Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Oh, hello. I didn’t see you there. Patiently waiting for six months, are we?

I know you’re probably thinking that, having not written anything for so long it will be close to impossible to catch up on everything, and I hope you’re prepared to be wrong. Let the brevity of this sink in. Once it does, you’ll get an accurate grasp of daily life in Zambezia for me.

First I’ll go back and recap everything that happened since my last visit until the beginning of this month.
1) I bought about twenty new capulanas. Admittedly that may be a conservative number.
2) I had matching dresses made for my site mate, Gina, and myself in order to comfortably indulge ourselves at an Indian food buffet.
3) An all-too-short trip to the States.
4) A breast exam by the Peace Corps medical doctor that can only be described as two karate chops to the chest and a check of the armpit gland. Cancer free in 2011!
5) One meeting with my official partner organization, FGH, because the boss of our supervisors actually made an in-person visit. Any activity or positive impact resulting from this meeting has yet to appear.
6) I watched the Super Bowl at an undisclosed location.

So, that sums up from (US) fall ’10 to March ’11. Not a bad few months, if I do say so myself. No malaria, no ghastly car accidents, and I came back to finish my service even though for four weeks I was in the grasp of all the temptations the States have to offer.

As for lately, my life is getting a bit exciting. I have two goals for this year: the first is to fund a community mural project for my girls group, and the second is to help organize and fund a small children’s library at a local orphan center. For both of these it is simply a question of getting paperwork in order and navigating the difficulties of transporting anything in Mozambique –and I mean information or tangible goods. So for now I’m trying to focus on getting funds and not thinking about how I would find and ship books, or fit a ladder on public transportation.

I have also recently visited my good friend at her beach-side site. I love the place for any number of reasons: excellent tailors, beautiful capulana market, bars one can dance at, fresh and greasy apas (it’s like a breakfast burrito, only instead of anything remotely healthy it has a thick tortilla folded around a deep-fried egg marinating in ketchup and mayo), the best matapa I’ve ever eaten, and of course Margaret who is wonderful, beautiful, and as passionate about capulana wardrobes as I am, if not more. However, there is one downside: every time I go I end up being eaten alive by an unknown insect, bug, or allergy. I can’t decide what it is that is attacking my skin, but it’s isolated to my thighs or torso, and it usually only picks one side of my body to feast on. I’m not kidding when I say there are more square inches of my stomach taken up by bites than not. The latest count is fifty-three, and the most fun part about it is that I don’t wake up with these bites. How boring that would be. Instead, I wake up and find myself bite-free, and then throughout the day they appear. My working theory is that the bites are actually demons sent from the fiery pits of the Underworld to act as a counterbalance to the state of happiness I am in when I’m visiting Margaret. You may think that sounds extreme, but one look at the ruthless execution of such torture and you’ll agree that mere mosquitoes, bedbugs, or spiders couldn’t carry out such an intense war strategy. Their ultimate goal may be for me to scratch my stomach out, and if so they are certainly making good progress.

As I write this, I am waiting for an FGH car to pick me up. Already tardy three hours, I have a feeling it may have forgotten about me. Unfortunately I can’t get my coordinator on the phone, so my only course of action is to stay in my house and hope the car eventually makes it. I think the inefficiency of FGH was surprising and a bit startling at first, but now it’s become amusing and, oddly, reliable. Yes. If there’s one thing I feel confident saying about FGH, it is that all of its systems that I have encountered are reliably unreliable. Cheers to that.

So I take my leave, but not before I share this gem:

During a ride with two other PCV’s, the driver proceeds to tell us that he happens to have a gun in the car, one that he carries with him. He hasn’t ever fired it on anyone, but when someone calls him ‘macunha’, or any other word in a local language that, essentially, means ‘whitey’, he takes out his gun, points it at them, and says,
“Call me whitey one more time.”


I have never been a gun advocate, but I do find myself jealous of such a bold move. It makes my stern lectures on respect seem a bit, well, unimpressive. I do hear one can buy guns down south in Inhanbane…