Life in our Yard

Although there was a fence around our yard at some point, it has been slowly disappearing as neighbors take little pieces of it to cook evening meals. Its unclear to what degree this is unacceptable here, although people say it’s bad behavior, no one really seems to care, not even our land lady who eventually gets stuck with the bill for replacing the missing sections of bamboo fencing. Without any real barrier to impede pedestrian traffic our entire immediate neighborhood walks through our yard at some point each day. Taking shortcuts through people’s yards is the norm here, and we do it too when we’re about town. With no formal streets or walkways, it would be impossible to get around without intruding on other’s property; people here hardly see it as intruding, although oftentimes we feel that way as non-stop streams of people trickle across the dirt patio in front of our house every day. Kids will often pause for a while to stare at what their foreign neighbors are doing. We’ve become inured to it so it hardly unnerves us like it did when we arrived over a year ago, plus we attract less attention now that our novelty has faded. Outdoor cooking still draws major crowds, and everyone has an opinion on what we do wrong, which they express continuously throughout the process. We get animals too: pigs, chickens, ducks, and the occasional goat wander through looking for anything green to munch on. Insects also loiter our premises. We usually only notice the colossal specimens, like the gigantic spider that spun a web so strong between two of our trees we contemplated hanging laundry on it and the snails that grow larger than the size of a fist. We’ve had to ban soccer games and drum/dance practice in our yard mainly because of the noise and dust levels produced, but we still permit the less intrusive games, like marbles or tag. We still get plenty of noise from so many daily activities occurring in such proximity to our windows, but it usually simmers down enough by sleeping time to not be a problem. Having a public thoroughfare through our house has its disadvantages, little things disappear from time to time, nothing noteworthy, but always an unpleasant discovery none the less. Passers-by also trample plants, or eat them if they are of the herbivore persuasion. Our latrine gets frequent unannounced drop-ins who rarely clean up after relieving themselves. Our clothes line has been inadvertently snapped by neighbors who don’t seem to realize a piece of twine can’t support their body weight. Despite our American sensibilities and tendency to feel like our personal space is being invaded on a constant basis, it is nice to be able to see so many people while simply sitting on our porch. Sometimes people will surprise us with fruit or sugar cane just because they were passing by on their way home from the fields. We certainly don’t feel isolated and it makes integrating into the community a breeze, something totally necessary for achieving Peace Corps’ cultural exchange goals.

Characters from Around Town

Living in a small town you really get to know quite a bit about most of the people you see on a daily basis. We wanted to share just a few sentences about some of the more colorful characters we encounter while we’re out and about, mainly because they usually bring a smile to our faces when we think about them:

Neto
The most prominent of the local crazys, numbering about five in total. Currently he has only one eye and nine toes. He often intrudes in dramatic fashion at church during mass and once even tried to steal the communion wafers from the priest. We oftentimes see him passed out or in advanced stages of binge drinking near the town market, but he’s usually non-confrontational with us. We’ve been told that as a teenager he was going crazy, so his parents took him to a witch doctor, who cured him on condition that he never drink alcohol. As a non-crazy he finished school and had stable employment as a security guard. One day he returned to the bottle and has been declining precipitously ever since. Luc and Romão like to imitate his distinctive dance moves, which always generates some laughter.

Moses
One of the more tragic figures in town, Moses grew up in London with some distant family and speaks perfect urban English. Being born in Africa without British citizenship he was expelled from England and has been unable to return to Europe. He is “deep into” poetry and theater, and laments the lack of access to the performing arts in our part of the world. He finds it difficult to say the name of our town in the same sentence with the word London, and misses all of the bumping action he experienced in the metropolis. He continually files paperwork in hopes of getting a visa, but I think he knows chances are slim. Moses does not feel like he fits in with our mostly rural bumpkin type population and often resorts to heavy drinking. He considers Luc a brother who transcends the barriers of race and often composes spoken word pieces for him. Lately he’s been into conspiracy theories and has an internet article about the Free Masons he wants us to read.

Chefe Leonardo
Our town mayor/chief lives in the biggest, fanciest home in town, and has a pot belly he refers to as his curve of happiness. He has fathered 9 children and claims he has sent them all to school. Any time he invites us to eat we feast on plenty of meat and are forced to drink many beverages, sodas in the case of Luc and beers in the case of Janet. He loves hearing about the outside world and gets sullen when comparing under-developed Mozambique with what we tell him of America and Europe. He always tries to make us feel welcome and prevent any type of isolation that we might experience as foreigners.

Luka
People in Mozambique who share the same name are known as xaras and oftentimes develop a special bond. Luc’s xara is the local tailor and leader of the choir at the Catholic church. He loves to have us stop by his little shop and chat, especially when he sits idle because electricity is out. He’s always full of smiles and jokes for us and likes trying to say things in English or teach us phrases in the local dialect. His work is usually good, and we get great discounts, but he’s not always able to complete our commissions on time, leaving us to make some last minute changes to our Christmas present list.

Janeti
Janet has a special relationship with some of the ladies at the market. One of them shares her name and often gives her free samples of the strange local fruits she sells, most of which we didn’t even know how to name when we first arrived. Another forced Janet to wear her sandals. Janet had developed some painful blisters from some shoes she had received from a student on Teacher’s Day and had resorted to walking barefoot, which scandalized the market vendors. Another of our market friends named her newborn boy Luka. Everyone in the market loves it when we say things in Chewa; they treat us as if we were fluent now.

Mister Light Bulb
One of our friends from church sells light bulbs in the market. We can never remember his actual name, so we call him Mister Light Bulb. His personality and face are round and shiny, and he always has plenty of smiles for us when we pass his hardware stand at the market. We also frequently see him at the Sunday evening soccer where he sits on the grass with the other older men from town to watch the game.

Senhor Cebola
We never forget his name because it means onion, which struck us as very odd at first, until we learned that it is a Chewa custom to name children after everyday objects (we’ve had students named Lettuce, Calculator, Six Pence, Lunch, Watch). He just retired as the school secretary, and tried to learn computers in one of our classes after years of using a type writer. His typing skills were great, but he never really grasped how revolutionarily different computers are from their mechanical ancestors. He loves to bring us items from his garden. He always employs the Chewa way of showing respect by clapping and bowing when he sees us. Several of his children have been our students.

Angolano
“There are only three of us,” confided the octogenarian, greeting us from his porch armchair. Born in 1925 in Portuguese Angola, and having lived in Mozambique since before it was independent, the man known only by his nationality (O Angolano) jokingly informed us that we were a group of only three white people in town. Angolano spends most of his time watching TV from Portugal he captures using the largest satellite dish in town, which also broadcasts Premier League games, which anyone can watch for 10 meticais on Sunday afternoons.

Five (Yes, that’s his name. You can also use the Portuguese ‘Cinco’ or just hold up your five fingers)
One of the many money changers who hangs out at our border post, he has learned not to get his hopes up for making a Kwacha sale, since we live here and rarely need to purchase the Malawian currency. All other foreigners who show up are fair game though; he and all the other eager salesmen rush each incoming mini-bus, thrusting wads of cash through the windows in the faces of unsuspecting white people, or any other person who looks like they might be headed across the border. When we do need to buy Kwacha, he actually quotes us the real rate the first time we ask, avoiding the usual 10 minutes of haggling afforded non-locals.

Smells of Service

There has never been any shortage of stimuli to the olfactory sense during our service here in Africa. Unfortunately, most of the odors encountered during our daily activities are of the sort we would have categorized as moderately to severely offensive back in America, however after a year’s worth of nasal conditioning it’s rare that we rank a smell above mildly stinky these days. Domesticated animals perennially rank among the foul culprits polluting our air with their stank aromas. We have plenty of pigs, cows, goats, chickens, ducks, and turkeys around so that piles of feces or pools of urine, as well as fetid wallowing holes, are never too far out of smelling range. People’s bodily functions also contribute to the rank odors: our latrine, despite Luc’s regular attempts to achieve some degree of sanitation with bleach, regularly lapses into the stinky category, especially on the warmer days. Even worse are the open gutters and cesspools where the human waste accumulates from those without access to pits. There is a lot of sweating here, and people are usually in close proximity to each other, so we are often smelling plenty of BO. Farting is also not uncommon, although it has recently become illegal in neighboring Malawi (unclear how they’re going to enforce that one)! Janet often remarks that she never really appreciated cologne or perfume as much as she does on this continent. During rainy season the high humidity can keep our house funky, as mildew accumulates and our not totally dry things get a little moldy, although a good dose of detergent or chlorine helps reverse some of the damage caused by these perpetrators. Conversely, during dry weather, smoke from fires, either for cooking or for clearing fields, and dust can hang suspended in the air we breath in quantities sufficiently irritating to remind us of the smog we felt we had temporarily left behind in LA. Even worse is when people burn their trash releasing dark toxic laden clouds to pummel our noses and lungs. The market concentrates its own set of odors. Piles of decomposing fruit and vegetable discards produce putrid aromas, and the tables of desiccated fish and shrimps add to the assault, especially when damp weather has slightly re-hydrated them. Vendors, with no means of refrigeration leave their pig, goat, and bovine carcasses out however long it takes to sell an animal’s worth of meat, so you can usually smell how good or bad of a day they are having. Any kind of confined space, but especially crowded modes of public transportation, usually include in an amplified state all of the above smells. Although it may sound like Africa is a really smelly place, not all smells go in the unpleasant category. Top on the pleasant list should be the abundant Plumeria flower, whose Hawaiian perfume is such a special treat Luc will often gather them by the handful to make Janet smile. Fresh bread is always exciting, as are non-rotten fruits, like the always pungently tropical smelling pineapple. Neighborhood cooking can produce delightful scents; we notice them most often when walking home hungry from school. Our own kitchen contributes some fine fragrances, especially when Janet is in the baking mood, which is frequent during the cold winter evenings as our toaster oven is one of the only ways to heat our little home. The smell of rain or fresh countryside breezes always provide a breath of delicious air. Hopefully this blog hasn’t been too unpleasant. Things really were pretty smelly when we got here, but after a year of coexisting with all kinds of odors, our noses hardly even register any except the most extreme examples anymore.

Mozambican Heroes Day

February third commemorates the death of Eduardo Mondlane, one of the Republic of Mozambique’s founding fathers. When we first arrived in country, Janet often got called Janet Mondlane, which we found odd until we discovered Eduardo happened to have an American wife named Janet who still owns a house in Namaacha where we were living during Peace Corps training. Mondlane died in Tanzania, assassinated by a parcel bomb possibly orchestrated by the Portuguese secret police, six years before independence. However, his role in uniting various nationalistic factions into FRELIMO, the party which eventually negotiated independence from Portugal and continues to rule the nation to this day, earned him a permanent day of honor on the national calendar. The holiday has expanded to also honor Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, and all Mozambican veterans of the struggle for independence from the nearly five centuries of foreign rule which ended in 1975. Mozambican Heroes Day is basically like Presidents Day, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day all rolled into one. The mortal remains of Mondlane and Machel, as well as some of Mozambique’s other most revered heroes are kept in a giant star-shaped mausoleum in a traffic roundabout near the international airport in the capital city. Luc tried to snap a photo of the monument last time he flew there and nearly had his camera confiscated by a couple of over-zealous national guards possibly fishing for a bribe, so there is no picture to accompany this blog. Every city and town in the country has a prominently situated replica of this memorial. Ours is looking a little shabby these days with bricks lying exposed where the plaster has cracked and chipped away; the local authorities always promise to have it refurbished by next holiday. This year we missed the ceremonious laying of the flower wreath and the speech making held at the star. Since every celebration we attended last year started at least an hour late, that’s when we arrived, only to find all the townspeople, with the occasional old war veteran in fancy dress uniform, trickling out in the opposite direction. Apparently this time they decided to start early and we missed the whole thing, although we have a good idea of what transpired since Mozambican holidays always strictly adhere to the same formula. The soccer team crowds had been anticipating from the big coal mining company down in the district capital Moatize failed to materialize for the evening soccer match, so we ended up having a mellow holiday weekend. Back in America everyone was partying for Super Bowl Sunday, but that means absolutely nothing here since no one has ever seen a football or even heard of this almost exclusively North American sporting institution. Some of our buddies were getting together at a 24-hour gas station on the national highway near the ocean where a satellite dish was going to capture the big game live. But it was too much travel and too crazy for our teaching schedule with the game airing at 4am Monday morning, so we just caught the results on the BBC Sports World wrap-up when we woke up at 7am.

Luc's Weekend Out

While Janet was off with her Peace Corps girlfriends at the regional REDES meeting, Luc decided to have some PC guy time and with only one other male volunteer in the province this outing basically planned itself. It also gave him a chance to see the new Peace Corps sites out along the road leading north to Zambia, which was one of his goals as the sole Peer Support Network representatitive of the province. For some reason the chapas plying this route run more crowded than the average Mozambican mini-bus, which if you’ve read our past transportation blogs, would seem impossible, but in these extra jam packed sardine cans there isn’t even enough room for the conductor (the man who takes your money, never seems to have change, and always crams in about five more people than we thought possible). On the ride up, the conductor literaly got out, stuffed three more women in, along with the babies strapped to there backs and closed the door. I thought it strange that we would continue without a conductor, but he just slid the window open, stuck half a butt check inside, grabbed the roof, and with 85% of his body outside the vehicle, yelled for the driver to continue. Even worse was the chapa back into town. It was equally as crowded with human passengers, but also had five chickens, two goats, and a large pig, the last of these animals inhumanely cramed under the back seat. The grossest part was when the pig had a panick attack and began to simoltaneously defecate and urinate in large quantities. Luckily I was quick to pull my bags from under the seat to the saftey of my lap just before the surging pond of yellow liquid overtook our row. The Mozambican man to my left was not so luicky and procceded to protest in vain demanding for the pig owner to somehow clean his now soiled luggage. Volunteers often claim transportation provides the best stories from service, but that is little consolation for the discomfort and danger we must endure every time we venture from site. The new sites are beautiful, cooler than the sweltering Zambezi River valley, and look more African, with more mud huts and grass roofs. On the down side, they seem to have little access to food beyond tomatoes and what looked like some beef legs. Two of them have no cell service, and the transportation, aside from being more cramped seemed much less frequent thanon our road . We always find it interesting to imagine what service would have ben like if fate would have destined us to another site; we almost always conclude it would be hard for us to love another place as much as our own town, but it seems as if most volunteers grow to feel this way about their own sites.

Janet Hits the Road

Usually we take the 4am bus between Tete and Chimoio since it’s the only formal transport available, but Janet likes to get her sleep, so she’s been trying to think outside the public transit box to avoid that dreaded 3am wake-up alarm. Last week, for her regional REDES coordinators meeting in Chimoio (REDES being the national girls’ empowerment program spawned by earlier generations of Peace Corps Volunteers we’ve worked with during the past year) she decided to chance the hitch hiking method of getting around. For many Peace Corps Volunteers hitching is the preferred means for covering long distances, especially in the heavily touristed southern provinces where friendly South Africans with fancy vehicles just seem to be waiting on the EN1 (the national North-South highway) for volunteers to pick-up and chauffeur around. Up here in Tete most highway traffic consists of large semi trailers hauling goods from Mozambican ports to landlocked Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We’ve taken these trucks over shorter distances visiting our neighbors in the province, usually paying for our rides. Although it isn’t too glamorous or fast, it usually gets us where we need to go. After a short hitch in a personal car to the crossroads outside Tete, Janet waited only 20 minutes until a big Coca-Cola truck stopped for her extended hand (no thumb signals here). The driver was a nice man named Luis, driving crates of empty soda bottles back to the factory in Chimoio for refilling (soda and beer bottles get reused in Africa, not recycled, a much more environmental option!). Although his truck was slow, he drove safely and chatted with Janet about America and science (Janet was surprised the former geography teacher thought the world was literally flat, he adamantly wanted to know what was beyond the ocean and what was below the ground). They arrived outside the Coca-Cola factory, where he dropped Janet, since he’s not allowed to give rides to passengers, and he didn’t even ask her to chip in for the gas, always a welcome situation. Janet caught her third ride of the day from the factory into Chimoio town and spent the weekend with a few volunteers, planning out the activities for our girls’ empowerment project this year. Chimoio is our favorite of Mozambique’s provincial capitals, for its cool weather, wide tree-lined avenues and walkability. It was, as always, great to see friends, eat city food, and do city shopping (on the list this trip were Pringles, nail polish, ramen noodles and garbanzo beans). One volunteer living in Chimoio has a particularly nice house, where she spent several evenings cooking, playing games and writing scavenger hunt clues for a regional get-together next week. Janet sucked it up and took the 4am bus back to Tete though, but enjoyed some language practice with a friendly Frenchman sitting next to her. It was exciting to come home and swap tales with Luc, who spent the weekend visiting new Tete volunteers.