Thursday, December 24, 2009

My Mosquito Net is My Safe Space. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out.

Creepy crawlies galore! And I’m a wimp! I was really excited about getting out to the mato (aka boonies) and seening cool birds, etc. Heck I’m a biologist and a nerd …. I live for this stuff. So… things have not been panning out how I expected. I’ve seen: (1) humungo cockroaches. It has really been an all out war zone. Me versus the cockroaches. I sleep with the cockroach spray next to my bed so that when they wake me up with their little prickly legs scratching up against plastic bags, my suitcase, the cardboard box… I attack. I’ll do anything to get rid of them. Sometimes I even leave the little chemically crippled bodies out for a little while, just so their little roach friends can see that this is no safe zone. (2) Mini dragon – thing. Big black and caught by the dogs. Iguana? I don’t know but if you get a chance to check out the photos please don’t tell me it’s some endangered critter… I’ll feel bad. (3) Big furry spider. A friend who was visiting went on to the porch. I hear some banging and went outside to check what he had killed. It was so big and so furry that I thought the pulverized mass was a mouse. But it’s okay because apparently they only come out after rain. Too bad it rains fairly often. (4) I’ve seen a couple of little scorpions on the window frames. I wasn’t really worried about them because they are like ¼ of an inch and clear. Kinda cute, as far a scorpions go. Then my mom talked about the little ones being the dangerous ones in San Cristobal, and the missionaries said that a friend of theirs was stung by one here and it hurt for a week. (5) termites and ants. I wonder if my house will morph into the last few pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude (ants take over the family and their house). The ants have already burrowed through parts of my house. You can’t really see it unless you look carefully. At junctures in the room you can see their little red tunnels moving up walls. Or sometimes mini mud towers erupt through cracks in the floor. A few nights this week there have been termite hatchings and the outside wall around the front door gets covered covered covered with them. In the morning they die or loose their wings, I’m not sure, and when the mounds of their bodies get swept out the ants take over and after a few hours there isn’t anything left.

At least the rodent problem isn’t like Namaacha (teeming would be an understatement, but they are cute compared to the woodrats, etc. of the PNW), I’ve only seen one in the latrina…. I hope he was a loner and sterile.

I like all the geckos, even though they poop everywhere, they eat lots of bugs. And I like the lizards. They are a bit fat. Again, I probably like them because they eat bugs.

It really could be a lot worse (horror stories of rats nesting in people’s mattresses), and as far as Peace Corps goes this is a cakewalk and I probably shouldn’t be whining.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Site Delivery

It has been a week since site delivery. I am officially at site. My town has two names: you may find it called one on some maps or in the name of the secondary school, but on other maps, or on the entry signs it is called something else (very different). I’ve yet to get a good explanation about why there is confusion, it has been vaguely explained as some linguistic disconnect between the Portuguese and the original inhabitants (by Dio) and the fact that it is a district capital. But the names come from two mountains (more like huge huge rocks…. don’t think mount hood) next to the town.

The house is in much better condition than I thought it would be. Two plus bedroom, bright paint colors. Nothing fancy, but comfortable. Hole in the ground latrine… guess I’ll be working on those thigh muscles.

When I got to site I was greeted by Dio (soon to be 17 yr old, who gets room and board for helping out around the house, he is a wonderful person and extremely honest/thoughtful… he called me his “new American mom” on day one. So guess that’s the first time I’ve been called “mom”…. I don’t know if I’m mature enough) and some girls from the neighborhood. They sang a greeting song and had hung little welcome notes around the house. Made my day… especially after a rather long day of travel to get to site (our chapa was unauthorized to leave our city of departure, so we had to wait for it to go get proper paperwork before we could actually get anywhere).

***

Today I had to pay the electric bill. Easy enough. Right? Imagine: 20+ people crammed into a small area, three of them are with suckling babes (there is no personal space difference when it comes to nursing… anytime, anywhere, even if you are pressed up against other people), no deodorant, 150 degrees F and really high humidity. Even though there was quite a lot of space to spread out—even form a line (astounding!)--everyone pushed up against each other at the window to pay, there was a women’s and a men’s line (more like mobs) and the office would alternate between the sexes, slowly printing out receipts. I guess lines are a cultural thing, I kind of miss them. While I was trying to assert myself and trying not to step on any kids, one women (nursing while working her way through, pressed up on everyone else) did the standard hiss/hand flick motion – Mozambiquan beckoning-- granted it still takes me a little while to register the gesture I couldn’t figure out how she wanted me to get any closer to her… I was right up in there with her baby, nipple, and everything. Well it turned out she wanted my money and bill, so she passed it up with hers when she got to the window. Again part of the way it is done. People kept coming up passing bills/money to their friends waiting in line. I am glad she helped me out, I would have probably drowned in the crowd. Receipt printed and I was outta there.

***

Tonight, we were getting low on water, but it rained. Luckily. We filled up buckets and watched the neighborhood fill with smoke. A cane house down the street caught on fire, maybe electrical maybe a cooking fire—though the owners said (through the grapevine) they had put everything out. It’s still smoking now but I think (hope) the rain will keep it from getting too far.

There is something precarious about filling up basins in a lightening storm. I know they say don’t stand in puddles go swimming—I just don’t know if it counts if you are holding a contained mini body of water. Either way, with the smoke in the air, fire on the mind, I kept getting paranoid and would stop filling up buckets when the lightening got especially bright or the thunder particularly loud.

(Written 12/21/09)

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Site Placement! And Rain!

SITE PLACEMENT: Northern Zambezia province!!! Woohoo (though they did reject my marine bio background... apparently not so important). I´ll just say more when I get there in December... I do have roommie, another PCV who has been there for a year. There is rain. And an avocado tree. And a view. We´ll see.. I’ll have a new mailing address soon so hold off on things for now!!

Here is something that I wrote like a week ago but haven’t had a chance to post until now:

After electrocuting myself in the process of plugging in my computer -- I’ve decided to hold off on re-charging pretty much everything I own until site. At the moment the only outlet in my room is an extension cord, which has been threaded from who-knows-where down into my room. That horrendous electricity section in physics senior year may not have been my thing... but I’m pretty sure the set up is a hazard.

It’s rainy season--officially. Our training began with a few showers, but nothing compared to the last 5 days. Namaacha is saturated. The aptly called matope-- or mud-- is inches deep around my house and the rainboots I purchased a few weeks ago have been key!! The mud forms a thick layer on the soles of my shoes...any experience (mostly in middle school) I had with platform shoes is finally paying off.

With rain the ecosystem has started to shift. 2 weeks ago there was a hatching of termites-- thousands, everywhere. Last week there were huge golden dragonflies. The frogs are louder. And the mangos riper.

Today we went to a waterfall outside of town that had transformed, in a matter of weeks, from a small trickle, to a huge foamy blast.

My mom wrote with a grab bag of questions that I can answer here too- more or less:

FOOD (I think like 90% of my mom’s questions were cooking related...so I figure this is what people want to know): varies depending on the family. Lots of rice and sauce. The sauce is coconut based half of the time with greens (bean leaves, kale, chard, etc) and ground peanuts. Also pasta (but they cook it like rice) with carrots and tomatoes. Fabulous bread-- but that is special for Namaacha. You can get fried bean cakes outside of the bakery to put in bread rolls. YUM! Bananas and oranges are standard; apples are considered a luxury but purchased in Swaz for a reasonable price (or so I’m told). Meats: smaller boned fish (lots of bones. lots and lots of bones. really just more bones than fish), chicken (very fresh and running around outside the house). Actually my host brother just bought 20 chickens that he is planning on fattening then re-selling around Christmas. Food at my host family house is cooked over a charcoal stove (iron structure with small coal beds). My formal charcoal cooking lesson involved plastic bags as the start up fuel... luckily I have electricity at site, or I’ll have to figure out an alternative method, because plastic seems...toxic. The host fam also has an electric stovetop for backup. I miss food from home though. sigh.

TRAINING: lots of work, long days but totally manageable. We just finished model school and I can give a 45 minute lesson on genetics in Portuguese (more or less). The most successful lesson was when I "bred" Beyonce and 50 cent (sorry Jay-Z) and students had to pick out which chromosomes they had, etc... a lot more attentive and more participation when they got to act as sperm and egg from superstars in from of the class. Oh geez... we’ll see how this goes. Got to work on those hypothetical phrases.

Current book: Africa: A biography of the Continent by John Reader. So interesting, despite some claims that it was dry (it´s not)...

::Also sorry for the weird english writing here on out, I can´t write in english anymore apparently::

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Brincaring. All the time.

My family loves to joke around. A lot. Actually, all the time. Which is good but since everything is done so differently here I really can’t tell the difference between major cultural divergence and them just giving me a hard time for a good laugh.

Earlier this week, after seeing my sunburn t-shirt lines my irmao told me that the pink skin looks better than my pale-beyond-pale skin, and to even out the sunburn I could either (1) walk around town naked (2) or hang myself up on the clothes line for an afternoon. Supposedly his wife was once as white as me and he just hung her up in the sun for a few days.

Wish it was that easy, then all the neighborhood kids wouldn’t yell “malungo” at me everytime I walk down the street. It’s not really said in a derogatory way…. more of a statement of observation… I like it better when they give me shy smiles and try out English phrases.


Today I was a part of an impromptu dance party in a friend’s living room (boom chica chica) with a herd of primary school age boys. Unfortunately I was unable to bring out the dance moves I learned from my host sister and niece— I need more practice and am not even sure I even have the joints/muscles to do the things they can do. I’m convinced Mozambiquans are born with extra bones or something. THEY CAN DANCE LIKE NOBODY’S BUSINESS. The boys today had different moves than my host sister… more thematic (?) moves. There was the Magician, where one person lies on his back on the ground and moves his limbs up and around according the wizard-like direction of another person standing over them; Rope- climber, using invisible rope to pull yourself straight-up from the ground; Guitar Player, air guitar with one leg being the guitar; Wind-up Doll, etc etc.… the list goes on. . . .

….. someday …..maybe I’ll be as good

…. maybe enough potatoes will give me the extra joints. After one trainee calculated how many fish he eats per week here (about a small school of fish), I realized I could to an analogous calculation with my consumption of potatoes, which comes out to a grand total of 25-35/week. I not sure what can be converted to in terms of bushels but I conservatively put my monthly potato consumption at about two acres worth.

Good thing I like potatoes.

Side note: I guess this wasn’t clear in the last post… but the girls who live in the house with me are part of my Mozambiquan fam fam. PCT don’t live together.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Really quick hellooooooo!!

Greetings from Mozambique!!! I’m settled (maybe unpacked is a better word. I’m still getting to know things) into the community where we are doing our Training for the next few months. So a quick rundown:

Host Family=AMAZING!! I lucked out. My host dad (I call him big brother, and he calls me his youngest sister) is a self-described cowboy with dreams of going to the home of all good westerns: TEXAS. Actually, Texas is pretty much the only place that Mozambiquans know about … it’s an automatic in if you’re from there (Oregon… blah… not a city… nope…. not a village either….hmmm. California is met with blank stares too). He has been giving me extra Portuguese lessons in the evenings, which have been much more useful the actual classes I’ve been taking. His wife is one of the toughest ladies I’ve met, but full of warmth and welcome. There are two other girls who live in the house and a grandmother (my Mama… just got to be careful which “a” I emphasize or it comes out inappropriately…oh Portuguese). They do talk a lot about their other volunteer from last year—standards are high. But they keep saying that when my parents come they can’t stay in the hotel the have to stay with them (the other volunteer’s parents came a few months ago for a couple days… it was a big hit)…. so get ready for bucket baths mom and dad!

Rather than one larger building for everything, their home is a collection of smaller buildings facing inwards towards a well-swept dirt yard with mango trees. There is a building with three bedrooms and a dining room (with TV and endless hours of steamy steamy Brazilian telenovelas…. scandal has a whole new meaning), another building with a kitchen (learning how to cook over coal), and then a third with the grandmother’s building. There is an outhouse a little ways away. The community has a severe water shortage so even though the bath has piping to a water tank, the water level is too low for it to function. Lots of carrying around water. And getting up a 5/530am to do things like clean my floor before going to class/lecture. I'm still totally useless and wimpy in comparison....

I have a nice room, looks like I have a princess bed with the mosquito net up (that damn thing is so annoying it better be working, I keep getting netted in the early mornings or when I have to get up in the middle of night). Lots of posters which are reminiscent of a certain Peruvian hostel (Chels and Kate you know the ones)…

Living with a host family is always a little awkward, and I am such a baby here because EVERYTHING is done differently. For the first few days I kept hording trash because I couldn’t figure out where the burn pile was. Basically, I speak a lot of Spanish. And despite some similarities there are a lot of major differences between Spanish and Portuguese. Like pasta. I’ve been telling them I like to cook pasta all week. But since pasta means paste in Portuguese I’ve really just been telling the about my culinary explorations with paste. Ah all those weird looks I was getting make so much sense now….


So trying to make that leap into Portuguese.

The PCT group is really nice. None of that competitive air that I’ve heard can happen. Weirdly Westwind connections have extended here to Mozambique… seriously… how does this happen everywhere I go?!!!

Oh and to anyone who that got that big send out email, the address on there is wrong, so don’t send anything to it. I’ll email the correct one when I get it….

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Four days to go….YAYAYA!

The Plan: leaving PDX Sept. 28th for orientation in Philadelphia. Then training in Mozambique for 10 weeks (host family and all).

AND THEN teaching biology in Mozambique. In Portuguese.

Nope, don’t speak Portuguese yet…