I packed raggedy clothes for Mozambique – the shorts with a stain on the hem and the faded shoes. I farewell-ed the chiffon skirt and the Lululemon pants, thinking they’d be ruined if I brought them. I would want to wear them when I return, after all.
We Peace Corps Trainees had a strict 100-pound luggage limit, so I parted with the cork message board and the jar of sand from home that I like to take on long trips, as well as my favorite dessert, dark chocolate – pretty much nonexistent in Mozambique. I left behind things I didn’t think I would need – things I thought I could live without for a while. And as I experienced some splintering goodbyes with friends and family, I forced the thought of two years out of my mind. Thinking about that number would make a life without family beach days and the weekly Saturday brunch with my friends and 70% cocoa chocolate bars more real. Now 11 weeks past my marathon of farewells and zipper-splitting packing and re-packing – and where am I? I am sitting cross-legged on my yoga mat, in the middle of my room, halfway through writing an email to my mom, requesting she send a care package containing that chiffon skirt, those Lululemon pants, new shoes, a message board, and dark chocolate… The things I thought I should live without for “a while.” And also that Fine Frenzy book of piano sheet music – because there must be a piano somewhere in Mozambique, and I want to find it sometime in the next two years. I gave in – I live here now. And I will continue to live here for two more years. Like a child, I resisted this change of mind for my first five weeks in Mozambique. I was scared, and a defensive force kept swinging me back to thoughts of the U.S. I went through the motions as my host family, whom I stayed with for the first 10 weeks of my time in the country, wished. I peed in a bucket at night and dumped it out in the far-from-aromatic bathhouse outside every morning, where I would also do my “bathing” by standing up with a basin of water by my side and a cup in hand to pour the water over me. One day, I cut off a chicken’s head and helped my host mom de-feather and gut it with boiled water and a dull knife. I washed my cement floor with a perpetually dirty mop that could turn a clear bucket of water brown with one touch, and ate endless helpings of bread and rice and crackers and other carbohydrate-rich food, and tried to enjoy the exchange of gestures with my host family where my broken Portuguese should have been carrying more weight. I tried to enjoy these moments, and when I did, it was usually because they were unfamiliar and overwhelming, or, at times, terrifying and thrilling. Like the moment you climb on to a rollercoaster you’ve never ridden and, what seems like a second later, are suddenly back at the entrance gate, I sawed that chicken’s head off with my host mother’s dull knife. I mopped my floor to “clean” it and “bathed” and sometimes caught myself thinking of how things really are. In reality, people take showers. In reality, people go to the bathroom on a real toilet. In reality, people use clean mops to wash their floors. Half way through my time spent in Namaacha, a village in southern Mozambique rich with morning mists, half-hatched (or, probably more likely, never brooded) home renovations, and velvety-smooth hills where the other 55 Peace Corps trainees (PCTs) and myself spent the first 10 weeks in training, I began to come to terms with the fact that I had moved, (semi-) permanently. I remember the moment I became aware of it. At the five-week mark, I was sitting in a chapa (a mini-van-esque taxi used to travel here in Mozambique), looking out the window, watching vendors on the street of Maputo, the country capital, selling donated clothes, dusty buckets, and fried dough pastries carted straight from the vendors’ kitchens. I became aware that I was observing without comparing. Where I am and what I am seeing is right, independent of other realities. As a good friend said to me, your host mother’s version of a clean floor is just as valid as your birth mother’s version of a clean floor, however different they may be. Now that I have made it through training and have sworn in as an official volunteer, I live in Lioma, a small administrative post (in Portuguese, “posto administrativo” is considered to be smaller than a city or village, but bigger than just a “posto” because it includes other amenities; for example, Lioma has a small health center and electricity) in the central province of Zambezia. I live alone in a two-bedroom home. My bathhouse/bathroom is outside, and contains two drains – one for bathing water, and one for other necessities. I cart bathing, drinking, and cooking water from a pump that sits a 15-minute walk away from my house. I have a mango tree in my backyard that I believed to be broken for the first few days because so few fruit grow on it. Actually, children sneak into my yard in the early morning hours and pick the mangos to sell at the market during the day. Yesterday my friend, Matt, a volunteer in the Nampula province, informed me that there would be a meteor shower that evening. So last night, I flipped off the light in my house and pulled a chair outside, mango in hand. At first I couldn’t see much of anything, but my eyes soon adjusted to the dark, and quite suddenly the sky was no longer blank and as I shaved the skin off my mango, I saw a few stars escaping across the sky way up there into the blackness. My life here in Lioma is not so different from my life in Namaacha. I still sweep my cement floor, still bathe with a bucket, and still cook with a coal stove – though I probably won’t be killing another chicken on my own any time soon. But the way our eyes acclimate to darkness so that we can better see, my life here feels less like an amusement park ride every day. Slowly, we start to give in and accept. We open up to a new home.
1 Comment
Teri holland
4/2/2015 07:35:33 am
Love reading your blog . What an adventure . Wow good for you . I talked to your mom today she told me all about what you were doing with the peace corp . Can't wait to share with Eric ..I'll keep in touch . Take care . Teri
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