Conhecer-ing Casas and Other Ways I'm Starting to Feel Like I Belong Here

Currently, I would have to say that no news is good news, and there hasn’t been any news since my last post. Things have been calm all week and after talking to our security officer and getting the okay, I am getting ready to visit friends in the northern part of Mozambique for about ten days. There are no “official activities” at school for the month of July, although we are still expected on campus unless we take leave. I took off from July 14 - 29, originally planning to leave for the northern province of Nampula last Sunday, but because of changes in the bus schedule, my departure got delayed and I decided to hold off until Wednesday and catch a ride with a friend making the 12-hour drive in a private car. I figure it will be safer and more fun than cramming myself sozinha onto a speeding bus for that length of time. I am really excited to get out of the city for a while and see a new part of the country. Hopefully my next post will be full of pictures of beaches and zebras.

A calm Dia da Independência celebration in Chimoio

The delay in leaving has actually been kind of nice. With all the consolidation activity over the last couple of weeks, having a few extra days to get my patos in a fila before traveling will make for a more relaxing trip. I have been able to get my first couple of Marketing classes planned out and did some cleaning and organizing of my house. And made jam for the first time in months! The papaya trees in my yard were so full of fruit it was starting to rot right on the tree. My papaya-whacking skills are improving, but a couple were all but demolished in the process of knocking them off the tree, so I decided to give papaya jam a try: spiced orange-papaya jam was definitely a success.

As I mentioned in my last post, even with the recent unrest, day-to-day things have been great here. I haven’t taught a class since about mid-May, the last six weeks of the semester consisted of tests, review, exams and more exams. I still had plenty of responsibilities as coordinator of my course, but without evening classes or lesson planning, my days were much less packed. This freed up more time for the more-fun part of being a Peace Corps Volunteer: cultural exchange, i.e. hanging out with people.

An upside to living in the city is easy access to fresh produce and dairy. One downside is harder access to people. My house is a palace by Peace Corps standards and with that comes the equivalent of a moat: between the outer gates and front and back doors, there are ten locks in between my house and the street. I have been getting to know more people, but socializing in the city is a little more formal than the casual dropping-in that happens in smaller villages. On the plus side, this means that children aren’t wandering into my house and watching me pee, but it also means I rarely spend time in other people’s houses. It’s a strange feeling to go weeks at a time without entering another person’s home, and I’ll tell you, it was making me feel pretty isolated within my community.

In the first few months at site, I was invited to one colleague’s birthday party, another’s home on the way to having a skirt made for o Dia dos Trabalhadores, and a friend’s graduation party. I did visit the houses of fellow PCVs, but that didn’t make feel any more a part of the local community. None of my colleagues live near me and they tend to be unbelievably busy between work and family. I drew a lot of comfort from becoming a regular at certain bancas at the market or dairy vendors in town, or getting to know the guards outside the Peace Corps office. I was secretly thrilled every time I was accused of being desaparacida. “Someone noticed I was gone!” I started getting to know more people outside of school, but most also live lá (far away). It wasn’t until I got to invitations to “conhecer minha casa” from two friends in the same week that I realized how good it felt to be invited into someone’s home to meet their family. 

Church with my friend Dionisio; adorable babies are omnipresent here; communion

In the last month or so, things have been opening up a lot more. I have been going to church with a young friend I made in the market and he has been stopping by my house on the way home from school occasionally. Some nights he comes by for help with English, but sometimes just to say hello. When we go to church, I usually go to his house first and have a cup of tea with whatever part of his family is around. We have also gone to church with another guy from the market whose church features an amazing choir (videos to come when I have the necessary bandwidth). Last week, he invited me back to meet his wife and son and have lunch after church. It’s kind of shocking how great these casual little social interactions feel as someone new to the city.

Another recent highlight was having my English Club over for lunch as our last meeting of the semester. I had invited them weeks before, without knowing I would be hosting consolidated PCVs, but this turned out to be an absolute blessing. The two friends staying with me helped whip my house into shape and we cooked up a storm: a huge pot of chili, loaves of garlic bread a colorful green salad. By the time we were eating our feast of American food, a third volunteer came by and led an animated game of Celebrity after lunch. 

It was the first time trying American food for most of the six students who came and they cleaned their plates. As we were eating our fruit salad dessert, one started asking about blueberries. I happened to have a bag of dried blueberries my mother had put in a care package, so I brought out a little dish for everyone to try. The only berry I have seen here is the occasional strawberry; I think the climate is too warm for most. I think the blueberries may have been their favorite part of the meal! At the end, they asked if we could do lunch together more often, but offered to help with the food in the future. I would love to have a group lunch become a regular event: I find that having people into my home is almost as much a comfort as being invited into theirs!

The Chimoio English Club

A lot of the relationships I am forming are with young people here, which is not surprising as a teacher. So it was a special treat to be invited to meet the grandmother of my friend Carlitos. When Don, the PCV who lives in the house in my backyard, and I were told by the Peace Corps that we needed to find someone to clean our yard each week, fellow Chimoio PCV Shane recommended Carlitos as a reliable kid who needed the money to go back to school. We weren’t thrilled that we were being forced to pay someone to cut our grass and trim our hedges, but when I realized that this arrangement would be the difference between high school and not for the co-leader of Shane’s youth group, it became an opportunity to put 600 meticais a month to very good use.

I was impressed the first time I met Carlitos. A soft-spoken 24 year old with a luminescent smile, his iron handshake is a stark contrast to his slight frame. During the first months in my house, many workers were in and out of our quintal, making improvements to Don’s house, removing piles of trash left by the previous tenant, or giving us quotes on the cleaning job. None of the others hesitated to pick and eat as much fruit off our trees as they pleased. Carlitos was the first to wait until he was offered and the first to wash his guavas before eating them. (It could be that fruit is looked at as a common good, but as a neighbor in Namaacha electrified his lychee tree to prevent theft and I have heard of people being beaten for taking mangos, I think that fruit trees are considered property of their owners). When we discussed how much we could pay him, he didn’t even try to bargain, accepting our first offer with the response, “Really, the only thing that is important to me is being able to go back to school.” Since then, I have lost many a potentially productive Saturday morning standing in the backyard talking with him about everything from traditional Chinese medicine to the current political unrest. I heard about his previous life as the proprietor of a banca for a rich tyrant in his neighborhood and the sad story of how he came to be living with his grandmother.

Last week, before Shane’s two years as a PCV were up, we accepted Carlitos’ invitation to visit his home and meet his vovó  and the rest of his family. From the stories I had heard of Grandma Carlitos, I was excited to meet her, having a feeling that she was a big influence on his cheerful disposition and strong work ethic. It turns out that Vovó grew up working in the house of a Portuguese family on Ilha de Moçambique, and although many of her generation speak only local languages, she speaks better Portuguese than some of the professors at my school. 

Carlitos and family

We arrived at their small but well-built home in the mid-afternoon. Vovó (I still don’t know her name) worked at a local factory for years and all employees were given houses before the plant was shut down. She sat us down and fed us lunch: a generous helping of xima with a caríl consisting of mostly liquid and a few clearly precious chunks of goat. After we served ourselves, the rest was distributed among the seven others in the house. As we were eating, she brought out a jar of bright yellow and fiery red sauce, explaining that she made her own piri-piri with lemon peels. We tried a bit with the boiled taro root she offered when the goat was finished and then she sent us each home with a jar. As we were leaving, she let us know that since we now know where their house is, we should come by whenever we want. Although Shane is on his way back to the US, I will certainly take her up on it. One thing that is severely lacking in my youth-centered life here is time with vovós.

So things here are good and getting better. I am really excited for this vacation, but I am also looking forward to getting back refreshed and ready to start second semester. Our English Club will hopefully have a home in the American Corner that the US Embassy will be setting up at UCM starting August 1 and the kids are excited to meet the Embassy folks who will be coming to get it going then. I can’t wait to have an area dedicated to English-language materials that will be open to the whole community. I think the English Club kids will be enthusiastic early-adopters who will hopefully draw in more students.

I am going to be teaching English again, but this time to IT students who I have heard are pretty advanced. I may be able to push them a little farther with projects and activities. And although I wasn’t originally to thrilled with the idea of teaching Marketing – it doesn’t seem to be the most crucial subject to teach to students in a country were they really need people who can build roads and kick-start local manufacturing – I have come around on it as I have been planning the syllabus. I realized that this is an opportunity to teach students about how to be savvy consumers of marketing since big companies from more developed countries are currently flooding Mozambique with industrial products and the associated advertising and marketing.

So, until August!  

Update on the Unrest

After two weeks of uncertainty, the Volunteers who were moved out of their sites in Tete and Sofala because of unrest were finally brought home yesterday.  There were no attacks after June 25, Mozambican Independence Day. Our Mozambican Safety & Security Coordinator and his boss, the regional safety officer, traveled to the affected provinces and conducted numerous interviews over the past week and were satisfied that everything was calm enough that PCVs would be safe to return to their communities. Everyone was unbelievably relieved, especially after both men had spoken of the possibility of pulling all volunteers out of Sofala. No one wanted to abandon their students and neighbors, to leave projects just-begun or halfway finished. The consolidated volunteers were already feeling stressed because the two weeks they were missing coincided with preparation for final exams, or in some cases provincial exams. Many were receiving calls and texts from friends, neighbors and students wondering why they had disappeared for so long, and if this was a bad sign that they should in fact be scared for more violence. No one was quite sure of the best way to explain why Peace Corps had removed them without a) alarming their communities and b) making it seem like volunteers would just abandon their communities at the first sign of trouble.

So the news Thursday morning that everyone would be headed home by Saturday was just about the best 4^th of July gift anyone could ask for. We had already planned a potluck barbecue at my house, but we were much more in the mood to celebrate knowing that the exile was almost over. Everyone cooked something and we ended up with quite a spread. A couple of my Mozambican friends came to celebrate with us, including my friend Silvino who lived for more than thirty years in the US and was very happy to celebrate the 4^th with a houseful of Americans and a tableful of American food. 

Although we were all relieved to find out that Sofala had been deemed safe, it was difficult to feel like this was the final word. The attacks had stopped, and Alfonso Dhlakama, the opposition leader who had announced the roadblock and most believe had ordered the attacks, held a press conference Wednesday night calling for an end to attacks on the highway. But multiple rounds of talks between RENAMO and FRELIMO have gone nowhere. Neither side seems willing to give on some crucial points, both regarding the political issues that are nominally the basis for this conflict, or issues like military presence near RENAMO’s base of operations. The military is continuing to escort cars traveling on the southern part of the EN1, a signal that things still aren’t quite right.

Ever since the first attack by government troops on the armory near Beira, fofoca (gossip) has been flying. It is extremely difficult to separate fact from rumor when the media here barely exist and most news outlets are under some level of control by the government. Particularly in the more rural areas where Peace Corps places volunteers, there were endless reports of armed groups being spotted marching in one direction or another, attacks on weapons caches, or bandits blocking roads. When these events didn’t show in the papers, it was hard to know if it was because they hadn’t happened, or because someone had an interest in it not making headlines. Large international companies have started investing in Mozambique and no one involved wants instability scaring off investors. Once our security staff had checked out the scene on the ground and decided it was relatively stable, we felt much more confident dismissing rumors, but I don’t know if anyone felt like we actually knew the full extent of activity on the part of either side: RENAMO or FRELIMO. 

Everyone should have arrived back at site by today, so I shot off some text messages, checking on how their arrivals had been. After a few confirmations that all was well at site, one friend casually ended a message with, “Did you hear about the new shootings btw?” At first I thought she might be joking: it couldn’t happen that after more than a week without incident, there was a shooting the day they all went home. But, no, she was serious. Early yesterday morning, there was an attack on a RENAMO base, believed to have been perpetrated by the military. As in previous cases, reporting on the clash was inconclusive. I dug through Twitter for #RENAMO and found links to a couple of articles confirming that an attack had happened, one stating that eighteen people had been injured, but it still isn’t clear exactly what happened.

I talked to a couple friends to find out what they had heard and, interestingly, the overwhelming reaction we seem to be having to this is fatigue, more than fear. There was a smaller incident back in April which led to a few people being pulled from site, and now after two weeks of uncertainty about the future, worry about escalating violence, discomfort about our relationships with our communities in a time of unrest, and frustration with the media and lack of information, we were just tired of it and wanted to get back to work. And that’s just after two weeks! As I mentioned in my last post, it is hard to imagine what life is like for people who have lived for years in societies where they can never be sure of the next week, month or year. 

So I sat down to write this post (before I heard about the latest attack) full of optimism. No one here in Chimoio seems too worried about the unrest since the first spate of attacks. It felt like everything was settling down. US employees in the national park in Sofala had returned to work at the same time we learned the PCVs would be going back. Personally, everything has been great lately (new post to come later this week with some highlights). But after hearing about this latest event, I don't know. I haven't heard about any reprisals and still haven't heard anything definitive on the initial incident. It may turn out to be nothing and I sure hope so, but I almost think that no information would be better than the uncertainty of all the mixed messages coming from the media.