Road Trip! Machanga for a challenging workshop, sweetened by dancing with kiddos.

It has been a little while since I have updated, mostly because as the semester comes to a close, I have been busier than ever. As a teacher, I have been wrapping up classes; grading assignments; and writing, proctoring and grading tests. As a departmental coordinator, test time means making sure all the other teachers submit their tests when they should, then pick them up to grade them; this coming week it will mean collecting and verifying all the pautas (grade charts) that will determine which students are eligible to sit for their final exams next week. We have also started planning classes and professors for next semester (which starts in August) and my university has decided to make a push for more research which will launch with our first annual research symposium for two days this week. The focus on research also means a third hour-plus-long meeting for coordinators each week. I am starting to look at making some changes to my coordinating responsibilities for next semester to leave me more time for my teaching while still being involved in things like English Club – which has the potential to be of real value to the students involved, the REDES income-generation project I am about to write more about, and good old-fashioned getting to know my community. 

My turma diurna during our last English class

When I have had some free time, I have been slowly building up a little garden of herbs, peas and soy beans – some things that I can’t find in the market here. I have added a couple more items to my capulana dress collection and have found that the modistas here in Chimoio make some high-quality clothing. Chique capulana clothes have the added benefit of being great conversation starters. And since I was diagnosed with anemia last month, I have been spending more time cooking real food.

But the highlight of my recent activities came this past weekend when I traveled south for the first test-run of the palestra/mini-class on entrepreneurship that I have been helping my friend and fellow volunteer develop. While we had mixed results for the palestra itself, the visit overall was just what I needed. Since school has kept me so busy this semester, I haven’t had much opportunity to visit other volunteers’ sites. I adore Chimoio and my students and colleagues here, but the experience I have here is very atypical for a Peace Corps Volunteer and the people I spend most of my time with live lives different from your average Mozambican. If I left Mozambique now, I really wouldn’t be able to speak to how 95% of the country lives.

So, I was really excited to have the chance to spend a few days at a more rural site, particularly because my friend thre who is halfway through his second year has really put an effort into connecting with a broad swath of people in his community. Over the course of three days, I was able to experience many of the things that so far have been hard to come by in Chimoio: sitting and eating with a family at their home, meeting the doctors in a local hospital, partying with crianças, watching a traditional medicine man’s dance and, since I forgot my running shoes, I even got in a barefoot run by moonlight. Add to that some quality time with my awesome hosts (including some impromptu yoga with the two tallest men in PC Mozambique) and a surprise visit by one of my favorite girls from my training group, and it easily would have been worth twice as long in a chapa as the 9 hours it took each way. AND I got some wonderful pictures to share here!

Maybe my favorite. She insisted on having her picture taken, but this is the only face she would give me!

My friends Mac and Jesse live in Machanga, a small town about an hour and a half down a dirt road from the N1, the main north-south highway in Mozambique. There is one chapa that runs from Beira to Machanga and if you don’t get on this, the only way in and out without a private vehicle is by taking a canoe-ferry across the river south to Nova Mambone in neighboring Inhambane province and to travel from there back to the N1. Luckily, I was able to get the chapa both ways. Some would say that it is actually better to travel through Inhambane and hitch a ride in a private vehicle – this can be faster (without dozens of stops to pick up and drop off cargo and money that the chapa transports along with the passengers) and is usually more comfortable (one person per seat, fewer chickens nestled up against your hip and I had for seven hours this morning), but traveling by myself, I preferred getting the chapa to hitching. Plus, it’s an experience I don’t get too often and I usually end up with at least a few pictures of adorable children.

My chapa buddies on the trip to Machanga.

Machanga is a small town on the Rio Save, full of dirt roads cutting through fields of sorghum. There is a small center with and handful of shops selling a small variety of industrial food and home products, along with a moderately-stocked market featuring little more than the staples of tomatoes, couve, dried fish, onions and garlic. Some of the buildings still show signs of damage from the civil war that ended twenty years ago. The people are friendly and nearly everyone knows the two absurdly tall muzungus who teach at the secondary school. Mac and Jesse live on school property, along with many of the other teachers. The houses are concrete and small, each with a porch opening onto a shared yard area. They have electricity, an easily accessible well and an attached bathroom with a pit-toilet. Other than the neighbor playing Lil’ Wayne and Elton John on alternating repeat and the constant sound of children playing in the yard, Machanga is blessedly quiet. 

Palms and sorghum stalks by day; sunset in Machanga; moonlit clouds by night.

Mac has taken to eating most nights of the week with a family that lives in a power- and water-less hut about a twenty-minute walk from his house out into the bush surrounding the town. One day while walking by the hut around lunchtime, Joana, one of the women living there servido’ed Mac and his visiting friend (Mozambicans have a very hospitable habit of offering whatever they are eating by proffering the plate or pan and telling you “servido” or “you are served”) and they accepted and asked if they could come back for dinner. Since then, he has started bringing a load of basic groceries each week, then joining them for dinner four or five times. 

Joana and her family.

We ate with them the first and last nights of my visit and it was really nice sitting around the open fire over which they cook and just chatting and laughing with them. Only a few in the family speak any Portuguese, but Mac has developed a handful of running jokes with them using the fifty-or-so Ndow words he knows. The first night, we lucked into a plate of xima served with two carrils, one of little shrimp and the other of small river fish. The second night, since our friend Karina was visiting and we were three mouths, we brought a few packages of pasta, some potatoes and carrots. It was lucky we did, because the men of the family had not returned from town that night and the women, left without money or food, were about to go to bed with nothing to eat. We cooked up the pasta with salt and ate it with our hands from a shared plate. 

Friday morning, I joined Mac at the community hospital, where he recently started to volunteer when they have work for him. They didn’t have anything for us to do that morning, but one of the médicos gave me a tour of the facilities and we talked with a few patients there. The majority of patients we saw there were pregnant women, young mothers with thin, sad-eyed children and HIV patients. Everything was impeccably clean. The pharmacy was well-stocked, the equipment looked well maintained and there was even a TV mounted in the outdoor waiting area. The doctors, nurses and lab techs I met all seemed energetic and engaged. Despite the conditions of the patients there, I left encouraged by the apparent quality of care at this facility, after some stories I have heard about care provided to those without financial resources in Mozambique.

A worried mother whose daughter has worms; Dr. Mac practices taking pressure; a young patient.

We spent the rest of Friday relaxing and finishing plans for Saturday morning’s mini-workshop, the impetus for this trip. Mac has been developing the beginnings of a program on entrepreneurship to use with his REDES group. REDES (Raparigas en Desenvolvimento, Educação e Saúde) is a network of groups of secondary school girls dedicated to education about HIV/AIDS prevention, avoidance of unplanned pregnancies and general empowerment of women and girls in Mozambique. The project is PEPFAR funded and implemented by PCVs who work with Mozambican counterparts to build a group that can eventually be run by the Mozambican leader, but still with the support of PEPFAR funds and the network of other groups.

Mac had wanted to start a project aimed at generating income that could be used to pay school fees for girls in his community who couldn’t afford them. Since entrepreneurship and women’s issues are two of my favorite subjects, I volunteered to help Mac develop the materials. Then, PEPFAR funding was slashed and the REDES leaders saw the project as a great way to begin funding some of the activities that PEPFAR would no longer support. Teaching women business skills and providing them with the means to have independent income is also one of the best ways to achieve all the goals of the REDES program. Now half of the annual, two-day, country-wide workshop will consist of the program we develop. It has been fun to work on, but challenging to try to write a booklet that can be used by facilitators throughout the country, with backgrounds and abilities that will vary enormously and with audiences of girls with little to no knowledge of how a business runs. So, this Saturday was the first test of the material we have developed so far, and we came out with mixed, but very useful results.

Mac is in the process of asking his student leaders to take greater leadership roles, but the transition has not always been going smoothly. We encountered some glitches due to poor/non-existent communication between the leaders and the rest of the group that set a rather difficult tone to start the morning on Saturday. This was compounded by even bigger problems with the other group who hosted us for the test run. In the end, since this was a test for a program that will be used by people in many different circumstances, maybe it is better that we were in less-than-ideal conditions.

After our challenging morning with the REDES girls, which left us feeling a bit drained and frustrated, we stumbled across the perfect antidote: a joint 2 year-old/6 year-old birthday party, complete with food, dancing, cakes, party hats and loads of adorable children who just wanted to be picked up and swung around. It’s amazing what a couple of hours of grinning, laughing, dancing children can do for the psyche.

We left feeling reinvigorated, just in time for the arrival of a walking ray of sunshine in the form of our friends Karina. After a quick, sugar-infused visit/photoshoot with Mac’s 11 year-old neighbor and friends, we headed to dinner at Joana’s.

Karina, João and friend. So much sugar in those cups, might as well have been tequila.

On our way home from dinner, we heard drums in the distance. We had heard the same drums the night before, but had decided not to investigate because we needed our beauty sleep for Saturday morning’s workshop. Mac thought the drumming was coming from the house of some of Machanga’s curandeiros, or traditional medicine men. The night was brightly lit by the full moon and as we made our way through the fields of towering sorghum, with the sounds of drums and chanting growing louder with each step, I suddenly felt a little like I had stepped out of my own life and into a story about the Peace Corps. 

Women singing and playing instruments, others dancing.

We finally arrived at the curandeiros’ hut and were greeted by the bare backside of a sweating man straddling a set of three large drums. He was flanked by a few other drummers seated on esteiras (reed mats) and a woman seated among them, legs extended and whole body trembling. Based on his experience with other ceremonies, Mac conjectured that she was sick and having bad spirits expelled. We stayed another twenty minutes of so, watching as groups of women wrapped in capulanas and wearing white headbands danced in circles, at times holding up small axes and other tools (weapons?). Karina and Mac both joined in for a dance, but I decided I had more to contribute as the photographer. Because of the full moon, I was able to get some blurry but intriguing shots with a slower shutter speed.

The experience was fascinating and the music was wonderful, but I sure would have loved to have had someone there to explain what was going on. But sometimes I feel the same way in staff meetings at school… Such is cultural exchange. 

I got on the chapa at 3:30 the next morning, ready to head back to Chimoio and my daily life of meetings, internet problems, plentiful produce and paved roads. It was great to experience a little but of what some of my friends are doing with their communities, but it also motivated me to want to get to know my own better.