the donors are coming to do a surprise training/ meeting/ auditing, that they need such-and-such report by that afternoon, that they need to acquire statistics for this-and-that by the end of the week, etc. etc. Half of the time when I have planned weeks in advance an in-house activity with my activists they don't show up because our donor called that morning and demanded xyz. And then they have the nerve to preach the importance of planning in advance and having a calendar of activities.... grrrr.

Anyways, last month I was back to spending looooots of time reading at home and cooking with the kids in my neighborhood that were too young to go to school yet. Seeing as I had nothing else better to do, I decided to take a long weekend and visit a few fellow PCVs who were having more luck at their sites; man did I really feel like a big old loser after that weekend! Why could they get people to participate in their activities when I always heard the crickets chirping in my trainings and meetings? I decided to shift tactics; up until that point I'd been so used to blaming my failures on external causes (see above bullets for point in case) but my fellow PCVs faced similar obstacles yet were still able to accomplish their projects. I decided that I needed to stop focusing on these external factors that I had no control over and instead focus on the things I could change; mainly my approach and methods. What was I doing wrong? How could I avoid going home next year a complete failure? I came back from that long weekend with a new-found determination – I didn't dream about being a peace corps volunteer for years, leave my work, family and friends, and travel across the world to sit around on my bum!!!

• The first thing was to get more serious and stop acting like I'm on vacation. I cut down the amounts of weekends I traveled out of site to visit other volunteers, and the trips that were absolutely necessary (like work trainings or birthdays) were made into day-trips or 1-nighters. Staying at home more now I could plan work meetings on Saturdays when people had more free time and catch up on housework on the weekends. I also got rid of all the movies and tv shows on my external hard drive to get rid of temptations to hang out in my house alone. Little by little I let neighborhood kids hang out more and more in my house with me, making cookies or popcorn with them, showing them how to draw, making bracelets with them, etc. I up-ed the number of house-visits I made to my Mozambican coworkers and friends, started visiting churches again, having dinner parties with Mozambicans (not just foreigners), and going to more community events (a few weeks ago there was a big talent show in town!), among other things...
• Meanwhile, me and a friend were able to convince my org to let us use our meeting room to host the English Club 3 nights a week if we installed electric wires and lights into the room and payed for any increase in the electric bill (due to the extra lights and hours of electricity used). Me and my friend then set off to buy and install the wires and lights, we bought a big plywood board and next week we're going to paint it into a blackboard, frame it and hang it up in the room. Seeing as we're no longer using a school classroom to host the club the government no longer has any liability over our actions and therefore no authority to stop us :)
• After weeks of relentless pursuit I was able to coerce some colleagues on the hospital to at least plan out our projects but (of course!) we wouldn't go forward with them without the okay of the chefes. The process still took forever and a half but at least we were able to make progress and go in the right direction. The GAAC program hasn't started full-swing but we're a lot closer to implementation than even just a month ago.
• I prepared all the documents solo for our possible food distribution project, got the leadership of my org to sit down with me and review them, and then we emailed them out together. Not as much collaboration as I would have liked in organizing this but in this particular case I'd rather have the project come to fruition and help with our OVC's food security instead of waiting for another several months until my coworkers have time to do it with me.
• I decided that my youth group JUNTOS needed more instant gratification instead of planning for big future events. I invited some of the kids over one Saturday (participation bribe complete with cookies and all) to create a website to showcase their website, and had a foreigner friend lend me an extra camera he had so I could let my kids record their work and take pictures of their work. And voila! Soon participant at our meetings was at 100%,new members were coming every week, kids were preparing poems, songs, news articles and dances in their free time to share at the meetings, and my kids were visiting me at my house on weekday evenings and weekends just to hang out and show-off their work!
• I also met a new social activist in my town who was interested in starting another youth group with me specifically for girls called REDES (something I'd wanted to do for months but couldn't find anyone to do it with me.) (Let me clarify that as a Peace Corps Volunteer we're not supposed to do any projects on our own due to sustainability purposes; the idea is to create these projects and groups along with a Mozambican counterpart so that they can learn how to do it and so that after I leave the group will be able to continue without me.) Anyways, she also just recently started a preschool which is awesome because preschools for some reason are very rare here and the few that do exist are usually run by foreigners, are very expensive, and hard to get into. She's teaching the kids how to read & write, basic health and hygiene, and does arts & crafts(!) Again, this may not seem all that impressive to people reading this back in the States but a single woman in rural Mozambique who has the entrepreneurial ambition and creativity to do something like this pretty unheard of here and I am so psyched that I found this woman! I plan to help her get more health and artistic materials for her preschool, I want to also make a blackboard for her like the one I'm making for our English Club, and I also want to work with the preschool kids a few hours per week. Not to mention there's already a huge amount of interest in the girls community to join our new REDES club just from word-of-mouth. I have high hopes with this group :)
• In terms of my own organization, well I'm implementing the same chefe-sidetracking methods that I used with the hospital. I can't wait for the leadership in my org to find time for me any more so I'm just going to bribe the activists on my own to work with me. For example...
  • I told my activists that I'd teach them an English lesson once a week if they participated in a health lecture before each English lesson. I put it on the calendar, reminded the activists every time I saw them, asked them to choose the health lessons based on their interests, etc. Of course, like the several times I'd tried giving English classes or health lessons in the past nobody showed up for the first few weeks, but I kept at it and pushed and pushed and finally this past week 3 people showed up! And then 4, and then 5..... Can this be the beginning of something??!!
  • I also made a deal with some activists that live out in one of the rural towns that if I travel out to them once every other week they'll meet me for a health lesson and to offer activities for our OVCs there (we have a center there that isn't being used and those activists complain that it's too hard for them to come into the town every week for activities here.) I'd like to increase our meetings to once a week, and eventually have them offer activities for our OVC's at least 2 or 3 days a week without me, but I'm taking the small victories as they come. We've had 2 health lessons so far, have made a solid comprehensive list of activities they want to provide for our OVCs, and I've allocated responsibilities to each member to research the feasibility and cost of each activity. I hope to find a grant for them in order to acquire basic materials (like crayons and paper for arts & crafts, a ball for sports, a drum for music & dance, rope and a tire to make a swing, some chairs and a table for homework tutoring, etc). The grant would also be good to compensate them a little for their time and energy (even though they're volunteers, they already have to do home-visits for each OVC several times a week, so to also provide activities for them doesn't leave them a lot of time to work on their farms or sell products in the market.)
  • In terms of the CNA, I've utterly given up hope in getting my boss to assign someone to help me complete that. Ideally PCVs are supposed to realize the community needs assessment with a counterpart so that the organization learns how to perform a CNA, but I've been here for almost a year and, like the food distribution program, at this point I just want to finish this instead of taking the risk of waiting forever for someone to help me. At the very least after I finish collecting the data and write up the report hopefully they'll be able to use the results to focus future projects on the community's actual problems instead of always just reacting to donor mandates.
• Also, my constant popping into different sectors in town that work in health or youth development and reminding everyone and their grandmother to call me if they need help has finally payed off! This past week a contact I have in the Education Department called me up and asked me to help him plan and realize a training for all the professors in our district on student oral and visual health. I helped him create the budget, write up the objectives of the training, and next week we're going to investigate possible areas to get funding for the training (even though the training curriculum came down from the national government, funding to actually implement the training wasn't included!)

It's pathetic but I cannot tell you enough how happy I was this week having something to do every single day! Today I even made a schedule of my routine week-day activities: Mondays evenings are Eng Club, Tuesday mornings is health training and OVC activities in the field, Tuesday afternoons are REDES, Tuesday evening Eng Club, Wednesday mornings health training and Eng lessons, Wednesday afternoons JUNTOS, Thursday afternoons meetings in the hospital, Thursday evenings REDES (and of course all the times not specified is spent at my primary org or at other meetings.) Can you believe it, I'm almost busy!!!

Needless to say, I'm pretty darn happy right now. I know that in a few weeks all of this may fall apart again, but I'm going to bask in the momentary glory of feeling like a successful Peace Corps Volunteer! And when the next inevitable dip in the roller coaster comes again I'll remember this moment and struggle to climb back up here again.

Big hugs!