Volunteer Heroes

During our most happy time, our triumphal return home after two years serving in the Peace Corps, we received sad news. On our very first day back we got an e-mail informing us of the death of two of the teachers in the new Peace Corps group in Mozambique. We had just meet them briefly during the training session we gave and at their swearing-in ceremony at the ambassador’s residence the week before in Maputo, so we did not know them well personally, but as brothers and sisters in the Peace Corps family we naturally felt a strong bond; the news of their deaths just a couple days before Christmas affected us deeply.  We only got a few details about the circumstances of the tragedy, we know a group of five volunteers were involved in a bad car accident while hitch hiking near the beach in Gaza, Southern Mozambique, and that two died as a result of injuries and the other three were taken to the hospital, at least one with injuries severe enough to end his Peace Corps service. Usually heroes is a word we associate with soldiers, firefighters, or police, men and women willing to put their lives on the line to serve their communities and countries. Peace Corps volunteers may not be in armed combat or have to rush into burning buildings, but they are also asked to make sacrifices. We give up the comforts associated with our lives in the USA, running water, delicious foods, often times electricity, toilets, reliable telecommunications, access to entertainment, but also we give up many of the safety features built into our American lives: seat belts, airbags, well designed and  maintained roads and vehicles, general education campaigns against drunk driving, emergency responders, nearby hospitals, in essence putting our lives at risk to serve the poorer communities of this planet we all live on.  Its not often that a Peace Corps Volunteer dies in the course of their service, these were the first deaths in the history of Peace Corps Mozambique, but this was the case for the two young teachers from Wisconsin and Washington state, aged 22 and 23, recent graduates from college, having just started their service in Mozambique. We thought of them and their families, as well as our friends recovering in the hospital, all throughout Christmas, as we read articles and internet tributes.  We were so happy to have finished our service and with our joyful reunion with our family and friends, and the thought of these two who would never be coming home and the families who sent away their daughters with so many hopes and expectations, only to hear this news; it made us extra grateful for our own circumstances and reminded us of the ephemeral nature and inherent mortality in life. We only have a finite time here on Earth, we are glad we spent two of those years together serving the people of Mozambique.

The newest PC Mozambique group at their Swearing-In Ceremony in Maputo

Home, Jetlag, and Reverse Culture Shock

Mozambique is basically the farthest place from California on the planet. Actually we’ve consulted our world map several times on this issue and there are two countries further from our home in Pasadena, Mauritius Islands and Madagascar, but still Mozambique is really far! If our rocky, unpaved airstrip in Zóbuè could accommodate passenger jets, and there was a direct flight to LAX (Los Angeles International) it would take at least 24 hours of flying and require a mid-air refueling session.  If we somehow booked that hypothetical flight, we would earn over 12,000 frequent flier miles. Needless to say, that flight does not exist, and our sojourn back involved several different planes, layovers, and in flight movies.  After two years of travel in Africa, we had no major complaints, other than Luc’s irrational air-travel anxiety, possibly exaggerated by his malaria prophylaxis’ psycho-side-effects.  Our moms were waiting to greet us at the LAX International Terminal and we went immediately to El Arco, our favorite Mexican food restaurant where the rest of our welcoming committee greeted us as we chowed down on corn chips, enchiladas, burritos with tomatillo sauce, mole, and all those comfort foods we just couldn’t quite replicate in Africa. Our journey took us through progressively more developed cities: Maputo (a huge step over our rural village), Cape Town (way more advanced than Maputo), and Istanbul (a full blown European metropolis), so we had a gradual readjustment to the speed of modern life which helped mitigate our reverse culture shock. Jet lag was another story. Mozambique, Capetown, and Istanbul are all in the same time zone, so we left all of the time shifting for the last 14 hour leg of our journey on the non-stop from Turkey to Los Angeles. 11 time zones left us with an extra ten hours of being awake; we originally planned on sleeping in-flight, but were just way too excited. The trade off was several days of serious jet lag, crashing out at dinner time and waking up at 2am, possibly exacerbated by our non-stop trying to see everyone and do everything schedule. 

Lucas at 8pm on Christmas Day

So now that we’re back in the land of plenty, we’ll see if we can stay at our recommended BMI (Body Mass Index). With a virtually infinite array of tempting foods at our fingertips staying thin will be much more of a challenge than it was in perma-skinny Mozambique, but Janet rejoined her favorite gym and Luc has plenty of hiking and jogging trails nearby. We’ve traveled back and forth between the modern fancy rich part of the world and the poor less-developed traditional part of the world several times, so reverse culture shock wasn’t too bad, but we’ve still had a few moments of culture related anxiety attacks: trying to get the remote control to work, realizing we had nothing fashionable to wear to Janet’s ten year HS reunion, walking into the AT&T store and looking at all the different models of iPhone, opening up piles and piles of X-mas presents, all the while thinking of how simple our lives were back in Zóbuè. 

Janet's Dad's house post gift opening

We’ve tried not to convert prices from dollars back into meticais, or think about how many months we could live in Africa on the amount of money spent on an evening out here in Los Angeles. But we are glad to be home, especially with so many people around for Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. Even though we don’t have jobs, or cars, or phones, or a place of our own to live, or any of those items we once considered luxuries but people here seem to think are necessities, we are confident things will work out for us.  We’ve heard the question “So, what are you going to do now?” at least 200 times, basically everyone has asked us. Luc is going back to UCLA to finish his dissertation on Education for Sustainable Development based on the research he did while living in India just before Peace Corps. The project has basically been on hold for two years, so hopefully it reignites without too many hitches. Janet’s future is less constrained, and involves finding some sort of meaningful employment, hopefully in the International Health Education field. We don’t know where that job will be geographically, but we would like to stay near our families, which live mainly in California. In the meantime we have lots of friends and family to catch up with and are expecting a new niece this month. We have thousands of pictures to sort through; we have some wardrobe shopping to do and various of our favorite museums to visit, so many new books to peruse at the library, endless food sensations waiting for us at Los Angeles’ endless assortment of eateries, and recipes to try out with the grocery store’s limitless array of exciting ingredients. We would like to take a couple of road trips and reacquaint ourselves with USA and maybe visit some of our new Peace Corps friends now scattered across the country.  Africa feels distant now. We try to keep up, reading the news on the internet and following the blogs of the current volunteers living in Zobue (Lisa and Dan), but it’s all quickly fading into the past. 

Istanbul, Turkey

When flying Turkish Air, you have to stop in Istanbul, so we decided to take advantage of the layover and make it into a mini-vacation. The modern network of subway, buses, and metro rail facilitated circulating through the massive city, and being wintertime low-season, we had this staple of package tourism almost to ourselves, sharing mainly with local Turkish tourists. After two years in Africa, Istanbul had a very metropolitan feel and with ancient monuments in site everywhere, it felt much more historic than anything in our part of Africa. Situated on several hilltops and surrounded by various narrow bodies of water, every direction tempted the photographer’s eye with panoramic vistas, so even though we are only amateurs with a little point-and-shoot digital machine, we still took nearly 400 pictures during our short stay.

The city’s countless mosques with their myriad minarets, each trying to outdo its neighbor in projecting the call to prayer from its megaphones left no doubt when the faithful should face Mecca and comply with their religious duties. For us the five times daily cacophony of Arabic was a convenient way to mark our daily activities: waking up, breakfast, lunch, mid afternoon snack, and time to head home.

Food in Istanbul is omnipresent and amazing. Markets burst in cornucopias of fresh fruits and produce priced very reasonably. We treated ourselves to pomegranate, dried apricots, and apples. There is no peanut butter, but we discovered hazelnut chocolate spread just as good for making snack sandwiches. Street vendors make sure you are never more than a two minute walk from the nearest sesame seed bagels, called simits, pastries, or fire roasted chestnuts.

Tea vendors find you even in the most obscure places, like on top of the cities ancient walls. Luc’s favorite vegetable eggplant is everywhere, and in every form.

Potatoes are also taken to creative extremes, often times unrecognizably camouflaged by toppings,

and bright windows full of sweet desserts, baklava, and Turkish delights entice even the most regimented of dieters as they wander the avenues.

For the bargain hunter there is the Grand Bazaar, an entire covered section of the old city spanning several city blocks where you can find anything from antique carpets, to tourist curios, to plastic junk manufactured in China. We took advantage to do some last minute Christmas shopping.

Istanbul is most definitely a European city when it comes to walking. Even a drizzly afternoon created no visible reduction of volume in the river of Turkish pedestrians clad almost exclusively in dark colorless winter attire.

Istanbul, having served as capital of various empires, had more historic sites than even Luc could try to visit on a three day layover, so we tried to get a representative mix of the highlights: imperial mosques,

ancient Christian churches with golden mosaics,

the more than opulent Topkapi Palace where the Ottaman sultans reigned,

the roman aqueduct and city walls,

the Genoese fortifications,

and even an underground Byzantine cistern.

We took a ferry cruise across the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city, which seemed no less European to our casual visit. We enjoyed the views from the boat, but locals seemed busy feeding the seagulls ensuring flocks of birds around each vessel.

Janet found time at one of the centuries old Turkish baths to get the full clean experience where a young masseuse scrubbed off two years of accumulated African grime. Still, despite the amazing opportunity for a mini Istanbul vacation courtesy of Turkish Air, we were longing to be home, and secretly enjoyed the fact that we only had three days there and soon enough found ourselves on a USA bound jet plane.

Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town is not only the oldest city in Southern Africa, founded by Dutch settlers in 1652, it’s also the most picturesque, built between a seafront and the dramatic Table Mountain, and enjoys a temperate California climate year round. Given its tourism credentials, and its extremely inconvenient distance from the USA, we thought it best to visit before we permanently departed the Motherland.

We found Cape Town much more inviting and walkable than sketchy Johannesburg, South Africa’s apocalyptic version of Los Angeles, and Southern Africa’s largest and most dangerous metropolis. But even postcard perfect Cape Town has its dark side. Given the recent history of apartheid, race relations in the city are still viscerally tense, and violent crime is a constant threat. Having navigated cross-cultural challenges continuously during the past two years, we had plenty of skills to cope with these obstacles, but in South Africa everything is exaggerated, probably explaining why the country’s Peace Corps completion rate is the lowest in the entire Peace Corps. We explored some of this history on a tour at the Robben Island maximum security prison; the site of Nelson Mandela’s captivity during some of South Africa’s darkest times.



Segregation far exceeds levels we are accustomed to in the United States with many posh all-white neighborhoods surrounded by more distant ghetto-style black townships. We also had an unsavory taste for the ever-present danger of violence when an aggressive street hustler threatened to cross the line in downtown Cape Town, but the police quickly intervened, weapons in hand. It’s something that happens in all big cities, but with one of the largest wealth disparities between rich and poor, and white and black, its all the more common in South Africa.


Despite the disagreeable underlying realities which make Cape Town a place neither of us would like to live in, it is an amazing place to visit. The city is full of historical sites, parks, and museums, everything having received a facelift for the 2010 World Cup. We stayed on a pedestrian avenue were we could walk to an array of funky restaurants, souvenir shops, or curio stands.


We rented a little car and saw all the big sites, including a driving tour of wine country, and a road-trip all the way to the Southwestern-most point of the continent, the Cape of Good Hope, where baboons tried to hitch a ride on our windshield and Luc led our group on a walking safari where we encountered a herd of large Bontebok antelope with babies and a group of ostriches running on the beach.



We also visited the largest colony of breeding African penguins in a protected cove.



Another highlight involved hiking the city’s dramatic topography to countless amazing views, including the very top of Table Mountain, recently declared one of the 7 new Natural Wonders of the World.


We enjoyed the steep hike up, but decided to take the scenic cable car down.


Culinary highlights included Mexican-like food, eating extremely big sandwiches at a sports bar, Ethiopian food, and several picnics full of chips, cheese, crackers, olives, and other assorted snacks not available in Mozambique, purchased at the outrageously American supermarkets. We even got a candle light Christmas concert in spectacularly beautiful, Kristenbosch, one of the premiere botanical gardens in the world specializing in the unique Cape Floral Kingdom.


South Africa is the most American of places in Africa, and indeed a few times it actually felt like we were back in the USA, in a fully stocked grocery store, or at the mall all decked out in Christmas decorations, or hiking on a well maintained and signposted trail, or dining in a sports bar, which was admittedly showing rugby instead of football, but the club sandwiches were just as obscenely stuffed with chicken and bacon as you would expect back in the USA.

Our COS Trip, 4 Continents in 10 Days

After Completion of Service there is the trip home; some volunteers take the first flight back to America, but more commonly volunteers have a tradition of rewarding themselves with at least a few stops along the way to visit some of those places they failed to squeeze in during their busy two years of service. Some volunteers take the COS trip to the extreme, extending the voyage to as many countries as their limited budget permits. We had several volunteers from other African countries stay at our house on extravagant Capetown to Cairo trips and our PC Malawi neighbor took over three months touring India and Southeast Asia before finding his way back to America after completing his stint. We originally envisioned a grand celebratory road trip of our own hitting up all the highlights in Southern Africa; fantasizing about a leisurely COS trip got us through several low points during our two years. However, as our close of service approached and we ticked off most of the regional destinations on our must-see-list, we felt more eager to get home for all our family Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. We drastically abbreviated our trip, focusing on Janet’s favorite city on the continent, Cape Town, South Africa. In addition, Turkish Air was the cheapest flight home from Cape Town to Los Angeles, so we extended our layover in Istanbul as a bonus. Since the Turkish metropolis occupies two continents, extending across the Bosphorus Strait that divides Europe and Asia, our nearly 12,000 miles took us to four of the Earth’s seven landmasses, Africa, Europe, Asia, and finally North America.