Ave Maria, Cheia da Graça

Every trainee here has had a different experience with their homestay families; some have faced more challenges than others - whether it be issues of personal space and freedom or a shortage of nutritive food - but as a whole, we have been astounded by the generosity we have encountered here in Namaacha. Much as we are "volunteers" who receive a monthly stipend, free housing in some of the nicer accommodations in our communities and free high-quality healthcare, our families are not paid to host us, but only given a monthly payment to "offset the cost" of having us in the house. For those families with too many mouths to feed, this amounts to a windfall and a good amount of the payment isn't reflected in the quality or quantity of food the trainee is receiving. We can only assume that the money is being used to pay for thing that the family usually can't afford. Other trainees have been eating prawns brought in from Maputo that are way outside the budget funded by the Peace Corps. Two trainees have running water in their houses, while the majority have outdoor pit latrines full of cockroaches at night.

The front yard of my host home in Namaacha

I really lucked out to be placed with a woman like my host mother, Maria. Many friends who have come over for a meal or afternoon tea have commented on what a nice house it is. Some call it a mansion, while others go straight to castle. It is a nice house, even by US standards: a spacious split-level made of stone that stays cool in the heat. Although there is no water in the plumbing fixtures, we do have a gas stove and a refrigerator. We even have a microwave, although it next to useless at night when the electric grid is under too much strain to provide adequate power to heat a plate of food in under 15-20 minutes. The living area has two walls of floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that let in light almost all day and provide beautiful views of the sprawling machamba (subsistence farm) that surrounds it. As I write this, I am watching a neighbor cut a branch from a mango tree outside the window. I can see a plot of corn, a handful of papaya trees, and three litchi trees covered in nearly-ripe fruit. The birds-of-paradise dropped their flowers a few weeks ago, but the jasmine is in full bloom. On the other side of the house you can find fields of peanuts, mandioca, beans, garlic, onions and salad veggies. The garden takes a lot of work, and requires the help of the woman who works in our house, a neighbor girl who works outside regularly and some others who come at planting times. But my nearly 70-year-old host mother is out there, too, seeding, weeding and harvesting.

Part of the garlic harvest. My meals here weren't bland.

My mãe is a worker, whether it be in the machamba, Tuesdays at the local convent, or staying well past midnight helping the Cruz Vermelha (Mozambican Red Cross) during the bi-annual pereginações (pilgrimages) to Namaacha's Catholic church. She has been back-and-forth attending trainings as the president of AMODEFA, a local organization that runs youth programs promoting family-planning, combating HIV/AIDS and giving voice to girls and young women. She was actually a founding member of the Namaacha chapter back in the 1990's. And this is her retirement. She worked as a clerk in a municipal office until mandatory retirement at 65. She and her late husband put their three children through college, including their oldest daughter who attended university in the UK. This daughter now works in Maputo at the Irish Embassy, while the middle son runs a trucking company and her youngest is a professor at the teacher training college in Maputo. While the spacious freezer is probably what impresses most of her neighbors (especially because she lets them use it to store their chickens), it is the well-stocked bookshelf on the back wall of the living room that catches my eye. In a community where many can't even read and most books are prohibitively expensive, a full bookshelf says a lot about where someone is investing their time and money. 

With her goddaughter's grandson and another trainee

As one of our language trainers who had worked with her at AMODEFA said, my host mom is the kind of woman a community like Namaacha needs. I knew the moment I met her and saw her shirt that read "Women have the right to vote and be counted" that I was about to get to know someone with an interesting perspective on life in Mozambique. One of the best motivators for improving my Portuguese has been my desire to have conversations with her about more complex issues. Those conversations have been coming along, but I look forward to meeting her for a cup of tea some time in the future when I can form better questions and express myself more clearly. I know that I will be able to ask her about nearly anything I encounter in my community and get a perspective informed by a balanced blend of education, experience and extreme generosity of spirit.

One of the many beautiful trees in her yard.

Although I won't be leaving Namaacha until tomorrow morning, I unfortunately had to say goodbye to my host mother on Saturday. She has been traveling back and forth to Maputo for the last few weeks caring for her daughter-in-law who was sick with tuberculosis and sadly passed away on Friday. My mãe had been traveling two hours each way to the hospital to visit her daughter in law, clean her, change her clothing. Finally, last weekend, she even traveled to Swaziland to pick up the South African version of Depends for her. When I stopped home during lunch on Friday, she was on the phone and I overhead her telling the story of calling the hospital to check on visiting hours and finding out that the patient in question had already passed away. As I tried to express my sympathy in my broken Portuguese, I gave her a hug and she started crying on my shoulder. All her family was in Maputo and she was home alone, so I ran back to class to collect my belongings and rushed back home.

When I returned, we sat and drank tea and talked more about her daughter-in-law and what was going to happen for the funeral. Over the course of the conversation, I realized the complexity of the relationship with the woman who had just passed. I knew that my mãe's "grandson," Kikas, who came to stay some weekends was actually her grand-nephew. What I hadn't known was that his mother had disappeared from the family when Kikas was nine months old. The woman who my mãe had been spending so much time and effort caring for had abandoned her son and husband more than twenty years ago, occasionally making promises to visit that she never kept, while my host mom raised Kikas like her son. When her daughter-in-law reappeared in a hospital bed, deathly ill and asking for help, my mãe didn't hesitate to make weekly trips into the city to care for her when no-one else would.

That is just the kind of person she is. When someone is in need, you help them; be it a young girl visiting AMODEFA because of an unwanted pregnancy, a relative in the hospital, or a neighbor without a freezer. Or a young American Peace Corps volunteer, learning to navigate a brand new culture in a foreign language.

Mãe and filha