hi all, is it even worth mentioning that i'm super behind on this as usual? i didn't think so.
SO, my big vacation. i went to tanzania to meet my dear brother john for two weeks after christmas. my trip started with the long bus ride to nampula (ya can't get there from here in quelimane by plane), running around there doing last minute errands (buying dollars to pay my tanzania entry visa, getting my doctor to fax me my proof of yellow fever vaccine which, interestingly, i needed to show to EXIT mozambique but not to ENTER tanzania), then flying to dar es salaam, henceforth known as dar. got to dar and my sweet brother, who had gotten there the night before, had made his way back to the airport to meet me. the taxi ride to our hotel reminded me a lot of my first ride from the airport to hotel in maputo, through the outskirts of the city, past car dealerships and industrial areas, but prettier public transport, brightly-colored "dalla dallas" (chapas) everywhere. dar is BIG - definitely bigger than maputo, so pretty overwhelming for me at first. that first day we got ourselves situated, figured out that, sadly, many restaurants don't serve beer because of the significant muslim population, and decided to head to zanzibar the next day.
getting to zanzibar is kind of crazy, the port is predictably bustling, and there are seemingly dozens of companies selling fares, and of course everyone you meet is trying to convince you to get on their boat or their friend's boat. so again, a little overwhelming, but we got a nice small, fast boat, maybe an hour and a half of a smooth ride over beautiful blue waters past spits of pristine white sand and a nice mix of commercial motor boats and traditional sail boats. our first day on zanzibar we just wandered around the main city of stone town, here being disappointed by the lack of cold drinks - apparently THE cable bringing electricity to the island had somehow been cut, so everywhere (that could it afford it) was running on generators, which were often reserved for silly things like light, and not refrigeration of beverages. and that first night happened to be new year's eve, so we were wanting cold drinks even more to get in the spirit of things, so we had a pretty lame new year's if you're judging by how late we stayed up/out. but it was still fun, that night (and every night in the city thereafter) we had dinner in this beautiful waterfront park, where tons of vendors set up stands and you can buy all varieties of meat and seafood grilled on sticks, soups, salads, falafel, pizza, and really yummy sugar cane juice with lime and ginger.
the next day we went on a spice tour, a must-do on zanzibar. a delightful little man led a group of us around the jungle pointing out plants and trees bearing pretty much every spice you've ever heard of, as well as several fruits and flowers you probably haven't. everything smelled delicious. on the tour we also saw the ruins of an old bath house built by a former sultan, had a delicious lunch of rice pilau and coconut curry, and went to a gorgeous beach.
the next day we decided to head to the "real" beach. zanzibar has several popular beach towns, and we picked one that was supposed to be a little less touristy and busy, called jambiani. we didn't have a hotel reservation, just recommendations, and the bus drivers brought us to the places they recommended, which i thought seemed like a pretty sketchy system, and probably can be, but worked out wonderfully for us because they brought us to a place that was too new to be in any guide book, only had 4 bungalows and a tiny restaurant, and was super peaceful. we spent 3 nights there, and it was the most relaxed i've been in over a year. we spent long hours sitting on the deck of our cute little bungalow reading and half sleeping and listening to the waves. we took long walks up and down the beach. we ate lunch in a different beachside restaurant every day, and delicious dinners at our hotel every night. on our last full day we went snorkeling on the reef just offshore, with a chill guy named "captain james" and his crew, and just us. they sailed us across the bay which was a dozen amazing shades of blue-green, out to the reef where we walked around, captain james kept picking up star fish and sea cucumbers and other random crazy things, and at one point he shoved a stick into a hole and killed an octopus! eventually we went back to the boat and snorkeled around little underwater coral islands, i felt like i was on the discovery channel, it's so quiet and peaceful under the water. at one point i spent several minutes waving my hands and making faces at a group of clown fish who were swimming around me curiously.
eventually we had to leave the beach, we returned to stone town for one more day, had fun wandering around windy allies, bought souvenirs from a nice masaai vendor we had met, had one last dinner in the park. the next day we headed back to hot, busy dar for one night, and the next day we got picked up to head out on a safari! this was our big splurge of the trip, john didn't want to come to africa without seeing wild animals. tanzania is home to some of the most famous game parks, like serengetti and ngorogoro crater, and they're supposed to be spectacular, but because they're spectacular and famous they're also supposed to be pretty much always crawling with tourists and tours and i couldn't wrap my mind around seeing wonders of "nature" surrounded by cars. so we arranged to go to some of the southern, more off-the-beaten-track parks. the first day we drove to the udzungwa mountains. on the way we drove through mikumi national park - the highway goes right through it - and there we saw our first big animals, elephants, some zebra, a lion guarding an elephant that had been hit by a car. i'm used to spotting deer, skunks, and turkeys from the car, but it's pretty wild to think about elephants along the highway not being noteworthy! the place we stayed the first night was a lovely little camp, called "hondo-hondo" (the swahili name for the hornbill, which were flying all around), on the side of a hill right at the edge of the national park. we were the only guests there, we stayed in a little "banda" (hut/bungalow), ate outside, and at night sat by a campfire and tried to communicate with the camp staff, who didn't speak any english, about the elephants ("tembo") we could hear trumpeting and rustling in the trees down the road! it was super peaceful, and wonderfully cool.
the next day we took a long drive to ruaha national park. we felt like we were in the park long before we actually reached the gate, because it was so isolated. and once in the park it was still another 15 minutes drive to the camp. the park was beautiful, rolling green hills, and awesome, quirky baobab trees everywhere. it was dusk as we were getting there, and as we drove in we saw some elephants right by the car, and some giraffes on the top of a nearby hill lovely-ly silhouetted against the darkening sky. it's hard to explain the sense of wonder at seeing large animals in the wild that are almost mythical to me, in the sense that i always thought of them as far away and not part of my world. john said he felt like he was in jurassic park in the scene where they first see the dinosaurs, and i think that really captures the feeling. consequently, i had the theme song from jurassic park rolling around in my head for the remainder of the trip! at this camp we slept in a round tin banda, the camp was quiet, right along a river, and guarded by an armed guard which made me a bit nervous to go outside to pee at night!
the next morning we left early for a game drive around the park. the game drive is the focal point of a safari, up until now we'd really just been driving to destinations. we drove around for about 5 hours in this beautiful park. it was kind of hazy and misty, which made it hard to take good pictures, but gave it a sort of mystical, surreal feeling. we could go for long stretches without seeing animals, but we saw tons: elephants, giraffe, zebra, lions (including one with a freshly dead zebra), impala, gazelle, hippos, baboons, storks, ibis (and i'm sure other birds whose names i'm forgetting), water buck, giant lizard, warthog, dik-dik (tiny deer) and some fast little rodent that looks sort of like a ground hog but apparently is a close cousin of the elephant. this was all pretty incredible, but the best thing for me was that we only passed 1 other car the whole morning, no other humans in site until we got back near the camp for lunch. in the afternoon we went on a "walking safari," just me, john and an armed guard. we walked for about an hour and half along the river, it was unbelievably peaceful. we saw alligators, hippos, baboons, and giraffes.
the next day we drove back to mikumi. once we had settled in there, at a campsite at the base of a huge baobab tree, we set out for an evening game drive. we saw some lions pretty near our camp (unsettling!), and were headed to another part of the park when our car got stuck in the mud at the bottom of a dip! not a big deal, we missed the game drive, but kind of enjoyed just sitting there letting the world go on around us. it started to pour, making it more impossible for the car to get out, and sometime after nightfall a park car came to get us, and we had to take a long route back to our camp in the back of a pickup truck, in the pouring rain. john said it was his favorite part of the trip! we got dry and warmed up and had dinner and went to bed early. the next morning we had one last game drive. we avoided the mud this time. mikumi is pretty, tho not as pretty as ruaha for me, it was a flat open plain, and in the morning covered in mist. it was pretty cool to see long graceful giraffe necks appear out of the mist, and we saw tons of them that morning. saw elephants, hippo, crocs, impala again. and water buffalo, and some new birds, and on the way out of the park, one lonely wildebeest. then we had our long drive back to dar.
we spent one last day in dar before leaving. we finally knew our way around the area of our hotel, so we just wandered around, looking for craft shops and places to buy gifts, tried some new restaurants, and went back to some old ones. it was a good last day, tho i, at least, was tired and ready to go home by that point. of course my going home was dragged out by having to spend another night in nampula then a long bus-ride home and i was thoroughly exhausted by the time i got here. it was a really great trip tho. i definitely recommend tanzania, it has great food, beautiful sights, and very friendly people. if you want ok pictures of all these wonders, mine are already up on webshots. if you want professional quality, contact my brother.
04 February 2010
21 December 2009
what have i been doing for the past several months?
for once, i'm not hard-pressed to answer this question, i know i've been busy! and to change things up a bit, i won't be doing a play-by-play month-by-month (i know several have gone by), but instead will organize this thematically.
first, one thing i've done a lot of is more permaculture. this has, apparently, become my thing. in october i helped my friend charlotte, another icap volunteer, plan and run a training for her peer educators. we used basically the same format i'd used in the past, with a few notable and interesting exceptions. first, the town she lives in is near the malawi border and although many people speak portuguese, not all speak it 100%, but everyone speaks chechewa, the local language. so she worked with some of her peer educators to translate a lot of the materials into chechewa. i'd love to get this done for chuabo, but it hasn't happened yet, i'm spoiled by almost everyone around me speaking portuguese. another big difference was that she thought it didn't make sense to use power points to show pictures, so we had some pictures with good examples printed on large paper to show instead. we did the classroom part of the training in a small mud-house, and it had a much more home-grown feel to it, which i really enjoyed. it was also a good experience to be able to remove myself a few steps from the process, since they weren't "my" people we were working with, i didn't get as stressed out worrying about the way things were going, and i think it went well.
in the beginning of november i helped another friend and fellow icap-er, jimmy, do a training with his peer educators. we had a nice big space to dig behind the hospital, and a really gung-ho group. they kept digging through their snack time in awful heat just because they wanted to finish (and anyone who's worked in moz knows how big a deal it is to voluntarily skip "lanche")! after the two days in nicoadala, the participants were super thankful, and gave gifts of food and capulanas to me and the other trainers as thank yous. it was very moving, as was jimmy telling me that was the most excited he's seen his peer educators about anything in the two years he'd been working with them.
at the end of november i did another training here in quelimane, for more of my peer educators together with some high school students. this collaboration was the initiative of one of my peer educators who had participated in the first training we did. her daughter goes to the high school, and she's a "mother" of the school, meaning she's very involved and respected there, and i thought it was a great idea and she helped make it happen, so she and another female peer educator were the trainers for this group. icap supported it because it also included other peer educators, and was a sort of community outreach in one of the neighborhoods where there's a hospital that icap supports. because we were combining peer educators and students, this training was a lot bigger, 31 people including the trainers, so it was a bit overwhelming because of that. also, because a lot of the participants were teenagers the group got a bit unruly at times. but all in all i think it went well. we got permission from the school director to dig on school property, so the garden really "belongs" to the school; a teacher participated and was very into it and will help them keep it going; and it was actually really nice to see the interactions between the young students and some of the older peer educators. even though the kids were really energetic and gung-ho, they sometimes would dive into a task without really knowing what they were doing, and the older, parent-aged peer educators would take the hoes away from the kids and show them how to do things, which i got a big kick out of.
the last of my recent spate of permaculture trainings was in early december, also in quelimane, this time just for peer educators. this time we got permission to dig in the yard of the sister of a peer educator, right next door to one of the hospitals. the location was great, but because the land had years of hospital trash in it (syringes, glass vials, who knows what) we could only dig in a much smaller space than we'd anticipated, so we ended up getting done with work more quickly and people got a little antsy. i really like doing these permaculture trainings because i can tell that it's a topic that people are genuinely interested in and will use, but this last training in particular highlighted all the things i don't like about doing trainings, mainly i don't like having to control a group (i'm not a teacher!), and i don't like having to worry about logistical headaches, like the food not showing up on time or keeping things on schedule. every time i do these i get really stressed out, and every time it all works out one way or the other, and i know i need to just let go and let things happen. i'm working on it. one reason why i think the stress hasn't decreased is that i've been changing my trainers every time. i'm doing this to let lots of people get the experience (and the pay) of being trainers, which i think is good, but it means that every time i'm still guiding the process more than i would be if it were always the same trainer. and i'm sure i'll have plenty of opportunity in the new year to try and work out all these kinks, because there are still tons of people interested in participating who having had the chance yet.
the other main thing that has been occupying my time and my thoughts these months is the changing of the guard - the group of pcvs who were here when i got here (moz 12) all left one by one, and the new group (moz 14) has recently arrived. so i had to say goodbyes to a lot of friends and colleagues, the most difficult of which was alison, my site-mate and co-worker who i saw almost every day, and was a good friend and mentor. she was in the very first group to leave. and in the interim stage, we remaining icap volunteers (moz 12 and 13) spent a fair amount of time talking about what we do, what we should do, what we shouldn't do, and how to help the new generation of icap pcvs transition in smoothly. so i helped with and participated in several different meetings, some with just pcvs and main icap staff, one with representatives from all the districts that have pcvs. i was working on this mainly with my boss juliana, who's amazing and very supportive of volunteers, and who has also recently left! another big change for me. so i'd already been thinking alot about the icap-pc relationship, and how to talk specifically to new icap volunteers to help them in their first months. and then my pc boss, kristie, invited me to help her at the supervisor's conference in nampula, a one-day event for the new pcvs for zambezia, nampula, and cabo delgado provinces to meet their supervisors and for everyone to hear a little bit about peace corps, and suggestions for how to help the volunteers settle into their new lives, work, communities, etc. so i traveled to nampula to help with that as well, which was a good experience. i had, truthfully, been sort of dreading the arrival of the new volunteers - i didn't know any of them specifically, it was more the thought of new people "invading" my "territory" and "replacing" people i loved, respected, and, most importantly, knew how to work with. it was the thought of having to start over from scratch that was overwhelming, when i just barely am starting to feel like i really have a good handle on things. but it all went fine, of course. icap zambezia has gotten 3 new volunteers, all really nice. no one is moving to quelimane, so even if they weren't nice i wouldn't have to worry about seeing and dealing with them on a daily basis. icap brought all the new volunteers to quelimane for an extra few days, to give them a chance to buy stuff for their houses, get to know the organization, and to meet more representatives from each of their districts. all those meetings we'd had before the new volunteers arrived had been to plan what to do with them when they arrived, and what we did with them was have a meeting (which was supposed to be 2 days but turned into 1) with them and a team from each site (doctors, peer educators, etc), to talk more specificially about what a pcv with icap should and shouldn't be doing, what their options are, what each side should expect from the other, etc. it's a weird thing, meetings like this. i've lived through them. i know they can seem pretty boring for all involved. and you'd think that, living through them, i wouldn't want to inflict them on others. but the thing is, i do think they're necessary and, ideally, helpful. not perfect, but what is? i know the first group of icap pcvs had a lot of confusion and very little information about what they should be doing when they first got to site. my "generation" had more of an idea, but still not real clear. so we're trying to improve things for the next lot. i think, hope, it was all worth it, because i definitely spent a lot of time and energy on this subject over the last few months!
aside from permaculture and changing of the guard, some other things i've done over the last few months include: visiting maganja da costa to celebrate a friend building a new house; visiting mexixine and macuzi to see where my boyfriend lives and works during the week; visiting the beautiful rural site of my friend denys to celebrate the opening of a new project; celebrating world aids day here in quelimane, which mostly involved sweating and fighting over t-shirts; taking my joma group to nampula to perform during the celebration of 25 years of U.S.-Mozambique partnership.
and now the new volunteers are at their sites, everyone here in the city is winding down for the holidays, and i am ready for a BREAK - which i am getting! i'll spend christmas here in quelimane, with my friend gina, my boyfriend laras, some pcv friends, and my christmas music on endless repeat on my ipod. and after christmas i'm heading to tanzania for vacation with my little brother! even tho it seems, to the blog-reader, that i just had a "foriegn" vacation one little post ago, and i probably haven't done a good enough job in this post of conveying how much work i've done and stress i've gone through in the last few months, i feel i'm ready for a vacation and i'm getting one whether i deserve it or not!
i hope that everyone reading this is enjoying the cold (i hate you all just a tiny bit for knowing what cold is....it's consistently in the 90s or higher here these days, and i'm dying). i hope you all have a peaceful, relaxing break from whatever it is you're doing with your lives, and that you enjoy time with friends and family during whatever holidays you celebrate. i will be missing the cold, the holiday food and drink, the music, the friendly spirit, the bustle of christmas retail, and most of all the people.
boas festas.
first, one thing i've done a lot of is more permaculture. this has, apparently, become my thing. in october i helped my friend charlotte, another icap volunteer, plan and run a training for her peer educators. we used basically the same format i'd used in the past, with a few notable and interesting exceptions. first, the town she lives in is near the malawi border and although many people speak portuguese, not all speak it 100%, but everyone speaks chechewa, the local language. so she worked with some of her peer educators to translate a lot of the materials into chechewa. i'd love to get this done for chuabo, but it hasn't happened yet, i'm spoiled by almost everyone around me speaking portuguese. another big difference was that she thought it didn't make sense to use power points to show pictures, so we had some pictures with good examples printed on large paper to show instead. we did the classroom part of the training in a small mud-house, and it had a much more home-grown feel to it, which i really enjoyed. it was also a good experience to be able to remove myself a few steps from the process, since they weren't "my" people we were working with, i didn't get as stressed out worrying about the way things were going, and i think it went well.
in the beginning of november i helped another friend and fellow icap-er, jimmy, do a training with his peer educators. we had a nice big space to dig behind the hospital, and a really gung-ho group. they kept digging through their snack time in awful heat just because they wanted to finish (and anyone who's worked in moz knows how big a deal it is to voluntarily skip "lanche")! after the two days in nicoadala, the participants were super thankful, and gave gifts of food and capulanas to me and the other trainers as thank yous. it was very moving, as was jimmy telling me that was the most excited he's seen his peer educators about anything in the two years he'd been working with them.
at the end of november i did another training here in quelimane, for more of my peer educators together with some high school students. this collaboration was the initiative of one of my peer educators who had participated in the first training we did. her daughter goes to the high school, and she's a "mother" of the school, meaning she's very involved and respected there, and i thought it was a great idea and she helped make it happen, so she and another female peer educator were the trainers for this group. icap supported it because it also included other peer educators, and was a sort of community outreach in one of the neighborhoods where there's a hospital that icap supports. because we were combining peer educators and students, this training was a lot bigger, 31 people including the trainers, so it was a bit overwhelming because of that. also, because a lot of the participants were teenagers the group got a bit unruly at times. but all in all i think it went well. we got permission from the school director to dig on school property, so the garden really "belongs" to the school; a teacher participated and was very into it and will help them keep it going; and it was actually really nice to see the interactions between the young students and some of the older peer educators. even though the kids were really energetic and gung-ho, they sometimes would dive into a task without really knowing what they were doing, and the older, parent-aged peer educators would take the hoes away from the kids and show them how to do things, which i got a big kick out of.
the last of my recent spate of permaculture trainings was in early december, also in quelimane, this time just for peer educators. this time we got permission to dig in the yard of the sister of a peer educator, right next door to one of the hospitals. the location was great, but because the land had years of hospital trash in it (syringes, glass vials, who knows what) we could only dig in a much smaller space than we'd anticipated, so we ended up getting done with work more quickly and people got a little antsy. i really like doing these permaculture trainings because i can tell that it's a topic that people are genuinely interested in and will use, but this last training in particular highlighted all the things i don't like about doing trainings, mainly i don't like having to control a group (i'm not a teacher!), and i don't like having to worry about logistical headaches, like the food not showing up on time or keeping things on schedule. every time i do these i get really stressed out, and every time it all works out one way or the other, and i know i need to just let go and let things happen. i'm working on it. one reason why i think the stress hasn't decreased is that i've been changing my trainers every time. i'm doing this to let lots of people get the experience (and the pay) of being trainers, which i think is good, but it means that every time i'm still guiding the process more than i would be if it were always the same trainer. and i'm sure i'll have plenty of opportunity in the new year to try and work out all these kinks, because there are still tons of people interested in participating who having had the chance yet.
the other main thing that has been occupying my time and my thoughts these months is the changing of the guard - the group of pcvs who were here when i got here (moz 12) all left one by one, and the new group (moz 14) has recently arrived. so i had to say goodbyes to a lot of friends and colleagues, the most difficult of which was alison, my site-mate and co-worker who i saw almost every day, and was a good friend and mentor. she was in the very first group to leave. and in the interim stage, we remaining icap volunteers (moz 12 and 13) spent a fair amount of time talking about what we do, what we should do, what we shouldn't do, and how to help the new generation of icap pcvs transition in smoothly. so i helped with and participated in several different meetings, some with just pcvs and main icap staff, one with representatives from all the districts that have pcvs. i was working on this mainly with my boss juliana, who's amazing and very supportive of volunteers, and who has also recently left! another big change for me. so i'd already been thinking alot about the icap-pc relationship, and how to talk specifically to new icap volunteers to help them in their first months. and then my pc boss, kristie, invited me to help her at the supervisor's conference in nampula, a one-day event for the new pcvs for zambezia, nampula, and cabo delgado provinces to meet their supervisors and for everyone to hear a little bit about peace corps, and suggestions for how to help the volunteers settle into their new lives, work, communities, etc. so i traveled to nampula to help with that as well, which was a good experience. i had, truthfully, been sort of dreading the arrival of the new volunteers - i didn't know any of them specifically, it was more the thought of new people "invading" my "territory" and "replacing" people i loved, respected, and, most importantly, knew how to work with. it was the thought of having to start over from scratch that was overwhelming, when i just barely am starting to feel like i really have a good handle on things. but it all went fine, of course. icap zambezia has gotten 3 new volunteers, all really nice. no one is moving to quelimane, so even if they weren't nice i wouldn't have to worry about seeing and dealing with them on a daily basis. icap brought all the new volunteers to quelimane for an extra few days, to give them a chance to buy stuff for their houses, get to know the organization, and to meet more representatives from each of their districts. all those meetings we'd had before the new volunteers arrived had been to plan what to do with them when they arrived, and what we did with them was have a meeting (which was supposed to be 2 days but turned into 1) with them and a team from each site (doctors, peer educators, etc), to talk more specificially about what a pcv with icap should and shouldn't be doing, what their options are, what each side should expect from the other, etc. it's a weird thing, meetings like this. i've lived through them. i know they can seem pretty boring for all involved. and you'd think that, living through them, i wouldn't want to inflict them on others. but the thing is, i do think they're necessary and, ideally, helpful. not perfect, but what is? i know the first group of icap pcvs had a lot of confusion and very little information about what they should be doing when they first got to site. my "generation" had more of an idea, but still not real clear. so we're trying to improve things for the next lot. i think, hope, it was all worth it, because i definitely spent a lot of time and energy on this subject over the last few months!
aside from permaculture and changing of the guard, some other things i've done over the last few months include: visiting maganja da costa to celebrate a friend building a new house; visiting mexixine and macuzi to see where my boyfriend lives and works during the week; visiting the beautiful rural site of my friend denys to celebrate the opening of a new project; celebrating world aids day here in quelimane, which mostly involved sweating and fighting over t-shirts; taking my joma group to nampula to perform during the celebration of 25 years of U.S.-Mozambique partnership.
and now the new volunteers are at their sites, everyone here in the city is winding down for the holidays, and i am ready for a BREAK - which i am getting! i'll spend christmas here in quelimane, with my friend gina, my boyfriend laras, some pcv friends, and my christmas music on endless repeat on my ipod. and after christmas i'm heading to tanzania for vacation with my little brother! even tho it seems, to the blog-reader, that i just had a "foriegn" vacation one little post ago, and i probably haven't done a good enough job in this post of conveying how much work i've done and stress i've gone through in the last few months, i feel i'm ready for a vacation and i'm getting one whether i deserve it or not!
i hope that everyone reading this is enjoying the cold (i hate you all just a tiny bit for knowing what cold is....it's consistently in the 90s or higher here these days, and i'm dying). i hope you all have a peaceful, relaxing break from whatever it is you're doing with your lives, and that you enjoy time with friends and family during whatever holidays you celebrate. i will be missing the cold, the holiday food and drink, the music, the friendly spirit, the bustle of christmas retail, and most of all the people.
boas festas.
01 November 2009
appalling statistic of the day
In Africa, 3% of the world’s health workers struggle to combat 24% of the global disease burden with less than 1% of the world’s health expenditures.
(World Health Organization. World Health Report 2006. World Health Organization 2006. Available at: http://www.who.int/whr/2006/chapter1/en/index.html. This is based on a threshold of at least 2.3 doctors, nurses, and midwives per 1,000 population.)
(World Health Organization. World Health Report 2006. World Health Organization 2006. Available at: http://www.who.int/whr/2006/chapter1/en/index.html. This is based on a threshold of at least 2.3 doctors, nurses, and midwives per 1,000 population.)
26 October 2009
férias (vacation)
yup, i finally had a vacation...it was surreal and wonderful. jeff came to visit, and he gets 1000s of bonus points for being the first person i know brave enough and willing enough to make it all the way over here! we met up in maputo, which was a bit overwhelming to me as i hadn't been there (or any big city) in almost a year. just the fast pace, the number of cars (instead of bikes!) trying to run me over, having to worry more about pickpockets, etc. but it was fine, i shockingly knew my way around more than i thought. we had fun, jeff indulged my desires for thai food, macaroni and cheese, coffee, and other things i can't get in quelimane. we walked around the city, did some souvenir shopping, saw a really bad (but new!) movie. it was fun. only spent about a day and a half there, then we came back to quelimane. here jeff got a whirlwind tour, and because he declined to experience the wonders of bike taxis, we did it all walking! we saw the city, bought capulanas, made him some capulana pants; he met my pc friends, and we made dinner with my neighbor and good friend gina. jeff got along fabulously well with his spanish, he learned how to take a bucket bath, he ate zambezian food. i think i showed him a good time!
from there, we took the LONG bus-ride from quelimane to maputo. we chose this option a) so jeff could see some of the countryside and b) so he could experience the wonders of the mozambican public transport system. now, his report will probably differ a bit from mine, but this was by far the NICEST public transport i've been on in this country: new, comfortable seats; no trash on the floor; no farm animals; no people in the aisles. it was truly incredible, and i thought that long trip was going to suck a lot, but it actually wasn't that bad with a friend. i'd do it again. the only downside was that we made SUCH good time that we got to maputo at like 1 am, and had to wait at the bus stop (a place i saw another pcv aptly describe as several football fields full of buses) til dawn, so that was kind of a drag. but we headed out of there bright an early, got to downtown maputo to catch a chapa to namaacha, where i'd done my home-stay during training.
it was really cool, but weird, to go back over roads and into a town that was so familiar but that i'd been gone from for so long. it was made a little weirder by the fact that when we got in my family wasn't home (they were all at school). but i gave jeff the short tour of the town, and when we went back to the house the girls started coming home one by one and it was SO awesome to see them - the little ones especially have grown so much! they were so sweet and i was so comfortable with them, it was almost as if i'd never left. they were really wonderful to let me just drop in, with a male, non-portuguese speaking friend, and it made me feel even more than i already did like they really are family. it also made me sad i'm so far away; i love zambezia, but volunteers further south get a chance to drop by more, something i wish i could do. ah well.
the real adventure started after our night in namaacha! we walked to the border of swaziland, negotiated that without too much hassel (travel note: highly beneficial to travel with a hiking backpack, customs guys almost never want to take the trouble of digging into them!), and caught a bus to manzini, the second-largest town in swaziland. the landscape was beautiful, understandably similar to namaacha, and although we didn't partake of any tourist activities there, the newspaper we picked up said it's full of hostels and safaris and all kinds of cool things, so i'd really like to go back there. in manzini we had lunch, and we were supposed to meet up with a friend from college who lives there, but that didn't work out. so we had to figure out how to get from there to joburg on our own. the bus lot there is not as big as the one in maputo, but possibly more crowded and confusing, and after jeff struck out finding transport i went to give it a try. as i was asking around for buses to joburg (in english, very odd), a guy volunteered his services to help me, which i accepted because we really needed to get on a bus that day, although i was a bit wary because, well, life has taught me to be wary of strange men offering to help obviously foreign women. but he was super nice! he walked me all the way across the maze of buses, found a kombi (chapa in swazi) going to joburg with a company he knew, made sure i was all set and they weren't ripping me off, and wished me luck and went on his way. amazing! so jeff and i made it to joburg fine, and there we had our second it-could-have-been-sketchy-but-people-were-nice experience. through a planning error on our part (and trouble figuring out the swazi cell phone system) we didn't have a hotel in joburg, and we got in after dark, in a strange city known to be less than safe, so we were a little nervous. but our kombi driver offered to help and walked us to the door of a safe, clean, cheap hotel right by where we needed to be the next day. amazing!
the next day we went to the train station and got on a train to cape town! the train was really fun, it felt very romantic (in an old-fashioned movie sort of way). we had our own room with a bench, a drop-down table, a tiny sink, and an upper bunk that folded into the wall when we weren't using it. a porter came around to offer us coffee and tea, and to take our meal orders, so 2 meals we ate in our room, and one we opted to eat in the dining car. the scenery was beautiful, and we (or at least i) got a great night's sleep. it got amazingly cold! the next morning the scenery was even more beautiful, and i could totally see why europeans settled here, low green rolling hills, perfect for farmland, probably looked a lot like where they'd come from. we rode through vineyards, passed ostriches, cattle, and sheep, i even saw a baboon from far away! and there were gorgeous rainbows to top it all off.
we got to cape town, managed to get supremely lost walking to our hostel, but checked in and all was well. our first afternoon we had mexican food (yay!), and just walked around and saw different parts of the city. i'm having trouble remembering the order of the rest of our adventures, but we did the rest of this stuff too: we went to the district 6 museum, a museum dedicated to the former residents of district 6, a black neighborhood that was cleared out for whites to live in during apartheid. (a new movie, district 9, is based on this story, although with aliens....i need to see this movie.) it was an interesting museum, with a concept that i'd never heard of before: it's intended just as much for the residents of the district to tell their stories and connect with each other as it is for outsiders to visit and learn, so it had a very home-grown feel to it. we went to the top of table mountain, a cape town must-do. this impressive mountain sits, ridiculously, SMACK in the middle of cape town. it's known for being moody, from minute to minute it can change whether it's under a cloud or not. we went at the only time it really made sense for us, and unfortunately it was pretty cloudy, but we got a few breaks in the clouds with some incredible views of the city and the bay. we went to robben island, the site of the prison where nelson mandela (among many others) was imprisoned during apartheid. we took a bus tour of the island with a really smart, funny university student, then a tour of the actual prison with a former prisoner. it was very interesting, although made me wish i knew more about the history....i want to get my hands on nelson mandela's autobiography that he wrote while in the prison. our last day in cape town we took a tour of the cape peninsula. we drove down through beautiful, sea-side villages and windy mountain roads, into the national park that covers most of the cape. it was gorgeous, i loved it, reminded me of maine a bit. we went to cape point, where you could actually see where the atlantic and indian oceans met. we had lunch in a cute little town in the wine-making region, and ended the day with a (slightly disappointing) wine-tasting.
all-in-all, it was a good trip. it was great to get away, to spend time with a friend i hadn't seen in a year, to just remove myself from all of my realities for a bit. but honestly, i didn't love south africa that much. yeah, it was beautiful, but to be perfectly honest their harsh, and recent, racial history makes me uncomfortable, and being in super-white super-wealthy cape town didn't help. seeing prices that i know were cheap in dollars but outrageous in meticais was very weird. and cape town is the only place on the trip i felt unsafe, as we were approached by a lot of disturbingly aggressive panhandlers. so, i suppose in the best of both worlds, i enjoyed my vacation, but by the end was homesick for quelimane and ready to come home.
and yes, now i've been home for about another month, and, as usual, i'm going to remain behind on this blog cuz i don't feel like writing more right now. sorry! i've been trying to put up pictures as well, but the internet is not my friend today. i hope everyone is well. you are all hereby ordered to go out and enjoy at least one of the following for me: a nice walk in crisp fall air, rolling in the leaves, hot apple cider, hay rides, pumpkin pie. it has definitely started getting hot again here, so i'm back to complaining about the weather. don't worry, there will be more of that to come i'm sure. until the next time, abraços all around. :)
from there, we took the LONG bus-ride from quelimane to maputo. we chose this option a) so jeff could see some of the countryside and b) so he could experience the wonders of the mozambican public transport system. now, his report will probably differ a bit from mine, but this was by far the NICEST public transport i've been on in this country: new, comfortable seats; no trash on the floor; no farm animals; no people in the aisles. it was truly incredible, and i thought that long trip was going to suck a lot, but it actually wasn't that bad with a friend. i'd do it again. the only downside was that we made SUCH good time that we got to maputo at like 1 am, and had to wait at the bus stop (a place i saw another pcv aptly describe as several football fields full of buses) til dawn, so that was kind of a drag. but we headed out of there bright an early, got to downtown maputo to catch a chapa to namaacha, where i'd done my home-stay during training.
it was really cool, but weird, to go back over roads and into a town that was so familiar but that i'd been gone from for so long. it was made a little weirder by the fact that when we got in my family wasn't home (they were all at school). but i gave jeff the short tour of the town, and when we went back to the house the girls started coming home one by one and it was SO awesome to see them - the little ones especially have grown so much! they were so sweet and i was so comfortable with them, it was almost as if i'd never left. they were really wonderful to let me just drop in, with a male, non-portuguese speaking friend, and it made me feel even more than i already did like they really are family. it also made me sad i'm so far away; i love zambezia, but volunteers further south get a chance to drop by more, something i wish i could do. ah well.
the real adventure started after our night in namaacha! we walked to the border of swaziland, negotiated that without too much hassel (travel note: highly beneficial to travel with a hiking backpack, customs guys almost never want to take the trouble of digging into them!), and caught a bus to manzini, the second-largest town in swaziland. the landscape was beautiful, understandably similar to namaacha, and although we didn't partake of any tourist activities there, the newspaper we picked up said it's full of hostels and safaris and all kinds of cool things, so i'd really like to go back there. in manzini we had lunch, and we were supposed to meet up with a friend from college who lives there, but that didn't work out. so we had to figure out how to get from there to joburg on our own. the bus lot there is not as big as the one in maputo, but possibly more crowded and confusing, and after jeff struck out finding transport i went to give it a try. as i was asking around for buses to joburg (in english, very odd), a guy volunteered his services to help me, which i accepted because we really needed to get on a bus that day, although i was a bit wary because, well, life has taught me to be wary of strange men offering to help obviously foreign women. but he was super nice! he walked me all the way across the maze of buses, found a kombi (chapa in swazi) going to joburg with a company he knew, made sure i was all set and they weren't ripping me off, and wished me luck and went on his way. amazing! so jeff and i made it to joburg fine, and there we had our second it-could-have-been-sketchy-but-people-were-nice experience. through a planning error on our part (and trouble figuring out the swazi cell phone system) we didn't have a hotel in joburg, and we got in after dark, in a strange city known to be less than safe, so we were a little nervous. but our kombi driver offered to help and walked us to the door of a safe, clean, cheap hotel right by where we needed to be the next day. amazing!
the next day we went to the train station and got on a train to cape town! the train was really fun, it felt very romantic (in an old-fashioned movie sort of way). we had our own room with a bench, a drop-down table, a tiny sink, and an upper bunk that folded into the wall when we weren't using it. a porter came around to offer us coffee and tea, and to take our meal orders, so 2 meals we ate in our room, and one we opted to eat in the dining car. the scenery was beautiful, and we (or at least i) got a great night's sleep. it got amazingly cold! the next morning the scenery was even more beautiful, and i could totally see why europeans settled here, low green rolling hills, perfect for farmland, probably looked a lot like where they'd come from. we rode through vineyards, passed ostriches, cattle, and sheep, i even saw a baboon from far away! and there were gorgeous rainbows to top it all off.
we got to cape town, managed to get supremely lost walking to our hostel, but checked in and all was well. our first afternoon we had mexican food (yay!), and just walked around and saw different parts of the city. i'm having trouble remembering the order of the rest of our adventures, but we did the rest of this stuff too: we went to the district 6 museum, a museum dedicated to the former residents of district 6, a black neighborhood that was cleared out for whites to live in during apartheid. (a new movie, district 9, is based on this story, although with aliens....i need to see this movie.) it was an interesting museum, with a concept that i'd never heard of before: it's intended just as much for the residents of the district to tell their stories and connect with each other as it is for outsiders to visit and learn, so it had a very home-grown feel to it. we went to the top of table mountain, a cape town must-do. this impressive mountain sits, ridiculously, SMACK in the middle of cape town. it's known for being moody, from minute to minute it can change whether it's under a cloud or not. we went at the only time it really made sense for us, and unfortunately it was pretty cloudy, but we got a few breaks in the clouds with some incredible views of the city and the bay. we went to robben island, the site of the prison where nelson mandela (among many others) was imprisoned during apartheid. we took a bus tour of the island with a really smart, funny university student, then a tour of the actual prison with a former prisoner. it was very interesting, although made me wish i knew more about the history....i want to get my hands on nelson mandela's autobiography that he wrote while in the prison. our last day in cape town we took a tour of the cape peninsula. we drove down through beautiful, sea-side villages and windy mountain roads, into the national park that covers most of the cape. it was gorgeous, i loved it, reminded me of maine a bit. we went to cape point, where you could actually see where the atlantic and indian oceans met. we had lunch in a cute little town in the wine-making region, and ended the day with a (slightly disappointing) wine-tasting.
all-in-all, it was a good trip. it was great to get away, to spend time with a friend i hadn't seen in a year, to just remove myself from all of my realities for a bit. but honestly, i didn't love south africa that much. yeah, it was beautiful, but to be perfectly honest their harsh, and recent, racial history makes me uncomfortable, and being in super-white super-wealthy cape town didn't help. seeing prices that i know were cheap in dollars but outrageous in meticais was very weird. and cape town is the only place on the trip i felt unsafe, as we were approached by a lot of disturbingly aggressive panhandlers. so, i suppose in the best of both worlds, i enjoyed my vacation, but by the end was homesick for quelimane and ready to come home.
and yes, now i've been home for about another month, and, as usual, i'm going to remain behind on this blog cuz i don't feel like writing more right now. sorry! i've been trying to put up pictures as well, but the internet is not my friend today. i hope everyone is well. you are all hereby ordered to go out and enjoy at least one of the following for me: a nice walk in crisp fall air, rolling in the leaves, hot apple cider, hay rides, pumpkin pie. it has definitely started getting hot again here, so i'm back to complaining about the weather. don't worry, there will be more of that to come i'm sure. until the next time, abraços all around. :)
01 September 2009
august (subtitle: doing SOMETHING)
and another month is over. i donºt know how this happens. you know why this blog is a good exercise (apart from keeping my readers happy)? i often end a week/month/whatever feeling like i havenºt really done much, but when i come here to try to sum it up, i see that i at least did SOMETHING.
at the beginning of august alison and i ran a few mini-trainings for the icap office and medical staff. the first was on hiv and safe sex. we did this at the request of our boss, partly because she believes that many people in the office either donºt know what they should, or arenºt practicing safe sex, and partly as part of an initiative from the provincial director of health to have all employees of health-related ngos knowing something about the health topics the ngo works with. so on a saturday morning (much to the consternation of many employees) we ran a training using the same slide presentation we had prepared for peer educator trainings. we talked about how hiv acts in the human body, how treatment works, various means of transmission, and prevention methods. it was really interesting for a number of reasons. we gave a pre and post test on the material, a way to see what people know before and after a training. the evaluations were anonymous, but we divided them between medical and non-medical staff. the non-medical staff learned a lot, which was great. the medical staff got clarification on a few points, but for the most part their understanding remained the same, which is actually good, because it means they didnºt have a lot of misconceptions in the first place. but the thing that was really interesting (and also kind of annoying) was that during the parts about safe sex, the people who got the most giggly and jokey were the male medical staff! c'mon guys, youºre supposed to be talking about this stuff for a LIVING, and you canºt talk about how to put on a condom without giggling and making jokes, and you hold a female condom with the tip of a pen as if itºs going to get you dirty or something? yeah, i know, boys will be boys, but i was still kind of disappointed by that. if the medical personel canºt deal with talking about this stuff, itºs no wonder that the people theyºre supposed to be helping donºt always have good information. some of the non-medical male staff, on the other hand, asked tons of really good questions so you could tell they were actually getting something out of it, so that was good.
the other training alison and i did was a tech training. the icap office is a pretty "modern" looking place, computers and technology and whatnot. all office staff and many doctors have company computers, and thereºs a copy machine, fax machine, and scanner for everyone to use. but many people only know how to use this equipment on the most basic levels, and people are constantly asking us for help. after seeing our power point presentations (complete with lots of animations) people were really interested in learning how to use that program well too. so we planned 2 afternoons worth of trainings. on the first day alison taught people the basics of power point, how to make a presentation aesthetically pleasing, and the fun stuff like animations. on the second day i showed them a program to learn how to touch-type, and how to use the scanner and fax machine. teaching people how to use this technology, i often notice a similarity in talking about technology stuff with family members of other generations. depending on how long youºve been using certain types of technology, youºre more comfortable and adept at playing around to figure out new stuff. for instance, i had no idea how to use the office scanner, but i figured it out in an afternoon, but many people have only been using computers, etc. for a very few years. if you think technology has changed/improved rapidly in the us, itºs changed at lightening speed here. another difficulty a lot of people have is that almost all the equipment and programs are in english, so that even if they did feel comfortable playing around, theyºre severly limited by language. anyway, it was a pretty minimal tech training, but we covered some basic things people had shown interest in, and made some staff who arenºt around us a lot aware that weºre here and available to help if they have other questions. and because our boss was supportive in allowing people to get out of work to attend these trainings, iºm sure we could do similiar activities in the future if there was more interest.
on the second day of that tech training, with only about a days notice, i signed up to participate in a bike ride to nicoadala, the next town up the highway from quelimane. the story behind the ride and my participation in it is kind of complicated, some other pcvs had been trying to organize a bike-a-thon across the province in collaboration with a local youth activist organization, and although it looks like that project has fallen through, through those contacts we were invited to bike with them on a different outing. there were mixed messages as to the reasons for the ride. everyone who participated was given a t-shirt which comemmorated the "day of youth and sport" or something like that, which was the day after the actual ride. but when we got to nicoadala there was a big event at the secondary school, and i was told that a local group was kicking off a month-long testing campaign. so either way, 3 other pcvs and i (and about 50 other people) biked from quelimane to nicoadala. itºs 37k which is 23 miles according to my cell phone converter, which is almost without a doubt the farthest iºve ever biked. luckily for me itºs all flat, and it wasnºt super hot, and even still i almost died. the group included professional biker guys and a lot of bike taxi drivers, in short people in MUCH better shape than i am, and they were going a bit faster than i would have chosen and not stopping for water as often as i would have liked. to top it off i swear the wind was blowing against us the entire way. a couple of times 2 of the professional biker guys grabbed the back of my bike to push me along to help me rest a bit and catch up with the group, and if it wasnºt for them i might have fallen behind. but i made it! not really dying to do it again any time soon, at least not when i canºt control my pace, but it was something different, nice to be able to appreciate some pretty countryside in a different way, and definitely a feeling of accomplishment!
on another saturday in august i went to participate in the first "feira de saude," or health fair, in quelimane. the purpose of the day was to promote healthy practices, all the local ngos had booths set up with information and were doing various screenings (HIV tests, breast cancer, blood pressure, etc). there were singing groups and skits with themes of non-discrimination, etc. some outstanding community health workers got prizes. all really nice, right? well it would have been, but my day started by meeting the icap car and my peer educators at a point on the other side of town from the fair to hand out t-shirts. thatºs nice, right? peer educators and icap staff were all supposed to get t-shirts that said icap and "feira de saude" and walk together in one happy group to the fair location. except that t-shirts are like gold here. every event, every commemorative day, every organization, etc. makes a t-shirt and they are coveted prizes which people will wear for years, and when i got to the meeting point there was already a full-scale war going on, all 90+ peer educators were in a mob around the icap car scrambling and screaming that they didnºt get a t-shirt, or they wanted a different colored t-shirt, or the person next to them had taken 2, or that another person wasnºt even a peer educator. it was RIDICULOUS, but i should have known, thereºs always a guerra (war) when ANYTHING is being given away, money, t-shirts, food, whatever. i blame the ngo culture for making people believe that they need t-shirts to be taken seriously, or that they have the right to expect something free when an ngo car shows up. but it is still such a spectacle over something that SO isnºt worth it, it always puts me in a bad mood. it is an unfortunate part of my reality here.
to round out my month, towards the end of august my joma group put on a training. the kids who had gone to the nampula conference had really wanted to do a full-on training for the rest of the group, for them to experience well the material that they had learned. so we wrote a grant, got the money, and finally did it this month. theyºre really motivated, smart, organized kids, so i was lucky that i had to do relatively little prep work. i gave them the money to buy supplies, and a little guidance, and they ran with it. they did a 7-day training (their choice). 5 afternoons after school and all day saturday and sunday. i went every afternoon during the week. the first day started pretty late, and i was starting to get annoyed, but i decided that it was their project, and that as long as they accomplished something and they were happy with it, iºd let it be, and it all turned out ok. every day they started more on time and more people showed up and the training went better. they divided up the training into 2 days on leadership, 2 on gender, and 3 on theater, with different people in charge of leading each day. the associationºs president (one of my best peer educators) ended up running a lot of the sessions, and sometimes their leadership styles or management skills werenºt necessarily how i would have preferred, or what i thought was the "best" way to do things, but i let them go with it, and again, every time i thought something wasnºt going well, it ended up ok, and i was really happy with my decision to stay out of most of it (even though they complained) because i think it was much better for them to learn how to do this on their own. as reading my blog will probably indicate, trainings are a major part of the ngo/activist life here, and as these are all smart, dedicated kids many of them are likely to end up working or volunteering in some capacity where knowing how to put on a training will be a very useful skill. anyway, the training had low points (more kids than weºd budgeted for showed up on some days and there were fights over food; some of the kids got into an argument about each othersº behavior and the group was pretty tense as a result) and high points (the peer educator who did a session on gender explained sexual orientation in a way that i thought completely correct and respectful but also sensative to the fact that the ideas are uncomfortable for a lot of people here, making me really proud; the groupºs final theater piece in a local market was really interesting and well-received) but overall i was happy with the way it turned out.
with all that, i still manage to feel unproductive a lot of the time. things like fights over t-shirts and whatnot, lack of attendance and participation in peer educator activities, and inability to get answers to what i see as simple questions because of ngo beurocracy, can get really annoying and disheartening, and certainly contribute to my feeling of uselessness or lack of accomplishment. but as this blog proves, i have been doing something. and iºm taking a 2-week vacation starting next week which iºm SUPER excited about, and which i think will really help me relax and reenergize. and this week i have meetings every day with people to talk about a variety of different potential projects, so iºll have something to work on with all my new energy when i get back.
at the beginning of august alison and i ran a few mini-trainings for the icap office and medical staff. the first was on hiv and safe sex. we did this at the request of our boss, partly because she believes that many people in the office either donºt know what they should, or arenºt practicing safe sex, and partly as part of an initiative from the provincial director of health to have all employees of health-related ngos knowing something about the health topics the ngo works with. so on a saturday morning (much to the consternation of many employees) we ran a training using the same slide presentation we had prepared for peer educator trainings. we talked about how hiv acts in the human body, how treatment works, various means of transmission, and prevention methods. it was really interesting for a number of reasons. we gave a pre and post test on the material, a way to see what people know before and after a training. the evaluations were anonymous, but we divided them between medical and non-medical staff. the non-medical staff learned a lot, which was great. the medical staff got clarification on a few points, but for the most part their understanding remained the same, which is actually good, because it means they didnºt have a lot of misconceptions in the first place. but the thing that was really interesting (and also kind of annoying) was that during the parts about safe sex, the people who got the most giggly and jokey were the male medical staff! c'mon guys, youºre supposed to be talking about this stuff for a LIVING, and you canºt talk about how to put on a condom without giggling and making jokes, and you hold a female condom with the tip of a pen as if itºs going to get you dirty or something? yeah, i know, boys will be boys, but i was still kind of disappointed by that. if the medical personel canºt deal with talking about this stuff, itºs no wonder that the people theyºre supposed to be helping donºt always have good information. some of the non-medical male staff, on the other hand, asked tons of really good questions so you could tell they were actually getting something out of it, so that was good.
the other training alison and i did was a tech training. the icap office is a pretty "modern" looking place, computers and technology and whatnot. all office staff and many doctors have company computers, and thereºs a copy machine, fax machine, and scanner for everyone to use. but many people only know how to use this equipment on the most basic levels, and people are constantly asking us for help. after seeing our power point presentations (complete with lots of animations) people were really interested in learning how to use that program well too. so we planned 2 afternoons worth of trainings. on the first day alison taught people the basics of power point, how to make a presentation aesthetically pleasing, and the fun stuff like animations. on the second day i showed them a program to learn how to touch-type, and how to use the scanner and fax machine. teaching people how to use this technology, i often notice a similarity in talking about technology stuff with family members of other generations. depending on how long youºve been using certain types of technology, youºre more comfortable and adept at playing around to figure out new stuff. for instance, i had no idea how to use the office scanner, but i figured it out in an afternoon, but many people have only been using computers, etc. for a very few years. if you think technology has changed/improved rapidly in the us, itºs changed at lightening speed here. another difficulty a lot of people have is that almost all the equipment and programs are in english, so that even if they did feel comfortable playing around, theyºre severly limited by language. anyway, it was a pretty minimal tech training, but we covered some basic things people had shown interest in, and made some staff who arenºt around us a lot aware that weºre here and available to help if they have other questions. and because our boss was supportive in allowing people to get out of work to attend these trainings, iºm sure we could do similiar activities in the future if there was more interest.
on the second day of that tech training, with only about a days notice, i signed up to participate in a bike ride to nicoadala, the next town up the highway from quelimane. the story behind the ride and my participation in it is kind of complicated, some other pcvs had been trying to organize a bike-a-thon across the province in collaboration with a local youth activist organization, and although it looks like that project has fallen through, through those contacts we were invited to bike with them on a different outing. there were mixed messages as to the reasons for the ride. everyone who participated was given a t-shirt which comemmorated the "day of youth and sport" or something like that, which was the day after the actual ride. but when we got to nicoadala there was a big event at the secondary school, and i was told that a local group was kicking off a month-long testing campaign. so either way, 3 other pcvs and i (and about 50 other people) biked from quelimane to nicoadala. itºs 37k which is 23 miles according to my cell phone converter, which is almost without a doubt the farthest iºve ever biked. luckily for me itºs all flat, and it wasnºt super hot, and even still i almost died. the group included professional biker guys and a lot of bike taxi drivers, in short people in MUCH better shape than i am, and they were going a bit faster than i would have chosen and not stopping for water as often as i would have liked. to top it off i swear the wind was blowing against us the entire way. a couple of times 2 of the professional biker guys grabbed the back of my bike to push me along to help me rest a bit and catch up with the group, and if it wasnºt for them i might have fallen behind. but i made it! not really dying to do it again any time soon, at least not when i canºt control my pace, but it was something different, nice to be able to appreciate some pretty countryside in a different way, and definitely a feeling of accomplishment!
on another saturday in august i went to participate in the first "feira de saude," or health fair, in quelimane. the purpose of the day was to promote healthy practices, all the local ngos had booths set up with information and were doing various screenings (HIV tests, breast cancer, blood pressure, etc). there were singing groups and skits with themes of non-discrimination, etc. some outstanding community health workers got prizes. all really nice, right? well it would have been, but my day started by meeting the icap car and my peer educators at a point on the other side of town from the fair to hand out t-shirts. thatºs nice, right? peer educators and icap staff were all supposed to get t-shirts that said icap and "feira de saude" and walk together in one happy group to the fair location. except that t-shirts are like gold here. every event, every commemorative day, every organization, etc. makes a t-shirt and they are coveted prizes which people will wear for years, and when i got to the meeting point there was already a full-scale war going on, all 90+ peer educators were in a mob around the icap car scrambling and screaming that they didnºt get a t-shirt, or they wanted a different colored t-shirt, or the person next to them had taken 2, or that another person wasnºt even a peer educator. it was RIDICULOUS, but i should have known, thereºs always a guerra (war) when ANYTHING is being given away, money, t-shirts, food, whatever. i blame the ngo culture for making people believe that they need t-shirts to be taken seriously, or that they have the right to expect something free when an ngo car shows up. but it is still such a spectacle over something that SO isnºt worth it, it always puts me in a bad mood. it is an unfortunate part of my reality here.
to round out my month, towards the end of august my joma group put on a training. the kids who had gone to the nampula conference had really wanted to do a full-on training for the rest of the group, for them to experience well the material that they had learned. so we wrote a grant, got the money, and finally did it this month. theyºre really motivated, smart, organized kids, so i was lucky that i had to do relatively little prep work. i gave them the money to buy supplies, and a little guidance, and they ran with it. they did a 7-day training (their choice). 5 afternoons after school and all day saturday and sunday. i went every afternoon during the week. the first day started pretty late, and i was starting to get annoyed, but i decided that it was their project, and that as long as they accomplished something and they were happy with it, iºd let it be, and it all turned out ok. every day they started more on time and more people showed up and the training went better. they divided up the training into 2 days on leadership, 2 on gender, and 3 on theater, with different people in charge of leading each day. the associationºs president (one of my best peer educators) ended up running a lot of the sessions, and sometimes their leadership styles or management skills werenºt necessarily how i would have preferred, or what i thought was the "best" way to do things, but i let them go with it, and again, every time i thought something wasnºt going well, it ended up ok, and i was really happy with my decision to stay out of most of it (even though they complained) because i think it was much better for them to learn how to do this on their own. as reading my blog will probably indicate, trainings are a major part of the ngo/activist life here, and as these are all smart, dedicated kids many of them are likely to end up working or volunteering in some capacity where knowing how to put on a training will be a very useful skill. anyway, the training had low points (more kids than weºd budgeted for showed up on some days and there were fights over food; some of the kids got into an argument about each othersº behavior and the group was pretty tense as a result) and high points (the peer educator who did a session on gender explained sexual orientation in a way that i thought completely correct and respectful but also sensative to the fact that the ideas are uncomfortable for a lot of people here, making me really proud; the groupºs final theater piece in a local market was really interesting and well-received) but overall i was happy with the way it turned out.
with all that, i still manage to feel unproductive a lot of the time. things like fights over t-shirts and whatnot, lack of attendance and participation in peer educator activities, and inability to get answers to what i see as simple questions because of ngo beurocracy, can get really annoying and disheartening, and certainly contribute to my feeling of uselessness or lack of accomplishment. but as this blog proves, i have been doing something. and iºm taking a 2-week vacation starting next week which iºm SUPER excited about, and which i think will really help me relax and reenergize. and this week i have meetings every day with people to talk about a variety of different potential projects, so iºll have something to work on with all my new energy when i get back.
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