PST and Permagardens... AGAIN!

Thursday November 4rd, 2010
Listen up! Word to the wise: As of about a month ago, there’s a new kid in town... which means…. Yep! You guessed it!... We’re no longer the newbie punching bags around here. We’re actually (scary thought!) the experienced, all-powerful, all-knowing, wise sage-esk PCVs who have never and will never make any mistakes! I mean, as soon as December comes around and all the ole’ 13ers have packed their bags, tucked their tales, and run back to the States… we’re practically going to be running this program!

Okay, so I’ll admit it… all that is a little ridiculous... to say the least! Moz 13 has always been really nice to us (Moz 14) and my guess is that a lot of the new incoming Moz Health PCVs probably have more experience/knowledge than I do. So don’t worry too much about all those ramblings above regarding us running this joint. Ultimately, the take home point is this: there’s a new group of PCT’s (Moz 15) and I’m down in Namaacha this week to help out with their training :-)

And from my limited interactions with them thus far, they seem to be a pretty cool group! They are a lot more demographically diverse (ie age, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc) than our group and, sure enough, have more degrees and experience than Moz 14 to boot (a few people have MPHs and there’s even someone who has already served as a PCV in another country for 2 years and is back here for 2 more… Wow! Can’t imagine…)!

I said “limited interactions” above because, after paying for all us volunteers to come down to Namaacha from all over the country to help out with training, Peace Corps is actually demanding that we do work while we’re here. Imagine their nerve! ;-) This whole week, Yohko and I have stayed quite busy during the day helping out with meetings and even during our downtime in the evenings we find ourselves planning for other sessions.

Luckily, though, our visit to training coincides with Permagardening (the don’t call it Permaculture anymore because it isn’t a complete inclusion of all of Permaculture’s principles) so several sessions are being led by the awe-inspiring Peter Jensen… which means we get to chill in the background and just try to keep the group motivated. Peter, even fresh-off a flight from Dar-es-Salaam, has been his inspirational self as usual. The group has had several people who have really gotten into Permagardening during the training… hopefully they’ll do a better job than us keeping up the momentum once they get to their sites (our group had several people who jumped head first into Permaculture during training, but quickly lost steam once outside Namaacha… myself included!). During the hands-on sessions in the practice garden I had a chance to ask Peter about some of my lingering questions and now I feel reenergized to tackle the topic again in Nauela. Can’t wait to get back to site to try things out again!

So even though I just said I am always busy down here… somehow I’ve managed to visit my host family 3 times during the week, hanging out and talking with them over dinner. They are all doing well and the kids growing up so quickly! (I feel like a grandparent when I say that…) I even got to bring my computer over yesterday evening and showed them my photos from the past year at site. They loved ‘em, especially the one’s of the mountains and my garden. They aren’t hosting a volunteer this year because PC decided their house was too far away from the center of town… but that’s a shame because they are, as I relearned in the past few days, AWESOME!

In short, the week has been GREAT thus far… but issues with my visa are lurking ahead…

Turns out the Mozambican government skyrocketed the price of visas this year and Peace Corps Mozambique hasn’t gotten the new budget approved yet for those price increases. So what to do? Well if you are at site, you’re advised to stay put… but since I’m here in Namaacha already, we figure it’s best that I get a temporary 30 day visa at the Swaziland border to buy us some time. The catch is, however, that my current year-long visa expires on Tuesday and you can’t get a temporary visa when your current visa is still active. Right now, the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants idea is for me to stick around Maputo/Namaacha and fly back to Nampula once it gets resolved… whenever that is! Sooo… looks like a few extra days with the new trainees :-)


Sunday November 7th, 2010
Even though we’re no experts on child nutrition, our Friday afternoon sessions on the subject go pretty well. I feel really happy because the PCTs were interacting a lot with Yohko and I, suggesting that they were at least somewhat interested and engaged in our discussions and games. What makes it even more impressive is that it was almost the weekend and they are in the “hump” week of training... so what I’m saying is that we’re pretty much awesome at this whole training instructor thing ;-)

***

I glance down at my watch. Eh, what does that say? The sweat dripping down from my brow doesn’t make it any easier to read the time as I fly downhill running. My pace slows and I pause for a moment: 3:55pm. Almost late! I turn around the corner at the bottom of the hill as instructed and follow the length of the gigantic baize wall topped with terrifying spikes rising up on my left … I must almost be there … Finally, an entrance! Armed guards peer out and cautiously swing open the heavy gate while demanding to see my documents. Long after my breathing slows, they eventually accept my story and let me pass unscathed. Two steps forward and the metal gate slams shut behind me.

“Where am I?” Visiting a maximum security prison? Seeking out the ambassador at the U.S. embassy? Trying to gain the attention of His Excellence Armando Emilio Guebuza (President of Mozambique)?

No silly! All those hyped up security measures are solely for the USAID housing complex: an oasis of American livelihood tucked away in one of Maputo’s many nooks and crannies. Although located just a stone’s throw from the water’s edge, there is no ocean view from these mansions (relatively speaking). The 12-foot-tall fortification surrounding the complex prevents any chance of that. The houses (and their occupants) are cut off from the view of the outside world and are seemingly content to do without even a small peek into what is beyond their walls. And why not? Upon stepping foot inside the compound, one immediately feels the relief of having escaped all the poverty, crime, and problems that run rampant in the surrounding streets, as if one has stepped through some kind of magical transport to America’s pristine suburbia. A little creepy at first actually…

Just past the guarded entrance, I’m awestruck. A year ago I wouldn’t have even given it a second thought. “Ho hum. Nothing special...” But halfway through my Peace Corps service, a good ole’ American cul-de-sac has me near trembling as I slowly move about the houses. It’s a feeling difficult to describe to those of you back at home, but there is something eerie, yet exciting and nostalgic, about simply watching the neighborhood kids run around on grassy lawns, escape the summer heat by splashing one another in inflatable swimming pools, and contently dig around in a sandbox as the time passes by. While it reminds me so much of home, it all seems so out of place and unreal here in Mozambique!

The inside of my host’s house is no less surprising. Of course there are the basic amenities of a nice house in a big city (running water, electricity, television, air-conditioning, tiles/carpeting, etc), but there are also more startling, unique aspects of the house: the shelves are stalked with American goodies (apparently each family is granted a 2,500 pound non-perishable food shipment once a year) and the kitchen is outfitted with all the household appliances you could ever dream of (including a waffle press that we definitely made use of the following morning!). The bedrooms contain various workout machines, the playroom has a huge doll house, the extra bathroom is storing a recently used microbrew kit, and the living room boasts beer on tap… ridiculous! Exploring the house’s nuances, perhaps the only real reminders of the African locale are the various pieces of art hung throughout the living space: African masks, batiks, sculptures and the like. A nice house I was prepared for. I’ve been in plenty of them in Quelimane, Nampula, and even Maputo. Just none that so well imitated all the little intricacies of American life. It’s crazy!

Needless to say, I man up and adapt. ;-) Soon the shock wears off and my mindset melds comfortably with this secluded overseas American lifestyle. That night, I sleep in an air-conditioned room on an extra cushy, king-size bed and wake up feeling PRETTY DARN refreshed. On the slate for breakfast? Home-made waffles, of course! Sunday morning plans? Lending a hand constructing the neighborhood playground set bought and delivered from Home Depot!... Next up for lunch? Delivered pizza!... Seriously?! This is just ridiculous and TOO fun, but a nice escape from the past year of roughing it :-)

If my hosts are out there reading this back in Maputo… just want to say thank you all so much for your hospitality and generosity! You guys are awesome and inspire me give back to others around me in need :-)

***

I come back to PST in Namaacha telling the trainees about my weekend digs/activities and there’s definitely a hint of jealousy in their responses. Some say “That’s great!” or “Sweet!”… others are a little indignant replying “Is that what our tax dollars are paying for?!” and “Now THAT is exactly what’s wrong with international development!”

I immediately rebuke them (initially probably because of how well it has treated me in the past two days!), but taking a step back, Are they right in some way? Is all this luxury, associated exclusively with expat State and development workers, in the middle of so much poverty, a bad thing?

What do you all back home think?


Tuesday November 16th, 2010
Big pot, little pot – a comparison:
One thing I’ve noticed since arriving here in Nauela is that, when preparing meals, people usually have two pots: A big one for rice/xima and another, significantly smaller, one for whatever sauce (flavoring) they can scrounge up. Sometimes, in the drier months, the smaller pot disappears and all that’s served for dinner is a helping of xima or nothing at all.
I, on the other hand, also have the two pot system working for me, but it’s oftentimes the opposite: the big pot for sauce and the other smaller one for rice (never xima!).
The tale of the two pots illustrates many things. 1) Usually I am eating alone or with one other person so we don’t need a lot of base carbs 2) I have more money to buy whatever sauce I need at a moment’s notice 3) Maize and rice are easy to store for long periods of time and are, generally speaking, readily available in the area. 4) There’s a cultural preference of filling up the belly with carbs whether or not there is other food available.

***

Renewing the permagarden spirit:
Since arriving back at site from my week or so at PST (where I helped out with Permaculture lessons), I’ve become all jazzed-up again about teaching aspects of Permagardening in the community. Last year I was really worried about stepping on toes and trying to educate a farmer population about agricultural practices when I really had no clue as to what the heck I was talking about! I mean I had never even grown a vegetable before… How am I supposed to tell a life-long farmer what do differently?!

This year things are going to be a little different. Everyone saw me successfully grow a number of crops last year (in a place and during the time of year when most people said the plants couldn’t be grown) and are interested to see how I’m doing it. So far it’s been pretty easy to get an audience. I started up a new compost pile next to my house by gathering fallen leaves along the street and neighbors immediately starting asking me what the heck I was doing. I politely responded, telling them just enough to gain their attention and then left ‘em dangling wanting more. In the end, I agreed to teach composting at the houses of several neighbors over the next week or so and even talk to the local church about various agriculture problems people are having. First I’ll ask them to share their problems and then I’ll suggest some solutions and we’ll see how it goes from there. Maybe people will want to do some kind of training, maybe not. Either way, I’m definitely still trying to approach the Ag issue with a lot of humbleness.

***

Today was the day: my first loss at chess in Nauela to a young man named Vladimiro, a Mozambican from Quelimane who is in town to help proctor the end-of-the-year national exams. I find out after the loss that he’s won the Zambezia provincial chess championship several times in the past. So… I don’t feel too bad about losing to him :-) At the end of the match I also talked to him about me trying to start up a chess club here and he promised that before he left, he’d give me another chess board and chess strategy manual, in Portuguese, to help our chess club start off strong at the beginning of next school year.

Speaking of chess makes me think of my best and most fervent chess student: Rogerio, my rapaz. Sad thing is that as soon as I came back to Nauela from PST I discovered that he had failed ALL of his classes this year! Now it looks like he’s going to have to repeat (again) 10th grade. Not sure if he’ll be back in Nauela anytime soon to talk about it, but I’m REALLY bummed! He’s a smart kid, but people (other students/teachers) tell me now that’s he just hasn’t been working hard this whole year.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new thing. Students have been telling me that he’s been missing classes and not putting forth all his effort all year, but when I approached him about it in the past he said those people were lying and just trying to get him in trouble because they (or a friend of theirs) wanted to work for me in his place. I took his word for it, but never went to his classroom and actually talked with his teacher. My mistake… :-(

Worst thing is that I had these grand hopes of him passing 10th grade and then me helping sponsor his schooling next school year in Alto Moloque (we don’t have 11th and 12th grade here in Nauela). But now that it seems he hasn’t been trying academically all along, I feel that he has lost that opportunity. A downer for me and him both. I wanted it to work out SO bad! You can get so frustrated sometimes when things like this happen. Here’s a kid who so much going for him… and he just let it slip away.

***

Random thought. During my last blog post, I referred to how I was happy about how the Natural Medicine training here in Nauela had gone. In the same breath, I also briefly spoke out about how it definitely WASN’T a perfect training by any stretch of the imagination (we’ll see if any of the knowledge spreads throughout the community…) , but at least there purposefully hadn’t been huge amounts of excessive money and/or outside resources thrown into it. Below is a real life example of how heavy-funded trainings can go wrong:

Trainings can be such a waste! Just the other day I was visiting a fellow volunteer’s site when I ran across an expat NGO doctor who was discussing the highs and lows of this week-long training she had spent months setting up and how she is now neck-deep in frustrations.

In this international development age of “sustainability and capacity building” (definitely jargon words!), trainings aren’t supposed to be put on entirely by ex-pat staff members (NGO’s in Mozambique actually have a maximum percentage (10%?)of their in-country workforce that can be foreigners). No, instead trainings should be partnerships where host-country nationals are the main facilitators. This is good because they are obviously fluent in the language and cultural norms, but can be bad if they aren’t up to par on the information they are doling out.

This one particular doctor was going off, talking about how her overly zealous host-country national counterparts were simply fabricating answers to health questions they didn’t know, rather than admit to their ignorance and appeal to a higher authority (the medical doctor) for the answer (as one might expect, the imaginative answers were quite WRONG). Some of the information had been so erroneous that, when nearing the end of the training, the doctor was simply hoping that the people attending the training would FORGET all that they learned that week because it’d be better than spreading all the false information they had been fed.

Hear that?! That’s the sound of $8000 USD down the drain! Not to be too harsh, but seriously… what is there to show for the monetary investment? Wrong concepts being taught, transportation and a week’s worth of food and lodging for the participants and trainers… and best of all… the infamous per diem.

Even though the trainees were all getting fed breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the NGO was still providing every person with 1000 mets per diem (that’s 5000-6000 mets for the week… a small fortune for a lot of people here in Zambezia!). And what for exactly? Good question… As I saw the trainees loading into their privately rented chapa at the end of the week, packed in the back seat were newly purchased speakers, TVs, and DVD players to name a few… riddle solved.

Not too be too critical of Mozambican’s who take full advantage of the per diem thrown at them… We, PCVs, look forward to per diem handouts surrounding periodic meetings from our partnered organizations too. In my opinion, the problem isn’t those who are using what they are given… it’s at the people who are giving it! Seriously though, sometimes I feel that international NGOs are just trying to find semi-legit reason to spend all their money so they won’t get a budget cut down the road…


Thursday November 18th, 2010
Site placement :
Amanda is at PST this week and today was the long anticipated day of site placement for the new PCVs! Yay! They find out where they’ll be for the next 2 years and we take a look at who’ll be our new neighbors for our last leg of the Peace Corps journey. During my week at training, I met all of the Moz 15 health volunteers, but the closest new volunteers will all be from the education sector. So although the mystery has been revealed as to who’ll be replacing the exiting Moz 13ers around me, right now all I’ve got is a list of names without faces. Still… exciting stuff!

Up in flames:
Nauela is an area of pyromaniacs! Seriously! Sure you could argue that some/most of the burning is necessary or at least functional (ie the parents going to their fields and lighting last year’s crop refuse on fire to make way for this year’s), but I’d also argue that they enjoy it to some degree… maybe too much for their own good!

Thing is, all too often these flames come back to haunt the surrounding communities and yet somehow everyone is still amazed it happens again and again. Flash back: two months ago, a whole mountainside field of un-harvested beans is engulfed in flames and ruined by some drunk teenager playing with matches. Flash back: one month ago, an area church goes up in smoke when someone leaves their burning trash pile unattended and a rogue flame flies on top of the nearby grass roof. Today, more of the same: a little boy is flippantly lighting matches, trying to imitate his parents and, poof!, there goes a makeshift stick house with a grass roof (Thank God that at least no one was injured in all these fires…).

This most recent burning is the only one I got to witness up close and personal and thus it made a big impact on me. With the dried grass roof acting as fuel for the eager fire, it is incredible, but not surprising, how swiftly the entire house burst into flames and was reduced to embers… only in a matter of minutes really.

Quick add on: Although not the entire reason for the preference of tin roofs, being flame retardant is definitely a plus. I recently discovered that the primary reason for saving up to buy a tin roof (each sheet cost about 250 mets, or $8 dollars, and a house needs around 20… so about $160!) is actually so that you won’t have to keep taking off last year’s aged grass, going out into bush to cut and collect new grass, and then replacing/adding a new layer to the roof (all the while worrying about the excessive weight that builds up from layers of grass). A tin roof is a HUGE expense for the people here that are mostly living hand-to-mouth, but people recognize that it’s a great investment because it saves 2-4 WEEKS of labor a year by avoiding having to go out and redo the roof.

Actually, a little trick of the trade for you here in Mozambique… When approaching a rural community, one can (generally speaking) quickly tell the agricultural success of the area by simply seeing how many tin roofs are in place. If the general population has enough money to be doing some long-term investing (a tin roof mind you… we’re not talking about Wall Street here!), then things are going pretty well!

Friday November 19th, 2010
Going against my roots:
Gainesville, FL (where I was born and raised) is a pretty tree hugger place I feel. And I have welcomed and embraced that vibe my whole life (generally speaking)… until today!

Picture this: me in the middle of some scrubby bushes with a machete in my hand, whaling away with all the force I have at a big tree branch. Now picture this: me still in the bush… but with the machete now on the ground as I’ve given up on cutting through the rock-solid branch and have now resolved to try to use my weight to pull the branch off. It finally gives and I haul it off to my bicycle to strap on and transport (along with 5 other similar branches) back to my house to extend my shade hut for my growing number of compost piles.

In my mind, I can justify it all though. So listen before you judge me too much... You see, the thing is… I didn’t actually KILL the trees. I just cut off one lousy branch from each tree. I mean… you could look all around and see where people had cut off other limbs and new ones were already budding off. It’s an aggressive form of pruning really!

Now that I think about how great a wild undergrowth gardener I am, I might even go back in the next few days and do it again!… After all, I do need a fence for my garden to keep all those darn pigs out :-)


Saturday November 20th, 2010
Two scheduled compost lessons done… already THREE compost piles throughout Nauela (and that’s not even including the two at my house). Yep, that’s right! The first group (two area high school boys) I taught the other day came by this afternoon and informed me that they’d already gone over to a friend’s house and done another pile at their house. So exciting for me to see how energized they have gotten about it! Now I just hope that they maintain the piles and it helps their gardens. But I guess that’s my responsibility too with that whole Monitoring and Evaluation stuff we always talk about ;-)


Thursday November 25th, 2010
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone back at home (or wherever you all might be now you world travels)! I just wanted to take this moment to let you all know that I’ve been thinking about you all today and I’m definitely thankful for having you all in my life in some shape or form. I hope your holidays are starting off on the right foot… with some Thanksgiving day-stuffed bellies! :-)