Permaculture training, putting it to practice, and getting ready to travel north!

Thursday October 29th, 2009
So for the past two days we’ve gotten a welcomed break from our normally scheduled classes in order to go out to the fields and learn about an agriculture technique called “Permaculture.” The term comes from the union of “permanent agriculture” and is called such because the method tries to achieve small scale, sustainable agriculture success for families with a very limited space to plant. As we found out over the past two days, the technique is thousands of years old, but has just recently been popularly promoted by people all over the world as an effective method of farming. In fact, this was the first time that PC Mozambique had decided to devote time to it during PST and I’ll go ahead and say that the overwhelming consensus was that it was time well spent!

With this training behind me and with the resources that the PC is going to provide us regarding agriculture, I’m really confident that I will be promoting this technique in my community. Not only will it hopefully give my community members a better yield of crops, but it likely will also provide an opportunity for people in my community to better relate to me and give me a chance to broach several health topics regarding agriculture and nutrition.

That said, Permaculture is different from how most Mozambicans do their agriculture and I suspect that there will be a lot of resistance to change. The technique has a few key pillars to its implementation and some are significantly more labor intensive than the traditional agriculture technique here. Our permaculture training instructed us that a “double dig” (literally digging once, then pushing that dirt out of the way and digging again) and mixing the soil with compost ,among other things, will significantly enrich the soil and easily allow the plant’s roots to grow deep into the earth so the plant can grow tall and healthy. Both of these techniques, the double dig and adding compost, put air into the soil and thus it is essential to keep people off of the plant bed once dug. However, this is easier said than done here in Mozambique because you have to worry about the whole neighborhood’s children and animals running around in your yard and having to construct a fence around the plant bed is just another barrier keeping people from changing their current agriculture practices.

Thinking about all this, I want to get my family to try it out, even though they have comparatively a lot of land, just so that I can get some practice explaining the rational to people in Portuguese and have some actual experience planting things outside of Farmville (that one’s for you Mariah, Mom, and Ricky)! We’ll see how receptive they are to it…

Sunday November 1st, 2009
I’ve realized over the past several days that even though Mozambique doesn’t choose to readily acknowledge four seasons (usually they only refer to winter and summer A.K.A. the dry and rainy seasons), that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a period of time where it is still cold, yet periodically rains (i.e. this whole week!). Today, however, is a warm day with no rain and hopefully it is just a sneak peak of what more is to come…

So after writing about my experience with Permaculture on Thursday night, I fell asleep just as my body was beginning to feel the effects of 2 days in the cold, wet fields (or as they say here in Mozambique, in the cold, wet “Machambas”). I was feeling pretty achy when I woke up the next morning, but decided to try and tough it out through the day of classes. Bad idea! The morning went by without incident, but I didn’t make it too far into the afternoon’s classes before I started feeling horrible and ended up having to go home early and rest. I passed out on my bed early in the afternoon with my t-shirt halfway off and my jeans still around my knees and could very well have made it through to the next morning like that if it wasn’t for my host mom’s thunderous knocking letting me know that, sick or not, it was time to take a shower and eat dinner. Despite my moans and groans, the shower really did feel pretty good and it was a tasty, filling dinner. It also gave me a chance to call up my friend Matt (previously shown in a lot of my pictures, most recently crushing up peanuts with his mother during the Mozambican luncheon with my language group) and he quickly came to my rescue with a bottle of ibuprofen that really helped me make it though the weekend’s Halloween festivities.

Saturday morning I woke up feeling better, but knowing that I was still pretty weak and wanting to test out my strength before the Halloween party later that night. I remembered that the capulanas (a traditional Mozambican cloth that is typically wrapped around a woman’s waist like a skirt) which I bought and dropped off to be made into shirts were ready, so my brother and I walked across town to pick up the shirts and test out how I was really feeling. Although the trip was tough on my body, I decided that, sick or not, I had been talking up the party for a while with my host brothers and I really didn’t want to let them down by backing out at the last minute.

The party went off without a hitch and I actually continued to feel better and better as we went through the evening. Walking from my host family’s house to the party was quite the spectacle. My host brothers knew that I had been planning on dressing up as the Chiquita banana woman for some time, but when it came time to head out for the party they couldn’t believe that I was actually going to walk all the way across Namaacha in the dress. Consequently, my host brothers both chickened out at the last moment in joining me as Chiquita banana women and instead left for the party without costumes. When we got to the party, however, we ran into a PC friend of mine and his host brothers who had bought several rolls of toilet paper and were wrapping themselves to dress like mummies. My younger brother, Ramadan (the serious one), immediately decided that he also wanted to be a mummy and we made quite the couple at the party together (hopefully I’ll be able to get a picture of this for you all soon). After the family oriented portion of the party ended around 8:30, I walked my brothers back home, changed clothes, and then headed back out for Palushas after a quick dinner. The Halloween dance party at Palushas was really fun and didn’t run too late into the night (we had to be home by midnight). Getting a bunch of Americans together to celebrate the occasion really made Mozambique feel a little bit more like home and lessened the reality that we are so far away from our friends (I miss you all!).

This morning I went to church as usual, but switched things up a little by singing “I’ll fly away” in front of the congregation with my host mom (even though I wrote out the lyrics for the song for her, she still mostly just hummed the tune while I sang) since all the other volunteers flaked out on coming to church the morning after the Halloween party. The whole church service I thought about how in a few hours my family would be going to church in Gainesville for All Saints Day to remember Memom, my grandmother who recently passed away, and thus I spent a lot of the service thinking about her (I wish I could have been there).

Later in the day, I ended up running errands with my brother Ramadan trying to get ready to make my small Machamba in front of my host family’s house. We went around the neighborhood buying manure, gathering small pieces of char/ash, and getting seeds before finally heading back home to start digging. With the help of my brothers, we completed the first dig today and tomorrow we should finish up with second dig and possibly plant the seeds.

Monday November 2nd, 2009
Today my oldest brother (Lissaio) and I finished digging the two plant beds (it’s a lot harder when you don’t have 3 or 4 people helping you) and then planted and watered the seeds. I don’t think that I’ve mentioned this before, but the PC trainees are going on “site visits” this weekend to give us an idea of what it might actually be like once we get to our sites in December. I am not exactly sure about all the details, but when I come back next Wednesday, hopefully the seeds will be germinating and the ground won’t be compacted by the neighborhood’s roaming chickens or my youngest brother (Eunicio) and his gang of 5 year old friends.

On a small side note, I cut my hair really short after planting the seeds this afternoon and now it feels so cold! I can’t wait for my hair to grow back or for the weather to warm back up a little (whichever comes first!).
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
It’s official! I’m going north to the province of Zambezia for my site visit. I don’t know too much about the details, but a group of us are flying out of Maputo to Quelimane (the capital city of Zambezia) on Saturday and won’t be back in Namaacha until Wednesday evening. I am really looking forward to breaking up the routine of training in any way possible and I can’t wait to get out and see what other parts of Mozambique are like. I’ll post again later next week after I get back from my site visit…

One Love,
Michael


Me and my brothers getting ready to go to the Halloween party! I'm supposed to be the Mozambican Chiquita Banana Woman


My brother watering our newly planted Machamba!


Me sporting my new hair cut and new Mozambican shirt made from a calpulana.