Third world travel

            From any one of my posts on travelling, you can gather just how difficult it can be to travel in Mozambique.  Even so, it is usually bearable.  Our return trip Lichinga to Cuamba during the last two week break was above and beyond Mozambique’s normal standard.

            Normally, you start your travel day as early as possible but for reasons that are unimportant, Mireya and I were not able to go to the Lichinga chapa station until around 8am.  By that time, the only closed mini-bus had already left and the only vehicle available was a small flatbed truck.  It, too, already appeared full but as per Mozambican custom, we wedged ourselves in anyways. 

            I knew I was going to have an interesting day when almost immediately, one of the new mothers facing me went to breastfeed her baby and, well, missed.  I received a generous squirt right in the face.  Normally, when exposed to bodily fluids that can carry HIV, we are supposed to call our medical staff and start on prophylaxis.  Luckily, though the shot was fairly direct, it still wasn’t much and it’s not absorbed through the skin so I didn’t need to do that but I could imagine how that conversation would go… Excuse me, Doctor Isadora, um, I was sprayed in the face with breastmilk… I need  PEP…

            That was where the humor ended.  We continued to just sit in the Lichinga station until 10am filling up like a clown car with people, sacks, and boxes (some people had been waiting for the chapa to leave since 6am!).  I tried to count our passengers at one point but it became too difficult after getting to 25 adults in just the front half of the truck bed (that’s just adults.  I didn’t include children under the age of 12ish, babies, or cargo… and that was just HALF of the truck.)  I would estimate that we left Lichinga with a minimum of 60 people in the back of that truck. 

            I was wedged down in the bed of the truck between a sack of clothes, a few large boxes of batteries, with my elbow in a newborn’s face.  There were two men sitting basically on me and one was determined to have a full conversation.  I did my best but it was difficult to hear him and I was constantly distracted by the batteries digging into my leg (justified after I found a bruise there the next day).  Eventually, as I lost feeling in my butt and in my legs, I lost my patience for small talk in my second language. 

            With every bump and hole in the road (of which there were many), the cargo shifted and I sank deeper and deeper under the people and boxes.  I honestly thought I would be crushed with my knees to my chest, my feet under the people sitting on me, a box in my ribs, and still struggling to hold myself upright so I didn’t elbow the newborn behind me.  If we hadn’t stopped for a bathroom break, I would have had to demand that the chapa stop because I could barely breathe.

            All this while, you have to remember, that the sun is climbing in the sky over our uncovered truck.  I could barely reach my hand to my face let alone find my water which was in my burried backpack somewhere over by Mireya.  To be completely honest, I had never given any thought to giving up and coming home until that chapa ride.  What was worse, is that if I did want to throw in the towel, I would still have to ride that chapa all the way unless I wanted to be stuck in the African bush.

            This ride continued 5 hours until we finally reached the next city, making for 7 hours in that horrendous chapa.  When we arrived in that town, the chapa driver decided he simply did not want to continue on to cuamba.  Mireya and I luckily quickly jumped into the last mini-bus before it filled up but I’m certain many of the people on the first chapa were left without any way to continue on to Cuamba.  An overcrowded mini-bus, children puking and all, has never been so welcome.

            Peace Corps volunteers get asked all of the time about the differences between life in Mozambique and the States but usually, they just ask about money and celebrities.  Sometimes we wonder if they think about how there aren’t usually 80 people in a single high school classroom or 23 people in a 15 person van because these things are just so normal in this country.  They do.  An older man sitting near Mireya on the first chapa, talking to no one in particular, muttered, “This is the third world.”   That chapa was a dehumanizing experience for all of us.

           

Gurue

Mreya, me, and Derek at the top of the Gurue waterfall

Path through the tea fields

Off the waterfall

Drinking tea in the market

Derek and Mireya

Gurue mountains

More Gurue mountains

Tea fields

This is where I'll retire.

Zambezia landscape

I thought I felt someone watching us...

My favorite picture of Gurue.

Mireya, me, and Derek fter a successful hike

2nd Trimester break (a little late...)

            It’s hard to believe that I’ve already taught 2 trimesters of the 6 I will teach in my two years here.  Time sure does fly.  With the end of every trimester comes a short break that education volunteers tend to take full advantage of.  Lee, a health volunteer in Gurue, has named these breaks PCV tourist season because as soon as school lets out, we are all on the move.

            For this two week break, Mireya and I planned a packed trip.  First destination: Gurue, Zambezia.  Of course, getting anywhere is always an adventure.  Mireya and I had an unusually difficult time of getting to Nampula this time around but after two buses (one of which broke down…), a truck, two personal pick-up trucks, and 11 hours later (mind you it normally takes less than 6 hours to get to Nampula from Montepuez) we finally arrive in Nampula.  The inconvenient thing about Nampula is that it is expensive, a little dangerous, and there are no PCVs to crash with.  Even after 11 hours of travelling, we still had to continue on to Morrupula to stay in a PCV’s house.  So we met up with Derek (who had much better luck than we did getting to Nampula) and caught the last chapa out of Nampula to Morrupula.  Finally, 3 more hours of riding backwards on the tiny ledge behind the driver seat and locking knees with an old man, we arrived at our first pit stop.

            The volunteer in Morrupula was actually in Maputo the night we came to stay so she had left her keys with her new Brazilian neighbor.  Some of the most interesting people I meet here aren’t actually Mozambican but like me, somehow ended up in this country almost completely randomly.  We took her out to dinner and, although tired, resigned ourselves to speaking Portuguese for a few more hours.  Well into the conversation, she reveals that she speaks English!  I’m thinking, well geez, why have I been struggling to spit out broken Portuguese when she speaks English?  Of course, she speaks English only a little better than we speak Portuguese so the conversation continued flowing smoothly betweeen English and Portuguese as we saw fit to express whatever it was we were trying to say.  For me, those bilingual conversations can be the most fun.  She had to raise the bar, though, when she admitted to going to graduate school in Germany and therefore also spoke German fluently.  The United States needs to get it’s act together because from what I gather, we’re the only ones who really only master one language…  My students speak Portuguese plus whatever dialect they speak at home plus they are learning (though not that successfully perhaps to no fault of their own…) English and French in school.

            Anyways, back to our trip.  We woke up early the next morning and caught a ride to Alto Moloque.  Crossing the river into Zambezia, everything was immediately greener.  Then, as we climbed into the mountains in an open back from Alto Moloque, it became obvious we were a long way from sandy, rocky Cabo Delgado.  When we finally made it to Gurue… just, wow.  If I combined the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to, it wouldn’t compare.  Zambezia is the most fertile province in Mozambique and Gurue certainly exemplifies that.  Even though I think I can spit more than the rain we’ve gotten in Montepuez since May, Gurue was damp and muddy.  Maybe you have to live somewhere as dry as Montepuez for a while to appreciate sloshing around in the market.  Maybe the insane variety of cheap produce in the market made me think I liked the mud, who knows.  What I do know is that we went crazy over carrots (a kilo in Gurue was probably about 20 mets when in Montepuez it’s 100!!!)  The most striking things, however, are tucked away in the mountains just outside of Gurue.  Tea plantations, eucalyptus groves, waterfalls… a runner’s/hiker’s dream.  I’ve dedicated another post just to pictures from Gurue.  Seriously, paradise.

Mireya, me, and Derek snug as bugs in a rug.  Yes, Gurue was cold enough for a big fuzzy blanket.  It was delightful.

Me, Patrick, Patrick's sister, Derek, and Mireya, hanging out in Gurue.  You can't see it but Patrick's sister is sporting one of our REDES bags!!!

            After a few days, Derek, Mireya and I begrudgingly said goodbye to Gurue and made our way to Cuamba, Niassa.  Cuamba is really just a huge intersection.  Pretty much the only way into or out of Niassa is through Cuamba, not to mention it’s on a popular route to Malawi.  Cuamba really doesn’t have much scenery to speak of and is notorious for being DUHUHS-TY.  You can see the dustcloud over the city from miles away.  However, what Cuamba lacked in hospitality, our PCV host Zackaria made up for.  We spent an entire day relaxing, eating chocolate and homemade hummus, and watching new media.  Well, Mireya, Derek, and Zackaria did anyways.  I unfortunately had to spend my relaxing day hugging a toilet and battling a fever.  But that’s just how it is.  In anycase, I chose an awesome house to be sick in as Zackaria has running water, a tiled bathroom, and even a working shower!

            Luckily I was feeling better by the time Mireya and I continued on to our next destination: Lichinga, Niassa.  I’ve seen some bad roads in Mozambique but almost nothing comapares to the road connecting Cuamba to Linchinga.  Apparently, that ride is not complete without at least one person getting motion sickness and throwing up (great when you’re recovering from a stomach bug).  Our ride was no exception and we scored seats in the splash zone.  Actually it wasn’t that bad.  It was just about 10 seconds of chaos as the woman started to get sick while Mireya and I shuffled everything in the cramped backseat of the chapa to simultaneously take her baby (now covered in vomit but somehow still adorable and cuddly) and dig out a plastic bag and some water.

           

            Lichinga is a strange place.  It’s cold almost impossible to access yet it seems to be the only place in Mozambique that can support cows.  This was exciting.  I ate a hamburger for lunch and the next morning, we went out for fresh yogurt!  In Lichinga, we met up with Grisha, Victor, Ella, Jade, Matt, and Stephen all from my training group, probably the biggest Moz 19 reunion I’ve been two since the Reconnect conference three months ago.  We ate s’mores over a campfire in Jade and Ella’s backyard and more importantly, Mireya and I went capulana crazy.  I bought three capulanas in Lichinga!  They’re just so pretty I couldn’t help myself. 

            To get home, we needed to return to Cuamba, take the train to Nampula, and then find our way back to Cabo Delgado from there.  Our second pass on the Cuamba-Lichinga road merits its own blog post and after writing it, I never, ever want to speak or even think of it again. 

            So fast forward to Cuamba where again we got to enjoy good food and showers.  This time we even decided to try our luck at a poker game.  I’ve never played but I’ve always wanted to give it a shot.  My first thought after playing is how on earth people can have weekly poker games that obviously start in the evening???  Our game went SOOOO LOONGG!  Good grief.  By the end we were doing all in just because we were tired of playing.  But guess who won the whopping pot of 200 meticais (less than $10…)?  I did.  Guard your wallets, folks.

            The train leaves Cuamba at 6:30am which means Mireya and I had to start our 7km walk to town well before sunrise.  The thatched neighborhoods we had to pass through don’t have any organization to speak of so trying to find our way through them in the dark almost ended in disaster until we realized that the majority of the people up and moving at that time were also going to the train station and we needed only to follow them.  When we finally did make it to the train station, we couldn’t figure out where we were supposed to go and a group of jeering men were absolutely no help as we paced up and down the cars looking for 2^nd class.  When we finally found our cabin and plopped our bags down to claim our bunk beds, we were greeted by a Mozambican girl about our age. 

            The conversation started in Portuguese until she suddenly just started speaking English with and American accent!  Turns out she had received a scholarship through a church organization to go to college in Texas.  Not only that, but she’s actually from Montepuez.  She landed a job as a secretary/translator for Rubing Mining Company which runs out of Montepuez.  You will probably be hearing more about Susanne in the future.

            Anyways, Mireya and I weren’t the only lost souls Susanne collected on the train.  She had found a Swedish college student, Alex, the day before in the line and had helped him purchase his ticket.  Mireya and I were fully prepared to spend the 10 hours on the train alone in our cabin staring out the window at the Nampula countryside, but instead we had an extremely pleasant time in the food car chatting away, drinking cokes, and playing cards… in English!

Alex, Susanne, Mireya, and me on the Cuamba-Nampula train

            Joining Peace Corps has probably been the most adventurous spontaneous (so spontaneous it took only a year to get in…yeah…) I’ve ever done.  I struggled to decide what to pack in the two suitcases I was allowed and fretted about how I was going to keep in touch with everyone back home.  Then Alex comes along completely alone with a tiny backpack, no Portuguese and no phone half-way through a 2 month trek through southern Africa.  Even after my Peace Corps experience, I don’t think I could travel by myself half a world away with no language skills and just sending an email once in a while to my mom to tell her I’m still alive…

            Well, now I’m back in Montepuez while school supposedly started this week, it should come as no surprise now that it, well, didn’t start.  I won’t be fooled, though.  This is only a slow start to what is bound to be my busiest trimester yet.

Cinderellie, Cinderellie

Our typical weekday begins around 5am.  We wake up with the sun and usually, our neighbors are already up taking baths, washing dishes, cooking breakfast, etc.  Around 6:15, Marisa, Veronica, and Tobias all dressed in their white shirt and black pants, join the herd of other students on their way to the secondary school.  My younger neighbors, dressed in white shirts and maroon skirts and pants, head off to the primary school.

            Rita stays behind.

            Rita’s father, supposedly living somewhere in Nampula province, is of some relation to our neighbor, Selemane.  Rita’s father was married but her mother was not the woman he was married to, but some other woman that he had on the side (unfortunately a practice ridiculously common in this country).  Rita grew up with her father and his wife, but his wife, in simple terms, refused to take care of her or treat her as one of her own.  As a result, Rita was never enrolled in school and too often not even fed.   Looking at her now, singing the latest popular song while finishing up her chores, you wouldn’t know.  She seems healthy and she seems happy now that she’s living with her uncle (maybe?), Selemane.

Our neighbor, Rita

            Unfortunately, food is about the only support she gets from my neighbor’s family.  It is common for Mozambican families to hire “empregadas” or maids, but the key word is hire.  Rita is essentially their maid, working for her keep.  In addition, as a result of being passed around the family before settling with my neighbors, Rita has never had the opportunity to go to school.  Given that she is living with a math teacher with the equivalent of a Masters degree and his wife who just graduated from the primary school teacher trainer institute, I find it strange that at her age, Rita cannot read or write.  Our neighbors claimed to have bought her a school uniform at some point but just never got around to enroll her.  Rita is now too embarassed to start school so late and I’m not sure she would go to school if she were given the opportunity because it would mean starting at the very beginning and her classmates would probably be only 7 or 8 years old.  Mireya started teaching her to read last year but eventually it just became too difficult to dedicate enough time.  She did make progress.  Rita can now, with difficulty, recognize and copy letters and write her name.

            We’ve since started a REDES (Raparigas em Desenvolvimento, Educação, e Saúde or Girls in Development, Education, and Health) group with most of our female neighbors, including Rita.  We focus on income generation and independence by teaching the girls to sew bags.  If this really were a fairytale, Rita would be some seamstress prodigy with an eye for fashion that would land her in Milan, but it isn’t and we struggle to get her to align the fabric and sew in a straight line… We have some work to do, but she is learning all the same.  This group has also given us more time to observe how Rita interacts with the other women in her family, in particular, her new “stepmother,” Paula.

            Paula does not hide her dislike of Rita well and while she doesn’t deny her food like her previous stepmother, she can be psychologically cruel.  This became painfully obvious when Mireya and I started planning for the annual REDES workshop.

            Like the JUNTOS workshop, REDES workshops teach the girls about leadership, health, and HIV/AIDS.  Also like JUNTOS, it is an opportunity for a bunch of girls from different cities to hang out and have fun.  Mireya and I knew that we had to invite Rita because she’d never get this kind of education or opportunity otherwise.  We approached Paula for her persmission.  Paula hesitated and said she’d have to talk to Selemane as the workshop was in Monapo, Nampula and Rita would be gone for an entire weekend.  We expected this since Rita really does do most of the housework.  A few days later we asked Paula if she had made a decision and she said she had spoken to Selemane and they were still thinking about it.  A week later, they still had not made up their mind.  We knew at that point that she probably hadn’t spoken to Selemane but had made up her own mind that Rita wouldn’t be allowed to travel; she just hadn’t found an excuse that didn’t make her seem like a, well, yeah.

            Fine, if she wanted to play dirty, so could we.  One afternoon, Mireya and I went over to talk to Selemane for ourselves, since that was the excuse that Paula was clinging to for not yet giving us an answer.  We couldn’t have timed it more perfectly.  Selemane and Paula were sitting alone in the house and Rita was washing dishes outside.  We told him that the workshop was completely paid for, that I’d be going with her along with our other adult neighbor, Esperança, and that this would be a good opportunity for her to learn about herself and meet other girls her age.  He agreed almost immediately as if we were idiots for even needing to ask permission.  All the while, Paula pretended to be asleep on the mattress on the floor until Selemane asked her opinion.  Since he’d already agreed and Paula had no REAL reasons for disagreeing, she just rolled over and said something like “sure, yeah, whatever.”

            It turns out Cinderella was going to the ball afterall and we didn’t even need a fairy godmother to kidnap her in a pumpkin.  Don’t get me wrong, we love Paula and 90% of the time she’s a likeable human being.  It just so happens she’s not a likeable person the rest of the time and she spends that rest of the time with Rita.

Our counterpart Esperanca, Veronica, and Rita at the workshop.

2013 Cabo Delgado/Nampula REDES workshop

            Rita had a blast at the workshop and is still talking about it and singing the songs she learned, but it was no royal ball.  With its workbooks, posters, and “read alouds,” it was full of reminders that she was the only one in the room who could not read.  During the self-esteem session, after an entire morning of reading about business plans and doing math for calculating revinue, her frusteration came to a head.  The facilitator of the session said she was going to throw a marker around the room, and if she threw it to you, you had to stand up and say something good about yourself.  She started.  She was smart and loved to read and study.  The first girl she threw it to was Rita.  Rita stood up and said “I don’t go to school, I can’t read, I don’t do anything.”  Not really sure what to do with that, the facilitator threw the marker to the next person. I was a little too shocked to say anything but luckily the counterpart for another group stood up and said, “She forgot something.  She’s pretty.”  I did some more damage control after the session that day but it’s never been so obvious just how far we still have to go with Rita.

            Now Mireya and I are always looking for ways to make Rita feel important.  A few weeks ago, we started talking about birthdays in our REDES meeting while we were sewing.  We’d known for a while that Rita didn’t know how old she was let alone what day she was born so when we got to her, we set out to give her a birthday.  First we asked if she like rainy season or cold season.  She liked cold season so we told her to pick her favorite month between May and September.  Then she picked a number between 1 and 30.  We celebrated her birthday this past Sunday, June 30^th.

            Most of our REDES girls came to the party, as well as some neighborhood children, and even Brito, our JUNTOS counterpart, showed up.  We decorated our alpendra with paper chains, put out drinks and snacks, and put on the music.  We brought out a brownie cake and sang happy birthday first in Portuguese, then in English.  In accordance with Mozambican tradition, Rita cut HER birthday cake and fed the first bite to her most valued guest at the party.  She chose Rodasa and Suel, the toddlers she spends most of her day caring for.  After cake, in accordance with American tradition, we made Rita open her present, a brand new capulana Mireya and I had picked out for her.  Then we played musical chairs, danced until it got dark, and had a generally great time.

            Happy Birthday, Rita! 

Farzana, Rita, Neuza (with nephew Helio) and Eunilde playing musical chairs.  Helio did not like this game.  He refused to let Neuza put him down but cried every time she went to grab a chair.

Rita feeding cake to her guest of honor, Suel

Presents!

Neuza, me, Farzana, Rita, Brito, Suel, Mireya, Paula, and Eunilde at Rita's 15th (?) birthday party.