All of Tete Together

Life in site during the school year gets so busy time just flies by. Janet was a little sick, so she was in bed part of this week, so Luc was extra busy trying to cover her classes. No, there are no substitute teachers we can call to fill in with situations like this. Here in Moz if a teacher is absent, kids just have free time. We try as best we can to make up the lost hour on Saturday or when the kids are free when someother teacher is out. No worries though, Janet is fine. We thought it might have been malaria, but after consulting our doctor it seems more likely to have been the flu or some other virus that resolved itself after some conserted rest. Before we realize it, its already been an entire month without seeing any of our colleagues from PC Mozambique. So with St Patrick's day and a birthday earlier this month as excuses we all got together for the weekend hosted by our buddies up in Angonia. We all talked pretty much non-stop since we all
live in relatively isolated sites in our already isolated corner of Mozambique and don't usually get to hear so many stories and exciting news. It was invigorating to appreciate how much all our new volunteers have developed as teachers over the course of the first trimester. Weighing the good and the bad of our collective experience it seems like we're coming out on the positive side so far, which is encouraging considering how many challenges schools present here. Even more exciting was to hear about who has started dating Mozambicans here in Tete and getting a month's worth of gossip about the larger Peace Corps Mozambique community. Some major revelations included learning that one of the volunteers from our training cohort was sent home for breaking some sort of PC rule, which was disappointing to hear, and that two volunteers from the new group have fallen in love with each other and decided to get married here in country, which was very exciting
to hear! Mostly here in Peace Corps we just occasionally need some time out to relax with friends.

Misadventures in Geography

With very little exposure to television most of our neighbors know little about the world outside our town. Few people have ventured beyond the distance they can travel in a day, perhaps as far as Beira to the South, Lilongwe or Blantyre in Malawi, or cosmopolitan Harare in Zimbabwe. Very few people have seen the ocean, or even relatively nearby Lake Malawi, and very few have ever been to Maputo, the national capital: just a few political leaders, and teachers and border guards who trained there. We have maps decorating nearly every surface in our home, but these convey no more information to our typical visitors than do the out-of-date calendars and the assorted colorful photo posters or religious decorations covering the walls in our neighbors’ homes. When we put up the USA map we tried to see if Romão would be able to identify what to us are the iconic shape of our country. Without hesitation he told us he knew which country it was, it was Malawi. Most locals are able to recognize the contours of their own country, but still have a hard time locating Mozambique on a world or even a southern Africa map, until we point it out. Our own geographic origins present a conundrum to locals as well. Since non-black Africans make up less than 1% of Mozambique’s population, most people assume we are from somewhere else. Since we speak Portuguese, locals quickly rule out Zimbabwe and South Africa, the origin of most whites they meet, but who rarely speak their language. People most commonly assume we are Brazilian, just like all the Portuguese speakers they see on their Brazilian soap operas. The mining boom has drawn Brazilians to Tete, so the assumption isn’t bad. People are further confused when we tell them we are Americans, from the United States. The United States means nothing to most people and they associate the word America with all the countries in the Western Hemisphere, making no continental distinctions between North and South America. They are also surprised to learn that Portugal is not in America, the difference between America and Europe being very hazy. Few understand the location of the American continent, and that a large ocean separates it from Africa; we are often asked if we came from America by plane or by bus. Janet actually met a former geography teacher while hitchhiking who thought the world was a flat disc; he kept asking what was under the earth, or beyond its edges. Recently one of the party leaders in our town died while at an international congress in Vietnam. People merely stated that his body had to be brought from far away, having little idea of what or where Vietnam may be. Only when we throw out the name Barrack Obama out do people finally get what we mean by the United States of America. But then they are confused because they did not know that Portuguese was the official language of USA. Most people don’t believe that we learned to speak Portuguese here in Mozambique, only reconciling the conundrum by reaffirming how different our brains must be than theirs. We remind them that the former president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, spoke 11 languages, and he was a black man with African brains just like theirs. Rarely can we convince any of our students that we learned the entire language during a 10-week training, the approximate length of a single trimester for them.

Romão and the Bicycle

In our previous lives we used bikes as integral parts of our daily transportation solutions. Luc had a phase when he biked over 40 miles a day commuting back and forth over the San Francisco Bay to Stanford from where he lived with his brother in Fremont. We assumed, given the primitive state of Mozambican transport infrastructure, that bikes would give us some options and a degree of freedom from the mostly insane minibuses, at least over short distances. Peace Corps provided us the funds to purchase two bikes, which we did during the first couple months of service. We quickly grew to regret the day the two Chinese mountain bikes showed up at our homes, delivered by some neighbor that caught word that we had 5,000 Mets to spend. We took it as a bad omen when, on our inaugural spin, the handlebars fell off one of our brand new bikes. Basically, every time we took the bikes out we had to do a complete pre-departure tune-up just to get going. Its not that we bought a couple lemons, everyone in Mozambique has the same struggle to maintain their bikes. Despite being very accustomed to doing repair work, methods are frighteningly brutish, almost always involving a hammer, a tool neither of us used during our years of bike maintenance in the States. Every time out something would happen. We made it as far as Malawi, which given our situation in a border town is not too impressive. Once the pedal started to fall off on a regular basis, and having to push the bike back from Malawi, Luc just gave up. The bikes unreliability stripped us of all the joy we had anticipated experiencing on circulating freely driven by our own muscle power. So the bikes are now under the sole jurisdiction of Romão who derives his greatest life pleasure from zooming around on those accursed contraptions. Its about as cool as being a high schooler in the US with a car to be seen driving around town in. Plus, he actual enjoys spending endless hours tinkering with his one tool trying to get the bike into riding form. By cannibalizing the parts of one to sustain the other he has been able to get some remarkable life out of the bikes, especially considering how hard he rides the fragile things. Unfortunately, just before our departure to America the last low quality wheel cover wore through, exposing the frail inner tubes to all kinds of popping hazards, which rendered the bike unusable. A new tire would be 300 mets, or about one month and a half of Romão’s income. So the bikes sat idle, but Romão had a plan. He began fishing and selling his catch. Apparently he’s a pretty good fisherman, because within three weeks he had enough to buy the part he needed to rehabilitate his prized mode of speeding around town. He made a trip to Malawi, and sorte! (good luck!) they had the tire he had been hoping for. He spent every met he had saved, but he was so happy to be biking again that he barely noticed he had no food to eat that night. We felt proud that Romão was able to set a goal and achieve it, although we wish he could get as motivated in schooling or other life improving activities as he does over the bikes.

Drama in the Neighborhood

There is little privacy living in a small town in Africa. Given the dearth of entertainment, gossiping is a major pastime. Our lives here are pretty tame, but even our most mundane events circulate continuously from neighbor to neighbor. Even though with our busy schedules we are less available for idle chatter, Romão usually keeps us informed on the most salacious occurrences. For example, last week our recently widowed neighbor, Marcelina, traveled to the city to visit a sick relative, leaving her eldest son, Fademo, and daughter, Cheila, in charge of the house. Cheila is prone to making poor life decisions, so entrusting her with this degree of freedom was a miscalculation on Marcelina’s part. Cheila did not sleep at home, but snuck out after dark and spent the night with her sketchy older boyfriend who sells Malawian corn beer in the market. Since she failed to close the house properly upon her furtive departure, the late night open door drew our other neighbors’ attention, who upon investigating discovered Cheila’s absence. They later revealed her now not-so-secret tryst to Marcelina upon her return. Considering the high prevalence of HIV in our community, a casual sexual encounter here can have fatal implications, so Marcelina was rightfully furious with her daughter. Now she swears next time she’s out of town, she’s leaving at least two older cousins in the house. As if that wasn’t enough neighborhood drama, the next day, while the shouting and crying from the aftermath of Cheila’s ill-executed night time rendezvous was still resolving, Romão’s mom from Nkondezi, one of the nearby villages, showed up unexpectedly with all his little siblings. Apparently Romão’s stepdad had recently married a new women, his third simultaneous wife, and the new in-laws sent some thuggy cousins to rough up Romão’s mom to get her out of the picture and eliminate some of the competition. Having been kicked out of the home where she lived and with injuries to her face and eyes, she had to flee with several children still unable to walk strapped to her back. We went over to Romão’s house to help him communicate with his uncle who was out of town, and saw his little brothers and sisters lying together on a grass mat trying to retain whatever heat possible from the chilly night. There was no space in his small one room hut for them to sleep. They looked so vulnerable exposed as they were with nothing between them and the heavens above. Luckily it didn’t rain that night. Once Romão’s mother recovers, she’ll have to look for a new place to live. In such a male dominated society, women’s life situations are too precarious. Janet’s recent illness was a less dramatic example of just how immediate everyone’s lives are to each other. Janet had been in bed for half a week with low energy and aches. Within a day of Janet not leaving the house, the entire town knew she was sick; this makes sense considering Romão already assumes Janet is sick if he doesn’t see her before 6am. Upon hearing her vague symptoms, locals nodded knowingly, assuring us of their favorite diagnosis: malaria, the catch-all explanation for every ailment. Janet did not have malaria, likely just a virus. After Janet’s 8th grade biology class found out their lesson was canceled, some of the students showed up at the house asking if they could haul water or do chores Janet was unable to perform while in her enfeebled state. Several other students and neighbors wanted to come by and visit with Janet, since that is the custom if someone is sick here, but Luc turned them away, since Janet is more accustomed to resting when sick, not hosting visitors.

Maputo

There are lots of potential health hazards in the Peace Corps, that’s why Washington requires an annual complete check-up for all volunteers. We would just go to a local health services provider, but apparently Peace Corps cannot find a single dentist outside of the Maputo area that meets US standards, so this yearly ritual requires all of us to migrate to the capital. For us this is a 1000km+ undertaking, but they fly us, much to the delight of Janet and consternation of Lucas, making it a two-hour journey instead of the 4-day odyssey by land (which Luc would prefer). The capital city isn’t a bad place to hole out for five days while submitting three stool samples and a couple of vials of blood (the stool samples provided endless amounts of comedic relief to every conversation). The food selection in Maputo is amazing. We gorged on Thai, Indian, Mexican, and on a splurge: an impressive seafood fantasy platter in a swanky restaurant overlooking the waterfront. One of Luc’s buddies from Peace Corps Honduras works for the State Department in Maputo, so we got to see him and his wife and experience some of their life style. Basically the embassy employees live in little Americas. While swimming in the pool we contemplated what foreign service would be like under these conditions, something that appealed more to Janet than to Luc. For a few days the sheer contrast between the opulence and our comparative squalor was intoxicatingly relieving, so we didn’t think about it too much. Seeing Peace Corps buddies from other regions of the country provided chances to swap stories and enjoy each other’s company. Our office has AC and internet connections, so that’s why there are so many February pictures on our website. Although lounging on the couch watching satellite TV is a temptation many PC volunteers can’t pry themselves away from, we tried to walk the streets of the city a little and were rewarded with some awesome little markets, seaside views, fancy hotel lobbies and the national art museum, which is the only art museum in Mozambique and only has two galleries, but was well worth the 50 cents charged for admission. As we strolled the acacia-lined avenues, admiring the decaying Portuguese architecture, we enjoy imagining Lourenço Marques (Maputo’s former name) in its heyday, although its current state of semi-rehabilitation has a definite charm. We also saw our host mom from Namaacha, Cristalina, who just had a major leg surgery at the central hospital and has been convalescing with her daughter in Maputo. It was sad to see her in such a frail and diminished state, but her spirits were good and her agonizing arthritis pain is gone. She has so much family checking in on her on a continuous basis that we felt reassured. On our extremely crowded chapa to the airport on our way back home we met a man who had known Peace Corps teachers way in the north of the country, and another two ladies who offered to carry our bags turned out to be from Namaacha and friends of our host mom, so even in what we thought was the anonymity of the big city we were connected with people we assumed to be random strangers. Back in Tete, our chapa recognized us walking out of the airport, made a quick stop, and whisked us home to our peaceful town. From leaving our hotel in Maputo, to arriving at our front doorstep, it was a total of five and a half hours, but a world of difference. But then we still waited another hour and a half for Romão, who was house sitting and still doesn’t know how to use a calendar, to return with our sole set of keys.

Cohesion

It's tough serving in Peace Corps. Amongst the myriad of challenges this blog will have already acquainted regular readers with is the persistent difficulty of dealing with isolation. As a married couple we have a built-in support network; many of the solo volunteers serving in remote areas have it much more rough. Helping cope productively with this ever-present tribulation inspired our annual Cohesion event, basically a get together to keep spirits high, held in the pleasant hub-city of Chimoio. The central region of Mozambique, which includes Tete, Manica, and Sofala provinces, is the most sparsely populated by Peace Corps. A staff member commented on how ‘cohesive’ our little group is, and the proud central volunteers have adopted the word like a badge of honor ever since. Last year with classes every day and youth groups on the weekend we weren’t able to get out of site much. We were one of the few to miss the event, but this year with our dream schedule (nothing we can’t skip on Mondays or Fridays) we have more travel flexibility, which is a good thing considering the generally unreliable nature of transport here. We almost missed the event again this year after we had to give-up on our first day’s attempt to get to Chimoio after waiting on the edge of Tete city, begging for any kind of ride for nearly three hours and suffering a massive soaking thanks to an unexpected tropical downpour. Luckily the ordeal was not in vain. One of our Zimbabwean expat buddies with a car who was planning on traveling through Chimoio the next day on his way to perform a Valentine’s Day gig in Beira with his rock band, saw us in our pitiful state by the side of the road. He invited us to spend the night at his place and ride in the back of his pickup with the guitars and amps the next morning. The generous offer, a nice evening stroll around Tete City, and a delicious chicken dinner in the market near the river mostly made up for the harrowing afternoon, although I don’t know if we’ll try to hitch that stretch of road again in the near future no matter how inconvenient the 4am bus tends to make our getaways. When we finally did make it to our get-together one day late after a scenic rain-free ride, it was great. Everyone was there, except one volunteer stuck in site due to flooding, so we got to meet all of the new teachers and health workers who arrived during December while we were in America on vacation telling everyone about the difficulties of life in Africa. We were in charge of the expedition up Cabeça do velho, a cluster of large rocks resembling the face of a reclining old man just outside the city limits, making for a moderately strenuous afternoon of hiking. On top we stumbled upon a colorful church group performing exorcisms (we’re still trying to load the video to YouTube). Otherwise, we ate plenty of pizza, drank moderately, got to bond over a photo scavenger hunt, gave plenty of advice to the newbies, and just enjoyed the company of fellow Americans. No one was really upset or surprised when the Cohesion t-shirts we designed and ordered from a local silk screener failed to materialize, especially those of us starting our second years here in Moz.

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.