2010 in Review

As the calendar closes on 2010, we have been using the last days between Christmas and New year's Day to look back, spurred on not only by impulses of end of the year reckoning, but also by countless questions from our families and friends here in California about our experiences in Africa.  It has been an amazing year, full of adventure, accomplishment, and sacrifice.  We have grown immensely since we left the USA on September 28, 2009, especially when we compare it with a hypothetical life in which we stayed in the USA and continued working at UCLA and AIDS Project Los Angeles.  Although Luc had already been a high school teacher before this, full-time teaching in a formal school setting was a brand new experience for Janet, and teaching in Africa was like being a first year teacher all over again for Luc.  We pulled off several big extracurricular projects, including student participation in the regional Science Fair, English theater, and REDES/JOMA conferences.  Linguistically we are now both fluent in Portuguese, even though it has come at the cost of our Spanish, which is now hopelessly jumbled with its Romance neighbor in the language processing part of our brains.  We can also communicate in ChiChewa, the local African Bantu language in our town and the national language in Malawi, so even though that skill has no real application outside of the Malawi/Tete Province area and we'll probably forget it as soon as we leave Africa, it is a lot of fun, and brings endless laughs to the locals who hear us garble their tongue.  We've also grown as a married couple.  Considering that we've spent every day and night together for the past 15 months, except for the week each of us went to lead training, and we work together at our school, and we work together in our extracurricular projects, and we do all our domestic work together, and we're together during our vacations and travel, one of our friends commented that this last year of marriage is the rough equivalent of ten years of marriage in the United States.  We've stayed healthy, with only one bout of dysentery between the two of us, but no malaria and no crazy tropical diseases so far.  We both lost between ten and twenty pounds during our year in Africa, but regained the weight during our month back in the United States during the food rich holiday season.  Financially, we had to forgo thousands of dollars of income, and Luc had to put his PhD project on hold. Spiritually we are both in very good places.  Considering the amount of sacrifice and hard work we have put into serving our school and our town, our karma account must be in the positive.  Often times when Janet questions the value of our mission Luc challenges her to think of something more noble or worthwhile than then helping so many AIDS orphans and desperately poor families in Africa?  2010 has been a memorable year for us, full of experiences that will be with us for the rest of our lives.  Let's hope 2011 is equally successful and continues to be full of growth and joy. 

Merry Christmas!

Being back at 'home' for Christmas is extra special this year after 15 months in Africa.  'Home' for us however is about three different places: Janet's mom, Janet's dad, and Luc's parents.  Plus aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.  Luckily they're all located within a ten minute radius of Pasadena, so we're having four different Christmas day sessions at four different locations, which translates into lots of food, lots of presents, lots of love, and lots of Christmas cheer!  It turned out to be a much more elaborate and festive celebration than our little Peace Corps party last year. We had done all of our shopping at the craft market back in Africa, and luckily most of it survived the voyage around the world.  Africa was a definite theme in the gifts we received, like safari clothes, an e-reader for taking books to Africa, an i-pod for taking music to Africa, an external hard drive to store all of our African pictures and music, and lots of beef jerky and non-perishable cheeses.  We're also bringing back Christmas presents for all the new volunteers in Tete province sent to us by their families here in America.  So Merry Christmas to everyone and Happy New Year!  

Home Sweet Home

Hello from the great U.S. of A.! We are enjoying a restful, foodful and action-packed vacation with our families and friends this month. Stay tuned for some updates and more pictures and features on our blog!

27 hours in the sky

Mozambique is really far from California. It’s almost literally on the exact opposite side of the earth, so traveling home to Los Angeles for Christmas vacation generated a lot of frequent flier miles. All flights out of the Southern Africa region go through Johannesburg. Unfortunately that’s nearly a 40 hour bus ride for us. There is a regional flight to Jo’berg on South Africa Air that leaves from our nearby Tete airport, but we were already spending $1400 each on our Emirates tickets home and couldn’t really afford the additional $600 each for the extra two hour flight. Somewhat miraculously, one of the local Tete coal companies decided to sponsor us and pay for the extra leg of our trip. Janet ran into one of the South African coal executives while traveling to Maputo to lead Peace Corps training, and he was appalled when he found out we were contemplating busing it all the way to the Oliver Tambo International airport. He gave us his e-mail, and a couple weeks later he had gotten us tickets using the mines charity fund. We felt a little guilty since the tickets were for our vacation, but he assured us that since our work had benefited the community all year long, we shouldn’t worry about it. The quick two hour jump on a little 15 passenger Leer jet saved us 2 days bus travel, but we still had two days of air travel and layovers to look forward to. Tete to Jo’berg was two hours, then a three and a half layover, then Jo’berg to Dubai was another 8 and a half, another three hour layover where we could see the tallest building in the world from the Emirates terminal window, and finally Dubai – Los Angeles was 17 hours, the fourth longest commercial non-stop route in the world. Even though Emirates delighted us with their service and in-flight entertainment options, we were really glad, and jet lagged, when we disembarked in LAX. We were both hoping our bags made it with all the Christmas presents we had brought for our families. Since our little Tete airport had no computers, our baggage tags were all hand written, which made us a little skeptical, but they made it! We were so happy to see our dads, who had come together to pick us up, waiting for us in the International Terminal lobby. What a journey!

Visa Drama

We imagine everyone around the world dislikes paperwork and bureaucracy; our latest bout was particularly distasteful. As foreign residents in Mozambique, we need special permission and documentation to reside in the country, known as Documento de Identificação de Residentes Estrangeiros or simply, DIRE. All foreign residents must renew their status every year; our turn for this tedious task was coming up the first week of November. Normally the Peace Corps office in Maputo takes care of all the cumbersome paperwork involved in this ordeal, but this year’s process presented additional extenuating obstacles. Previously, the old DIRE was a simple sticker you paid for and they stamped into your passport, so a third party, like our Peace Corps support staff, could take care of the task; the new DIRE is a biometric card, meaning everyone now needs to get photographed and fingerprinted in person. This can only be done in provincial capitals, presenting a logistical nightmare for an organization like ours with volunteers in remote areas with tenuous transportation. Also, the price for this bureaucratic service skyrocketed from 2,000 meticais (approximately $60) to 24,000 meticais (≈ $720) or about the amount of money we see in 4 months from our living stipend. Considering Peace Corps has about 140 volunteers in country, plus some American staff, this price hike has a significant impact on our organization’s budget. A small crisis ensued, and given our irregular means of communication and access to information, this all resulted in a lot of confusion and anxiety. Compounding our personal situation, we needed to get out of the country to travel home for Christmas break. We had already bought our expensive non-refundable tickets, so for us, resolving our legal status felt extra expedient. So while Peace Corps tried to negotiate some sort of exemption or reduced fee for our documents and we watched our departure date approaching without any exit papers in hand, our stress increased. We started to devise alternate methods for leaving the country surreptitiously, like crossing the Malawi border at nighttime, or trying to get our friends in the immigration office to put some sort of fake stamp in our passport. Even once Peace Corps had transferred the funds to our local Immigration Services office in Tete City we still had to wait three weeks for the funds to arrive in a banking system that is nowhere near as efficient as we’re used to in the USA. Those three weeks were very stressful, but we finally got the green light from Peace Corps in a uplifting phone call acknowledging that funds had arrived in Tete. Despite the relief, we still had to navigate the murky waters of paper work in Africa. Apparently the 24,000 meticais processing fee did not cover the 50 meticais fee for stamping the photocopied form we needed to officially request the DIRE. Additionally, Peace Corps had given Immigration 40 pages of agreements with the Ministry of Education, but the officials wanted each of us to have our own 40-page copy; apparently the 24,000 meticais didn’t cover the 100 mets of photocopies. We had to wonder town looking for a place that could make legible copies. After waiting all morning with some Brazilians for our turn to be photographed and fingerprinted, the power went out, so none of the fancy new biometric machines could work, and we were told to return the next day to finish the process, which we did. After succeeding in getting the photos done the next day, we found out the DIRE can still only be made in the capital, Maputo, so we would have to wait over a month to receive this documentation critical to us leaving the country, so we had to request another document to leave the country in the mean time for our trip home to the USA. We were told we would have to come back the next day to receive this piece of paper, which made no sense to us. We had already spent two days in the city away from our school and students, having to find people to lodge us, and finding ways to eat, which was a major inconvenience to us, so we didn’t see why we should stay another, but as the lady working the front desk told us, this was their process, and we needed patience to get things done in Mozambique. We did have patience and outlasted a less serene South African mining executive who gave up after about an hour of waiting. He was trying to get permission to leave Mozambique to buy an ignition piece in Malawi to repair a large machine at one of the big Tete coal mines. The entire operation was sitting idle waiting for this man to get his paperwork, so we could understand his frustration. Eventually, after some coaxing and cajoling, we did get our documentation that afternoon, even though we had to wait several more hours for someone to come back from an extended lunch to stamp the paper, so we could make the two hour trip back to our home. Back in America we’ve had our share of frustration trying to get things done at the DMV or with waiting on hold while trying to complete credit card business via telephone, but Mozambican bureaucracy is the next level. We’re just glad everything worked out for us to come home for the holidays!

Boroma Mission

Near Tete city there is an old Catholic Mission built by the Portuguese at the end of the 19th century. Since traditional life in Sub-Saharan Africa has for so long focused on day to day existence and societies rarely had enough surplus to construct monumental architecture, few buildings of historical existence from the past remain today. Most traditional structures in our area were small and temporary and returned to the earth within a generation of construction. So, unlike many of the places we have traveled in Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, that are full of temples, palaces, fortresses, and monuments, it’s hard to find physical traces of the past in the places we visit here. Aside from a few Swahili settlements and some ancient petroglyphs, there is almost nothing in Mozambique from before the Portuguese era. So at over 100 years old, the Mission at Boroma is a historical anomaly, and one of the oldest man made structures in the region. Taking advantage of the one day during national exams neither of us were scheduled to proctor tests we attempted a visit. Boroma lies only 20 kms from Tete city, but not unexpectedly since we do live in Africa, the outing turned into an entire day of adventure. There is no paved road and no formal transportation between Boroma and Tete. We had to rely on hitching in a really crowded pick-up truck leaving from the outdoor market on the edge of town; luckily the driver invited to ride inside the cab since possibly because we are foreigners. Once we got to Boroma, and could see the old Mission looming over the small population on a high bluff, we had to locate the man with the church key. This took almost an hour, and several teams of loitering kids who we sent running back and forth looking for people while we talked with the small community of nuns. Finally Inocencio, the caretaker of the local perish found us, he had been at a funeral that morning and was taking a shower when our young messengers found him. At first he seemed a little non-plussed about our visit, but once he learned that we were fluent in Portuguese and were volunteering as high school teachers in the province, he got very excited, and gave us a deluxe tour of the entire grounds, showing us every room in the church. We even climbed up the old bell tower, although we were a little reluctant to climb the rickety 100 year old wooden stairs. The chapel interior still preserved original colorful fresco paintings, but everything was in a very poor state of conservation, with an owl living in a big hole in the ceiling just above the altar, a funky chicken coop smell in the sacristy, and a huge monitor lizard which our guide called a salamander. The mission had been converted into a high school soon after Mozambican independence, and I don’t think any maintenance had been performed on this historic monument since that time. The principal greeted us and we got a tour of the old facilities were students were taking national exams. When we returned to Boroma village we learned there were no cars returning to Tete. No problems, we just sat at the “Final Stop” cafe while our host tried to locate some soda and transport. Apparently this remote population only gets one type of soda delivered per week. They were worried because they had promised us Sprite, and that week’s flavor happened to be Coke. Eventually our hosts did find one jeep leaving and we were off, and despite one break down, we were just in time to catch the last minibus back home from Tete.