Mariri

Happy Saturday!  And that it was.  To celebrate not being sick anymore (or maybe it’s better to say to celebrate slight improvement and not having to run to the bathroom every 20 minutes), my site-mates and I decided to hitch a ride with Chad, our Missionary friend, and visit two of our friends in Mariri, arguably one of the most Matu Peace Corps sites in all of Mozambique.  As I’ve previously mentioned, the term “Matu” means bush, and when you use it to describe something, you are essentially saying that something is out there, or in Portuguese, simply “la.” 

So, Mariri is Matu.  It’s just about right smack in the middle between Pemba and Montepuez, and seventeen kilometers off the main road between those two cities.  Oddly enough, there’s a paved road that veers off the main road in a perpendicular direction and then goes all the way there even though cars rarely use it.  For the most part, motorbikes are the main means of transportation to town (if you can even call it that) to and from the main road.  At the main road, you find the town of Nanjua which is essentially just collection of homes set up around a market that’s as barren as the dirt roads running though this rustic crossroads.

Turn down the paved road and follow it for 17km through a few small towns until you finally hit Mariri, a sleepy African Oasis entrenched behind an enormous rock and at one point in time, home to the most prestigious secondary school in the entire country.  During the war, if you were a student, this was the place to be.  Samora Michel, as well as a laundry list of other highly influential people all sent their kids there to study.

Unfortunately the story today isn’t as encouraging.  Fallen from grace, the school now functions as a spillover for the surplus student population from the surrounding cities, towns and villages that were unable to register in time to take classes where they live.  Practically none of the teachers that work there are native to the area, and therefore they mostly commute in for the week and leave on the weekends.

Although still gorgeous, the feebly painted concrete complex has an eerie feel to it. Walking through the quiet community up to the school along a gravely road lined with humongous, wide-armed mango trees felt like walking through post-Chernobyl Pripyat.  Everything is still intact and oddly aesthetic, yet it’s completely deserted.  I should probably point out that we were there on a Saturday, so that probably accounts for the feeling of complete and utter abandonment.

We explored the desolate school yard, popping in and out of buildings hidden by tall grass and upturned soil, pretending like we were the only ones left on earth.   One dark room we came across looked as though the school decided to use it as an above ground, contained trash heap.  Loose papers covered the floors a couple of inches deep.  Random broken furniture was thrown about, entangled in piles of other junk.  And then wouldn’t you know it, but we saw a body; or, what we thought was a body.  Once a relic of the school past prominence, someone had thrown the top half of a very realistic, yet plastic cadaver dummy into the pile where it was resting in an upright and terrifying position.  In the low light, it was hard not to mistake it for the long-lost peace volunteer that was in Mariri before our friends, but never heard from again.

Totally a body.

Behind the school, we followed a path along a lake, and up into the matu until we eventually penetrated a thick forest.  In the middle of the forest, we came across the remnants of what appeared to be a concrete Portuguese  tee-pee.  So naturally, we took a picture in front of it.

On the other side of the forest the was the mountain, a enormous homogenous piece of rock poking out of the ground at a docile angle and stretching far above the canopy.  So naturally, we climbed it.  Even though it was raining. And then we took pictures.  And then we descended.  And then everyone slipped and fell.  And then laughed.

We made it back to our friends home just in time to meet Chad for our Ride home.  But the adventure doesn’t end there. Driving though the matu on the way home we ended up getting stuck in the middle of a bush-town and had to recruit the majority of the populates to help get us out.  Here are some pictures.

Who wears a Pink Parka to a pull-out?

Cholera

So apparently Cholera is still a thing.  Guess naivety got the best of me as I always thought it was just something your wife could contract if it was 1840 and you were steering a wagon across the Oregon Trail; an antiquated disease that went the way of disco, cassette tapes and America Online. I thought it was a thing of the past.  I was wrong.  Apparently, I was very wrong.

We got an e-mail yesterday from one of our Doctors (Side Note: Peace Corps provides pretty impressive health care for its volunteers.  Even though this country has something like one Doctor for every 10,000 people, Peace Corps managed to somehow get three on staff.) who alerted us to recent outbreaks of Cholera in two Mozambican cities, one of which is Pemba, the coastal resort town right down the street from where I live.  Her e-mail included a warning, as well as a detailed explanation on preventative measures (wash your hands, bleach your vegetables, don’t indulge in street food, etc.), so that we can do our best to avoid getting sick with a disease that does a number on your insides.

The e-mail itself brought me back to training in Namaacha, where we spent countless hours getting a quick and dirty education on global health issues in Mozambique from those very same doctors.  In addition to the training we received, we had a constant stream of current volunteers flowing in and out of Namaacha, visiting us so they could share information about their experiences in-country.  They typically stayed for a week, and during their visits, we had the opportunity to bombard them with questions.  One of the fun questions to ask always concerned what they’ve had to deal with medically, and the responses to that question were always entertaining. Typically, the volunteers (especially those at the end of their service, having been in Moz for two years) would rattle off a laundry list of exotic diseases and ridiculous incidents they’ve had to endure while living in Nossa Terra Gloriosa, often times enduring maladies that we’d never even heard of.

Anyways, that e-mail was a stark reminder of what life is like here in Mozambique.  It’s different, and not always in a good way.  Often, these differences make life a whole lot more difficult for the people who live in these conditions.  The thought of it all weighs heavy, and it baffles me how the people here aren’t more stressed out about all the things here that there are to worry about, and about life in general.  But they don’t, and everyone here is so carefree.  Maybe it’s the massive quantities of alcohol being consumed, or maybe there’s something in the witch doctors medicine that I don’t know about.  Meanwhile, this American is sitting here shaking in his boots.  Maybe I need to go pay that witch doctor a visit…

Lucas’ Farm

At least this time we stayed on a path.  Well, it was a path most of the time.

 

For some reason – and I’m still trying to make sense of it, but for some reason I decided to spend my Saturday morning like any normal person would; normal Mozambican that is.  I signed up for some good old fashioned manual labor.  But like, old fashioned in the literal sense.  And as a result, I’m sunburned, exhausted, sore, and smelling like a bag of aged Cooler Ranch Doritos.  Now, on to the story of how I feel into this mess.

I’ve recently realized that the schedule I designed for myself (because I produced all the schedules for all the teachers I was able to custom build mine as well…), is a little too perfect.  In designing it, I grouped all my classes together each day so as to avoid having 3 or 4 hour breaks between times that I was supposed to teach.  Genius I had thought, this way I can just go to school, do my business, and then leave without having to return.  Brew ha-ha, what a glorious plan.  Well, as common to all my plans, there are often unexpected consequences.  I designed my schedule so well, that it turns out I’m really not at school all that much.  It didn’t take long for me to figure out that it’s tough to interact with your colleagues and students when you aren’t actually present.   So, now I’m trying to spend a little more time there before and after classes, talking with whoever will talk to me about whatever I can manage to get out.

So there I was, hanging around school on Friday, trying to socialize a bit, and in the middle of a conversation with one of the Continuo’s (I have no idea what kind of position that is, but he works at school, I discovered that he was planning on going to work on his machamba that weekend.  He’s been sick for a few weeks now (there’s a bug going around town, it’s like the flu or something, but everyone thinks they have malaria; more on that some other time), so I thought it would be nice to offer to help him out.  He seemed really surprised when I asked if I could tag along the next day, and was ecstatic when he realized I was being serious.  I asked him what time he wanted to leave, and he responded by telling me he’d come pick me up at my house at 5am the next day.  Ugh, 5am.  I nearly had an embolism in my brain trying to fake a smile and produce enough enthusiasm to sustain what used to be genuine excitement and make it believable.  In reality though, my insides began to weep as I immediately regretted my decision.  This was the first warning sign that I was in for a true treat. 

Well, I woke up at 430am to try and eat something before heading off on my adventure to the bush machamba.  I discovered that Montepuez is quite pleasant at this hour.  Actually, it was magnificent.  It was one of the only times I’ve ever experienced complete and utter silence here in this wonderful country.  As sun began to rise, it illuminated a colorful display of delicate looking clouds, smoothly spread across the morning sky.  The air was crisp. I wasn’t sweating.  As I sat outside and ate some homemade oatmeal, I did my best to soak up early-morning Montepuez before it made the inevitable shift to African chaos in just a few short hours.  I was alone, and content.  And when 515 finally rolled around, Lucas rolled up with it.  After greeting each other, I grabbed my bag and we set out on our journey.

We first stopped by his house to grab some tools.  Right as we were leaving, Lucas paused.  “Esqueci!” he said, explaining that he had forgotten something.  He quickly turned around and motioned to one of his young sons to bring him a machete.  “Precisamos este,” he said, “We need this.” 

As we began walking, I started asking him about the tools he was carrying.  Two small hoes, a jug of water, and the machete.  I knew what the hoes and water were for, but I wasn’t sure about the big knife.  Maybe we would be cutting banana trees or something.  I wondered, so I asked him.  “Banditos,” he replied.  The machete was for self-defense.  And then I soiled myself.  Well, not really, that didn’t happen until he gave me some detail. Lucas explained that the path we were going to be walking along was pretty dangerous. During the early morning and early evening, people had been known to get jumped by some armed jerks looking to rob unsuspecting and helpless farmers of what little they already had.  Because of this, you needed to bring something to protect yourself just in case.

So we walked.  We weaved through the biarro on the edge of town as we made our way towards the matu.  Where civilization ends, the matu (the bush) begins.  There is no transition.  You stop seeing mud-huts topped with dead capin, and start seeing live capin.  It’s big, and it’s wild.  It swallows you, overwhelms you, as if it were a wave crashing on a beach, almost to the point where it feels like you might actual drown in the tall grass.  You look down and all of a sudden you are walking along a rustic dirt path that’s been molded by generations upon generations of bare feet.

You have plenty of time to think about those who walked this path before you, even before you were born, because you’re walking for what seems like hours.  Then you realize that it actually has been hours, because Lucas’s Machamaba is a sandy two-hour walk outside of town.

It was barely 830 when we finally arrived, and I was already on the verge of passing out from exhaustion.  What started out as a slow meander evolved into a ferocious power walk about half way through the hike out there.  We were hustling, and that movement didn’t stop when we arrived.  Upon arrival, Lucas handed me a hoe and we got to work. 

The goal was to carve up a large section of his land, uprooting weeds and bush plants and turning over soil so that he could plant beans the next day.  Lucas bent over at 830am and didn’t straighten his back again until about 11am.  I’ve never seen someone work so mechanically, but this man redefined what it means to be a machine. I, meanwhile, was not nearly as impressive.  I held my own for about ten minutes.  From there after, it got ugly.  Farming is not easy work, and it’s even worse when you don’t have access to a tractor.  Instead, you’re using a tool that’s made from a sharpened piece of discarded metal and sanded-down tree branch.  Very technical stuff.

We spent the next three hours capinaring (puling weeds, turning soil, etc.) until there was no more to do.  At that point, I was happy again.  Job well done!  Well, for Lucas at least. 

Covered in thornes and prickly things from the corn, clothes dirty, sweaty, and my skin starting to give me a sneak peak of what I’d look like if I were a strawberry, I was ready to go home.  Also, my water was almost gone.  And so after Lucas tomar banho’d in the stagnant water that splits his land (Schisto Central, Bro), we set out on the long journey home.

I did know it at the time, but every Saturday and Sunday, Lucas does this same thing, usually alone.  He gets up at 5am, eats, then walks into the bush to do work he doesn’t get paid for.  He has (not owns…there’s no official ownership of the land, it’s more so just an unspoken honor system that clarifies possession) two plots outside of town that he’s been farming for years.  The first one was passed onto him from the previous generation, who was gifted it from the generation that came before them.  Who knows how far back that stretches.  The second plot was newer, and Lucas had claimed, cleared, and capinared everything himself. 

With so much time to talk with him, I learned a lot about his life and found that he is truly an incredible and selfless man that has chosen to devote his life to supporting his family.  During the day, he works at school and at night he becomes a student.  He’s working towards finally earning his high school degree at the ripe age of 40 (ish... or maybe 50, I don’t know).  Instead of relaxing during the weekends, or spending what little free time he has getting drunk, he performs back-breaking labor so that he can feed his family.  There are no vacations for Lucas, there are no holidays or breaks.  Lucas the machine turned on 40 or 50 years ago, and just like the energizer bunny, just keeps on running.

Lucas is a prime example of one of the people I came here to meet.  He is everything that is good about this country, and his story, similar to that of so many others, is beyond fascinating.  He speaks something like 7 different languages; he has traveled far and wide across Mozambique; built countless homes; started a family and stayed true to it.  He’s watched first hand as his country broke through the shackles of colonization with a war for independence.  He lost friends and family in the prolonged civil war that followed.  He witnessed the collapse of his country, felt its effects, and then watched as it was born again. His eyes have seen things and his brain has processed thoughts that my imagination couldn’t even conjure up.

Working with Lucas, and having the opportunity to talk with him was absolutely invigorating.  It reminded me of why I am here.  I am here to help, but more so, I am here to learn from people like him.  It’s funny; I’m supposed to be the professor, but I can’t help but feel like I’m the one doing more of the learning.

Tests.

I haven’t really written about school all that much, I’m staring to feel bad about that.  Particularly because teaching is my primary job here and everything else is supposed to come second to it.  So, here comes a post about school…

Tests.  Giving tests really sucks.  It sucks because whenever you give a test, it also means you have to grade the test. You have to spend countless hours trying to decipher chicken scratch handwriting, all the while trying to remain calm and fair as you slowly start to realize that the more you grade, the more you start to realize that you’re the concepts you spent the past few weeks trying to teach your students clearly didn’t stick.  Even though the test was open book.  And they had all the answers in the pages right underneath their noses.

I failed my fair shares of tests in my time.  Biology in high school was not my forte; I repeated calculus 2 in college.  Jeez, it took me three tries just to get my learners permit.  I thought it felt pretty bad to fail a test, but I never once thought about the other side of the equation.  How does it feel to be a teacher and give out so many failing grades?  Well, I know now.  It sucks.  6 out of 20 here, 4 out of 20 there; on more than one occasion some students only earned a half of a point on the entire test.  These are 12^th graders; and this was a test about addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division! 

It’s hard not to blame myself for their failures. Perhaps I could have been more thorough. Perhaps I could have been more clear with my explanations.  Perhaps I could have given more homework.  Perhaps I could have made the test easier.  Perhaps I could have done a better job.

Fortunately, there were some shining stars in the group, and not everyone bombed completely.  There were some glorious outliers and I’ve since discovered that erratically distributed among the 40 or 50 kids in each of my turma’s are some pretty talented people.  I understand that not everyone is going to get the concepts.  Just like in the states, sometimes it just won’t stick.  But, there are those which will receive, process, and save the messages I’m sending them.  Those are the students that will make it all worthwhile.  They always say to focus on the little things, so I guess that’s what I’ll try to do.

Round two of tests is in a few weeks.  Next time they actually be tested on material that should be new to them.  That’s when things will get real interesting…

So Fresh.

I reminisce a lot here.  I think it’s pretty normal, and most other Peace Corps Volunteers would probably say the same.  I can’t confirm that though, but it seems like it would be true.  Anyways, I reminisce a lot, and I’m always surprised by how my memories of life in the US – analyzing the construction projects on L street as I walk towards my sister apartment in DC, sweating into the back of my seat as speed across the bay bridge on my way to the shore in a car no 26-year-old deserved to be driving, lugging boxes of vases of the step and narrow stair case to Becca’s old office where I was always greeted by an wave of enthusiastic salutations and a gorgeous group of smiles, or waiting in line at Chipotle and attempting to order my burrito in Spanish all the while always forgetting to ask for extra pico – still seem to fresh in my mind.  I can’t get over that, and I constantly wonder if that’s going to change.  It has to, right?

With every new day, the past falls further and further behind and as time fades away, I have to assume that the extraordinary amounts of details I’ve been remembering will follow suit.  I hope not.

(Random Note:  I read somewhere that when you remember something, you are actually just remembering the last time you thought about that same thing.  I feel like that’s something Helen, or reddit, or both probably showed me) 

Wedding Bells?

One of my neighbors has a certain fondness for his MP3 player and seemingly humongous speaker system.  I say seemingly because I haven’t actually seen them, but I can most definitely hear the mixture of American and Mozambican pop music that’s being spewed from them at all hours of the day.  From across the street.  With curtains pulled.  And my doors and windows shut. And locked (not that it would really help dampen sound, but it’s more for dramatic effect…).

He blasts his music all day, every day from 6am to usually about 9pm or 10pm at night. When I say “his music” I am of course referring to the collection of 7 or 8 songs he actually has on his USB flash drive, which he then plays on repeat.  It was maddening at first, and I just couldn’t understand how anyone could put up with it.  The same songs.  On repeat.  All. The. Time.

A few weeks ago, I came up with an idea to try and solve the problem.  “I know,” I said to myself, “I’ll fill one of my other neighbor’s flash drives with music – music that both he and I like – and then he’ll inevitably pass it along to the neighboring playing DJ who will then at least have a little aural diversity to play with.”  I thought it was a great plan, and just when it seemed to be working, the Mozambican’s decided they didn’t like the combination of Rock and Roll Power Ballads, American Rap and Pop I had given them and went back to their old seven or eight songs.  Or maybe they lost the USB stick I had put music on.  Or it was stolen.  Probably a combination of all three.  And then, as my plan quickly fell apart, I learned a harsh lesson about what happens when you give someone something in Mozambique: Everyone else wants something too.  Adding salt to the wound still festering from my failed plane was every single teenager with an USB coming over and asking me to put music on their flash drives too.  Dumb move Will.

But, I’ve started becoming desensitized to the shitty soundtrack  at this point and can usually go about my day toning the music out.  But I was just caught off guard by something…a new song.  And what is that new song he’s apparently added to his collection?  Well, it’s wedding bells of course.  Why?  I don’t know.  Probably because it’s Mozambique.