the parent trip

i went to maputo to meet them, and they were about the last people off the plane. we didn't get to our hotel til after 11, we were all exhausted but hungry, so we went downstairs to a local bar to find something to eat. they told us they didn't have anything to eat cuz it was late, so we ordered drinks and bought bad potato chips from a street vendor. then we saw the waitress bringing grilled cheese sandwiches to a table next to us, and were like, wtf?, so we asked and she said, "oh, we just have sandwiches, not real food".....yeah. welcome to mozambique guys! the next day we got up and caught a chapa to namaacha to visit my host family. it was totally surreal to be sitting on a chapa with my parents. worlds colliding! and then it was totally amazing to be back in namaacha. my family was awesome as usual, because of the cell-phone problem i'd only been able to re-remind them we were coming the day before, and they were like "sure, show up with your family, no problem!" we basically just relaxed with them, had good meals, my host-mom plied my dad with beer, my real mom plied my host-sisters with questions; my family harangued a cousin or something into driving us around town so they could see the swazi border and my host-mom somehow convinced the border guards to actually let us walk past the mozambican immigration (we'd left our passports at home), all the way up to the sign that said "Welcome to Swaziland." crazy. the next day after lunch we headed back to maputo, did a little walking around the central market and got some souvenirs, and rested a bit. then went out for thai food for dinner with my old boss juliana, her mom, and her empregada/my friend luizinha. it was a strange combination of people at the table, only juliana and i spoke both english and portuguese so there was a lot of halted conversation and translation, but it was really wonderful.

the day after we headed to quelimane where we had a whirlwind tour. my parents of course wanted to see everything, and everyone i know wanted to meet them. we had exactly one meal in my house because people kept inviting us over, i've never had such a busy social calendar! we rented a car, which seemed like a bit of a luxury but also completely necessary in order to see everything. and luckily laras had vacation at the same time and was a saint and drove us around the entire time. the first full day, while laras picked up the car, we walked to town, and even tho for me it was finally cooling off it was sweltering for them coming from spring in new england and they almost melted. but we cooled off, they saw the icap office and met some of my co-workers, and after lunch we drove around so they could see the city and the variety of neighborhoods, even went to some places i'd never been! that night was our one and only meal at home, laras and i made coconut rice and fish, and my parents got to experience grating coconut and cooking on my charcoal stove, it was pretty fun. i'm having trouble remembering the exact order of our other adventures, but here's what else we did:

we ate out: one breakfast at laras's aunt's house (mandioca with coconut); one breakfast at paulo the peer educator's house (mandioca and mucapata and coconut water); dinner at a restaurant with my bestest pc friends (half-chickens all around!); lunch at laras's mom's house (matapa, mucapata, chicken); dinner with my land-lord's family (matapa, beans, 2 kinds of chicken, fish); drinks at the top of hotel chuabo, watching the sun set over the river; and dinner at my friend gina's house (matapa and zambezian chicken). we were stuffed silly the entire time.

we drove to gurue, a beautiful town in central zambezia. it was about a 6 hour drive, and we went there and back in a day. it was pretty ridiculous, i know, but i think it was worth it. mom and dad got to see a lot of scenery, and lots of different towns and places i've talked about a lot. laras really wanted to take my parents there because he'd lived there for several years, and we had a great time. we walked around the market there and bought capulanas, then drove up a long, windy, narrow, cliff-side path to the top of a hill, to a place called casa dos noivos (the newly-weds' house). the house itself was pretty run down, but you could tell it had been lovely once. and the view from the top was incredible, you could see forever. the only thing i could compare it to was a national park i visited in brazil, but this vista had the added bonus of being full of gorgeous green hills, so it felt more like home. after a picnic lunch at the top of the hill we drove all the way home again. again, ridiculous, but worth it.

another day we visited a house where they're running the sewing training i mentioned in my last post. mom and dad got measured for capulana clothes. we then went to visit paulo, one of the peer educator leaders and my counterpart for permaculture, he'd invited us over, and was so proud to show us his machamba (farm), serve us food from his land, and introduce us to his infant twins who'd i'd been given the honor of naming, and did so after my dad's parents, frank and ruth. it was really touching both to see dad with the babies and to hear paulo thank my parents for sending me to africa and for all the help i've given him. from there we drove through nicoadala, where laras lives during the week, through licuare, where he works during the week, to luala, where we picked up gina, my best mozambican friend, who teaches there. we surprised her at her house and it was so amazing to see her, we'd been out of touch for weeks between my work and hers and the cell phone problems. she gave me and my parents huge hugs, it was like she'd known them forever. we piled her and her son into the car and kidnapped them to continue on our field trip. the destination of the day was the Zambeze River, famed in song and story, and southern border of zambezia province. it's always farther than i think it is, but i think it was worth it, kind of a mile-stone, and more beautiful views. we drove back to nicoadala and a late lunch at laras's house, then went north to the Lagoa Azul ("Blue Lagoon"), a famous local beach spot i've never been to. we had to bribe a guard to get into the grounds, but we got there just in time for sunset, it was beautiful.

on a sunday my mom and i went to church, something she'd really wanted to do. i hunted down the anglican (episcopal) church in queli, not easy to find, it's off the street and still under construction. it appeared "normal," pews, ornaments on the altar, etc. the format of the service was pretty traditional, it was luckily in portuguese not chuabo so i could translate the basics for my mom, until it came time for the sermon, when a handsomely dressed lay-woman stood up and began to basically re-hash all the readings, in english and portuguese (turned out she was nigerian, but never figured out if the english was solely for our benefit or not), with a lot of fire-and-brimstone style moralizing. the sermon lasted over an hour, by which point my mom was getting antsy to leave, which i thought was kind of funny. but the service wasn't complete until we newcomers had stood up front and introduced ourselves. i hate that. but we survived. we went straight from church to the beach with some of my pcv friends. we'd forgone the prettier beach for the long trip to gurue, but my parents couldn't leave without putting their feet in the indian ocean. that's probably about all they did cuz it started raining not long after we got there, but it was pretty and we relaxed and had a nice lunch afterwards.

and that's it. i can't tell if it sounds like a lot, but it sure felt like a lot! i think just 5 full days in quelimane. i think we were all exhausted by the time it was over. at times it was a little odd to be mixing my worlds like that, but mostly i was really pleased with how easily my parents fit in with my friends and my world here. i'm having camera issues and can't get pictures off my camera right now, but my mom has posted lots of pics on facebook, so friend her and see them for yourself! or go hunt down my dad, who's the professional photographer in the family.

mom and dad, if you disagree with anything i wrote, or if you think i left anything out, feel free to write up your own account and send it to me, i'll even post it as a real post. :)

general update

omg, i don't know if i can handle this, i've been gone so long and so much has happened. but i know the longer i put it off the more daunting this task will be. so......

let's start with april, which is when i pretty much dropped off the face of the earth. towards the end of april is when the joma conference happened, so pretty much the whole month of april was spent being really really tense and stressed. it's hard to explain, cuz in some ways i would say the conference wasn't that much work, i mean, it was all pretty straight forward, the national level project and financial coordinators did all the hard work and sent us regional underlings precise lists of what we needed to do. and it wasn't anything particularly hard, most of the prep stuff was actually kind of mundane: open a bank account, pay deposits on venue and food, make a million photocopies, buy supplies, etc. and my good buddy luke was actually the conference coordinator, i was his second-in-command and the money person, but as i have learned at other trainings i've helped run i have trouble letting go and letting things happen in their own way so i was antsy and micro-managing a lot. i think the real stress was just the weight of the idea, it was "The JOMA Conference" in big bold letters, something i'd heard about and thought about for so long that it was like we had to be stressed just to make it seem like we were doing it right. sigh. and we did it. the actual conference only lasted 3 full days. most things ran pretty smoothly, and the things that didn't were pretty predictable: the trainer, who was from maputo (a city many of whose inhabitants don't realize they live in one of the poorest countries in the world) wasn't satisfied with the accommodations; the food was late more often than not; almost all of the sessions ran over schedule (i take a large part of the blame for this, we tried to pack probably 5 days worth of really heavy material into 3 days); often the other PCVs (all newbies except for me and luke) seemed a little uninterested in what was going on.....i could go on. i unfortunately can't comment much on the actual content of the sessions, i probably missed about half of them cuz i was running around organizing stuff and during most of the rest i was so stressed out i didn't absorb anything. like i said, the content was dense, and i'm sure got a little much for some people, but i think over all they were interested. they played games at night at had a blast. we got a lot of good constructive criticism but no super-negative feedback, so all-in-all i think it went about as well as could be expected. it was a good experience that i have no desire ever to repeat!

right after joma, i just crashed. literally, the day after i was running around town paying the remaining balance on the venue, food, and trainer's expensive hotels, and i almost fell asleep on my feet. i booked it home and collapsed. a day or two after, my technological world collapsed too. meaning, something happened to a major fiber-optic cable and the northern 2/3 of mozambique was without mcel (the main cell phone company), land lines, or internet, for about 2 weeks. i know, boo-hoo, i'm in the peace corps in africa without technology. actually, i'm not complaining at all. sure, it was a slight pain in the ass. but i managed to get my most vital communication done with a cell phone number from the other company (which was so flooded with new customers that it basically didn't work either, but did a few times for me when it counted most which is all that matters), and other than that i decided that this was the universe's way of telling me it was ok to chill out and relax and not work. all the work stuff i needed to do (and there was definitely stuff i needed to do after 2 weeks of thinking about nothing but joma) involved either catching up on email (no internet), finding and meeting up with people in quelimane (no cell phones, and i'm WAY to lazy to walk ALL over the city looking for people i'm probably not going to find), and communicating with joma folks in other parts of the country to work on finalizing data for that (no cell phone again).

the biggest upcoming thing that i couldn't work on was my parents' visit, but i'd managed to text a friend in maputo (where they knew nothing of our northern technological woes) to email them so they kenw why i'd dropped off the face of the digital world, and they made it here just fine without any virtual hand-holding. i'll give their trip a blog-post all their own. stay tuned.

since their trip, i've been re-figuring out, yet again, what i'm doing. one big activity i have going right now is a project that i helped a local association of people living with HIV write months ago that took forever to get approved. the association, called VAHIYA, includes several peer educators, which is how i met them. several of the members are skilled seamstresses and tailors and they wanted to run a 3-month training for OVCs (jargon for "orphans and vulnerable children," basically any child who is hiv-positive, has a parent who is hiv-positive, or has lost at least one parent) on basic sewing skills. with the grant money we were able to buy machines and sewing materials, and pay the trainers a little something for their considerable time and effort. the group has been great, i've hardly needed to oversee the activities at all. i see the association's president about once a week to see how things are going, give him money, get receipts, etc. i also try to stop in at least once a week to just sit. it's one of those funny things, sometimes it doesn't seem like a lot, people sitting quietly in a mud house and learning to sew, but to me it's so amazing that the initiative came from them, and they're doing all the work all on their own. some days recently, after lots of rain, the house where they're holding the training is almost impossible to get to, i had to have a bike drive me all the way up to the doorstep once cuz the house was completely surrounded by water, but they're always there working. i can tell some of the kids are going to come away from it with very good skills, and while others may just be able to fix their clothes at home, i think having this kind of attention paid to them is an opportunity many wouldn't have otherwise, and i'm really happy with how the project is going so far.

the small group of peer educators doing the savings and loan project is still going. i had a hard time meeting with them for several weeks because of joma, no cell phones, then my parents' visit, but they keep going, saving bit by bit, and actually gave out their first loans to 2 group members a few weeks ago! they don't always use the exact processes that i laid out, but what they're doing works for them and they all still seem happy with it, and last week they were extra happy because i was finally able to get them some materials, most notably a lockable cash box. they had gotten to the point where they'd saved enough money that they were nervous about leaving it around the house, so this was a great addition. still no other groups have latched onto the idea, but another group has proposed a much more modest and reasonable income generating project that i'm going to see if i can get funded, and regardless, i'm going to look into getting training in business skills for some of the more motivated peer educators.

so that's where i'm at in work. the only other big news in my life is that my extension has been approved and officialized so, pending disaster, i will definitely be staying for a third year of service. some days i think i'm crazy, but i am excited about it. i'll still be with icap, but i'll be doing different work. there's a grand plan within the ngo world and the ministry of health for ngo partners to slowly phase out of the country and leave their services to the government and local orgs. it's such a complicated process i can't even begin to envision how it's going to happen. i agree it needs to happen, but it will be difficult. and i will play a small part in it. icap will be one of the first ngos to start phasing out, as they were one of the first to start working here, so next year i will be helping some local organizations prepare for that switch, to receive responsibility for services icap currently provides as well as to handle the money that comes along with it. there's still a lot up in the air for me, for instance, the particular orgs haven't been identified yet, and depending on what area they work in and where in the province they work, my work could have some very different outcomes, but i'm excited about all the possibilities, excited to be moving to a different sector of icap.....we'll see what happens! but as promised, i will be home at the end of the year. i have to "c.o.s." (close of service) along with my group, so i will go through all the processes as if i were going home for good, and will leave the country november 19th, and be home through christmas. so mark your calendars and come and see me!

k, as promised, i will post a separate entry about the big family vacation asap, and, if you're lucky, i might even right about my most recent adventures. but i need to go get something to eat first. stay tuned! hugs all around! :)