Pouco a Pouco (Little by Little): Working with My Organizations
The beginning of my Peace Corps service has definitely been a test in patience. First were the holidays. Then came the rainy season on crack. Throw in lots of demorrar-ing and atrasar-ing (taking a long time and running late), and it’s not until mid-February that I finally have my first full week of work. So what did I do for those first two months? I cleaned my house from top to bottom. I painted parts of my kitchen (pictures coming soon) and had curtains and tablecloths made. I read A LOT. And I watched three seasons of True Blood, five seasons of How I Met Your Mother, a season and a half of Glee, and various movies. And just when I was about to lose it, Caitlin, a PCV in a nearby town, moved in with me for a while because her house flooded due to the aforementioned absurd amount of rain. She’s been living with me for three weeks now, her organization is still looking for a new house, and it’s been a lot of fun.
The rain had such a dramatic effect on my work schedule because both of my organizations, Associação Crista and AJAAB, are so community-based. They don’t have their own offices; Associação Crista uses a local Bible school to do occasional paperwork, and AJAAB has its meetings on the porch of a driving school or in a classroom at the secondary school. All events are either outdoors or require a significant amount of walking for some of the attendees or leaders. When it rains, everything shuts down.
Now that I am working, it’s going well so far. I’ve mainly been accompanying activistas on home visits to check on and offer support to orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs), elderly widows, and the ill throughout the various neighborhoods of Macia and sitting in on meetings. Slowly I am seeing more and more of the activities of each organization, such as visits to an escolinha (pre-school) with AJAAB and community palestras (lessons) about HIV prevention with Associação Crista.
Pouco a Pouco: Community Integration
Community integration is also a long process. Macia is centered on its large market along the EN1, a major roadway in southern Mozambique, effectively making the town a large road stop. While this brings lots of benefits for me, not the least of which is the increased variety of produce and goods for sale, it also made integration more difficult initially. My first few weeks were full of teenage boys surrounding me trying to sell bags of cashews and cell phone credit and neighbors giving me “what the fuck” looks when I greeted them in Portuguese. But slowly, as people see me walking around town more and more, they realize I’m not just a South African or Portuguese tourist passing through on my way to the beach, and now it’s unusual for my greetings to go unanswered.
It’s a process that will continue throughout my two years of service, and it certainly has its ups and downs. For example, just this past week I invited a woman, who had previously invited me over her house, and her two teenage daughters over to my house for cake. I made a cake, bought refrigerated fruit juice to serve, and had my straw mat ready to go. The afternoon came and went, and they never showed up or responded to my texts. And to add insult to injury, the power went out and I was never able to bake the cake. But when one Mozambican woman stands you up, three others sit down on your porch after an afternoon of home visits and want to be served food and drink. So only a few days later I finally had my first Mozambican hosting experience, and luckily I had made plenty of pasta salad earlier in the day. The woman approved of the salad and plan to invite me over to their houses to teach me to make Mozambican dishes, which I’m really excited about.
Bugs
When I first moved into my house, cockroaches were a major problem. As soon as darkness fell, 2+ inch-long roaches would invade. I sought refuge under my mosquito net but could still hear the big ones roaming around my room. Thankfully, after thoroughly fumigating my house with two cans of the bug killer Baygon, I have emerged victorious. The morning after spraying, it was both horrifying and satisfying to find 23 corpses in my kitchen alone.
Unfortunately, a sudden proliferation of spiders has since appeared. One night, I went out to my porch to enter my kitchen for some toilet paper (my bedroom and kitchen are not connected), and froze in horror. Right outside my kitchen door was a huge skeletal-looking tan spider. It took me about one second to surrender; using notebook paper was a much lesser evil than facing that monster. Turns out it was a baboon spider, a type of tarantula.
Thankfully that monster has yet to make a second appearance, but my bathroom has become reminiscent of the basement scene at the end of Arachnophobia. After painting my house all day, I took a shower much later than I normally would. When I got in the shower and turned the water on, something big and dark ran on the wall mere inches away from me. It’s pretty normal to have lizards around my shower, but I looked to make sure and proceeded to scream. It was a spider with a 4-inch diameter, no exaggeration, and huge eyes. I’m sure of the measurement because after I jumped out of the shower I was frozen in fear for a few minutes, just staring at the spider as I whimpered. Eventually I made a dash to the kitchen for some Baygon and then unloaded about half a can onto the creature. It started to run and made it out the door by the time I stopped screaming and grabbed a shampoo bottle to chuck at it. The target was hit, and I squashed it some more for good measure. The next morning, all that remained were some chicken footprints right outside my bathroom and shit on my porch. Its brethren still make regular appearances throughout my house, especially the bathroom, but after battling with motherfucking Grendel, 1-3 inch spiders don’t seem so bad. But I do scream like Billy Madison after his classmate pees his pants each time.
Cooking
I have never enjoyed cooking; through college, I relied heavily on lean cuisines and the like. But two factors have led me to take up learning to cook as a hobby here: I love to eat, and I have had absurd amounts of free time. And since Caitlin moved in with me, cooking has only become more elaborate. I’m working my way through “You Can Make It in Mozambique,” a Peace Corps cook book. I’m not going to be making anything gourmet anytime soon, this certainly is no Julie & Julia, but thank God for that since that would make me the annoying Amy Adams character with a terrible haircut. Highlights so far include: tortillas, guacamole, pineapple salsa, home fries, vegetable soup, vegetarian chili, garlic bread, hummus, tomato sauce, and pineapple-upside down cake. All from scratch, bitches. And the baking, sans oven (I make a “dutch oven” by putting small stones inside a large pot, putting the baking tin on top of the stones inside the pot, and then the lid on top of the pot). And from this hobby, another hobby has emerged: hunting for spices and other ingredients in various towns. Look for “You Can Make It in Mozambique: Now with New Revisions by Megan Lawless and Caitlin Rosenberg” in stores in approximately two years.
My Most Embarrassing Experience
If you read my last blog post, then you know that my stomach has been struggling here. Unsurprisingly, it played a starring role in my most embarrassing experience thus far in Mozambique. I had actually been doing really well until one fateful Thursday afternoon, which because of rain, was my first day of work all week. My coworker and I were meeting people in Bairro (neighborhood) 5 when the stomach pains started. I asked to use the bathroom, which turned out to be an uncovered but walled space with large stones on the ground. Only large stones. Confused, I asked the dona da casa (woman of the house) were the pit was located. Turns out, there is none. The bathroom is just a place to fazer xixi (pee) and tomar banho (bathe). Two men then took me to the yard of a neighborhood with a pit latrine. There wasn’t much of a pit left as the hole was less than a foot deep, which made it impossible not to see that it was full of maggots. But when nature calls in Africa, she stalker-dials you until you answer, so I used it. A bit later, while waiting for yet another person (I spend a significant amount of time waiting, clearly), my stomach started hurting again. I explained to my counterpart that I was sick and needed to go home. So they started walking me back and asked if I wanted to use a bathroom, again. Another complete stranger graciously led me to their bathroom, which had a (seatless) toilet, a real luxury here. After an embarrassing amount of time, we went to the meeting. My coworker officially introduced me to the leader of Bairro 5, and we all sat for a while as people from my organization and various community leaders talked in Changana, the local dialect. Even though I only know a few phrases in Changana, it was clear I was the topic of discussion (looks like diarrhea is pretty much the same in every language). At the beginning, a coworker translated into Portuguese that the leader said warm Coca-Cola would help my stomach, and thus everyone was served sodas, mine warm of course. And at the end, one of the attendees thanked my coworker for bringing the doente (sick person) to the meeting, since everyone got sodas because of me.
As mortifying as the experience was, I couldn’t help but be impressed by how understanding and compassionate everyone was. Without hesitation, several complete strangers allowed me to use their bathrooms, which clearly is not something to take for granted in impoverished communities. Additionally, everyone had such great senses of humor about the situation. It’s hard to imagine a family simply not having a latrine, as was the case in the first house, but that’s not uncommon here. But really, the take home lesson is that given a week with me going stir-crazy due to rain, my stomach will choose the only two hours I get to work to be a total bitch.
