Life has gotten a whole lot busier lately! Between preparations for school (which starts next Monday - eek!) and some side projects I have picked up, I haven't had too much free time. Also, I finally recieved my correspondence match and have been working on a letter to send to them. Peace Corps has a program that fits into the "third goal" activities of sharing the experiences of Volunteers abroad with communities back in the US. From
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps to promote world peace and friendship.
Things like this blog also fit into the third goal, as do activities like classroom visits by returned volunteers.
So I will be sending letters and pictures to an 8th grade class back in Massachusetts throughout my time here in Mozambique. In my initial emails with the teacher, I passed along a link to this blog and she used it to create a bulletin board in her classroom. I was a little surprised by how excited I was to hear that there is now a bulletin board with a map of Mozambique and pictures of me and my house in a class in western Massachusetts. Check that bucket list item I didn't even know I had!
Since I didn't have a chance to write a proper blog post, I figured I would share the letter I am sending to her. It doesn't have a whole lot of information that I haven't already shared here, but provides a good summary of my experience so far!
Olá, alunos da Profesora Smith. Estou bem aqui em Moçambique, mas não sei ao lado de vocês.
One of the most challenging - and most rewarding - experiences in Mozambique so far has been learning Portuguese, so I thought I would share a little with you all. An interesting thing about greetings here is that people will tell you that they are doing well, but instead of asking how you are, they will say “Estou bem, mas não sei ao seu lado,” which literally means “I am well, but I don’t know about on your side.” You can then respond with, “Eu também estou bem,” meaning, “I am also well.”
Thank you for all of your questions. I will try to answer as many as I can. For a lot of them, I will only be able to tell you about the small part of the country that I have seen so far. Ms. Stone told me she will put up a map, so you can see where in Mozambique I live. I have only been to two other parts of country and it is HUGE! It is the 35th largest country in the world. It is twice the size of California and almost 30 times bigger than Massachusetts! Since it is so big, there are all different kinds of people living very different kinds of lives. Some places are really hot all year and others get cold in the winter, but I don’t think it snows anywhere. There are really beautiful beaches, tall mountains and some places with nothing but grass for miles. So to answer Conor’s question, the landscape looks different in different parts, but most of the parts I have seen are really beautiful. I will include some pictures so you can see for yourself.
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| What does Mozambique look like? |
I live in Chimoio, the fourth largest city in Mozambique and the capital of the province of Manica. Provinces are what we have here instead of states. There are ten provinces in total in Mozambique. Manica is right in the middle of the country and it borders Zimbabwe. It only takes about an hour to fly to the capital city of Maputo, but it would take about fifteen hours to drive or take a bus, because the roads are really bad. One of the biggest problems in Mozambique is that there aren’t a lot of paved roads and the ones we have are not in very good shape. It makes traveling much harder than in the US, unless you can afford to take an airplane, and it makes it harder to get food or other products from one part of the country to another.
While I was in training, I lived in a smaller town called Namaacha, which was on the border of Swaziland, but I didn’t go to Swaziland. I did hike to a place where the borders of Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland all come together. I am including pictures of that for you. Shelby asked about sights in Mozambique. There are some famous places like an island called Ilha de Moçambique and a huge dam called the Cahora Basso. I haven’t been to them yet, but I have seen some really beautiful sights hiking. There is also a lot of wildlife, although not as much as there used to be. Mozambique has had a lot of conflict in the past and lots of the elephants and lions did not make it through the years of war. There are people working on restoring the populations now, but it is a slow process. There are lots and lots of venomous snakes here, too. Luckily, I haven’t seen any yet, but some of my friends have found snakes in their houses and yards. In Mozambique, it is really important to cut the grass around your house short enough that you will be able to see if there are any snakes.
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| Hiking sights |
For work, I am going to be teaching classes at a university, one English class and another about how to manage a business. That one will be in Portuguese! The Peace Corps has a very good language-training program, so my Portuguese has improved a lot since I arrived in Mozambique in September, but I am still nervous about teaching a class in a foreign language. Portuguese is the official language here, because Mozambique used to be a colony of Portugal, but there are also lots of local languages, the ones people spoke before Europeans were here. Most people still speak them at home, or in the markets and on the streets. Where I live, people speak Chiuwte. Some others are Ndau, Changana, Xiswa and Emakhuwa. Since I am still learning Portuguese, I haven’t tried to learn the local language yet, but I hope to eventually.
I live by myself in a nice house with an extra bedroom where my friends can stay when they visit. Since I live in the capital of our province, lots of other volunteers who live in small villages have to come here to buy food and other supplies, or to use the bank. It is fun to have them come spend the weekend and hear about the experiences they are having. Every Peace Corps Volunteer has a very different experience because every site (town or village) is very different. I am excited to go visit more of my friends to see what their houses are like and meet their friends in their communities. There is another volunteer who lives next to me and we share a yard. This is his second time in the Peace Corps. He was a volunteer in Tonga when he was much younger and now that he retired, he decided to come back and be a volunteer again. There are also three other volunteers who live in other parts of the city, so don’t worry Oscar, I am never lonely! But I have also started making friends with teachers at my university and other people from here in Mozambique.
A lot of people wanted to know about the weather here. Since we are in the southern hemisphere, it is summer now and it is really hot. Other parts of the country are much hotter than Chimoio, but it is usually between 80 and 90 degrees here and very humid. Then it will rain and everything gets much cooler for a little while. Lots of times when it rains, the power in my house goes out, so I always have to have candles nearby. Although most people in the city have electricity in their houses, many who live in more rural areas still do not. In my whole district, only 30% have electricity at home. I have not been here in the winter yet, but I am told it is cool in Chimoio. I have running water in my house, but I only have cold water. When the weather gets colder, I will have to heat up water on the stove to take a bucket bath instead of taking cold showers. But I am really lucky to have running water at all, because less than 15% of the people in my district have water in their houses and they have to carry water home from a well or collect it in buckets when it rains.
Food is one of my favorite things to talk about! There is some really good food in Mozambique, but it all depends on where you live. Since I am in a city and my province is very fertile, I can get all kinds of great stuff here. There is a market down the street where I can get fresh fruits and vegetables. The climate here is tropical, so the fruit is spectacular. I even have fruit trees in my backyard: mangoes, papayas, guavas, grapes and passionfruit. There are lots and lots of bananas here, too, and they are really cheap, so everyone eats them everyday. They are smaller and sweeter than the ones we usually get in the grocery stores in the US. I eat fruit in my yogurt, on my bread with peanut butter, by itself. If you have any good ideas about how to eat fruit, please tell me! One thing I really miss here in Chimoio is seafood. Mozambique has amazing fish and shrimp and lobsters, but only if you live on the coast. Since it so hard to ship food from one part of the country to another, it is hard to find any seafood here in Chimoio.
People don’t eat very much meat because it is expensive, but chicken is more common. There are grocery stores and butchers in the big cities that sell meat, but lots of people raise their own pigs or goats. Goats are really common and you see them tied up all over the place, in peoples’ yards or just on the side of the road eating grass. I have even seen them tied to the tops of buses driving through town! Also, people carry chickens around in their arms, or on their bicycles or in wheelbarrows. I have started getting used to it, but it still looks funny. But for most people, meat is mostly eaten on holidays and special occasions.
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| I have been eating well here |
One of the most common dishes people eat regularly is beans and rice, or beans and a dish called xima (shee-ma), which is like mashed potatoes made out of cornmeal. It is kind of like polenta or grits, if anyone has had those. People here use it to pick up other food with their hands instead of using a fork. We also eat a lot of greens, like the leaves from abobora, which is like a pumpkin, or the leaves of manioc roots, called matapa. My favorite way these are prepared is in a sauce made from coconut milk and peanuts. It is delicious! Another common way to cook things is in a caril, which is like a curry with tomatoes and onions and lots of spices. Since Mozambique was on the trade route between India and Portugal, there are lots of Indian spices here. Also, there are lots of influences from the Portuguese colonists. They brought things like tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, chili peppers, corn and rice. Another delicious things left from the Portuguese is their bread. There are bakeries everywhere that make small- or medium-sized rolls fresh throughout the day. You can walk in at almost any time and get bread that is crusty on the outside and chewy on the inside – and hot if you are lucky!
Christine asked about the clothes here. Most men wear regular American-style pants and shirts. A lot of the clothing actually comes second-hand from the US. They wear jeans and t-shirts or slacks and button-down shirts to dress up. Some women wear American-style clothes, too. They wear jeans, skirts, dresses and blouses or t-shirts. But they also wear a traditional wrapped skirt called a capulana. It is really just a big piece of printed fabric that can be used for many, many things. Women also use them to carry their babies, or as table cloths, or curtains. (Not the same one they wear, though!) They wear the capulanas with t-shirts to do work around the house, or with nicer shirts to go out. They aren’t formal enough to wear to a job at an office or a school, but you can make dresses out of the capulana cloth that are formal enough for any occasion. In general, women and girls here dress more conservatively. Outside of Maputo, you almost never see someone wearing a skirt or a dress that shows her knees and you rarely see tank tops with narrow straps.
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| Capulanas! |
I think the hardest of your questions for me to answer is what my favorite experience has been so far. I have had so many different kinds of experiences already and they are fun or satisfying for different reasons. Christmas here was one of my favorites. Since we were all homesick, 15 of my volunteer friends came and stayed at my house and we cooked tons of food and had dance parties. Another was the model school we had during training. After eight weeks of preparation, I finally got up in front of a room full of Mozambican students and taught a Math lesson in Portuguese. I was so proud when they could answer all of my questions correctly. Since I am still learning the language and the culture here, just getting through a normal day here can be challenging, so sometimes really little things are more satisfying than you would imagine. One thing that is really hard about learning a new language is getting comfortable enough to make jokes. I really like being able to make people laugh, so the first time I made a joke in Portuguese and the director of my school laughed, it was one of the best days I have had since I got to Chimoio!
But I would have to say that my favorite thing about being here so far has not really been an experience, but the people I have met. When I first got here, I lived with a Mozambican host mother who was one of the kindest, most generous people I have met. She raised three children who all went to college and have good jobs, even though there was a civil war going on when they were growing up and most people were not even finishing high school. She helped me learn about the Mozambican culture and how to cook Mozambican food. I have started meeting all kinds of wonderful people here in Chimoio, too. Mozambican people tend to be incredibly warm and welcoming. Families are large and inclusive, and they will treat anyone who comes to their house like they are a part of their own family. Even people who have very little for themselves will offer food and drink to guests. And they love to laugh. The people here are what make it a wonderful place to live.
Lastly, someone wanted to know what you can do to help. Right now, just learning more about Mozambique and its people helps support the work the Peace Corps is doing here. Our mission is to help the Mozambican schools and health system, but also to share our experiences with Americans, so they understand a little more about how people here live. So please keep asking more questions and looking at the pictures I send and tell your friends and families about what you learn!
I saw pictures of the snowstorm that Massachusetts just had. I hope you are all digging out and keeping warm!
Abraços,
Anna
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