REDES Exchange

Imagine 50 teenage girls, hot and sweaty after 3 hours traveling, the sun is setting, and you are responsible for feeding and entertaining them all weekend. And surprise! The school’s water was cut two days ago and the closest source is 1 kilometer away. You have no buckets, it’s getting dark, and sassy teenagers keep telling you they’re thirsty. This was the rough start to Janet’s weekend. As part of REDES, Peace Corps’ national girls’ youth program, think of a Mozambican Girl Scouts program, Janet took a group of 10 girls and a teacher friend, Inácia, to a weekend exchange with three other REDES groups in Tete province. The event was hosted at our friends Helen and Audrey’s school outside Tete city, a large Catholic professional school with a huge campus and great resources. Very unfortunately for us though, the running water in their neighborhood had stopped running. This is no big deal in places that don’t have inconsistent running water, because there are lots of backup wells. But this huge school had no well and most of its buckets were being used for the priests’ important visit the same weekend. But we rallied, borrowed a few buckets, sent the local girls into the neighborhood to find water and started to cook dinner in huge pots. Oh, and our cook ditched us, so we had to do all the cooking. Luckily there was no shortage of girl cooking power, something all Mozambican females do really well. That Friday goes up there on Janet’s list of most stressful days in Mozambique! But after we figured out our water, the rest of the weekend went more smoothly. Janet ran most of the programming, giving lessons on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and hygiene, topics she loves to teach and doesn’t get much of a chance to with French and Computers dominating her teaching schedule at school. The girls sewed purses out of capulanas, the local brilliantly patterned fabric, and participated in a sports tournament. We all slept in one big room, lined up on grass mats along each wall, a giant African slumber party! Mozambicans love to take baths, it is a matter of personal pride and those who are dirty are shamed. So the lack of bathing water was very controversial. “When do we get to bathe?” they kept pestering us. “Where do you see water to bathe with?” we sassed back to their bewildered faces. We managed to get bathing space in a nearby teacher’s house with water, so we walked our girls in little groups the 1 km distance, and, over the course of two hours, managed to get them all clean. At night, as if having no water wasn’t bad enough, the electricity went out too, so we cancelled our movie, lit a few candles and had a dance party instead, each group taking turns to present songs they had prepared at home, using one of the buckets as a drum. On Sunday, after shipping our groups off to home and finishing the finances for the weekend, Janet sat down with the three other volunteers, Helen, Audrey and Hannah, and enjoyed a well-deserved cold beverage!