The End

Read at your own risk...

When people here ask me what I’m doing in Mozambique, I say that I teach high school math and physics. Before I left the States to come here, and also when I was home on medical evacuation in January and February 2012, I told people that I would be (or was) a math/physics teacher in Mozambique. Inevitably, people ask follow-up questions. To Mozambicans or foreigners in Mozambique, I respond, “Yeah, I work here as part of an exchange program between the American and Mozambican governments.” To Americans, I explain that my teaching placement is through the Peace Corps.

Whether speaking with Mozambicans, Americans, or foreign ex-pats and travelers, I tend not to immediately present myself under the banners of “volunteer” or “Peace Corps.” It’s not that I’m trying to hide these tags, rather, I feel like both “volunteer” and “Peace Corps,” as common titles thrown around in both Africa and the States, carry sweeping generalizations.

On one of my last nights in the Bay Area before moving back east and, it was correctly assumed, on to Peace Corps service, I went to dinner with west coast family. I remember my cousin and his wife dropping me off at the BART station and sending me off saying (paraphrasing) “You know, we think what you are doing is really selfless and admirable.” I sort of didn’t know how to react to that and, if I remember correctly (this was April 2011), said something along the lines of “Selfless? Really?” When I was home on med-evac in February 2012, I was introduced as a Peace Corps volunteer to a girl at a party. When she left the party, she sarcastically remarked to me “good luck saving the world.”

The “why are you here?” conversation is one that comes up from time to time among Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV’s). Not surprisingly, you get a wide range of mentalities.

So what am I doing here? What have I done here? Has my perspective on what I’m doing here changed over the course of 25 months? All obvious reflections given the impending end of my time here.

I’ve been writing in my grad school application essays that I set three goals for myself when I graduated from college: stay excited, learn, keep doors open. That broad set of goals that is currently informing my post-Peace Corps plans similarly informed my decision to join the Peace Corps. I was pretty psyched when I graduated from college; really ready to just go see and do and explore. Not unusual for a 22-year old, I guess. I spent a great summer wandering around South America and driving out to the west coast to start a job in San Francisco. Hitch-hiking through the Atacama Desert and solo-cruising with the windows down on western back-roads don’t exactly prime a kid to start a corporate job. Sitting down for new-hire training felt like a strangle-hold on the gas-line of the flame of youth, if you will allow me the heavy-handed metaphor. I figure that once that flame goes out, it can be pretty hard to re-ignite it. And I can’t help but feel like the world would be a pretty bleak place for me without the youthful excitement that comes with the sense of all the great possibility that the world holds. I applied to the Peace Corps because I could feel that flame being slowly smothered and was terrified of letting it go out. I left the job in April 2011, spent a month cruising east, and then flew to Asia to see friends, work, and rock climb while I waited for a response from Peace Corps. Invite to Mozambique? Sounds good.

But I wouldn’t say that I joined the Peace Corps to run away from something. I don’t see my situation in San Francisco as the inevitable “real world” that eventually awaits me. Rather, I ran toward a dynamic situation that has allowed me to learn, to not close out future opportunities, and, most of all, to stay psyched to keep doing stuff. Running away from complacency or toward possibility; it’s not about getting anywhere (forgive the cliché) so much as the mentality you maintain in the process. I figure that as long as I’m keeping myself psyched to do stuff (in the end, it’s a string of actions…), as long as I keep learning (kind of reciprocates the staying psyched part and helps with the ‘doors open’ part), and as long as I do all that without pigeon-holing myself (possibility has to exist to stay psyched), I put myself in the best position to approach the world honestly and fluidly.

So how does Peace Corps specifically fit those goals? The learning and keeping doors open parts are pretty simple. It goes without saying that going to a new country, living in new ways, speaking new languages, teaching, and traveling all contribute to some new perspective. Whether it’s warranted or not, Peace Corps has enough name recognition to keep grad schools or employers from saying “What the hell were you doing for 2+ years?” The “stay excited” part, in a generalized way, isn’t too hard to see either. But I wrote specifically about it in my Peace Corps application essays (which I actually wrote in May 2010 even though my application wasn’t submitted until January 2011). An excerpt:

A large majority of people, both in the United States and around the world, form opinions based on generalized ideas presented by biased or inexperienced sources. As such, they often forget that behind every issue are individual human beings that laugh, cry, love, and share meals together. In dismissing these humanizing elements, it becomes easier to hate and make detached decisions. Serving in the Peace Corps would highlight the human element behind cultures to me…

 Once again, please forgive the frilly Peace Corps application language (though I may be duplicating it in this post…). I didn’t join the Peace Corps with some grandiose idea of “saving” a bunch of people I didn’t know the first thing about. Rather, I joined the Peace Corps to humanize, for myself, a region of the world that I only had a very generalized picture of and to do the same in the opposite direction. I joined the Peace Corps to maintain perspective on the complexity and depth of pretty much everything. Anyone who tells you that they don’t form generalizations about unknowns is, frankly, full of shit. The difference, I think, between “open-minded” and “close-minded” people is in how they act on the limited observations informing their generalizations. “Open-minded” doesn’t mean not having a pre-conceived notion; if you packed to come to the Peace Corps, you projected some idea of what you would encounter. “Open-minded” means maintaining an awareness of the limits of your observations and integrating that understood degree of uncertainty (although probably under-esitmated) into your actions: I observed A and B and therefore conclude X, but I know that the possibility of adding C (therefore concluding Y), etc. is ever present. The Problem of Induction:

Hume was right in his negative result that there can be no logically valid positive argument leading in the inductive direction. But there is a further negative result; there are logically valid negative arguments leading in the inductive direction: a counterinstance may disprove a law.

Hume's negative result establishes for good that all our universal laws or theories remain for ever guesses, conjectures, hypotheses. But the second negative result concerning the force of counterinstances by no means rules out the possibility of a positive theory of how, by purely rational arguments, we can prefer some competing conjectures to others.

In fact, we can erect a fairly elaborate logical theory of preference - preference from the point of view of the search for truth.

The difference between a scientist and a lunatic is not that the first bases his theories securely upon observations while the second does not, or anything like that. Nevertheless we may now see that there may be a difference: it may be that the lunatic's theory is easily refutable by observation, while the scientist's theory has withstood severe tests.

In other words, there is no 'absolute reliance'; but since we have to choose, it will be 'rational' to choose the best tested theory. This will be 'rational' in the most obvious sense of the word known to me: the best tested theory is the one which, in the light of our critical discussion, appears to be the best so far; and I do not know of anything more 'rational' than a well-conducted critical discussion.

 Being “closed-minded” just means acting on your limited observations and expecting “absolute reliance.” You probably piss yourself off when your “certainty” is contradicted. And you probably piss a lot of other people off when you try to put them in boxes that they don’t fit in. Hence part of my reason for avoiding the tags “volunteer” and “Peace Corps;” why help people generalize? Everybody loses, both the boxer and the boxed. Joining the Peace Corps, traveling, wandering down the road, doing anything to expose myself to people in light of being just people is where I get specific with that “stay excited” goal. It’s self-reciprocating. The more experiences you have where your generalizations are shattered, the more aware you become of the limits of your own perspective, the more able you are to approach situations in a way that allows your generalizations to be shaken up. Why is this exciting? Because it’s everything; it’s saying, “Holy fuck, I’m not really sure, but that’s totally ok, because, as I’m becoming more and more aware of as I get to know a broader and broader range of people (and hence become more and more humbled by the limits of my perspective), no one else is either. Everyone is trying their best. It’s ok.” “Be kind for everyone is fighting a hard battle.” Right? Drop me out of a plane with a parachute anywhere there are people surviving. I will be taken care of. I live to maintain that mentality. There is nothing more exciting to me than how broadly the world opens up when your experiences have ripped apart your ability to dismiss the possibility of positive interaction with essentially anyone.

 In case there wasn’t enough philosophy in there, tackle the same idea metaphysically: If we all experience the world through our unique lenses of past experience (bias), what experience do we truly share? We share experience when we see the world with our uniquely tinted lenses pulled away. Given that the lenses are the experiential reference structure we use to make sense of the world, “seeing without the lens” would mean staring into the nearly infinite degree of uncertainty in pretty much everything we understand (no referential experience = minimal ‘sense’). It’s everything and nothing; ultimate ownership and choice while drowning in a lack of absoluteness in anything. It would be crippling if not for the fact that in coming to this thinking you weren’t finding that it’s shared by everyone (to some degree). Humanize yourself (show that you’re not sure) and those around you will humanize themselves. Allow yourself and others to share the only thing that, in a metaphysical but also tangible sense, we can universally share: the fact we aren’t really sure.

 If “coming to God” means confronting the vast uncertainty of the world and surrendering to it, and if church, etc. is merely a way of sharing this confrontation and surrender (the only thing, I argue, that we can truly share), then religion is a beautiful thing. But if religion is used as a dismissal of the questioning process that brings you to know the only sharable thing, then it’s a sad tool used to keep people from sharing humanity with each other; it allows people to oversimplify, generalize, dehumanize, and, as a result, do things like drop bombs.

 Anyway…

I find it hard not to digress when talking about this stuff. It’s difficult for me to get into a discussion about pretty much anything without zooming out into the “big picture.” But I’ve found that that kind of all jives with what I’ve been getting at in this post. I quickly zoom out when I get into conversations with people. Repeatedly, people jump at the opportunity to engage in those discussions. Everywhere in the world. Kind of the “humanize yourself and those around you will humanize themselves” thing that I just mentioned. It may create rambling monologues but, ultimately, if it helps me to humanize my perspective of the world (and hopefully others’), then that’s good. Why hide from each other when at heart everyone wants so badly to be honest and to be treated honestly? (The “wife” character in Capote’s “In Cold Blood” being ‘tired’ comes to mind.) I’m not sure either. It’s ok. We don’t need to pretend.

So… yeah. I joined the Peace Corps because shaking up my universe has served me well – it keeps me honest and, by extension, helps me to humanize the world. I’m excited, I’m learning, and I have a lot of choice on the table.

But let’s zoom back in a bit. Everyone reading this has some idea of “Africa.” As if the United States was just one big generalization, we use the word “Africa” to talk about a place that’s like three or four times bigger and has more languages than have been counted. I had an idea of “Africa” and, of course, still have one. But I have also gotten to know a ton of individuals in Mozambique. Some people are great. Some people suck. Kind of like everywhere. But both the people who are great and the people who suck go home at night, lie in bed, stare up at the ceiling in the dark and wonder about something. The more time you spend around others, the more aware of that you become. I live in a neighborhood where few people know that the United States is a country. I could stay in Ncuerete for twenty years, learn fluent Makua, marry, and subsistence farm for a living but I would still be far from understanding my neighborhood’s culture. But in just two years, I’ve hung out with enough people to know that they wonder (in the most general sense). Hopefully I’ve shown some of them the same in myself; goal achieved.

I tend to dismiss the word “volunteer” because it implies that I went somewhere to help others because I know that they need help. To tell a Mozambican who subsistence farms to support their family that you “volunteered” to get a round-trip plane ticket, intensive training, a free house, free western-standard medical care, and a professionally comparable salary is sort of laughable. To tell my colleagues that I volunteered to teach with them implies that I don’t think that they are doing a good job and that I know how to do things better. Hence my usual explanation “I’m here on an exchange between the American and Mozambican governments;” this is a two-way learning process. Which isn’t a lie. In putting it that way, I find that Mozambicans I meet treat me more as just a person working as a teacher in their country and less as some guy telling them what’s good for them (see: humanizing stuff). I’m not trying to rip on volunteerism here, people helping people is what makes the world function, more just commenting on an approach to humanizing myself.

I definitely entered the Peace Corps with that mentality. I still have it in some ways. But I’m happy to say, as much as I avoid the whole “volunteer” thing and as much as I tend to view things from a “big picture” angle, that I do reflect positively on specific work that I have done here.

 I showed up for class consistently and on time. As a turma director, I looked out for my students when they had issues with their other teachers. I encouraged kids to ask questions and to wonder – physics explains things! I threw pieces of chalk around the room and made kids push each other over. Generally I tried to show my students that I felt a sense of responsibility toward them and my job (sadly far from a given here). Hopefully they learned some physics or at least saw that it’s way more exciting and applicable than orally-dictated theory lessons might indicate. If not, hopefully a new classroom environment, or, if nothing else, the presence of some weird foreign guy, planted some sort of seed of curiosity – I hope I encouraged at least a few kids to wonder. I got science fair going in our district. It seems like the district government is on track to keep it going. And I left a group of students at our school excited to come up with new projects for next year’s fair. Hopefully with the help of some new Peace Corps teachers, science fair will continue to improve. I kept the provincial government on track with the national science program – and had a window into an entire different world in the process; a rural classroom and a city government are different working environment.

 In the end, the best summary of the last 26 months is probably to say “it was an experience.”

 A few contrasts to highlight things that I will miss and things that I am happy to be leaving behind:

 Flexibility vs. Organization:

Probably the single biggest frustration I had adapting to Mozambique was the general lack of organization and planning. I already ranted a bit about the education system on this blog several months back; no need to repeat myself. Generally, nothing is planned in advance. Problems are never foreseen. They always arise. Nothing ever runs smoothly. When it means waiting over two hours for your grilled chicken, no big deal: drink a couple more beers and enjoy your company. When it means that you can’t even get a classroom open to meet with your science group because there is absolutely no organized system for storing and managing keys – pain in the ass. On the flip-side, what Mozambique lacks in organized systems it makes up for in its flexibility. In the States, you could rent a van and driver a month in advance, have a set price, and generally be able to rely on the company to have the car ready to go at the right time on the right day. In Mozambique, trying to plan that far in advance is a waste of your time. The driver will inevitably call you day-of to say that he got distracted and won’t be making it. But… you don’t have to worry about going through some company’s policy and procedures, or store hours, etc. to get something done immediately. Need a car and driver? Someone is cruising around with an open-back truck and wants to make a dime. Deal. Done. Let’s go. Want to raise pigs? Call up some neighbor kids to help you build a corral and another kid to find you some cheap pigs in the neighboring town. Feed them with the corn by-products the neighbor ladies already have. No livestock permits. No overpriced special animal corral builder people. Need fire wood for your oven? Pay a dude $0.60 to walk into the bush and chop some stuff. You may not be able to look up the nearest building supply depot and their prices, but you can put a word out in the hood that you need some bamboo and it will show up at your door. School is a disorganized hell-storm but I have no issues with parental or administrative interference. I run the classroom as I see fit. No way that a teacher could enjoy that freedom in the States.

 I will not miss the clusterfuck that is organization here. I will miss being able to make things happen on the spot – no red tape.

Efficiency vs. Enjoying the Moment

Hand in hand with things not being planned is a general lack of a sense of urgency about pretty much anything. When you live 6 kilometers from your town and have to bike down a dusty path in the heat to squeeze in meetings before your afternoon classes, lack of scheduling and timeliness can be extremely frustrating. You can’t plan to meet X from nine to nine-thirty, then Y from ten to ten-thirty, then quickly do your shopping and get a plate of rice and beans before racing back to school for noon class. Just no way anyone is reliable enough for that kind of scheduling. A huge part of getting things done here is simply being present. You meet with people or hear about plans whenever it is you bump into the relevant people. And in some ways, there is something great about that. Nothing is so important that it should get in the way of sharing a meal, beer, and/or conversation with whoever you run into throughout your day. Meeting scheduled? Oops, couldn’t make it because a teacher friend invited me to share a plate of matapa.

Things happen when they will happen. No need to stress. It’s great way to live when you get used to it. But I haven’t been able to totally suppress my American (and engineer?) urge for efficiency (which is probably a good thing…). The change in pace of life will surely be a jolt to my system upon my return.

Outdoor vs. Indoor

If you haven’t picked up on it from all the photos on this blog, I essentially live my entire life outside. I sleep, work, cook, eat, shower, shit, shave, and stare into outer-space outdoors. I go inside to change my clothes and to get the salt. Even traveling, I end up in the open back of a truck half of the time. It’s great. When I wake up in the morning, I can guess the time to within +/- 3 minutes based solely on the color of the sky. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I can tell what time it is based on the angle of the moonlight. I go to sleep when it’s been dark for an hour. I wake up at the first crack of dawn. I bathe under the stars. My bathroom never smells because its three grass walls keep the fresh air flowing. When I cook, I just throw food scraps to the side to get cleaned up by the animals. There are few downsides to living outside. The only complaints might be the dirtiness and lack of rain protection. You can pretty quickly get used to outstretched-hand-sized spiders, rats, bats, lizards, army ants, etc. chilling with you in your house. They are chilling and doing their thing – generally no interference. What’s tough about the grass-mud house situation is the hot and rainy season. The roof always leaks. Rain blows onto the porch living room space. Summer downpours are generally stressful and wet. The physical outdoor life also tends to mean regular scrapes, cuts, and burns. No big deal… except during the wet and hot season the smallest hangnail goes septic in about an hour. Keeping it clean and disinfected is tough when you manage outdoor life in the yard (animals, charcoal, bucket laundry, wood chopping, etc.).

 But hey, as long as I have a steady supply of Neosporin and the hot season only lasts for 3-4 months, I’m happy to keep up the outdoor life. Will be a claustrophobic transition home.

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Chiure Town:

 

Will miss teaching... sometimes:

Home sweet home; will miss this:

Wont miss cleaning clothes this way:

Will miss beaches like these:

And chilling with people like this:

The end of Manja, the pig:

...for a good cause: party:

...dance party:

...complete with poetry readings:

And some more partying down on the Lurio River:

I leave home on Saturday. Will spend a couple of days in Pemba saying "bye" to local Peace Corps friends. To Maputo on Monday. Four days doing close-out stuff. Friday night bus to Jo'burg. Jo'burg to Amsterdam (via Dubai) on the 16th/17th. Then some time in Netherlands, Begium, and France to see friends and visit a couple of potential grad schools. In D.C. on December 5th via flight from Paris with a stopover in Iceland. Stateside for the first time since February 2012!