Weekend at Ann’s

We spent the weekend at Ann’s, hanging out and eating delicious food. (Ann, a Peace Corps Volunteer and a friend of my sister, lives a few kilometers up the road in the town of Inharrime.) Friday, right after lunch, Ann and I headed into town from the mission. You can easily walk the distance in about forty-five, but sometimes you can catch a “balea” i.e. a free ride. Hitchhiking is very much part of the culture here and you can usually flag down a driver for a ride unless they’re particularly rude or South African tourists (which are essentially the same thing anyways.) We got a ride in the back of a pickup truck with several other people. There was an almost cinematic difference between Ann’s lively, laughter-filled conversation with an elderly woman and my awkward conversation-fail in which me and the man sitting across from me managed to communicate nothing but the fact that we couldn’t understand each other at all. After the third handshake, we gave it up.
In town, we went to the market and bought produce from the PCV’s favorite vendors, Sandra and Linda. When we had all the ingredients we’d need, we walked up the hill to Ann’s place where we were greeted by Amendoim (“Peanut”), Ann’s dog. (Interestingly enough, Mozambican dogs tend to be racist. It makes sense though; locals are used to feral, aggressive dogs covered in ticks and fleas and so they fear them and often act hostile towards them. Contrarily, American PCV’s, who are used to domesticated dogs, are much kinder to the animals.) We started to get dinner prepared, cutting up vegetables and lighting Ann’s coal stove outside. Ann does have a propane stove with one working burner but her gas tank was empty so we couldn’t use it. Staying at Ann’s definitely made me appreciate just how comfortable my living situation is at the Laura Vicuña mission; her reed house is cozy but pretty primitive in comparison. No internet access just a few minutes away. No running water, just a basin under the kitchen table. No bathroom, but an outdoor latrine. (To the B’s, she has the same kind of solar heated shower bag as you guys!) Staying there makes you realize just how much you can do without (although I realize staying there for two days is a lot different from actually living there.)
When my father and sister arrived, Scooter and Ann made a hummus dip appetizer, pad thai for the main entre, and a no-bake cheese cake for dessert. It was all wonderfully delicious.
My sister had a meeting at the mission the next day so her and my dad left early. After we got up, Ann and I passed the time by talking leisurely, making egg sandwiches, and watching Modern Family on her laptop. We also prepared the beer batter for tempura that we were going to make that evening, as according to Ann, the batter only get better the longer you let it sit. To get beer, we walked to a nearby “banca” (kind of like a reed hut convenience store) and I realized it was one of the stops we had made with Filipe on his delivery route – more specifically the stop with the little boy who says “hullo” to me. Turns out this same kid bursts into tears whenever he encounters Scooter or Ann.
That evening, my sister and father had returned and we all hung out in Ann’s front yard. Scooter was making vegetable tempura on Ann’s coal stove in her yard and I was ralar-ing coconuts (you sit on a stool with a protruding grater thing on one end that you use to scrape out the meat of the coconut – pretty fun you just have to be careful not to ralar your fingers) when Erin (another local PCV) and her father arrived. While our father’s got to know each other, the rest of us (mostly the girls) prepared the rest of the food. When I was done with the coconuts, we soaked the meat shavings in hot water and then squeezed/strained them to get coconut milk for the curry. Another excellent meal. No one gave us a balea on the way home that night but it was a nice walk anyways.

HELP

I realize Im behind on my blogging and I promise to post my latest adventures soon, but for now I need all the help I can get. I just began teaching a 1st and 2nd grade class of 40 kids for and hour and a half everyday and while the first day was a blast, I'm starting to run low on ideas. From what I can tell I get to teach them pretty much anythng I want, but maybe with a focus on music and physical education. So today we sang "Bon Dia a Voce/Good Morning to You" (in the tune of Happy Birthday), Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes (thanks to Brittany for the idea, they loved that one), and then went outside and played "Pato, Pato, Ganso/Duck, Duck, Goose" and "Sharks and Minnows" (that one was impromptu so I never got a chance to translate it). Anyways, yeah, so now Im floundering a bit as to what I'm going to do next and I could really use some suggestions just to get my creative juices flowing. Thanks!

08/06/11

The wind had started howling last night and early this morning there was a huge rainstorm, the sound of which was only amplified by the metal roof of the compound I’m living in. It was very dark when I got up and the power was shot so I had to find my way around with a flashlight. I was skeptical that we would deliver bread at all today; after all Filipe would have to bike the few kilometers from Inharrime through the rain and mud to get to the bakery. We did end up going, but we left later and finished early as the power in the bakery was out and they couldn’t make any more bread.
I’m still learning the delivery route which, in my defense, is quite complex and often doubles back on itself. The hardest is the part of the route that goes through the winding, narrow dirt paths of Inharrime which, when you leave downtown, becomes less of a town and more of a sprawling village/forest. I am, however, learning to identify the different stops we regularly make. For instance, there is the “blue box” stop, the stop by the saw blade vendor, and the stop with the particularly big drop off from the highway. There is also the stop with the poster that says “Glass eyes don’t see, wear goggles”, the stop with the building labeled “Don,t kill me anymore,,”, the pink “GrandPa: Headache Powders” stop, and the stop with the little boy who says “hullo” and the girl Marina who Filipe seems to be trying to set me up with. There’s the stop across from truck that crashed and hasn’t been moved since, the stop at the bar by the lagoon, and the stop at the Mercado. And many, many others.
I sat in on my sister’s English Club again today. They were playing Scrabble again and out of the blue, one student spelled EROSION without any help at all.
Now that my sister is solid in Portuguese, she has started taking lessons to learn Xopi, a local language. I went with her to her lesson today even though I’m still struggling to get a grasp of Portuguese. At one point a tiny kitten jumped onto my lap and, despite a) being allergic to cats and b) needing to be wary of touching animals in general because that’s how my sister got tick fever last year, I let it sleep there for a while because it was just so damn cute. However, I grew less enamored when I saw a tick crawling across my shorts and quickly got both kitten and tick off my person.

07/06/11

We helped Filipe again this morning and this time I brought along a conversational Portuguese dictionary so we could practice actual phrases in the car rides between stops. It turned out to be a great idea; Filipe got so engaged in going through the different phrases in English and Portuguese and fixing each other’s pronunciation that we almost missed a few of our stops.
After lunch, my dad taught me a lot about playing chords on the mandolin, something which I never got around to learning despite playing the instrument for so long. My dad has brought a small Little Martin travel guitar to Mozambique that we’ve started calling “Martiña”. Assuming that he leaves it here, I think I’ll try picking it up along with the mandolin since I’ve always wanted to learn the basics of guitar but never really had time.

06/06/11

Btw, in addition to a school and an orphanage, this mission also has a bakery which generates a good deal of money. My father and I spent this morning helping distribute bread with Filipe, the delivery guy. The usual driver is still unavailable so my father drove the “bread truck” (a Isuzu pickup truck packed with crates of bread) and I tagged along to learn more about driving in Mozambique as I might have to sometimes after my dad leaves. After an hour or two of driving however, I was more than a little scared of the thought of taking the wheel. In addition to the confusion of driving on the left side of the road and the steering wheel being on the right side of the dashboard, the roads of this country are simply abysmal. The only paved road is the highway (and in the one and only). The rest are dirt roads full of bumps and dips that jostle even the best drivers. Throw in the lack of sidewalks and the multitude of people walking in the streets and you have a true nightmare for a little boy who’s only ever driven an automatic in the safe, sane streets of Champaign Urbana.
My fears aside though, it was fun going with my dad and Filipe. I got to help Filipe distribute bread at the many different stops we made and while neither of us speaks much of the others’ language, we spent a good amount of time talking and learning the languages from each other.
My father and I ate lunch in the dining hall with the Sisters and meninas (girls). It’s incredible how self sufficient the girls are at taking care of themselves. Even the tiniest ones that can’t be more than 3 or 4 years old were getting their own food and feeding themselves. In the afternoon, we tried studying Portuguese with limited success. A group of girl’s found us and proved quite distracting by teasing us, running around us, poking us, singing and dancing for us, and hugging us. They did help our pronunciation a lot though as they had no shame in correcting our bad accents.
In the evening we went into town to meet up with Ann for a drink and then dinner. Erin came halfway through dinner and it was really interesting hearing the PCV’s (Peace Corps Volunteers) talk about their experiences in and frustrations with the program.

First Day at Laura Vicuña

I started today by running with my sister early in the morning. She’s training for a marathon in August and I suppose I’ll do it too, or at least half of it. We passed a hotel advertisement that featured various icons representing the accommodations provided. I laughed because one was the symbol for restrooms but my sister pointed out you can’t take that particular accommodation for granted here.
After church, the sisters asked my father if he could drive a group of students to Zavora Beach as the regular driver wasn’t available. Both my dad and I had gotten international drivers licenses before we came to Mozambique in order to make ourselves more useful at the mission, so he was more than happy to drive us down in the back of a gigantic pickup truck. It was a wonderful way to pass the day. Mozambique has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world and as it isn’t tourist season, we had miles of beach to ourselves save a few local fishermen. We ate lunch on the beach and then had another meal in the back of the truck on the way back. The ride was incredibly bumpy and I was sure some of the rice would spill or the Sister was going to impale someone with the sharp knife she was using to cut bread, but somehow we all enjoyed a meal together as naturally as when we had eaten on the beach.

Traveling

We started out early in the morning, driving to the Indianapolis airport and then flying to Atlanta. The Atlanta airport was buzzing with school travel groups and it made me nostalgic for the Spain trip last summer. After a long flight to Johannesburg, we took a taxi to the bus station. We got to know the taxi driver, Joseph, and he gave my dad his name and number, telling him to text him for a ride on his way back and promising him a discount. The bus station was a large, open building full or restaurants and people traveling all over. It was pretty chilly, but safe. The bus was nice and warm and we fell asleep immediately although my dad was woken up by a loud Christian soap opera they showed in the middle of the night and I spent most of the night awake in preparation for crossing the border. I’ve crossed the Mozambican border twice before, both times in the dead of night and both pretty nerve wracking experiences. Turns out though that now the border doesn’t open until 6 a.m. and we had to wait before we could line up to cross it. To go in and out of Mozambique, you have to get out of your vehicle and walk about a mile, going through several different check points: one to check you have a passport, one to get a stamp for departing from South Africa, and one for receiving the entry stamp for Mozambique (all with long lines). It was cold doing the whole process at daybreak but a lot more comfortable than doing it in the middle of the night and we got to watch a beautiful sunrise on our way. Finally, a few hours later, we met my sister, Scooter, at the bus stop in Maputo. Scooter had REDES (Girls in Development, Education, and Health) meetings all day so my dad and I spent the afternoon walking around the city, trying to avoid jetlag and stay awake. Eventually we retired to the hotel and I took a nap. My sister had difficulties trying to make and keep reservations at this particular hotel and it almost turned out that my dad and I didn’t get a room but when the owner heard it was my sister’s family who needed a place, she offered us one room she usually reserved for storage. Apparently many of the other hotel workers also stored stuff in there because, during our stay, we had at least five hotel workers walk into our room before quickly backing out, apologizing, quite embarrassed. In the middle of my nap, I woke up to find a small girl sitting on the bed next to me. After giving me a quizzical look, she scampered off and I fell back asleep wondering if I hadn’t just dreamt that happened. Turns out she’s the owner’s granddaughter and probably usually hung out in that room a lot. The next day we woke early and got on a chapa headed to Inharrime. We arrived at the mission where my sister works, and it seemed the long journey was over without any problems but then, just as the chapa took off down the road, we discovered we had left one of our suitcases on it. While I took off running and waving in vain after the chapa, Scooter ran inside the mission and explained the situation. A few minutes later, her and a driver took off after the chapa in one of the mission’s trucks. They had to go 40 km to catch the chapa and it was over an hour before they got back, but they got the bag. After unpacking a bit, we took our instruments up to the courtyard where we sang with all the girls (right, btw, the mission where my sister works and where we’ll be staying is also a school and an orphanage for about 60 girls). We played some Taylor Swift and spirituals but “Hallelujah” was the most popular as all the girls could easily sing along with the chorus.