It’s been quite a while since I’ve written! It seems like time is just flying by so quick lately… I’ve definitely had a few adventures that are worth sharing! The more I see of this country, the more I fall in love with it. There are SO many beautiful beaches and villages; I can’t imagine it will be much longer before the whole country is turned into a major tourist destination!
I’ll back up to the beginning of March… All of us FGH Volunteers had a meeting in Quelimane with some of the staff including a few that flew in from Maputo. We were a little unsure of what to expect and were completely caught off guard when, in perfect Mozambican style, the meeting was suddenly pushed forward a day and we were notified about an hour before we were to begin! We scrambled to get ready and race down to the office with nothing prepared. When we arrived we began the meeting by going around in a circle and explaining to the staff what we’ve been doing during our first three months at site and what projects we plan to implement throughout our two-years of service. Doing this without preparation in-front of our bosses and in Portuguese was a bit nerve-wracking to say the least! They seemed to like a lot of the ideas I had for future projects and were especially responsive to my library project idea. The second day we were given the opportunity to discuss any issues or problems we have encountered. Many of the other Volunteers have had significant problems with their counterparts showing up for meetings and also a few issues with housing-such as leaks in the roof and fences not being put up, etc. All of us as Volunteers have also felt a bit disconnected from FGH and excluded. This issue seems to have grown in the last month or so and is going to be addressed at our next meeting in the coming week. FGH is still a very new organization and has recently added the community health element to their project, they used to do clinical work only and still have a few kinks to work out with the addition of the community prevention and outreach sector of the organization. We just feel our job description is a bit vague and it’s difficult to work with our counterparts regularly since for most of us they don’t live in the same village as us. It seems many of the staff members are unsure of our role as well and have a tough time knowing how to include us in their projects. For example, I have FGH staff visiting my site a few times a week doing mostly clinical work but there are also non-clinical projects or tasks that I would be willing to help out with if they would allow. I realize it’s a two-way street though and as a Peace Corps Volunteer we really must be proactive and identify projects we can assist with in our communities.
At the end of March we had our In-Service Training (IST) conference with all the other health PCVs and most of the education, it was great to see everyone and felt like a high school reunion you actually want to be at! Peace Corps staff went over some information on monitoring and evaluation of our projects and we also got to hear about everyone’s experiences thus far…quite reassuring to hear that others are going through the same struggles and challenges. The conference was in Nampula which is in the northern part of the country, it’s a fairly large city and theft/pick-pocketing is a major problem. One night we decided to all go out and about 6-8 Volunteers had their phones, wallets, purses, etc. stolen or taken from their pockets! Luckily I wasn’t one of them! I don’t think people do these things with the intent of harming anyone; they just want valuable items so they can make some money to survive-it’s a product of their environment I believe, not because they’re bad people. When IST ended on the 24th, I went with about 13 other Volunteers to Ilha de Moçambique. It’s a beautiful island in the northern part of the country about 2 hours from Nampula. One of the education Volunteers from my group was placed there and I’m now insanely jealous of her! The school she works in over-looks the ocean and is in this cute little town covered in old Portuguese buildings. We took a boat out to Chocas, an old Portuguese holiday town across Mossuril Bay. We stayed at Carushka in little bungalows on the beach. It’s such a beautiful place to relax, we were literally the only group in site the first night and pretty much had the entire beach to ourselves all day. It just amazes me how these stunning beaches haven’t attracted mobs of vacationers, tourists, and business development yet. There’s really no market or place to buy food there so we had to bring all our food and beverages for the first night. There’s a small bar/restaurant that’s only open Thursday-Saturday where we were staying so we went there the next night. After two nights in Chocas we headed back across the bay and spent the day wandering around Ilha. There are a few restaurants, shops, book store, a museum and a lot of great architecture to see and then we all ended up spending the night outside on mattresses at the Volunteer’s house that lives there.
After all that traveling I stayed at site for a few weeks, getting everything set up for the JOMA conference, talking with the professor and getting permission slips from students to travel to Quelimane. I also participated in one of TCE’s meetings, they set up a conference with the students at the ADPP school. All the students there will become teachers after they’ve graduated so the conference was to teach them about HIV/AIDS and how to incorporate it into their lesson plans. I taught a few games that help explain the biology of HIV and can be used before beginning a lesson. Most of the students were around the same age as me so it was a bit frightening to get up there and teach these games in Portuguese to about 40 students, but I think it went well and they seemed to understand the concepts. I also had to write a report for FGH about my first three months at site about how the integration period went and what activities I’d like to begin. I was pretty proud that I was able to write this 2 page report in Portuguese and can see my language making progress finally it seems.
Mid-April I traveled to Quelimane with three students and one teacher/counterpart for the 3 day JOMA (Jovens para Mudança e Ação-youth for change and action) conference.
It went pretty well considering I hadn’t actually even held a JOMA meeting with the students yet-the 2 times I tried to set up meetings it ended up raining heavily and no one showed up, so I hadn’t actually even met the students before the conference. They are very sweet kids and seemed to enjoy the week. During the day we had a speaker that talked about HIV/AIDS, gender, being a leader, etc. There was also free HIV testing one of the days and I saw all my students and teacher in line to be tested, I was really proud of them for being so brave! At night the kids were divided into 2 groups, the Pirates and the Ninjas. I can’t even describe how into it these kids got! They were SO excited about this competition; you can just tell they don’t get to participate in activities like this often. I was the leader for the Pirates and it didn’t take much to get them all pumped up before an event. We had an egg toss, 3-legged race, crab walk, wheel barrow race, dance competition, limbo competition, and dizzy bat competition. It was so great to see the kids get a chance to let loose and actually be kids for once, they loved it! During the conference I ended up sharing a room with 3 other Volunteers, Josh (Moz 14-my group), Gabe (Moz 13), and Melissa (Moz 12-she extended and is staying a 3rd year), I’ve become pretty good friends with them and we’ve formed what we like to call… “a Wolf Pack.” Amongst the numerous reasons I’m thankful I joined the Peace Corps, the friends I’m meeting is definitely one of the top! The Volunteers here are from all over the US and some of the greatest people I’ve met; it’s just crazy to think if I wouldn’t have joined PC I most likely would never have these people in my life. Most often, Peace Corps Volunteers are some of the strangest people out there, but they are definitely a ton of fun and it’s so nice to be surrounded by such a large network of people that have common interests and goals—PC service would definitely be much more challenging without the friends I’ve made! When the conference ended Gabe and I, not wanting to break up “the Wolf Pack,” decided to visit Josh’s site in Maganja da Costa. He is in the district next to mine which is relatively close and I had not visited yet. He lives in a district capital so it’s a bit bigger than my village but seems like it’s still small enough where he can get to know everyone. It rained heavily all day so we just hung out..not doing anything too exciting which is pretty much typical life as a Volunteer but it’s always so much better to be doing nothing with friends rather than alone! And he doesn’t have electricity in his house so we were really getting the true Africa Peace Corps experience for a change.When we parted ways after that weekend we vaguely discussed plans to go to Vilankulos about a week, week and a half later because Volunteers from all over the country go down to Inhambane province to spend the first weekend in May in Vilankulos on the beach and have the 3rd annual Beach Olympics. We had decided to leave Thursday, April 29th and meet in Nicoadala, then head to Caia to spend the night at Melissa’s, our other Wolf Pack member. Little did we know that Mcel, the cell phone provider that practically everyone uses was going to stop working the next day for an entire month! Mcel goes out for a day or two here and there all the time so I was just waiting for it to come back on but as Thursday got closer and closer I realized I would have to just get to Nicoadala by noon as we had planned and hopefully run into my friends. The only other cell phone provider in Mozambique is Vodacom and I have a SIM card for this company but they don’t sell credit in my village and really it wouldn’t have helped because I didn’t have anyone else’s Vodacom numbers. I got to the bus stop plenty early to make sure I got a ride into Nicoadala on time but of course it took 3 hours for a truck to come that morning and I ended up being 1 ½ hours late! I looked around the market with no luck and headed to the Volunteer’s house that lives there. She let me know Josh had been by with another Volunteer and they left already with plans to make it to Gorongosa but she hadn’t seen Gabe. It was getting late so I decided my best option would be to leave and try to find Melissa in Caia even though I had never been there. Eventually I found out that some fiber optic cable had been cut and it was affecting the entire north-central region of the country, Mcel wasn’t working, banks and ATMs were down, and all kinds of problems have been going on. Apparently it’s going to be out for the entire month! I couldn’t help but wonder what chaos would ensue if something like this were to happen in the United States!? I ended up making it to Caia and paying a bike taxi to haul me around town until I finally ran into Melissa at the secondary school. We were far enough south that text messages were able to go through in her town so we ended up finding out that Josh and Gabe had made it to Gorongosa-which was good for them but it meant I would have to travel alone all day the next day. I left bright and early Friday and ended up making it to Vilankulos by 4pm, finding rides turned out to be pretty easy since I was traveling alone and was able to get a ride the majority of the way with a doctor from Maputo that knew most of my colleagues at FGH and I only ended up spending about $6 on transportation for the whole way!
Vilankulos has such a beautiful beach; it’s a bit livelier than Ilha with many more tourists. We stayed in a dorm style bungalow along the ocean and played “Olympic games” on the beach on Saturday. It was great to see a lot of the people that live in the central and south that I don’t get to see very often.
Gabe, Josh, and I left Monday and stayed in Caia again on the way back, we ended up making pretty good time on Tuesday and were able to take our time getting back to site. After traveling around and living out of a bag it’s always kind of nice to get back to site and back to a routine but it’s also a little depressing and hard to leave friends and get back to work and living alone with no one to really talk to.
I’m back at site now and have heard through the grapevine that my counterpart made it back from Spain but is apparently quitting FGH to move to Spain now and go to school there….? This is just what I’ve heard…we’ll see next week at our meeting. Today actually I had a visit from my boss at FGH and met a new staff member that they just hired who is going to be in charge of all the Volunteers. They’ve been creating and trying to fill this position for a few months now because our former boss also had many other duties as well and it was hard for him to take it all on. Hopefully now that they’ve designated a specific person to work with us things will go a bit more smoothly and we’ll all feel more guidance in our projects. We talked briefly about the struggles I’ve been having and I explained to them that right now I’m just coming up with projects I’d like to work on but I’m not sure if there are others that FGH would like to see me working on. Right now I’m working out some details for lesson plans I’d like to begin as an “after-school” type program with students at the secondary school. I plan on bringing up subjects such as HIV/AIDS, safe sex, gender roles/norms, goal-setting, etc. And also include a variety of activities such as creating a giant wall map, hosting HIV+ speakers, watching HIV related films and discussing them afterwards, it will vary and depending on the students interest may be only once a week for a few months or extend throughout my entire service. I am also still working on getting the agriculture project going with the women from TCE. When my co-workers were here today we discussed the project and he said I would be able to get the seeds and hopefully some funding next week at our meeting.
I can’t believe it’s already spring back home and starting to warm up! It seems like it’s finally starting to cool down a bit here…sort of. I don’t know what I’ll do when I get back to Minnesota after this; just being in Vilankulos the other week where it’s a bit cooler I thought it was freezing! And there it was only probably in the 70s! Only 2 ½ months until my trip home to visit! I can’t wait but I also have minor panic attacks at times when I think of all the hustle and bustle of home, it’s going to be an especially busy time with two weddings but I can’t wait to see everyone and time is just flying by, I’ve already been here for over 7 months!
Happy Mother’s Day to all my family and friends with children!
Cheers, Katie
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