a new goal for year 2

I’m probably the worst blogger in the very short history of blogging. Most of the time I can’t think of anything interesting to write about. That probably seems absurd to many of you. I realize that. But after a while things start feeling normal. If you had a blog to describe the day-to-day activities of your life, what would you write about? A trip to the grocery store? A Friday night out-to-dinner with friends? Your sleeping patterns? Sometimes, what I want to write about is just too long and intense and I don’t have the patience or desire to sit and type. Let alone having to relive the experience. Finally, I have to admit the main excuse is just that I’m rather lazy when it comes to blogging.

Recently, I read a passage in Barbara Kingsolver’s book The Poisonwood Bible that does an excellent job at summarizing my excuses. The book is a story of a Baptist family who uproots their life in Georgia to move to the Belgian Congo in 1959. The following passage is told by one of the daughters, 15 year old Leah:

I wish the people back home reading magazine stories about dancing cannibals could see something as ordinary as Anatole’s clean white shirt and kind eyes, or Mama Mwanza with her children. If the word “Congo” makes people think of that big-lipped cannibal man in the cartoon, why, they’re just wrong about everything here from top to bottom. But how could you ever set them right? Since the day we arrived, Mother has nagged us to write letters home to our classmates at Bethlehem High, and not one of us has done it yet. We’re still wondering, Where do you start? “This morning I got up…” I’d begin, but no, “This morning I pulled back the mosquito netting that’s tucked in tight around our beds because mosquitoes here give you malaria, a disease that runs in your blood which nearly everyone has anyway but they don’t go to the doctor for it because there are worse things like sleeping sickness or the kakakaka (referring to cholera) or that someone has put a kibaazu (referring to a spell) on them, and anyway there’s really no doctor nor money to pay one, so people just hope for the good luck of getting old because then they’ll be treasured, and meanwhile they go on with their business because they have children they love and songs to sing while they work, and…” And you wouldn’t even get as far as breakfast before running out of paper. You’d have to explain the words, and then the words for the words.

With all that said, I am making it a goal during my second year of service to update my blog more regularly. Lets say a minimum of 1 blog per month. I think that’s reasonable. Unless of course the internet at my office stops working and my source for posting blogs is no longer available and when I walk to the telecommunications building in the hot sun they tell me a technician will be over sometime today and I go back to the office and sit there all day waiting for the technician and it’s 2pm and I really want to go home and eat lunch but I can’t leave the office because what if the technician shows up in the 30 minutes that I’m gone to lunch…You get the idea. But really, this exact thing happened to me a few weeks ago ;)

just for fun

To celebrate being in country for 1 year I thought I'd make a list of my top 20 favorite things about Moz. So here it is- compiled of memories, holidays, and just the normal day-to-day.

1.       Children screaming “excuuuuuse me”, “where do you go?” and “Obamaaaaaaa”

2.       Paying next to nothing for transport to travel the length of a country 2 ½ times as long as California

3.       Being able to take a nap during the “work week” and not feeling guilty for it

4.       Eating matapa with coconut rice

5.       Sitting on the side of the road in the blazing hot sun for hours waiting for a ride, then being picked up by some awesome people in an air-conditioned SUV with great music

6.       Walking into the SCIP Nampula office and spending over an hour just walking around greeting and catching up with co-workers

7.       Snorkeling at the islands of 2 archipelagos

8.       Treasuring a Saturday night spent with friends, frango, and cerveja

9.       Making the best of what you’ve got. Sure, we didn´t have turkey on Thanksgiving but we did have tons of other delicious foods!

10.   The things yelled at soccer games-“Boa!”, “Isso!” Everything is just so much funnier in Portuguese

11.   Calling up a fellow PCV to vent because they know exactly what you’re going through. And laughing by the end of the conversation

12.   Thinking you’ve died and gone to heaven when you enter a store that sells peanut butter, cheese, oats and chocolate

13.   Christmas Eve on a deserted island with no electricity- nothing but beach, friends, a campfire and unforgettable memories

14.   Singing all the wrong words to Portuguese/Makua/Xangana music. The Mozambicans really get a kick out of it, too

15.   Care packages!!!!!!!

16.   Mango season. And eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner because its just too hot to make anything

17.   Grown men in Hello Kitty t-shirts or a used cheerleader’s sweatshirt

18.   Going to bed at 8pm because it’s completely normal and there’s really nothing else to do

19.   Watching whole series of some great television shows-The Sopranos, The Wire, Friday Night Lights

20.   Mandar-ing people to do things for you- run to the market to buy bread, return empty beer bottles, carry your suitcase on the top of their head

it's not always sunny in Moz

The plan was to arrive in Sanhote at 8am, mobilize the community into a central location, have the theater group perform two skits on malaria and HIV, then facilitate a community debate on these issues.  The debate was to be recorded by a journalist from the Community Radio of Monapo and then played over the air during our normal time slot for community debates, Mondays at 7pm.  However, like so many things in Moz, our day did not go as planned.  Instead, what resulted is a day I like to think of as “my worst day in Moz.”

I arrived at the office at 7:30am in order to have a brief meeting with the theater group before departure for Sanhote. I wanted to discuss the objectives for the day and highlight key points for the debate which was scheduled to follow the theater pieces. Shortly after 8am I called SCIP Monapo’s driver to see where she was  and let her know that we were ready to leave and waiting for her at the office.  She informed me that she was in Nampula city. It was an emergency.  But, fortunately, she just needed to stop by the SCIP office in Nampula and then she would be on her way back to Monapo. I figured it would be 2 hours, since Monapo is about 1 ½ hours from Nampula (and Mozambicans tend to underestimate when it comes to time…”oh, your food will only be another 10 minutes!” “We’ll have the report finished by the end of the week”). Before you know it, its 10am and we (the theater group and I) are still sitting outside of the office, under a big cashew tree. I call the driver again to find out where she is. “Estou a vir,” I’m coming, was her reply and also one of the most annoying phrases in Portuguese (because it can mean I’m coming in 3 minutes or 3 hours).  I kept apologizing to the kids in the theater group, feeling bad because most of them had arrived at the office at 6:30am that morning (apparently, the 7:30am meeting time wasn’t effectively transmitted from the President to the rest of the group…) But I was now frustrated, too, sitting in the grass hot and hungry. But what could I do? I suggested the girls braid my hair. What a great idea! They loved the opportunity to make me look more Mozambican and I loved the distraction it provided. But, after an hour (and a whole lot of pain!), we were once again sitting and staring at each other and wondering where the car was. It was 12:30pm. I called the driver. She says she is in Namialo, about 20 minutes outside of Monapo. I let the kids know she is close because they have started asking if they can go home. I call the journalist at the radio to let him know we will be leaving within the hour. And the car does arrive within the hour, but the driver has a small errand to run before taking us to Sanhote. I knew it was too good to be true. Eventually, we pile into the car and swing by the Community Radio to pick up the journalist. It’s 2:30pm.

We arrive to Sanhote a little after 3pm.  I am yelling orders, since we only have 2 good hours to work before it starts getting dark. So while the majority of the group begins setting up, I head off towards the house of a midwife and SCIP Community Health Worker.  I get to Celestina’s house to find her and her husband shelling peanuts. They provide a stool for me to sit on and give me atas (a strange Mozambican fruit, we have nothing like it in the US, but they’re delicious) and raw peanuts. I sit and eat and talk. Celestina explains that she worked with the leaders of Sanhote to organize the community at 7am in preparation for our visit. And I apologize and explain all of the problems that we encountered with transport and ask if it’s not too late to hold the event today. Well, many people have gone to their gardens now, since they were away from them this morning. But we can try.

I returned to the theater group to find them setting up and community members already starting to gather around for the performance. A man I met once before approaches me and asks if we spoke to the community leaders about hosting this event today. I explain that Celestina likely spoke with the leaders. He says it is better to go directly to the leader’s house and speak with him, just to be sure. So he points us in the direction of the leader’s house and we drive there to speak with him. Abdul, the Vice President of SCIP’s theater group is with me. He presents the theater group’s credentials to the leader and explains our plan for the afternoon. I’m sitting there trying to not look anxious (at this point we have a little more than an hour before its dark) and not understanding a thing as the conversation is in local language, Makua. But some things are easy to pick up on, due to body language and tone. And soon I realize this leader is arguing with Abdul. Abdul stops to translate- the leader is denying our presence in the community of Sanhote. He said last year a group came to do a theatrical piece on cholera, a diarrheal disease that kills hundreds of children every year in Monapo district. A few weeks after the group performed, cholera hit the community and people blamed the theater group, believing that the outsiders brought cholera into their community to kill people. The community became furious with the leader and even dropped a child’s corpse in front of his house. Literally putting the deaths of the children on the leader for allowing this outside group into the community.

So what choice did we have but to pack up and leave? Freedom of speech doesn’t exist in a community where the leader’s word is the law. So unfortunate, since this community clearly needs to have more activities  and opportunities to learn about disease prevention and treatment in their community. As we prepare to leave the leader’s house, a woman walks up to me with a small bundle of cloth in her arms. She’s pleading with me and clearly asking for help but I cannot understand a thing since she is speaking Makua. Then, she opens the cloth bundle and I see what she’s holding inside- a skeleton of a baby.  The eyes are bulging, huge and bug-like on her abnormally large alien head.  But everything else is so stunted and shriveled I can’t tell if her head is really that big or if it just appears that way because the rest of her is so small. If you Google ‘malnourished baby,’ you will see what I saw.  I have seen my fair share of babies, both here in Mozambique and in Ecuador-but I have never seen anything like this. This child was clearly so far gone, I don’t think any amount of treatment would save it. I’m positive that as I write this, it is no longer alive.

So now I’m in the car bawling from the sight and more importantly, knowing there isn’t anything I, or anyone else, can do for this mother and her dying child. At this point, I could care less about the malaria and HIV skit and community debate and the stupid leader of Sanhote. We go back to meet the rest of the group who has now attracted quite a large crowd and is beginning their performance by dancing. Abdul explains to them what happened at the leader’s house and that we need to pack up, there won’t be a performance today. They don’t understand why I’m so upset. The journalist explains that working with the community is difficult- politics get involved and complicate our work. I shouldn’t take it personally. I say that’s not why I’m upset, but rather for the sight of a dying child. Now they really don’t understand. I can hear the others asking Abdul- What happened? What did she see? Well, what was wrong with it?  Oh, just a baby? For them, this is so common and unemotional. Just a fact of life, hardly something to get so upset over.

As we drive back to Monapo the others are discussing what we will do now for the debate. Since we weren’t able to record a debate among the community of Sanhote, the theater group will perform their malaria skit live over the radio during our normal time slot. It’s about 5pm at this point. They arrived at the office at 6:30am that morning and still have not had anything to eat. The group agrees to meet at the radio at 6:30pm to be prepared to go live at 7pm. Surprisingly, they are all at the radio by the time I show up at 6:45pm. I cannot believe the dedication these kids have shown throughout the day. They get a small monthly allowance from SCIP, but otherwise receive no pay for their hard work. It’s people like them that can bring a slight smile at the end of an impossibly long day such as this.

Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday

It's funny, in the United States the death of a child is a tragedy. The death of a child from a treatable infectious disease makes headlines. As it should, since the leading causes of death for children 1-4 years of age in the Unites States are accidents, congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities.

Under-five mortality rate is the probability per 1,000 that a newborn baby will die before reaching age five, if subject to current age-specific mortality rates. In 2010, the under-five mortality rate in the United States was 8. This same year in Mozambique, the rate was 135. And the major cause, you guessed it, comes from a 100% preventable and treatable disease- malaria.

I am in no way justifying the deaths of children in the United States. In no way are they more or less important than the deaths of children in Moz. But here, this exorbitant number of deaths is not news. It is not a tragedy. It is just a way of life.

Many people are aware of World AIDS Day on December 1st, but less are informed of April 25th. Like World AIDS Day, World Malaria Day was created to raise awareness of the disease and its deadly effects around the world. In Mozambique, approximately 340 children die EVERY DAY from malaria. Roughly 85 children are infected every day with HIV (through mother-to-child transmission). It's time for malaria to get the recognition and notoriety it so truly deserves.

I'm not writing this to get people to donate money. I don't think foreign aid, specifically for fighting malaria, is the answer. In my opinion, the only solution is time and patience and well-informed Mozambican leaders who can generate behavior change in their own communities. Handing out mosquito nets is not an appropriate practice when the population is too poor and uneducated to pass up turning the supposed bed nets into fishing equipment or a food storage material.

Yes, unfortunately, there are no simple solutions. But that goes without saying here in Mozambique. Like so many other things, you must think "pouco a pouco" (little by little).


References:
The World Bank. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT
UNICEF. http://www.unicef.org/mozambique/child_survival.html

back to normal: mice, Mountain Dew and a music video

After a very lengthy and fabulous Christmas vacation, I came back to Monapo and got settled back into the regular grind- work Monday-Friday and relaxing/doing chores/eating chicken at Pica Pau on the weekends. Not too much has changed here in Monapo, except for the Mountain Dew that is now sold near the market. I was SO surprised to see the stuff, just too bad I don't drink it. Also, a new Mennonite family has moved in. It's so nice to have other Americans in town!I have not met the father of the family yet, but his wife and children are incredibly friendly. They have 2 dogs, kittens, and 2 monkeys! I was supposed to get one of the kittens (Simba), but he ran away before I got the chance to take him home.

Its been a slow start-up for work, but that is to be expected. Many of my colleagues still have not returned from holiday vacations but those who have returned are hard at work. SCIP recently created a new partnership with the community radios in Nampula province and I am the lead for SCIP Monapo's involvement with our community radio. The relationship requires community debates, reports on SCIP activities and interventions in the communities and radio 'spots' with health themes. Tonight is our first debate and I'm nervous! Along with 3 community leaders, a nurse and 2 HIV testing and counseling officials, my coordinator and I will participate in an HIV debate to be broadcasted over the radio.

Since returning from vacation, I've been battling against a family of rodents who have taken up residence in my house. I moved every food item into glass or plastic storage containers but the creatures just don't want to leave! While they have not caused much physical damage, the psychological damage has left me with insomnia. One night I woke at 3:30am to a mouse on top of me! I don't know how it got inside of my mosquito net (I guess I didn't tuck it in tight enough) and I don't know what it wanted, since I obviously don't have any food in my bed with me. Needless to say, I didn't sleep the rest of the night and only for a few hours each night afterward. Until one morning I woke up to find a dead mouse on the floor of my kitchen-the rodent poison finally took its toll! And 2 days later I was shocked to find a paralyzed rat (slowly dying from the poison) beside my mini-fridge. I was screaming and in no condition to remove the thing myself, so I got my 8 and 12-year old neighbors to help :)

Many people want to know how I spend my weekends here. So I thought I'd explain how I spent my time this past Saturday... I woke up early to meet some colleagues (members of SCIP Monapo's theater group) to have a meeting. I've asked them to help me with a workshop I'm going to be giving to community leaders on stigma and discrimination. So they wanted to show me a short skit they've been working on to perform at the workshop. Unfortunately, when I got to the office to meet them none of them were there! So I went over to Ariel and Leah's house (my new education volunteer sitemates) and chatted with Leah and some of our friends. Then I left to go pick up Simba, the kitten, from the Mennonite family. But of course when I arrived at their home they informed me that he ran away. Feeling pretty defeated, I stopped by the market to buy some fancy new plastic basins for washing clothes. I returned to my house to find 3 members of the theater group waiting for me and we were finally able to have a short meeting to talk about their involvement in the stigma workshop. After they left I washed clothes for 2 hours and ate leftovers (my attempt at pad thai) for lunch. Then, my friend Assane met me to go to the carpenters and ask about the prices of wood as I want to build a table in my kitchen to have space for preparing meals. We went back to my house after the carpenters where I invited Assane to watch an episode of "So You Think You Can Dance" (Season 6) with me. We didn't have time to finish the episode before another friend, Ismael, showed up to have me film his music video. Ismael has been asking me for months to help him with this video and we have just never had the time to do it before. So I spent about an hour filming him and his "dancer" with my camera as they performed to an original song written by Ismael. I'll let you all know when the video gets posted to youtube! You'll be able to see my lovely house and laundry (mostly underwear) hanging up in the background. When the boys finally left it was dark out so I locked up for the night, made banana pancakes for dinner, and fell asleep watching Robin Hood. All in all, a pretty solid Saturday.

Here's what February looks like- more collaboration with the radio, stigma and discrimination workshops in Monapo and Moma, stigma and discrimination refresher course in Nampula, Carnival in Quelimane (the biggest in Southern Africa!), Chocas or Ilha for the holiday weekend (Mozambican Hero's Day), and preparing to leave for vacation in SOUTH AFRICA!

thankgiveness

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving (or thankgiveness, as the Mozambicans like to call it)! Mine was very strange but still pretty wonderful. I spent the week before Thanksgiving in Nampula for a workshop on "best practices" with the entire SCIP Nampula team. The workshop was led by a young woman from Boston. While she did an amazing job facilitating the workshop, she does not speak any Portuguese so another American who works for SCIP, the 3 other PCVs who work for SCIP and I acted as translators all week. It was pretty exhausting.

At the workshop in Nampula I was asked to attend and help facilitate another workshop on stigma and discrimination, especially focused on HIV/AIDS. So me and 2 other SCIP PCVs went to Ribaue (a district in Nampula west of Nampula city) to help our fellow volunteer, Patty, who had coordinated the workshop along with the rest of her SCIP co-workers in Ribaue. The workshop was a huge success. Many of the community leaders that attended had no idea what the words "stigma" or "discrimination" even meant. But after the 3-day workshop, they were able to define the words, describe how stigma and discrimination can be displayed in their communities, and create plans to disseminate the information they learned to the members of their communities. Along with Jack (a PCV from my group, Moz 16), I led a discussion on "modes of transmission" and "portals of entry" for HIV and was pretty surprised by how much the community leaders knew on this subject.

After the workshop ended on Wednesday afternoon, a SCIP car took me, Jack, and Bethany (another Moz 16 SCIP PCV) to Malema, which is Bethany's site. Two of my friends from the province of Cabo Delgado came to Malema on Thursday and another Moz 16er from Niassa province came on Friday to celebrate Thanksgiving. We cooked ALL DAY on Friday. Literally. From 8am-6pm. We started with a delicious breakfast- fried eggs, hash brown potatoes with peppers and onions and french toast with banana and mango syrups. Afterward, we started the preparations for dinner. What's on a Mozambican Thanksgiving menu, you ask? Here's what we were able to come up with- mango salsa, cornbread, chicken parmesean, Jamaican macaroni salad, macaroni and cheese, curried vegetables, Mozambican beans (feijoada), rice, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole (with fried onions), beef roast, pumpkin cake, apple crumble, and ginger cookies with lime icing. We ate like kings.

Bethany invited several of her Mozambican friends over to eat with us and before eating we all stood in a circle and went around saying what we are thankful for. It was a little emotional, but the general consensus among the PCVs was being grateful for the amazing opportunity to be in Mozambique and to have each other to share the holiday with.

On Sunday we all left Malema and I rode the train back to Nampula. The scenery was absolutely amazing, riding through the lush mountain range. But it was nearly a 7 hour ride and we were all exhausted by the time we arrived in Nampula. Now, I am back in Monapo (finally!) and am still pretty exhausted. I have so much unpacking and setting-up to do in my new house. Not to mention house repairs and building furniture. And with Christmas right around the corner I am feeling overwhelmed! I never, ever thought I would be so busy as a PCV. But I would take this over having nothing to do any day.

Here's what my life looks like for the next month- spend as much time as possible with Vonnie (my sitemate) because she leaves to go home on Dec. 7th, work with Edmundo (my supervisor) to supervise the community distribution of birth control pills and condoms with our team of promoters and animators, get OVCs (orphans and vulnerable children) from two neighboring communities legally registered and enrolled in school, welcome the Moz 17 Education PCVs (I'm getting 2 in Monapo!), go to Nampula for a week to work with the SCIP Monitoring and Evaluation official, travel South to Inhambane province for Christmas, and finally, celebrate the New Year in Maputo! 2012 will be here before I know it!

changes in addresses

The Peace Corps branch office in Nampula has moved locations and now has a new address (see right). The caixa postal (post office box) is still the same, so I should still get anything that was sent recently with the old address.

After an amazing week in Maputo for our Reconnect conference, I'm back in Monapo. While it was great to get away and spoil ourselves in a beautiful hotel, I'm happy to be back. This weekend we'll be saying goodbye to Megan as she leaves Monapo on Monday. Unbelievable. Then I'll move out of the irmas and into her house! I'm very excited but also a little nervous to be living on my own for the first time in my life. So wish me luck!