First off, and most importantly, food!
Since arriving in at site, I’ve started eating more
vegetables than I think I have ever before in my life – they are one of the
cheapest and most readily available foods here.
Usually my fridge (oh, yes, I have a fridge!) is stocked with garlic,
onions, tomatoes, carrots, couve (a dark leafy green in the mustard family),
sweet potato and sometime with eggplant, green beans, peas, and avocado.
As far as fruit goes, we currently have bananas, lemons, and
oranges. During the year mangos, guavas,
papayas, and a few other unpronounceable fruits have their seasons as well.
Other staples include: beans, yogurt, tuna, eggs, pasta,
bread, oatmeal, and peanut butter.
I occasionally splurge on cheese, bolachas (cookies),
chocolate, ice cream (one of the bakeries has ice cream treats now! One of the
most exciting days of my life), hot chocolate, and alcohol.
Anything that comes in packages (pasta, oatmeal, peanut
butter, cookies, etc), I usually buy in a loja (or store). The ones in Lichinga range from fancy ones
with aisles and refrigerator cases to costo-esc ones where you have to stand in
line at a counter and they give you dirty looks when you don’t buy in bulk to
little lojas with just the few essentials.
Vegetables, fruits, beans, eggs, and anything else that isn’t
processed, we buy at one of the local markets.
The markets in Lichinga come in two varieties: sheltered under a
pavilion-type structure and open-air. Both
are comprised of many, many stalls run by mamas with their current haul of
produce from the family machamba (or farm).
Produce is sold either in lugares (small piles of 3-5) or copos
(cups). Things generally range from 5 –
20 meticais per lugar and 8 – 20 meticais per copo (30 meticais = 1 American
dollar).
My typical meals are egg scrambles, tuna salads, pasta, soup,
peanut butter sandwiches, and anything I can mix with yogurt. I generally opt for simple options, since
complicated meals mean more dishes and more cleaning without running water –
which, as it turns out, is rather a large pain.
Which leads into another very important part of my life – my
house!
As far as accommodations go in Peace Corps Mozambique, Jade
and I hit the housing lottery – our house is old Portuguese construction, which
means it’s solid, large, and features a drop-down ceiling that keeps the hot
our and the rain quiet. It features a
living room, three bedrooms (one serves as a very large closet currently), an
indoor bathroom (blessing and a curse), a kitchen, and a lovely, spacious back
yard. The kitchen is probably my
favorite room (as kitchens usually are) – we have a full-sized refrigerator and
freezer and a gas range, so I don’t have to sacrifice my baking while here, and
a sink…that doesn’t have running water.
That’s right – no running water on our property! But we do have electricity, so that’s a win. The
reason why I have mixed feelings on the bathroom is precisely because of the no
running water – we have an indoor toilet, which is nice when you have to pee in
the middle of the night, but incredibly unfortunate when water is low and it
needs to be flushed. That’s right, to
flush our toilet you have to dump a bucket of water down it. And, since we don’t have running water, our
showers are just pouring pitchers of water (heated on the stove) over ourselves
from a bucket. Makes washing long hair very tricky. The back yard is, like I said, beautiful, and
a bit of an orchard – we have a mango tree, a few papaya trees, a guava tree,
and a couple of peach trees!
To keep ourselves sane, we hired an empregada (or maid)…well,
more so we inherited her. Her name is
Lurdes and she comes twice a week to help us incompetent brancas carry water
form the well down the street, do our laundry (by hand…definitely an acquired skill
that I haven’t acquired) and some general cleaning around the house (somewhat
unnecessary, but helps when it comes to balancing different opinions on house
cleanliness between roommates).
Occasionally she can’t come one day, or we’ve had a lot of people over
for the weekend, and we run out of water and have to cart it ourselves. Not only is water heavy, and annoying to try
to carry in large buckets, the well that we use happens to be down the
street…that is, the main street in and out of Lichinga, that’s always busy, and
always has crianças (little kids) and mamas around to comment on the process. One of the funniest parts of last weekend was
when we were carrying a bucket with about 30 liters of water past a group of
crianças who first said we were strong (yeah!
The brancas aren’t inept after all!) and then suggested that we carry
the bucket on our head…keep in mind, I could probably fit in this bucket. Silly crianças!
Right next to our house is the school we work at E.S. Paulo
Samuel Kankhomba – pro, short commute; con? All the students know where our
house is and like to stop by to ask us questions randomly.
I am teaching 11th grade biology this year – I
have to turmas (classes) that each meet twice a week – an hour and a half one
day and 45 minutes another – and are comprised of between 90 to 110 students. Luckily (or sadly, depending) not all the students
come to class every day. The classrooms
I teach in are fairly small (one of the reasons it’s lucky not all of the
students come every day), without electricity, with a eclectic collection of
half-broken desks that appeared halfway through last trimester (before that,
students either brought chairs or sat on the floor), and are 50/50 when it
comes to doors. I’m pretty sure the
rooms were storage until the school admitted too many students this year. However, as a nice balance to my challenging
teaching space, the school has an absolutely beautiful science lab – well
stocked with physics, chemistry, and biology supplies. I haven’t ended up using this resource too
much yet, but am hoping to figure out a way to get smaller groups of students
in every once in a while.
Since I only teach twice a week (six hours total), I’ve ended
up with a lot of free time. Some of this
has gone toward secondary projects (my REDES group, the English group I’m
trying to get started, and my ongoing crusade to find a conservation-focused
organization that would find me useful) and a fairly large chunk has gone
towards cooking (nothing is pre-made, or in the just-add-hot-water! family, so
cooking takes more time).
My leisure time is generally spent reading (kindles are the
best thing ever for Peace Corps – anyone who’s headed out soon, definitely
consider investing), watching movies and TV shows on my new, functional
computer (thanks Mom!), hanging out with other ex-pats, and watching my pets do
whatever they feel like doing on a given day.
Lichinga is full of ex-pats – apparently being the provincial capital in
the poorest province in one of the poorest countries in the world will do that. There are quite a few missionaries that we
spent time with – some Australians and a couple from Texas. Lichinga is also known for its forestry, so
there’s a lot of people here working on the tree farms. We’ve met a few of the guys who work for one
company – a couple Swedes, a Portuguese guy, and a guy from Zimbabwe – and hung
out with them a couple times. There’s an
interesting difference in purpose between the people who are here with a
service focus (the missionaries, us as PCVs) and the people who are here just
for a job. One of the biggest things
that I’ve noticed is a difference in the importance of the opinion of the Moçambican
community – our time here is all about integrating with the local community,
they are the people we work with and their opinions are incredibly important,
whereas the forestry guys are more isolated (many live on the company’s
compound outside of town) and seem to find interactions with the community here
in Lichinga much less important. Food
for thought.
And then there are our pets – Matope, the puppy, and
Maningue, the cat. They are probably the
best form of entertainment we have. We
will honest-to-god spend an entire afternoon just watching the cat trying to
attack a bug on the wall, or the dog attacking the cat…or her new turtle chew
toy that my aunt and uncle sent over for her.
We may just be easily amused after almost 9 months in Mozambique or we
may now have a better sense of what is actually entertaining. Who can tell?
The next month at site is going to be a busy one – the next
round of provincial final tests and grading the provincial tests, the provincial
REDES workshop with girls from 8 groups throughout Niassa, my site mate Laura’s
despedida at
Lake Niassa and her COS a couple weeks later, helping an ORG out with a grant
proposal (which will hopefully lead into me working with them!), and, finally, another
Peace Corps conference at the end of July – PDM (Project Design and Management)
where I will learn all about how to apply for grants from everyone. Hopefully there will be some traveling before
or after the conference – still haven’t seen as much of this beautiful country
as I would like.
Ate mais tarde!
