I
apologize for the gap in posts, but I write to you now from the last leg of a
secondary project marathon. June is a
CRAZY month.
Two weekends ago, Mireya and I
started the marathon by hosting a workshop for JUNTOS (Jovens Unidos no
Trobalho Oportunidades e Successos or Youth United in Work, Opportunities, and
Suncesses). Of course as a pre-race
warm-up, we had to navigate an obstacle course of headaches common to planning
any such event in Mozambique.
The workshop was to include three
groups of kids: Home team Montepuez and visitors from Mocimboa da Praia and
Mariri. The first challenge was finding
a safe and affordable place to house the visiting groups. Ideally, visiting groups stay at the host
groups’ school dormatories because we can usually negotiate for them to stay
for free. Unfortunately, there was no
space at ours so we began to look elsewhere.
Thanks to the ruby mining just outside of town, Inns in Montepuez are a
tricky business for two reasons: 1) People who stay in inns in Montepuez
usually have a lot of money, therefore, the inns often charge an arm and a leg
2) Where there’s money, there’s crime (Don’t worry, life in Montepuez is not a
scene out of Blood Diamond), and so inns that don’t charge an arm and a leg are
often sketchy at best… no place to put our underage charges. Luckily Mireya found the perfect place: A bright pink inn with reasonably priced
rooms, a restaurant area that they were willing to rent out to us a conference
room, and PUPPIES!!!
Second obstacle: food.
Due to budget cutbacks, we couldn’t hire just anyone to “cater” our
workshop and pay for each meal by the plate.
Our budget demanded that we buy all of the food in bulk ahead of time
and negotiate for someone to prepare it.
The obvious person to prepare it would have been the cook for the inn’s
restaurant. But being Mozambique, just
because an inn has a “restaurant” it doesn’t mean it’s functional. There was no cook. Someone staying at the inn just happened to
know of a woman who used to hire herself out to cook for large groups and was
currently looking for work. The owner of
the inn gave her a call and just like that, the inn had a functional restaurant
and we had a cook.
Then we actually had to get the
food. Have you ever tried to extrapolate
recipes for more than 20 people? I don’t
know about you but I generally don’t think in quantities of kilos and litres
when I’m cooking (I don’t just mean the thinking in metric part). More importantly, have you ever tried to buy
food for that many people without a grocery store or a car to transport it? After 16 chickens and a 50lb bag of rice we
had over 200lbs of stuff to get across town.
As we were debating how to get our rice home (I can carry feed bags,
sure, but the last time I checked it wasn’t a mile between the barn and the
car), we ran into Alan, one of Montepuez’s lovely missionaries, running errands
in his truck and he graciously agreed to give us and our stuff a lift.
The first group to arrive Saturday
morning was Mariri. About this time, I
had learned that the inn had completely sold out of sodas so we would have to
bring them in from elsewhere. This is
not a simple task because sodas here are sold in glass bottles that have to be
returned to the vendor so unless you have empty bottles to trade, they are
hardpressed to let their bottles go.
This meant I would have to go to the wholesaler (of course on the other
side of town) to try to negotiate a deposit on some crates of bottles. Since Alan wasn’t around to save the day, I
put the Mariri group to work. I took
them into town, bought them breakfast, then we carried the two cases of soda
from the wholesaler back across town to the inn. Being typical respectful Mozambican students,
at first they refused to help carry one of the cases for a stretch. Finally they tired and I took my turn and we
spent the rest of the walk talking about Arnold Schwartzenager (as Mozambicans
are always surprised when we Americans show ANY willingness to do physical
labor).
Mocimboa da Praia arrived a few
hours later (9 hours of travel that started at 3am!!!) and the workshop was
finally underway. JUNTOS is funded by
PEPFAR so all of our sessions are about leadership, sexual health, and
HIV/AIDS. These kids have this
information beat into their heads time and time again so finding new and fun
ways to present these topics takes some creativity. One of the topics Mireya and I were
responsible for presenting was puberty.
All of our kids have already hit puberty so we decided that we could
probably get away with a game to review what happens. Thanks to a donation of extra hair weave from
my neighbors among other local materials, we were able to design relay races
with activities that related to feminine and masculine puberty. Some of the activities might seem crude, but
part of the purpose of these PEPFAR youth clubs is to make the kids comfortable
with the changes they are going through and you can’t achieve that by beating
around the bush, so, with that disclaimer:
Feminine
Relay Race:
1)
Body hair begins to grow – put clumps of weave in armpits
2)
Breasts come in – stuff shirt with two balls made of plastic bags
3)
Hips widen – run back with a ball/pot between legs
4)
Menstruation begins – Open a sanitary napkin and smash a tomato on it
5)
Face become oily – wash face
Masculine
Relay Race
1)
Facial and body hair begins to grow – put on a beard made of weave
2)
Muscles grow – Stuff sleeves with plastic bag balls
3)
Voice deepens – Read a sentence starting with a high pitched voice and end with
low pitched
4)
Wet dreams begin – “Fall asleep” in a chair covered in a capulana, wake up
surprised, “wash” the capulana and replace it on the chair
5)
Face becomes oily – wash face
Those 5 minutes were easily the most
entertaining I’ve had in months.
As far as the kids knew, the
workshop continued to run smoothly.
Things in the kitchen, however, were getting heated. For the first lunch, we had planned matapa
served over rice. We had intended for
the 50lb sack of rice to last for all four meals we were serving that weekend
but when we went back to check on the matapa, the cook had prepared 25lbs of dry
rice JUST FOR THAT LUNCH!!!! I mean,
they love their carbs here, but even our hungriest teenage boy wasn’t going to
eat an entire pound of rice. (A pound of
potatoes for every person, right, Mom?) The woman was indignant when we
confronted her about this and maintained this attitude for the rest of the
weekend when we started keeping a closer eye on the portion control. We told her she could use only 5 chickens
that night for the curry because the rest were for serving grilled
half-chickens the next night and had bought just enough. Of course she used 6 when we weren’t looking which
left us with the awkward decision of who wasn’t going to get to eat dinner the
next night.
On top of that, she had called for
her kids to come armed with large tupperwares to take home food…probably the
real reason for making too much food. We
quickly put a stop to this practice but compromised by letting the cook and the
rest of the workers eating the extra food after all of our kids were served. Then they tried tell us that they weren’t
going to see any of the money we had agreed to pay the owner of the inn for the
preparation of food so we needed to pay them extra. We cleared up that misunderstanding with the
owner right away. Mozambicans can be the
nicest people in the world but boy do they try to milk you for every last dime
sometimes.
Speaking of milk, the cook made an
odd request before she agreed to cook for our group. She asked us to buy her fresh milk to drink
while she cooked to protect her throat from the charcoal smoke. We agreed that this was an easy thing to do
and if it would she would cook better and faster with milk, then get the lady
milk. Then we saw her on her smoke break
with a fat cigarette… I really wonder what goes through people’s heads
sometimes.
Then there was the matter of plates,
cups, and utensils. Everytime I visited
the kitchen while planning the workshop I never saw enough stuff to serve 20+
people and everytime I brought it up with the owner and the cook, I was assured
that there would be. Either way, you’d
assume that would have been an obvious detail when it comes to running a
restaurant. When we were getting ready
to serve lunch the first day, I asked where the plates were.
Me:
Where are the plates? Cook: You didn’t bring your own plates? Me: No, you said you had them. Cook: Oh, I guess we can find some…
*Time
elapses*
Me:
We need utensils. Cook: What? You didn’t bring utensils? Me: NO!
Give us some freakin spoons!
*Time
elapses*
Me: We need 20 cups. Find them.
And
we still ended up bringing utensils and cups from home.
Despite all of the firey hoops
Mireya and I had to jump through to keep these kids housed and fed, they seemed
to have a great time and many went home with the names and numbers of new
friends.
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| Julito, Belarmino, and Pedro performing a skit about violence against children. |
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| 2013 Cabo Delgado JUNTOS workshop participants |
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| Montepuez JUNTOS 3rd year veterans Gamito and Joao |
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| JUNTOS Montepuez (left to right) Joao, Jorge, Mireya, Fastudo, Belarmino, Julito, our counterpart Brito, me, and Gamito |
