One thing that strongly characterized my time in the Peace Corps was change. Not necessarily the positive change that I was helping create in the community (although there are some examples of that), but more so project transition related. Because the Peace Corps encourages their volunteers to never take more than a co-leader role in projects, I spent much of my service shifting back and forth between project leaders who had the time, energy, and motivation to work at that moment. There were weeks when I would work almost daily with one NGO, group, or association and then suddenly not hear from them again for months at a time.
So what did I do exactly?
Several things :-) So read below if you want to know more….
FGH (Friends in Global Health – My primary assignment through the Peace Corps was a partnership with Friends in Global Health (FGH), an international non-governmental organization (I-NGO) based out of the Institute for Global Health at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. As an organization, FGH has the responsibility of supplementing Mozambique’s national health care system with materials and personnel to better address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Zambezia province. That said, FGH is not the only health NGO in the Zambezia province. While FGH is working in the majority of Zambezia’s districts, ICAP (who also partnered with several PCVs) is also in charge of the health care efforts in several of the province’s more urban districts. Within the area that FGH works though, they are largely based out of the main hospital in the district capitals, with a few of the districts having weekly mobile clinics that travel to set rural health posts. To better organize their efforts, FGH is divided into two main branches: medical care and community outreach. All the PCVs who were partnered with FGH during my service fell into the community outreach side of things and I was placed in one of the small towns where FGH had their weekly mobile clinics.In the community where I lived, Nauela, one of FGH’s main goals was to form, legalize, and give direction to a PLWHA group at the area health post. I worked with various people in the community to make this a reality, but the first association eventually disbanded and FGH sought instead to strengthen and legalize an existing community church group in Mihecane.
Another goal that FGH started focusing in on during my last several months of service was food security for PLWHA through teaching Permaculture techniques. To accomplish this they asked me to visit several districts and teach Permaculture to local, FGH-sponsored associations. During this time I was able to visit four districts and hold two-day trainings with over 100 individuals.
Due to the limited presence of FGH in Nauela however, I often found myself working with other NGOs and community members to help promote other healthy practices in the community. Below are some of the other organizations, associations, and groups that I worked extensively with at my site:
Lurdes Mutola Foundation – Lurdes Mutola is a famous runner from Mozambique who established her own foundation here in 2001 to promote the woman’s role in Mozambican society. Within the foundation, there were several programs that were going on in different places throughout the country. Passabola was the program that existed in the Zambezia and Nampula provinces with the goal to encourage young Mozambicans (particularly females) to participate in sports. The project worked to train coaches to better teach life/health skills through sports.Ultimately I worked alongside local counterparts to monitor and evaluate the program’s implementation by the trained youth soccer coaches after their initial training had been completed via weekly field visits and monthly meetings.
IBIS –A Danish NGO based out of Alto Molócuè that is dedicated to furthering development through improvements in education. At the time their project was called “escolas felizes”, or “happy schools”, where they selected a handful of schools (5?) in the Alto Molócuè district to participate in trainings geared to improve the overall education experience of the student, thereby reducing the number of dropouts. In these trainings, IBIS encouraged them to do several projects, including: building a perimeter to mark the school’s boundaries, creating designated play areas where kids can enjoy themselves and be creative, building a school library where kids can read the books provided by IBIS, building more classrooms to accommodate more students in more space, starting a school machamba to both teach and help feed the students, and implement interactive methods of teaching.
The hope was that after a number of selected model schools had become “happy schools”, neighboring schools will mimic at least some of the practices and the methodology will spread throughout the area school system.
The school that IBIS and I had been working together at was a primary school in Mitxaiane, located southeast of Nauela toward Alto Molócuè. At one point we had hoped to develop our partnership, with me co-facilitating a series of training sessions geared toward the school advisory council and teachers on the topics of sanitation, permaculture, and the development of the role of women in the school and community, but after working together consistently over a 2-3 month period, our relationship slowed and ended because of logistical problems (i.e. – community back and forth between Molócuè and Mitxaiane they were having to go out of their way to get me in Nauela-sede)
JOMA (Jovens para Mudança and Accão)– At the time, one of PC Mozambique’s main outreach programs for young men and women. The program had yearly regional conferences during the schools’ first trimester break where secondary school students in the groups had the opportunity to learn about HIV/AIDS prevention and other health topics and then get trained in areas such as theater, journalism, photography, art, etc as a medium to present those health topics. Each group chose what area, if any, they wanted to focus on and then use that medium to communicate positive health messages to their local communities.For the first several months of my service I was a co-leader of my local JOMA theater group and my main role was to guide the group in deciding the topics of theater pieces, help with basic theater techniques, and give a few health lessons followed by short discussions. After those several months the group suffered due to a lack of attendance by group members and eventually I started up a small chess group which didn’t have too much success, it met sporadically and unofficially, but taught many individuals how to play chess.
