Note 2

Apparently, I’m not learning.

After dropping off the letter at the statistics office, my second order of business was to reserve a meeting room for the enumerator training. I went to the Recycling Center (don’t ask me why it’s called that, as far as I know they have never recycled anything) and talked to the secretary. I told her what I wanted, the dates, how many people, and asked her if there was a room available. She said she didn’t know, and she couldn’t find out without–you guessed it–an official letter of request saying what I wanted, the dates, and how many people. But I just finished telling you exactly that information, I said, so wouldn’t it be possible to check right now and see if there’s space? No, she said, but once we receive your letter of request I can ask the director, who is not here today but will be on Monday, to look at the schedule.

So I’m back in the office, typing up another 2-line letter to be printed out, signed with my name and whatever official-sounding title I can come up with, and submitted in another big brown envelope. One of these days maybe I’ll understand why all this is necessary.

A short note

This morning I stopped by the provincial statistics institute to see if they could help me contact some people who have worked for them in the past and who have experience in surveys like the one we’re doing. I talked to one of the managers, and when I explained what I wanted, he told me that I had to submit a formal request for the names. Then the institute could contact the people and tell them to contact me. But I already have the names, I said, so can I just give you this list that I’m carrying? No, apparently not. They needed to have the official letter asking for the names, even though I already had the names, so that they could tell me the names and then I could tell them to contact the survey candidates. But I’m not sure how to write that letter, I said. So he dictated it to me in Portuguese while I copied it down: “To the Provincial Delegation of Zambezia. Re: Request for Enumerators. Through this letter, I am requesting of your Excellency that you provide the names of…” and I kept spelling things wrong, so finally I just gave the paper to him to finish writing, “enumerators with experience in Health Surveys. Most Cordial Regards,…”

So I thanked him and walked to the office, typed it up exactly as he had written it for me, and am now going to give the typed version back to him. So that he can tell me the names that I already have, and then I can ask him to contact them and then they can contact me. I’m getting the hang of it. Finally.

Milange

[Following what is now an official blog policy—although I’m a little bit behind--that anyone who sends me an email about the blog gets a shout-out in the next post, I want to say hi to Aunt Gail, Grandma, and of course Anna.]

I have new Internet! Or at least WV does. It materialized out of nowhere last week just after I had given up hope of ever being able to open a picture on my internet browser again. I am currently sitting here and clicking the refresh button on my email account just to watch the page load. Since what has been one of my most consistent sources of frustration is now so greatly improved (granted, 30x faster than nonfunctional is still not all that fast, but whatever), I am going to postpone the entry that I was planning for today, which was basically a list of my pet peeves. Instead, I guess I’ll ramble a bit about my most recent trip out of the city, this time back up north to Gurue (again) and Milange.

I talked about Gurue already, but Milange district, which is right next door, is a completely different experience: in fact, most of the district is linked far more securely—linguistically, culturally, and economically—to Malawi than to Mozambique. Alan, who spent 2 years in the Peace Corps in Malawi, was amused and a bit shocked at the idea that one of the poorest countries in the world could be a regional economic powerhouse. Okay, the region we’re talking about here is small. But there’s no denying that tiny, impoverished Malawi dominates Milange to the point where people are still using kwacha (Malawian currency) more than 80km on the Moz. side of the Malawi-Mozambique border.

Because we were on such a tight work schedule I didn’t have a chance to cross the border into Malawi, even though it’s less than 1k away from Milange Sede. But I’ll hopefully be back in the district in November (if not before) and maybe even be able to pick up some Malawian peanut butter! I was so excited to see South African peanut butter for sale in Maputo (it’s available in most large cities in Moz.) and apparently the Malawians love their peanut butter as well. The funny thing is that when I’m at home in the States I really don’t eat peanut butter that much, but the minute I set foot on foreign soil I start to crave it. I don’t really know why, except maybe because it was so hard to find in Argentina I started feeling permanently deprived. Anyway, it’s getting to the point that whenever I see peanut butter in a store for a less-than-outrageous price I feel like I have something in common with the culture and the country. My peanut butter habit became a bit of a running joke among the people I was driving with on this last trip, but I won in the end – by the last day, they were all eating it too.

Speaking of food, ordering from a menu anywhere in Northern Zambezia is an exercise in patience. The first thing to know is that the menu lists every dish that the restaurant has ever served, not what is actually available that day. Out of 25 dishes, it is entirely possible that only 2 will be offered, and it often takes some persistent questioning to find out exactly which ones they are. After that, be prepared for some cheerful bargaining as to when the meal will be ready. Say you are in the restaurant at 6pm, and after extended questioning you are able to discover what is on offer that day (usually a choice of fish or exceptionally tough chicken). When you ask what time your order will be ready, the manager cheerfully says 7:30pm. You feign shock: “But that’s such a long time, I’m starving! Isn’t there any way it can be earlier?” The ETA is immediately moved up to 7pm. Now comes the tricky part: what does that 7pm actually mean?

Sometimes 7pm means 7pm. More often in such cases, it means that the oil, salt, pepper, and possibly the sweet-and-sour sauce masquerading as ketchup will be served at 7pm and the meal will follow at 7:30. I know one guy who swears that after ordering early in the afternoon, he arrived at the restaurant and following an hour and a half wait, the meal was served—cold. The entire exchange is like a sport, and as long as the stakes aren’t too high, it can be quite amusing. The funniest part is when, every so often, things come out exactly right. On the last day in Milange, I got thrown for a loop: I ordered breakfast for “6:30”, and when I strolled into the dining room at 6:45 (expecting to drink coffee until my omelet was ready), my meal had been on the table since 6:25.

Gurue

Even though seems quite long ago now, I wanted to talk about my first “field trip” in Zambezia. WV was showing 2 USAID consultants around Gurue and Namarroi districts (the consultants were from Kenya, but one of them has a son who went to MUM, how crazy is that?????) and there was extra space in the guesthouse, so I got invited along for the ride.

Gurue is at the foot of the highest mountains in Zambezia – still not terribly high but remote and just enough cooler than Quelimane to make it seem pretty refreshing. It was beautiful but hazy as we flew north—it’s burn season, and from high up you can clearly see how the smoke from scores of brush fires settled into a layer of smog. After about 45 minutes of flying we began to see mountains. When, 15 minutes later, one of the consultants pointed out the airport, I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. Where was the runway? The consultants laughed and said it was clear that this was my first brush flight. In the end, we touched down with surprising smoothness on a long strip of red dirt, then took a truck into town.

Gurue held some sort of strategic position during the civil war; on the way into the village we passed taped-off sections that the driver said were minefields. We stopped briefly at the WV guesthouse and then hit the road again, driving along a series of SBR roads (SBR means “sports bra required,” and in this case, body pads and even a helmet would have been handy) for long enough for me to wish that I hadn’t eaten so much breakfast. Other than various WV vehicles, we passed only about five cars in the entire day. One had 22 people in the pickup bed.

For the children, a car passing was the equivalent of what the trains used to be in Chautauqua: an exciting glimpse of another world (I kept thinking about that engineer who threw Hostess cupcakes out the window to us—I must have been, what, 6 years old at the time?). But being inside looking out was also weirdly voyeuristic. Ricardo had told me: you go to Latin America and you think you have seen poverty. And then you come to Africa and realize you understand nothing at all.

It was incredibly interesting to see the visitors-eye view of WV’s field activities, and also profoundly embarrassing. I do believe that international aid work is worthwhile (clearly—I wouldn’t be here otherwise), but there is undoubtedly a certain amount of arrogance in any of these visits. We visited a farming association first, and were shown first to the fields and then to the meeting room, a storehouse with two benches and four chairs set up. All the men sat on one bench; the women sat on another, and the visitors in the chairs in the front of the room. I felt distinctly uncomfortable receiving attentions that I didn’t feel I deserved, and being treated like an honored guest. They clapped for us, the idea of applause but strangely synchronized: clap-clap-clap-clap-clap. At one village they sang for us in Lomwe, one of the local languages.

It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be to describe this. I always cringe when I read things that make it sound like people who are living in reed huts, drinking polluted water, and trying desperately to scratch enough out of dry, tired soil to stay alive are somehow better off than the poor little pampered citizens of the first world who have forgotten their roots and become disconnected from nature. I will say categorically, and with complete confidence: malnourishment, malaria, cholera, and general suffering and premature death from completely avoidable causes are not “traditions” that are part of anyone’s “true culture.”

But at the same time, being overly pessimistic isn’t right either. For the most part, the people who live here don’t waste time feeling sorry for themselves because they’ve never seen the Eiffel Tower. The sun is beating down and it’s 104 degrees out and they go to the field and work until it gets too dark to see (for the record, it was 104 degrees out today, not counting humidity). They laugh, they sing, they follow their elders. The older kids (and by that I mean age 4 and up) take care of the younger ones. People who have nothing but make the best of it are inspiring. The problem is that inspiration is for rich people. Those who are living these brutal conditions as a daily reality don’t have the luxury.

Quelimane, já

Today is the 7^th of September, a holiday that is somewhat related to Mozambican independence—maybe Constitution Day or something like that, I’m actually not quite sure. 2 days of work and I already have a vacation. Not bad. Actually, the best part is that now that everyone is gone who shares the WV internet connection, my email account opens in only 5 minutes. This is a big deal because the internet is brutally slow here, and expensive—when it works at all. A modem connection feels downright speedy compared to a lot of the service, and even the internet cafes are sometimes out of commission for over 2 weeks. So I’m submitting all this by email now because Blogger was taking so long to load, and I only vaguely remember what I wrote last time… I think it was about jet lag, how mundane.

The hostel in Maputo had a different crowd from most hostels I’ve stayed in. There were a lot of students going to and from volunteer work, people doing dissertation fieldwork, a pharmaceutical investor/researcher, a guy who was setting up an ambulance service in S. Moz., an international man of mystery, a bunch of random hippies/travelers/bums, a UN intern, etc. etc. etc. I had a great time in Maputo, even though I ended up speaking a lot less Portuguese than I thought I would because the language of hostels everywhere is, of course, English. In Maputo it was British/South African English—I actually started to develop this bizarre accent by the time I left. And speaking of accents, my Portuguese gets a lot of funny looks now that I’m in Mozambique. People understand me, but I sound very Brazilian—no one here bothers with those weird, fun things like pronouncing Rs as Hs and talking all sing-songy.

On the plane here I was talking to a foreign guy who denied that Quelimane is a real city. He was also skeptical of the word “town.” I think he was being a bit condescending—after all, calling the 4^th- (or maybe 3^rd-) largest city in Mozambique a suburb is pretty snotty. But even though I don’t agree with his characterization, I’ll admit that Quelimane does have a sleepy, small-town feel that makes its population seem much smaller than 150,000. Even allowing for the fact that I did most of my walking about during the 3-hour afternoon siesta, it’s still more a city of bikes than cars. Not that the cyclists are any more careful of pedestrians than drivers are.

It’s not a big tourist destination, so the foreigners that are here are largely aid workers. From what I can tell, violent crime is extremely rare, although foreigners make easy targets for pickpockets—Malena had her cellphone stolen from her purse as we walked to the World Vision offices the morning after I arrived. There is a huge modern cathedral just down the street from the house, another, historic church by the river, and a large mosque in the center of town—it is cool and strange to hear the calls to prayer out my open window in the evening. Quelimane has a fairly large Muslim population, and I was warned before I got here that it was a fairly conservative city. But it doesn’t seem overly rigid so far—as in Maputo, there are no short skirts and never shorts on the street, but plenty of tank tops, jeans, and tight clothes.

Malena picked me up at the airport on Monday, and I’m staying with the family until I can find another place to live, or maybe indefinitely. They are a completely adorable family—Peruvian-born but have lived in the States several years. Malena’s husband is working as an agricultural economist in Quelimane for the next 3 years, and they have a girl (6) who talks to me only in English, and a boy (2 ½) who talks to me mostly in Portuguese. They also have two small fluffballs, sometimes also known as Bisson Frise (sp?) puppies, who are cute enough that you can forgive them for peeing all over the floor.

There’s supposedly a university as well, although I haven’t located it yet. I was hoping originally that I might be able to live with local university students—living with Peruvians is like having a constant short-circuit on the Portuguese/Spanish switch in my brain—but that doesn’t seem to be a common arrangement here. Maybe I’ll find something. But then again, if not I think I’ll be quite happy living with the family. It will be like study abroad all over again—different continent, but another lovely South American family, and a bit of extra help for my current state of graduation denial.

It really is hard to hit the ground running in a place this different, but I’m doing okay so far and everyone I’ve met has been extremely helpful. I try not to seem too naïve about the way things work here, but I’m becoming accustomed to getting amused looks when I ask certain questions. There’s a particular kind of smile—it’s hard to describe, sort of half-laughing, half-smug, and half-sympathetic. But it says more clearly than anything else that “when you’ve been here longer, you’ll understand.” Maybe I will. Maybe in 4 months that will be my smile as well.

I went down to the river yesterday. It’s large, maybe twice as wide as the Mississippi, and there were a couple of smallish freighters in the port. The weather was beautiful—it’s been beautiful ever since I arrived, actually, except for a bit of rain on the first day. It’s the cool, dry season now (and by cool I mean highs in the 80s); the real rains don’t start until November. I’m writing at random now, I don’t really know what else to say. Has Mozambique lived up to my expectations so far? That’s a trick question, because I didn’t really have any specific expectations when I came. All the foreigners I meet tell me that Africa changes you. I don’t know whether that’s true, and I’m sure it’s not fair to make generalizations like that about a continent this big and diverse. Comparing Dubai and Quelimane is way worse than comparing Eldon, Iowa with NYC. But anyway, I like it here. And if worse comes to worst, at least we get a lot of holidays.