I Don't Know What I Expected (but it sure wasn't this!)

Last week, my school sent me to a formação – training or workshop – in Beira, Mozambique’s second largest city. Beira is on the Indian Ocean coast, about three or four hours from Chimoio by chapa, along a stretch of the EN6 (national highway) that has been left in such disrepair that it has reverted to a dirt road in places. Chimoio and Beira are the mid- and endpoints, respectively, of the Beira Corridor – what used to be a major transportation route across the narrow waist of the country for goods and people moving from Zimbabwe (Rhodesia at the time) to Beira’s ocean port. The complex politics of Mozambique’s civil war (that in reality involved a number of non-Mozambican players) and the period following it led to significant damage to transportation infrastructure and left Beira a still significant port city with tall buildings and deep potholes.  

One of my fellow travelers on the bumpy road to Beira.

Beira is still a beach city, too, and my hotel room had a beautiful ocean view. Unfortunately, the city’s untreated sewer water empties into the sea and the beaches are known for pickpockets, so when I had a couple of free hours between check-in and dinner, I decided to spend it inside, indulging in the wifi, air conditioning and view of waves and palm-trees. After taking my first hot shower since December 8, I settled in front of my laptop with a contented sigh and a thought that my Peace Corps experience sure was playing out differently than I had expected. And so when I later ended up on a Facebook chat with a friend back home, that’s what I ended up saying to him. Our connection dropped, though, so I didn’t have time to elaborate and he ended up sending a message later saying, “Tell me, how is the Peace Corps different from your expectations?” The hot shower and AC triggered the original comment I made to him, but seeing the question phrased like that has led to some deeper reflection. How exactly has this experience been different from my expectations?

On a campus tour during our formação.

Part of the difficulty in answering the question lies in the effort I put into not setting expectations before arriving. Between my RPCV friends and volunteers I had sought out specifically to ask about Mozambique, I knew that everyone’s experience is so different that expectations would be nearly useless. But somehow, despite going in with very few specific expectations, my experience has still managed to be outside those I had (or didn’t realize I had).

One clear expectation I had was regarding the pace of life for a PCV. I think that many Volunteers begin with an idea that they are being sent to a country with so many unmet needs that they will be inundated with things that need to be done and spend all of their time improving the quality of life in their community. Then, they arrive to find that their community, despite its deep level of need, moves at its own pace and there is only so much a single volunteer can do to affect change. To combat this shock, nearly everyone I spoke to warned me that the hardest part of Peace Corps service is the almost unending amounts of free time I would find myself struggling to fill. To prepare, I bought and loaded up a Kindle, invested in a number of yoga and anatomy manuals, brought knitting projects, journals, anything I could think of to fend off the boredom. I can tell you one problem I do not have here: free time I can’t fill.

In case your Anna’s Peace Corps Experience Cabula (cheat-sheet) isn’t handy, here are the essentials of my situation. I live in the fourth-largest city in Mozambique, along with four other PCVs, a few volunteers from other organizations and a small community of ex-pats, ie an instant friend network for a new PCV. Chimoio is also home to the Peace Corps office that serves the entire Central region of the country and there is a steady stream of Volunteers coming through the city. Chimoio is far from lonely.  

Although I arrived in training as a secondary Math teacher, I now work at the Engineering faculty of the largest private university in Mozambique as the coordinator of the Communications track. This means I have the privilege of attending about four hours of meetings each week, have to oversee the schedule, teachers and grades. I also teach two classes within that program, second-year English and Gestão de Empresas (Business Management), the latter in (sometimes still very broken) Portuguese.

My university

The experience of a PCV in this kind of setting is very different from that of one in a rural community or working for an underfunded community organization. Work is not hard to come by. Along with the work for the roles I already described, it has been easy to pick up side projects researching how best to improve the PC Mozambique website or trying to develop a curriculum for income-generating projects for secondary-school girls, simply because I am constantly exposed to the work being done by other volunteers and the gaps they need filled.

The university itself supplies a constant stream of extra projects, too. I was in Beira, where this train of thought began, for training on blended learning – the combination of classroom instruction and online learning – for English teachers at UCM. I left agreeing to help implement the new system since I have experience using e-learning platforms and as a project manager and a software company. I knew coming into Peace Corps that all my previous experience was up for grabs, but I sure didn’t expect this particular skill set to be tapped within the first four months of service. 

My English colleagues and the workshop presenters.

Also, I had my laptop in Beira because I found out two days before my trip that our MBA coordinator had left with four students still finishing work on their thesis. Don and I, the two PCVs with MBAs, were being tapped to help them through their final weeks of work. Since I was travelling, I would need my laptop to communicate with the student focused on Entrepreneurship who I would be helping. Luckily, three of the four students ended up working with another professor, leaving only the final editing for us. Either way, even editing someone’s masters-level thesis is not something I expected as part of my Peace Corps experience.

The level of connectivity I have has also been a surprise. I had been told that phone-based internet access and USB modems that use mobile phone SIM cards were changing everything about how people communicate in developing countries, but I arrived in Chimoio to find my house was a 10-minute walk from the PC office where there are two computers or free wireless access for laptops. Not a tiny smartphone screen or a modem I have to buy data packages to use, but regular old desktops and laptops with free access. BUT THEN, then I found out that I would also have an office with my own personal computer at school. So while I usually only use my phone at home, I have nearly unlimited access to internet in two places that are an easy walk from my house. Both connections suffer from some reliability problems (quite a few problems, actually) but it is still connectivity waaaay beyond anything I expected coming in, which may in reality contribute to the faster pace of life.

One of many (often food-based) Chimoio PCV gatherings

Being in a city also leads to things like giving directions to my house that end with “I’m the fourth house on the right after the stoplight,” which is not a phrase I expected to use as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I have a spare bedroom, power and running water. But this city still lacks many modern conveniences like a laundromat; so, I wash my clothes by hand on a concrete scrub-board. My house is large and nice by PC standards, but still has its share of problems, from a very crafty rat that my PCV neighbor finally helped eliminate, to the shower drain that currently will not empty in less than 24 hours. Until I hire an empregada to help with these things, they will keep using up plenty of time.

Right now, with so many things demanding time and attention, I force space into my schedule for the things that keep me balanced: running in the morning and yoga in the evenings. Blogging when I can. When I take my lunch break, I may run errands, but I almost never continue schoolwork over my meal. I try to keep my computer off and take an hour to read a book or one of the precious copies of The Economist my saintly mother mails me. Since I have morning and evening classes, I frequently arrive at school at 8:00 am and leave for the night at 8:00 pm, so turning off for lunch is necessary. But boredom is never a problem.

Sometimes, I find time to make jam!

All in all, this is a good thing. I am not having the more typical (if “typical” exists in the Peace Corps) experience of a smaller community and slower pace, but I am getting to know a different part of the Mozambican culture. My students and colleagues are part of the emerging middle class. All of my colleagues are just as busy – running programs, teaching classes, taking masters’ courses, or doing community projects. I have found that here, people who like to work tend to work a lot. Like any Peace Corps Volunteer, or probably most teachers in any setting, it’s hard to know if my work makes a difference. As we were told during training, we are here to plant seeds whose fruit we may never taste. But I am certainly growing from the experience and enjoying the work along the way.