Jeans.

Chimoio is chique. Women dress nice. Men dress nice. Attention is paid to such details, such as accessories, flare, shine of shoes, and matching (red on red; blue on blue; green on green… the shade is not particularly important, but keep the color somewhat constant through the outfit). And I still look like I rolled out of Eugene, not that Eugene isn’t a stylish place (there are a number of Eugene-ians that I can think of the elicit wardrobe envy) but it is the kind of place that I could wander around in a Care-Bear PJ onesie without drawing attention to myself.

Chimoio is especially chique at my work, so while my Oregon-summer-worthy wardrobe was perfectly hip for the professional environment up in Zambezia, I tend to feel Frumpy here in Chimoio---and Frumpy is not at all what a lady in their prime wants to feel. I'll be honest: I want to feel a little bit sexy (not the unsolicited attention kind, rather the inside confident glow kind), I want to feel like I’m going to be a hot mom and that I will never drive a minivan and never have a bored husband. Africa generally makes me feel completely opposite of those things, I think my internal nerd is overtly pronounced here in my effort to stay relatively conservative. I have been mistaken for a nun numerous times (I blame it on the knee length skirts and the fact I work for a Catholic institute), and in Zambia an intoxicated man on a never-ending bus ride told me I was clearly a pastor’s wife (I blame it on my passive, mental disengagement when dealing with drunks). I will, however, take being mistaken for a matrimonially bound church member over being mistaken for an albino (…damn it…*long exasperated sigh*) any day, which happens far too often for comfort or confidence. I do, however, find reassurance in the sporadic exchanges when I am mistaken for Brazilian (…much sexier than albino….): people will “Gee”-ify (bom “Gee”ia) their speech in order to emulate the Brazilian cadence and accent they hear on telenovelas (maybe to help me understand them better?).

The point is that I needed to buy… something…. just one outfit to up the Brazilian factor and down the pastor’s wife factor (though I’m sure my Dad would rather me do the opposite… Dad, you can just assume I found a heavy-turtleneck and keep my ankles covered). A PCV goes a-marketing….

You can buy perfectly nice fancy clothes in town store: American prices Chinese quality or really really expensive American prices of okay quality. You can also buy clothes at the mercados, all those things you donated to Goodwill are now in Africa (this can be a hard thing to explain, first because the Goodwill origin isn’t always known and second because there isn’t really a good defendable answer to: “But why would people get rid of perfectly good clothes?”). I’m not sure about the exact business but essentially vendors bulk buy the clothes in big plastic bundles, and then later individually re-sale the clothes. Sometimes a vendor gets lucky: contemporary clothes in good shape; other times he’ll get a bundle of mu-mus… just depends on when the bundle was packaged and where the clothes came from in the first place. At the big market outside of the town, it is like walking through 30 years of time warp: some stands with clothes straight (literally) from the 60s, other stands with sweatshirts from the early 90s, and still others with slinky slightly used lingerie. Clothes are displayed in piles, or hung up on wires, or dangled from a string with a stick as a cross-bar through the shoulders or hips. While this clothes market can provide hours of entertainment (…oh, man, did someone really wear this?!....), it can be hard to find something “professional”.

To deal with this clothing issue I went to the smaller market in-town. Same clothes, just filtered down to a manageable amount. I am not a really good shopper in Moz for a number of reasons: 1) different taste in style. Fashion is often flashy here! Bright skin tight pants with or without heavy stitching on the back beltline resembling a regrettable tramp stamp tattoo, gems rhinestone glitter accents, a little pizzazz here, a little motif there. Personally I’m not really into shiny, it makes me feel awkward and like a treasure chest, it looks great on people who can pull it off… I’m just not one of them 2) I’m bad at negotiating prices, and that is an essential part of the buying processes. 3)…. Okay I’m not really good at shopping in the states either so it’s not really a Moz-issue it’s a Alexandra-issue…..

So I went with Claire who is a good shopper, good stylist, and a good bargainer. And she probably felt like she was taking a 12-year-old shopping. “Try on these pants, it doesn’t hurt to try them!” “I don’t wanna….too much shimmer, they’re too bright, too much butt pocket stitching, too much gold!” After some fuss---on my end, and a number to trial and error changes behind a Jurassic Park bed sheet rigged up as a "dressing room", we found them: hip and happening jeans. Though they are a bit more…snug…. than what I wear in the states (…when in rome…), the purchase was a success: I got a big “Bom Gee-ia” first thing in the morning on the first day I wore them out.

Nightguard

“It’s broken,” pointing down at the slingshot, “Completely.”

This would be my night guard.

And That would be the … security system?

“Oh. Um… Where can you buy that… Thing….?” Thing: the best synonym because Arma seemed too weapon-y to be used to in substitution for the word Slingshot, which is not part of my vocabulary.

Seriously? Is there a full grown adult man standing here asking me to buy him a slingshot?

He stands, slanted and staring off to one side avoiding direct eye contact, a stance that would indicate submission and complete lack of assertion in the States, but here in Moz it is meant to show respect. His eyes are big (buggy, really, but that isn’t a really flattering description) jaundice-yellow balls poking out over his nose. Age… somewhere between 35-75, but definitely an adult. And that is definitely a legit, albeit stretched out, Slingshot; not a forked stick with a rubberband, but a professionally carved Y and a wrapped leather handle and hooks for the thick rubber strip and ammunition cradle.

This all happened when I first moved to Manica province, site number two, new house, new neighborhood, fresh start. Though the house/complex is shared with other employees of the university, through a strand of chance happenings I lived essentially alone in the complex for my first month. Just me and night guard. Me and …Drunk… night guard.

Yes, maybe I should start at the beginning of our relationship. The moment the primary tenant in the main house left to temporarily teach in another city at a different campus, night guard started drinking. A lot, or maybe just a little bit of the really strong homebrewed stuff, either way you could smell it miles away and he couldn’t talk straight. During the nights, it was me (in lockdown in the house) with this drunk man wandering around the courtyard or chatting with the other guards outside of the house. During the days, he would pass out on his nest on the patio… sometimes with pants… sometimes not.

As the more time went by from the primary tenant’s departure, various guard responsibilities started to go by the wayside: the yard dirt was left un-swept and he started augmenting his patio nest: first with the big pieces of cardboard from the recently purchased fridge and stove, then small boxes and jars, which were later filled with various bits of plastic paper metal. Essentially most of the things that I was putting in the trash pit was ending up, rearranged and reorganized, on the patio nest.

Then he stopped sticking around, some nights he’d be there and some nights not. The crucial guard responsibility: just being there, what not being done. One night I woke up to neighborhood guards tweeting their whistles, and laid in bed petrified as I heard them out on the street apprehending a thief who tried to rob the house next door. What if that had been my house? It was time for an intervention.

I scolded (firmly but nicely) this adult-man-guard. What if it had been this house with me alone? What if there had been nobody to alert the other guards? When you have a job it also means you have responsibilities. And though he was inebriated at the time of the Talk, he evidently took something in because he showed up the next day asking for a fix-up for the slingshot. He was ready to take his job seriously.

I gave him a pc issued rape whistle and 50 Mts for the slingshot. The more I thought about the situation the more I thought: maybe slingshot really is the weapon of choice for him, because alcohol plus a machete really sounds like a bad idea. Gun would be even worse.

Despite these new on-the-job-toys, it was clear that it was time to get a new night guard. With the help of some concerned co-workers, I hired a rather attractive young man with a name that sounds like Fabio. The first night he came to the house to work he was too shy (…wait, shyness is not a quality I want in a guard…) to interrupt me in the house, so he sat outside, next to the patio nest, next to the passed out old guard, for 20 minutes until I realized he was there. As we chatted about the set up, how the guards for all the houses work together, how they have a call system to check in on each other during those crucial 2AM-4AM hours, etc. the old guard woke up, stretched, stood up, slipped his pants over his underwear and lit a cigarette…. Yep Fabio was waiting for 20 minutes next to a dude passed out in his underwear…. In my frontyard…. We both tried to play it off like it was normal…. see this is a “clothing optional” work environment, heck let’s just start a nudist camp (though, speaking of which I did walk in on old guard taking a full-on bucket bath in the yard, I should have known since the other guards started giggling as I pulled back the gate… bucket bath is an at-home activity not an at-work activity…so guess there has been some nudity, but also guess that everyone needs to keep good hygiene somehow…anyways…)…..Fabio, old guard with no pants, and me: felt like a first date gone bad, really bad.

After a few conflict resolution sessions between the two guards (“So what I am hearing is that he feels frustrated when you get drunk and argue with the other guards”) and the return of the primary tenant of the house, we have finally figured out a system that works. Old guard now is day guard (apparently one of the actively functional moz laws is some labor law that prevents him from actually getting fired…. couldn't really explain it to ya), he tends his lush garden patch (in our courtyard), he has stopped drinking (here), shows up to work, and gets bubbly-excited about how big the couve is growing... it's quite endearing actually. The nest has been downsized and the dirt is swept. Young guard is night guard. All is well.

***

“It’s broken,” pointing down at the slingshot.

This would be Fabio, week three on the job.

And That would be the ….. same janky slingshot! Didn’t I already get that fixed?!

“The other guards make fun of how weak my slingshot is, they say it couldn’t even take down a little bird.”

Hm, guess that money went to some Tentação. Oh, well. And here, Fabio, take the machete. I think you can handle it.

Just Trying to Get From Point A to Point B

My grandparents and aunt called to wish me a happy birthday, and at some point someone asked me to tell them something crazy that had happened: “Hm… well yesterday a truckdriver who drove us down held a machete to his throat and said he was going to commit suicide because I wouldn’t return his love, he was joking….I swear…” Yikes! Okay, one of those times things sound way more intense then how it was in the moment and the second the words left my mouth I wished I could suck them back up, put a stopper on any anxiety that I could cause. (Why couldn’t I just tell a normal story about going to get meio frango at that little new stand near my friend’s house and the cute lady at the counter who served us). It is just so easy to spill out about the nuts, the bad, and the worse, but without the context of the good and the great it doesn’t make sense.

Transportation. I think probably everyone in PC Moz (if not all of PC) blogs about transportation at some point, how could you not? And I feel like if someone asks for a “crazy adventure story” they will get a story about transportation.

Public transportation: chapas: little white vans that are designed to fit 11 people but usually carry 20-30 people, no joke: 4 people per bench plus a couple of babies, a large plaid zip suitcase, and a some of chickens, maybe a caged pigeon (the worst was when there was a live sheep shoved under my seat, and it gave off the strong odor of rotting cheese and fear). Chapas are usually rusty, thick-exhaust producing, roped together death traps… sometimes you get lucky and the plastic on the seats isn’t tearing and scratchy, the paint is flawless, and the speakers are actually good enough to figure out what song is being played. At Inchope, the major crossing for me to catch rides, there is a charred chapa skeleton, victim of an engine fire or explosion, a little reminder about the lack of the enforceable-safety laws to motivate you on your way. Really I have nothing positive to say about chapas themselves, but I have this weird liking for chapa drivers and workers (I am also semi-obsessed with public trans drivers for trimet back home, you know they have good stories to tell at the end of the day… so this chapa driver intrigue might not be an opinion shared by all volunteers). They are usually helpful, honest Businessmen (except sometimes they say they are leaving RIGHT NOW when they are really going to be sitting for another hour) who point you in the right direction when you look totally lost, and up for a little chatting if you are sitting in the front. So far the only incidents: a few popped tires in the middle of nowhere, once the hood started smoking and the driver poured water, which was carried to the vehicle by an ancient women from her hut next to the road, all over the …engine?… and we were on our way.

Up north most of the transport is open-back flat bed trucks. Once two women got in a fist fight, which was physically limited by the 25 people standing and sitting around them. Open-backs mean big sky wind and sunburn, and for whatever reason I see more male passengers drinking in the open backs then the regular chapas.

Buses are my least favorite. The rows have fold down seats so that there is no aisle, the last row sits 5 across rather than 4 like the other aisles… I’m not sure, guess the bus is slightly wider in the back? Once coming home I was stuck in the back seat, and this adorably cute fat baby was sitting next to me with his mom (so we were 6 across technically). I dozed and woke up because my leg was damp, okay more than damp, it was wet. Juices from the baby’s cloth diaper had leaked on me. A man up front started complaining about the smell and the mom started changing her babe. It was a difficult process to coordinate because we were all packed so tightly on the bench that I would say we were more like snuggle-buddies than strangers on a ride home together. I pressed my fontside up against the bus wall, stuck my nose out the window and took big calming breaths hoping that the yellow baby sludge wouldn’t get on my backpack. Poor mama!

So, public transport is an experience but I’ll take a private car anyday. I don’t have to worry about a private car falling apart halfway into a trip. Hitching is, in my opinion, a safer option and my preferred mode of travel. I meet businessmen, workers, tourists, ex-pats and I awkwardly try to make engaging conversation, not that small talk has ever been a strong skill of mine. But it usually works, somehow, the chitchat goes between two complete strangers.

When public transport is not coming and private cars aren’t passing, you can pay to ride in a semi. Semis are slow. I avoid them but sometimes you just have to keep moving. In terms of what happened the other day, what I mentioned to my grandparents on my birthday: I ended up in a semi with two friends I was traveling down south with. They snoozed on the trucker’s mattress, and the driver turned up the stereo and started to serenade me with passada songs: “Listen to these lyrics, they are for you, listen carefully.” He passed his cellphone to me: “Your friends will never know, look they are deep asleep, they don’t have to know, just give me your number.” He talked about how if he had a white American woman traveling around with him in his truck nobody would question him, nobody would challenge him, everybody would just be in awe, and everybody would know he had unique prowess intelligence and success. I told him my husband (um … yeah that one who is teaching English down in Vil) would be soo angry with me, I just could not give him my phone number, and so on. The driver persisted: teasing joking complimenting. He started fiddling under his seat and pulled out a machete. And I thought: Oh no! Machete, again! He held it to his throat, he was going to commit suicide if I didn’t give him my number, he was heartbroken, he could not live without my love…he said everything with a little smile but tried to keep the theatrics serious … and, machete still out, he started singing passada songs to me, again.

Making Business

Though I feel, in some ways, like I have just rolled off the airplane, there comes a point when you forget that Business could be conducted in any other way than what is at hand. Before this Mozambican commercial system gets more normalized to me, I feel like I owe it a description… and this will more than satisfy repeated requests from Dad for mundane details of the ordinary life.


The Road Into Town:
Couches. Lots of couches. That is the first thing I noticed driving into Chimoio when I moved. Surprised? I sure was. The couchmakers line the main road going into the city and their products are pulled up alongside the road. These are really nice looking couches with a straight-out-of-Lazy-Boy SuperMegaStore look: sharp lines, various styles with decorative pleats at the headboard or along the corners, tight tan or black vinyl, wooden feet, usually sold in a couch loveseat armchair combo set. Granted I’ve only been in two houses with couches since getting here, but there must be a market because there are sure a lot of couches being made. What makes these couches special (at least in comparison to Lazy-Boy) is that they are built essentially with just hard manual labor. Every time I ride or walk by I learn something new about how you make a couch and there seems to be a few key components: chicken wire, used heavy bulk rice bags, and plastic grocery bags… you see: once the vinyl is pulled decoratively over the basic frame you don’t really have to know what’s inside the couch… that is if you are just looking at it… sitting on one, well that is something else. Wicker furniture venders sell their wares alongside the couches, for buyers seeking an economic alternative. I, personally, had a to go with a wicker item, specifically a standing basket shelf, but it is full of a healthy population of woodworms that are munching it down, leaving little yellow sawdust piles on my bathroom floor. In the mornings, the couchmakers wipe down the couches that are left sitting by the road day in and day out, the wicker furniture venders carry in their sets—2 chairs+loveseat+small coffee table can be roped together and carried all at once on your head or bike… if you are skilled.

The couchmakers share the road with chalkboard makers, woodshop co-ops. Street sold chalkboards are painted plyboard, so after one lesson you can’t hardly use it again and students complain so it is better to get the real thing. The woodshop wares are fine quality chairs, cupboards, tv stands (bookshelves not so common), bedframes (nothing beats the one chosen for my room: seductive purple velvet headboard, classy I know) cribs, etc. all well crafted with attention to style. Various carpenters share a shop (shack with a powerline) and tools, and each one has their own style or specialized item.


In town:
Being American I am constantly bombarded by whoever selling whatever, heck I’m foreign, I’ll buy whatever… men’s suit jackets:yes…baby shoes:yes…brooms:yes…briefcases:yes. If it’s been a legally acquired good it will be draped around arms, if it is an illegally acquired good (usually cellphone, sometimes jewelry) it will be held down low by the crotch and flashed up… a technique that would result in a lot of guys getting slapped in the face if it were used in the states. If there is a niche, or something that could be a niche even if there isn’t a market for the item, it is filled. In the city, people want money and will do what it takes.

There is a corner with shoe polishers. There is a corner with men who buy and sell dollar bills. There is a corner with legless men who repair shoes. Their tricycle, hand cranked/peddled wheelchairs (basically a metal chair enhanced with spare bike parks) sit on the street while they work on the curb. There is a corner for the medicinal (and probably some non-medicinal ones too) drug venders with their little suitcases propped up on a wall filled with packages of pills, and they will run fast and manically if the police seem like they are moving in, though this has only happened once that I’ve seen. The black sandals you see around town are made from old tires, and they are cut and stitched together by men working next to the bicycle repair lean-tos. On all corners there are boys selling prepaid cell phone credit, they clump together and each shake a long laminated ribbon of linked used cards as you walk by… “credito credito credito”. For one cell company you can whistle the jingle and they will come running, shaking their strips at you, eager for the sale.
In the park you can buy grey egg sandwiches in plastic bags to go with your mini-bagged koolade-like frozen beverage, or your bagged yoghurt. On the main road the newspapers are sold next to candy, which is laid out thoughtfully on homemade cardboard box displays with the lollipops propped upright in little holes. On rough days I go for the round chocolate bomboms instead of the street egg sandwich, still not brave enough for that one. In front of my work, ladies sell bananas and tangerines (now that they are in season). One lady also sells these rather alien looking baked goods: flakey cones with hot pink cream (if Barbie were a flavor these would be Barbie flavored) filling and sparsely stuffed chamussas.


In the Station/On the road:
The most … insistent… vendors hang out at paragems, where the overflowing chapas (like a minivan but really crappy) move in and out. Candy, chips—my favorite are straight from Maputo and the chutney tomato cheese beef etc. flavoring turns fingertip skin dark magenta, crackers, sodas and waters (though the bottles are usually refilled and glued shut: no that is not a Fiz beverage it is actually a Divita juice powder rehydrated), socks and belts, and fried dough knots piled in baskets and covered with cloth (sometimes they are sweet and soft, more often dry and disappointing). All paragems have the same vibe. As your chapa pulls up the vendors come running, the boys with bagged cashews will run alongside the windows trying to seal the deal as the chapa or bus putters on, the women will come with flat woven rice sifters filled with fruit on their heads…. 10 at once all with bananas or all with tangerines… and they wail at you to buy buy buy. Based on the discounted sale items, usually on the brink of expiration date, at the local supermarket I can accurately predict the hot items that will be at the paragem in coming weeks.


The Way of Business
The philosophy of making Business, of selling your product is different Mozambique than America. Okay that statement seems self-evident . . . duh, Alexandra, of course it is! But sometimes completing a transaction is so mystifying, and I can’t help but come out of the deal asking: But why…? Here the customer is not always right, actually the customer can sometimes be an inconvenience especially if there is a working tv in the shop. But why is it so hard to buy white envelopes? But why didn’t you show me this voltage regulator initially when I asked for this specific style? But why are you saying you don’t sell markers when I can see markers displayed behind the counter (is my Portuguese really that bad)? The pressing-pushy mood of Transaction on the street is the opposite from the leisure Transaction in a shop. The Buyer in a shop is in no hurry and the Seller is not to be rushed. A business owner will, frequently, harshly criticize a shopworker on the floor in front of customers (me, in my head: hey it’s cool if this is a bad time for me to buy something here I can come back later… me, actually: don’t make eye contact). But why were things so heated in there? In the market once a woman selling eggplants and greenbeans scolded a herd of other vendors for harassing/bombarding me (carrots carrots carrots beans beans beans tomato tomato tomato potato potato potato pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin). But why won’t you just let me be? But why do you have to say everything 100 times over? This woman leaned under the hanging scale dangling from the top of her stall: “She has eyes, she can tell what you have laid out!” One of the men said, “I’m just trying to tell her what I’ve got, I just want to make sure she knows! I’m just trying to make a sale!” …. Oh that is why, just making Sale.



The Players of Business
Regardless of where the place of Business is, and I would say this is true in the states too, there is the collision of vendor, buyer, thief, and beggar. For me the most irritating are the beggar boys in town, 5-10 years old, they will stand under your chapa window, or chase you down the street, and try to look at pitiful as possible (“mili mili mili”), one arm slung over their forehead, their pained expressions well practiced because they don’t know any better and not much more is expected of them…. asking the mazungo is like playing lottery, except they have nothing to lose. Child beggars make me extremely uncomfortable, and frustrated because I know that my coins are going straight to a little cake, but their poverty and lack of opportunity is real. I feel disgusted with how the way I communicate with child beggars, awkward with how spoiled I am, and depressed that this is how the world works.

Okay… a slight digression: I’m not sure about the validity of this but I heard that, especially in Southern Mozambique, South African vacationers will toss candies out of their car windows at the kids on the street as they pull in with SUV plus trailer (if they have a boat trailer they probably are from Zim not SA, check the license plates, I swear everyone in Zim has a boat that accompanies them on all trips… I’m not sure where they go boating but there are apparently lots of boating hot spots in Moz) plus food plus supplies for eternity as if they were entering Armageddon. And the kids love the sweets because who wouldn’t?! The beggar kids are there because, sometimes, they get goodies. If you can’t already tell, I am critical of creating a generation who expects handouts, this is the paradox of help. Less so with hand-outs from tourists and more so with foreign aid efforts I wonder: how do you help without making dependents, how do you help by empowering? Or do we just say fuck it? I try to think no.

Abertura do Ano

Buster’s Barbeque. That is what I think of when people start talking about school sponsored events to celebrate the start of the academic year. The only thing is that I have absolutely no memory of Buster’s Barbeque. Frankly I don’t think I even went once during my time at Lincoln High School, but I remember the sign-up form and the posters… it was probably some kind of PTA fundraiser linked to a football game, but those details are vague. My parents are absolutely phenomenal parents, they just aren’t the all-American, homecoming football game, Buster Barbeque type. At the U of Oregon start of the year events, there was usually a guest speaker, maybe food, again the memory is hazy and I only went once… I have stronger memories of the non-institutionally-associated celebrations, and I doubt few college graduates have good memories of those sloppy, but fun, gatherings.
Fast forward: me. Here. now. I have had the privilege of going to two, extremely different, start of the academic year celebrations, one at the secondary school and the other one at the university.
At the secondary school we had a tree planting ceremony (I know this sounds like some hippie thing from Oregon, but I’m not confusing things). Mostly everyone showed up on time, and waited around for a couple of hours for things to get set up: the chairs for the attending students and parents had to be moved to place, the plastic flower decoration, which was usually some kind of pencil holder from a director’s desk, had to be artfully positioned the speakers’ table, the district representative had to arrive (he was on Mozambiquian time… two hour difference with real time). By the time things were ready it was blazing hot and everyone was huddled in the shady spots under buildings or shrubbery around the school grounds. A student was selected to ceremoniously dig/plant a small sappling, and the school officials helped water it to show the strong bond within the community. We sang the national anthem (look it up online, the lyrics are good but the longest anthem ever, I think the main verse is repeated some eight times). When all was ready for the speakers’ time, the sun was high and the chairs were no longer in the shade… so things were adjusted and parents’ seating was moved perpendicular to the ornamented speaker’s table and students stood inside the building across the way, watching from the windows.
Okay so the set up was awkward, but what was more awkward were the main topics of the keynote speaker: (1) corruption. All involved parties: parents, students, and professors, were specifically asked to stop playing their respective role in the rampant corruption at the school. Parents were asked to not come by the school with live goats and chickens (… and I was later told by Dio pigs) to give to teachers, students are not to do manual labor and/or sexual favors (apparently a popular option) for teachers, and teachers are not to solicit sexual favors or livestock from students. Yep, I was going to have to hold back from my 8th graders…this kind of corruption is disgusting and sickening. (2) Dress code. Students can no longer show up to class with tagline shirts purchased from the mercado (these are clothes that Goodwill ships to Africa, meaning the shirts that you give to Goodwill, that can’t get sold at the regular Goodwill or, after, the BINs). The problem is that none of the students know what the shirts say because their english ain’t so good. The speaker’s examples of taglines include “My name is John” “I love you” “New York” …. But I could think of some (spicier) examples. Though I always notice the bizzarro shirts that make it out of the states to Mozambique, I had never heard a Mozambiquan talk about it. Granted I know people don’t know what they are wearing, I still get surprised when I see “guess what’s making me happy down here [with an arrow]” “Someone I know went to Hawaii and got me this shirt” around town, or in the classroom with the words are showing through the pressed white button up school uniform shirt.
I often imagine various scenarios with events from Mozambique transposed onto life back home. Like what if a suburban forest heights mom pulled a live goat out of her mini-van to take to her child’s trig teacher at Lincoln High, and what that teacher would say upon receiving the goat. Or a parent teacher conference with the student wearing an ironed t-shirt with “i have problems” on it. Or, over hamburgers at Buster’s Barbeque, teachers being told they could not do naughty things with their 14 year old students while parents stood around rolling their eyes thinking “hmm… that will be the day….”.
The university Abertura do Ano was… tame and much better and not too much of an interesting story (what will I blog about… man). This was one of the few times I’ve been to a mass, the bishop came, bible passages were read, people got on their knees and prayers were said. All of the professors were in their black graduation robes and hats, except for me… it was a like a game of “Where’s the Unqualified Volunteer Who’s on Faculty?”. Over the center table there was a photo of an African Mary holding a black Baby Jesus with a caption reading “our mother”. A phenomenal speaker came and talked about human rights issues and how to protect the oppressed. She talked about the US, and it was the first time I’ve hear a non-American give a reasonable account of US issues, usually things are unreasonably (and falsely) positive, or excessively (and unfairly) negative. We had chamussas, rissois, cake and champagne.
And at the university level here, just like the university level back home, the non-formal event was more memorable (and sloppy… if not sloppier than at home). The only difference here is the event was sanctioned by the school. After teaching my class one evening a co-worker asked if I was going to the “baptism” that coming Saturday morning. Sure, which church, whose baby, what time? He just laughed, no not a baby baptism, come to the main campus and you’ll see how the new students are welcomed by the old students.
Second/third year students had spent the last month fermenting raw eggs, milk, corn husk, and I’m-don’t-want-to-know what else in an old oil barrel… this is the “holy water” for a university baptism. Tests are arranged so all of the first year students have their last mid-term the same time on a Saturday morning at the main campus, and as they exit out they are initiated into the student body. The first year students had to walk on their knees in the mud to a pick-up truck with the spoilt food filled barrel; a rather animated, chanting mob of older students taunted…. Because of my language issues in understanding what the heck was going on in mob settings either the older students were chanting “I am bishop” or they were telling the first year students to say “I am little-insect”…..bishop and little-insect sound similar in Portuguese hence the uncertainty. Anyways…. once they reached the barrel they were smashed with raw eggs and doused with the chunky, foul smelling “holy water”. When I came to the campus, the gates were locked tight to prevent potential escapees; cars were pulled up around the perimeter as extra blockade. As the barrel emptied, the solution was augmented with muddy puddle water. Students who tried to flee had it much worse than those who embraced the ceremony. The parking lot was full of spilt “holy water”… it was absolutely disgusting. And disturbingly amusing to watch.
We do a lot of weird initiation hazing events in the states (for sports, for greek life, for secret societies, etc. etc.) I wonder how it would be different if it was all done out in the open, not behind closed doors.

I have arrived…take two

Long story short, Peace Corps decided to pull me from my Zambezia site because of that little security incident and because of absolutely zero support from the school. In retrospect I can now see what a headache everything was getting to be. Just a little sampling of what was going on between me and the school: they never called after hearing about the break-in to see if I was okay (and this is not a cultural difference problem… ), they did call once … to see when our personal belongings were going to be out of the house so the new director could move in. They never tried to help find a house and were unable to tell PC where we were living (we could have been living in a cardboard box under a mango tree and they would have never known or cared). A week before PC pulled us, I showed up to teach classes only to be told by students (?!) that I was no longer their teacher, half of my classes had been reassigned to a physics professor (when he and I talked about it, he asked for my all class prep materials because he didn’t know anything about biology), school administration apparently thought they didn’t need to communicate directly with me about this and later denied the whole situation when the PC chefe showed up. School administration was surprised and stressed about our departure “… but we love our peace corps volunteers, they do so many important projects and are such hard workers…. How can you leave us …. ” Suddenly, when they were faced with the monetary cost of finding replacement teachers, they were the most devoted administration in PC Moz history.

Peace Corps came to site, made a decision, and we had less than 24 hours to pack our belongings, say our goodbyes, and move to Manica Province. We drove through one of the biggest rainstorms; rain filled some of the boxes on top of the car and leaked down through the plastic tarp into the car. The roads between the village and Quelimane (where we overnighted) are some of the worst in the country, 100% deep rivets and pot holes, and as they turned into muddy rivers all I could think was: I love you SUV. The roads shouldn’t be that bad there, some government somewhere has funded a complete infrastructure rehabilitation project but the money has been sucked into someone’s play fund and the road remains… horrible. To make it worse (and you see this around Moz), people (with an average age of 12 years old) living along the side of the road have taken to digging up soil next to the road to patch the holes in the middle of the road--- it’s a niche to make money, they patch the road and the drivers owe them for the labor. As you drive by they lean on their hoes, clap their hands their hands together and and hold them out. The only hitch is that by carving out earth next to the road they are only creating more erosion, so besides the holes and rivets in the middle of the road the sides of the road are also cracked down and melting away into cassava and pineapple fields.

After a couple days driving, Peace Corps dropped me off at my brand new site, and guess what: I’m teaching biology at a university! Yep, Doutora Alexandra, that’s me because I also got a couple extra academic degrees in this transfer. Now I wish I could say this promotion was due to my incredibly inspirational teaching skills, but this is sadly not the case. The university schedule is a bit different, classes hadn’t started yet and I didn’t have to jump mid-term into anything, which would have been the case if I had gone to a secondary school.

I’ll be honest: teaching biology at the university was (still is) scary. I feel more accountable for what I teach, big difference from that secondary school up north where I could have showed up to class and taught basket weaving and nobody would have known the difference.

Getting assigned to teach at the university is some Karmatic fate after four years of being a complete bitch to all of those foreign GTFs I had at the University of Oregon. When I was a student I had zero patience when I showed up to class and the GTF lectured in sounds that are not even close to the English language and wrote things on the board that looked more like drunk Pictionary. … so I’m *that* GTF now, except I’m called Doctor and feel a little bit like a fraud. When I lecture I sometimes wonder what it sounds like to the students, in Portuguese I primarily can only speak present tense, my vocabulary is probably about 150 words, and I have directly transported my Spanish grammar/sentence structure into Portuguese (they are not the same). But they did really well on their first test, so either things are better than what it seems or there was a heck of a lot of cheating… Either way the students are enthusiastic and positive to work with. Despite being adults, I still get giggles when I talk about sperm and fertilization.

The university is in a city and my lifestyle has completely changed. This really brings to home the fact that every Peace Corps experience is uniquely different, even in the same country. Actually I am almost not in Peace Corps anymore: My house has tiled floors, a shower, running water, and electricity, I am no longer only eating okra, tomatoes, and wild chicken eggs because the markets here are fully of stunningly beautiful produce, the nearest place to buy food is a supermarket (just like one in the states: frozen processed food, ice cream, skim milk, diet soda, and everything… not that I eat most of it but the point is that I could if I wanted to), a driver comes to pick me up to take me to and from work, I have a real sized oven and refrigerator…. Etc. etc. Things can still be hard but in a different way than before at my first site.

Overall, I’m glad I stuck through the hard things and am excited to see how this whole teaching at a university thing goes. I get to be a part of a really interesting department (Nutritional Engineer) that could really help communities eat locally and am lucky to work with such wonderful, intelligent people. And on those rough days, when everything is going wrong and cultural differences seem impossible to overcome, when the guard is drunk and passed out in his underwear in the front yard, when the house floods and the faucets fall apart because they are super-low grade Chinese-ware, when my neighbor’s guest absent mindedly takes my house keys to Beira unbeknownst to me, when living alone is as lonely as it sounds, when the Portuguese just isn’t coming out right and I wonder how the heck I’m going to pull this lecture off, I just take a big breath . . . life is good, overall.

Nighttime Machete Break-Ins: This is why you should wear PJs always!

First: I am totally 100% okay and so freaking LUCKY!! This could have turned out really bad, but it didn’t.


I wasn’t sure which would be the best media to tell everyone at home about this. On one hand blogging seems very public, very open—it almost seems inappropriate to use this space for an event that will greatly affect my personal outlook. On the other hand the blog is an ideal way to let friends, family, etc. know without having to individually contact and recount for everyone (I already a bit burnt out on retelling). Also, I would rather people hear about this from me because I don’t want imaginations to get out of control in the gossip train, thus furthering negative or misguided stereotypes about Africa. No need for paranoia but these things happen EVERYWHERE and ANYWHERE—had this happened to me in America it probably would have been guns rather than machetes. Regardless of where, I think it’s important to persevere through the negative and choose to live life by caring for the community around us.
Okay … disclaimer being stated, where to start…


Two weeks ago, at 3 am, I woke up with a flashlight being shone on my face. My first thought was that it was Dio—maybe he was confused or sleep walking or something—but he had gone to sleep in his little house behind our house. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness behind the light, there was a man with a machete. “Get money, money, money.” I’m not really sure what I was thinking at this point—I knew I had to keep things calm, I didn’t want to provoke him, but I also needed to get the attention of someone outside the house. I told him to turn on the lights because I can’t see anything in the dark (maybe Dio would notice…). I kept my eyes down as I wrapped myself up in my sheet (because I wasn’t wearing PJ bottoms, it’s Africa and really flipping hot, and I will probably never just sleep in a t-shirt and underwear again) and fought my way through the mosquito net. I didn’t want to be able to recognize him; I didn’t want him to get edgy. He was intense but I could tell he was nervous—if he was the violent type he would have set the mood of the break-in aggressively—he would have hurt me to begin with. I shuffled around my room in my bed sheets, giving him money from the top of the bookshelf, from my wallet, a cell phone. I tried to respond to him loudly, in slow and long phrases… anything to get Dio’s attention but the man told me he would beat/cut me with the machete if I didn’t quiet down… so yeah that shut me up really quickly. He asked for my laptop but specifically didn’t want the cord (side note: idiot, because you can’t get mac laptop cords/mac anything in moz… meaning he has my computer and won’t be able to sell it or use it…. Clearly not a professional, which is fine by me). He left the room for a second and then came right back with a second man with a machete. “More money, more money, more money.” The first man had initially left my room with only about $15.00, his friend was clearly pissed that he didn’t steal enough money. The second guy made me nervous—his demeanor was much more aggressive. Again they threatened a lot to cut/beat me with the machetes. “Open this. Open that.” I think they really believed I was going to have bags of money lying around, and I’d be dumb enough to store it so obviously. I gave them money from my passport pouch (they declined the passport, again lucky me they weren’t professionals). They had me open the med kit, I told them I had no more money (apparently in really stressful situations I’m a pretty good liar) but they could sell the meds (yeah sorry PCMO, collateral damage)—nope they didn’t want to. Finally they left the room; I shut the bedroom door, tried really really hard not to cry or freak out, and waited 15 minutes until they left the house. I yelled for Dio from my room and he came up, pointy-wooden-carved-weapon-thingy in hand.


We assessed the house together. The men, probably more than the 2 that were in my room, had pried the security bars off the kitchen window—probably with a car jack—climbed up into the house. Took apart the lock on the front door from the inside. I’m still unsure how they opened my room because it doesn’t have a handle and you need a key to open the door. They also took a DVD player, which actually belongs to the teen community program Peace Corps runs and ironically was at our house for safe keeping, a Peace Corps bag (because that is something you can totally use anonymously around town), some money from my roomie’s room, a machete—looks like I was held up with my own machete, and other odds and ends.

I’m pretty sure the men came from the mato/bush outside of town because of the way they spoke Portuguese … it’s most people’s second language here and they did not speak it well, their old goodwill clothes, and the fact that they didn’t cover their faces. Also they were quite a bit shorter than me (I’m very tall for Mozambique)… but honestly when someone has a big ol’ machete it doesn’t matter if they are a head shorter than you are. The house had been cased, and the break in was planned, I don’t think it was just chance that this happened the night before Claire was coming back home.


Dio and I frantically tried to call people, a little hard when of the two cell phones we had one didn’t have rede/reception and the other was out of phone credit. He sent out as many beeps (this free text message that tells the recipient to call the person who sends the beep… very popular here, basically “I want to talk to you but you should pay for it”) as is in his daily allotment. We even tried calling the MCell customer service line to see if they would call PC for us. Long story short, got a hold of PC and they sent someone down from Nampula immediately to temporarily evacuate me.

While I waited for the ride, the sun came up and people started congregating around my house, looking at the grate dangling from the house. Most of the talk was about how I should ABSOLUTELY go to a witch doctor, who could have these men killed, make them go crazy, and other charming options. The rest of the time people debated if it was someone from Ile who did it, how the neighborhood was changing. It was touching how the rest of the community responded. People kept stopping by to make sure I was okay. The girls who play in front of the house everyday sat outside all wispy eyed. Actually everyone came by or called except for the school officials… interesting…


So that’s the bulk of it. Congratulations if you made it through this lengthy post. PC has been amazing through the process. We are in Ile for the moment and homeless… waiting to see where we go and live… (maybe I get to use my marine biology experience after all… haha)


A million thanks for all of the love and support everyone!! I’m just getting to the point where I can more or less laugh about it… and being in this positive emotional space would not be possible without the amazing community back home that I am a part of.


I don’t think I’ll ever get over how unbelievably lucky I am.