Reset

Hello from the Northern Hemisphere. I thought I was getting to skip winter this year but happenstance has me home in DC for most of January and February. The break in my right wrist, held in place by my neon pink cast, is a couple weeks from being fully healed. The left wrist is in a removable brace; I can move it around but it is still extremely stiff from surgery (permanent metal plate and eight bolts). I am regaining mobility in my left elbow, scars are closing up, and the shaved patch on my head is slowly growing back. And I'm off the sickening post-exposure drugs I had to take for a month. The orthopedist thinks I should be in good enough shape to go back to Mozambique in late February.

I flew from Johannesburg back to Maputo on January 3rd to give a police statement in Macia and clear my valuables out of old house. The Macia police chief showed us the wrecked car in the lot behind the station and grinned at me as I turned away, saying in Portuguese, "Man, I can't believe you lived." Thanks, Chief. Very professional.

I got to see a few friends in Maputo on the night of the 4th then flew out business class back to DC on the 5th. Since then, I've been home decompressing, seeing a few friends, and rehabing my wrists, elbow, and shoulder. Overall, doing pretty well. Enjoying good food and a luxurious house. A bit strange being popped out of Peace Corps world back to a home I didn't expect to see for a couple years. Assuming the orthopedist and counselor clear me, I should be back on a plane to southern Africa in less than a month. Will surely be another strange transition back in, but I am definitely looking forward to it. I will be assigned to a new site (to be away from the scene of the accident) that is yet to be determined.

For now, I am drinking tea and building cool shit out of legos. Oh yeah, and hanging around with our newly adopted cat, Sofie, aka Ziggy Cheese Sauce. I can be reached on my old American cellphone for the time being.

Tea and Legos

Super Secret Island Fortress

Super Secret Island Fortress Attack Boat (those are working gears!)

Ziggy Cheese Sauce

I wrote a post on December 15th (five days before the accident) that I never had a chance to publish about life at my site in Macia. While it is no longer relevant (I am moving), I thought I would give you guys a little picture of what life there was and would have been. A few photos from my last days in Namaacha and Directors Conference in Bilene are also attached.

December 15th, 2011:

After a couple days in Maputo to “swear-in” at the ambassador’s house and enjoy a final night out as a training group, we scattered to our regional directors conferences. I, along with the fifteen other kids sticking around the southern region, piled into Peace Corps trucks and cruised up the EN1 (Estrada Nacional 1; Mozambique’s main highway) to Bilene. Our little hotel was literally on the beach of the calm turquoise lagoon that divides the town from the deserted spit of sand dunes protecting the inner-body of water from the waves of the Indian Ocean.

The goal of the conference was basically to meet our school directors and get us all on the same page. An 8 am to 5 pm schedule was easily condensed into half day sessions that left the afternoon, evening, and night open for seafood lunches, lagoon swims, slackline sessions on the white sand, dinner feasts (it should be noted here that we had been subsisting on bread, fried stuff, and fried stuff up to this point), and final nights reminiscing about training. We rented a boat and cruised out to the Indian Ocean one afternoon; deserted beaches and the force of a rough sea gave me some Northern California nostalgia. Pool (as in the game with balls and sticks) and cold beers filled the later hours.

Bilene is about 35 km from where I am now setting up my home. Assuming some kind soul picks up the mulunga (‘white person’ in Changana) standing on the side of the road, that trip should take less than 45 minutes. Whether it’s to hang out in a sandy yard with Portuguese expats playing pool or to cantilevered-spirit-quest (read that as a verb, please) by a campfire on the dunes by the ocean, I plan to make my way out there frequently.

Anyway, we wrapped up the conference on Sunday afternoon. By Monday morning my boxes and my body were dropped off at the house I will call home for the next two years. Note: I have not lived in one house for more than eight months since high school. A life of seemingly constant transition will finally see some stability in Mozambique?

As far as Peace Corps standards go, I live in absolute luxury. My school’s teacher housing was built two years ago; I have electricity, running water, and a fridge. Compare that to some of the kids up north living in thatch houses with no energy or running water. To be honest, I had really been looking forward to the simplicity of occupying my days with fetching water, lighting charcoal, and sleeping and rising with the sun for the next couple of years (I really mean that seriously). Alas, my life will not be the idealized picture of the escapist mind. On the upside, not occupying my time building fires to heat my bath water means that I will have time to do lots of other cool stuff. A nice house is nice, but two-year old military-base style housing feels a bit sterile next to the “cane” houses across the street. I’m planning to spend the next few weeks putting time into adding character to the place.

I have the slackline tied up between a porch column and a fence post; the kids next door are already hopping the fence into my yard to do their best Filipe Petit impressions. I dug up the backyard this evening in preparation for the “machamba” that should produce some tasty food for me over the next few years (planned: papaya trees, tomatoes, pumpkin, hot peppers, squash, TBD). I commissioned a carpenter in town to build me some benches (only $5 each!) for the fire pit that I plan to dig tomorrow in the backyard. I am scheming to use a Peace Corps map making resource (they give us a massive software file, MozSoft, before we finish training) to paint a giant world map on my living room wall. Though apparently the school might not be ok with me painting maps on my walls…

So aside from having to walk 45 minutes along the highway to get into town and living in characterless housing (did the Chinese build this place? They did pay to repave the highway here…) things are moving along nicely. Once work starts I will be a five minute walk through a field to class. The trek to town should keep me in shape. Living on the highway means 30 second waits to hitch rides all over the country. The beach is close. Macia has most everything you could expect to buy in Mozambique. My school is fresh and new. And I got the next five weeks to putts about building a badass garden, digging a fire pit (and then roasting freshly slaughtered chicken over it), playing with my inherited dog Bee-Bop , perfecting my line walking abilities (I can walk backwards now!), going to beach, and probably reading a bunch.

Saturday (as in December 17^th; I lag between writing and posting these) will be enjoyed at the beach meeting other Peace Corps people from around Gaza Province. Sunday will be spent at the home of my new “host family” (the head of secretaries at my school is taking me in, as she did with the last PCV here) presumably feasting.

For all of you wondering why your tax dollars are funding this, let me tell you that I am going to give some damn inspiring physics lessons come school year!

Slacklining on the Lagoon in Bilene

Untouched Indian Ocean Coastline

Little Sis Ciara

Cousin Neto and Sister Arlete

Momma Celeste and Sister Ciara

Trouble in Paradise

I had saved a few posts on MS Word that I was hoping to put up last week. Unfortunately, plans get sidetracked. Seriously sidetracked. I spent Tuesday at the beach with four other PCV's. Our hitched ride back to my town sped and eventually flipped over off the road. All but two passengers (out of ten) were thrown from the van. I was fortunate to have a seatbelt on. I would provide a lot more detail, but I'm currently typing with both hands in casts.

I came-to to find myself covered in blood in an empty car off the road with my crooked left wrist throbbing in pain. Some bystanders helped me out and threw me in the back of a pickup to take off to the Macia hospital (basically a little house). I struggled to put the pieces together in a brain scrambled by concussion, pain, and adrenaline, and confusion. They gave me a pain shot and stabilized my wrist. Eventually thr other PCV's showed up. Two passed away. Two living: One with a severe concussion - very confused and scared; and one more (luckily doing well enough to be on the phone with PC. Hours later, ambulances showed up. We sped down to Maputo (about two hours), spent a night there, and then were evac'ed to Pretoria, SA on Wednesday by plane. I went into a long surgery on Thursday. Permanent plates on the left wrist. Bone graft on left elbow. Staples all over left arm (I think my elbow went through the window next to me) including closing up where my entire elbow joint was exposed. Bone set on right wrist. Stitches in head. Christmas in the hospital. Released yesterday to a nice guesthouse in Pretoria. Nice to be out but friend is helping bath me... haha. Hanging in. Lots of big question. Would like to provide detail but typing is very slow. Doing ok. My phone is down. I can be contacted at The Rose Guesthouse in Brooklyn, South Africa. Hope everyone's holidays have been better. All the best wishes.

Transition

A food deprived man happily digs in on Thanksgiving.

Sporting some new gear at the host family party.

Hiking outside Namaacha.

Currently sitting in the Peace Corps Mozambique Headquarters in Maputo. Today is a big admin day before we swear-in tomorrow and transfer to our sites later this week. Peace Corps Office = Fast Internet. Thought I would take the opportunity to put up a few photos.

Not a ton to report at the moment. Been busy packing up my life in Namaacha and prepping to go to site. While we are all a little sad to say our goodbyes and spread out around the country, everyone is ready to cook their own food and have some more personal space; eating deep fried everything for every meal and worrying about what time you have to be home gets tiresome when you are used to more independence (although I was lucky to have a lax family with the latter).

I scored "mid-Advanced" on the final Portuguese language interview. I gave five seperate 45-minute classes on math and physics in the language; am feeling comfortable speaking. Now I just have to learn some Changana (local language - a dialect of Tsonga - spoken around southern Mozambique) so that I can avoid getting ripped off at the market in my town.

This afternoon we are trucking back up to Namaacha to chill with our families for one last night before leaving the breezy mountains on the Swazi border. Tomorrow morning we come back to Maputo, "swear-in" at the U.S. Embassy, and then enjoy an afternoon and night to wander around the city; likely some 'despedida' festivities for our training group. Friday we all ship off to regional supervisors conferences.

The southern regional meeting (I live in the south) will be in the beach town of Bilene right down the road from my site (see photo in my "Site Placement" post). We will be chilling on the beach and having meetings with our school directors. By Monday, I'll be in Macia setting up my house on a completely deserted school grounds. No students (and likely no other teachers) on campus until late-January. Peace Corps restricts our travel for the first three months at site to make sure we are getting to know our towns. The idea makes sense, but when your entire community is basically gone on vacation it seems like the rules could be loosened up a little.

With no school in session and limited travel, I'll likely spend the next 6-8 weeks setting up my house, starting a garden, building a fire pit in my backyard, reading a ton, regaining my physical health (all day classes, a terrible diet, and lots of beer take their toll...), getting really good at walking back and forth on a thin rope, decorating my house (I'm thinking some cheese wheel and geometric drawings on my walls using charcoal as my paintbrush), getting to know the dog that was left for me (Bee-Bop is his name, I am told), finding a bike, wandering around my town, and hopefully chilling on the beach a bit. I will likely meet up with other PCV's for Christmas and New Years at a beach somewhere.

I'll be sure to update everyone when I get to site and start finding my way around.

Giving Chase

Running down Thanksgiving dinner. He'll be soaking in brine for the next two days in prep for our Thanksgiving feast on Friday.

Thanksgiving Prep

You know your Thanksgiving turkey is fresh when you behead it yourself. That's me with friends Sean and Sam making the second kill.

War Stories

Call me up when you are badass enough to kill your own turkey for Thanksgiving.

11/22/2011

My host mom, Celeste, and I have a great relationship. We rarely engage in much conversation but, as most moms do, she has quickly picked up on my quirks and habits. She’ll drop a “estas com fome… “ (you’re hungry, huh?) as I squat next to her by the coal stove, then flash a knowing smile as she chuckles to herself and pulls my lunch out of the frying pan. When I come home from playing basketball, I rarely wait ten minutes before I’m commanded to get clean, “vai tomar banho” (go take a bath); a bucket of hot water (with a bucket of cold next to it to get the temperature just right) is already waiting for me in the bathroom. When she realized that me saying “cheguei tarde” (I got home late…) meant I had showed up at 5:30 am and been let in by my 7 year-old cousin, her response: “Tem que brincar” (you gotta play). I would be remiss in not throwing a shout-out to the real Momma Roberts in this post. Not only is the kitchen always stocked to my taste when I make my occasional appearances back in DC, but dinner requests are always honored. And pre-dinner conversation over a glass of wine is unrivaled by any chats in Portuguese with my temp mom here.

Anyway, Celeste is looking out for me. I’m out bragging about her fish samosas (“chamusas de peixe” in Portuguese) to my American friends. We got each other’s backs. This Friday we are having a huge Thanksgiving party. She’s agreed to make one-hundred chamusas for our party for only 150 mets. To put that into perspective, she’s going to buy ingredients, hand make thin samosa wrappers, cook and mash fish-onion-spice filling, individually wrap and fill one-hundred perfect samosa triangles, and then fry them one-by-one for 150 meticais. “150 meticais is how much?” you ask, yeah that’s about five dollars.

Like I said, as well as Celeste and I get along, she rarely seems interested in engaging in too much conversation. That’s why I was surprised to watch her and Samuel, a guy who stays in a room off our house on weekdays, go off on a two hour chat about the civil war (oxymoron?) years here in Mozambique.

For those of you who don’t know the history of obscure corners of Africa, Mozambique became independent from Portugal in 1975. Frelimo, the socialist political party that spearheaded the independence movement, took control of the newly sovereign nation under the guidance of President Samora Machel. Immediately following independence, the government of what was then Rhodesia engineered an internal resistance movement within Mozambique, Renamo, aimed at destabilizing the country and, by extension, aimed at preventing Frelimo from supporting the movement for an independent Zimbabwe. Similarly motivated, the South African government threw their support behind Renamo fearing that an independent black Mozambique would support Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid ANC party (read William Finnegan’s “A Complicated War” if for some reason you decide you want more history on southeastern Africa in the 1980’s), The Frelimo-Renamo conflict snowballed into a 17 year internal war that completely ravaged the country. When the war ended in 1992, Mozambique “was widely considered the world’s poorest country.” Renamo wasn’t really organized around any idea beyond de-stabilization – its actions reflected this. And Celeste and Samuel’s stories reflected these actions.

It would have been weird to watch Momma Celeste super engaged in any two hour conversation. But to hear her and Samuel chuckle like old friends reminiscing about childhood fun as they chatted about personal accounts of a vicious war was, for lack of a better word, weird (I’m curious if some of you Vietnam-era readers can relate to how unsettling it is to listen to people tell horrifying war stories in this same tone). According to my mom, an entire wedding party was shot up at a house down the street from where we live. She remembers hoping, behind locked doors in the house I currently write from, that the Renamo soldiers singing in the street outside wouldn’t knock on the door and force the parents in the house to murder their own children before robbing them (I guess it happened elsewhere in town). Samuel (not originally from Namaacha) remembers hiding out in a pond in his hometown farther north and ducking as Renamo bullets killed a group of young kids hiding out right behind him in the same pond. Pretty sobering dinner conversation…

But as tough as it is to hear some of that stuff, it was interesting to get some primary-source anecdotes about a history I had previously only read about. Hopefully I can happen across a few more similarly interesting conversations within the household before I dip out in a couple weeks.

Anyway, all is still well here. Hopefully no one took that blurb in the last post too seriously – wasn’t meant as a criticism, really just lamenting that people seem to have to be more guarded around each other than they seem to want to be. Time for me to doze off into some Lariam-induced psychotic dreams (Lariam - a malaria prophylaxis that may as well be classified as a psychedelic drug – I’ve experienced the Apocalypse and stabbed people in my dreams, among other fun things) gotta be fresh to give a lesson on “Determinacao de Planos” in Portuguese to a group of Mozambicans at model school tomorrow. Hopefully the geometric patterns in my dreams tonight will inspire a great geometry lesson!

SunBurned Sunday

Swazi-South African-Mozambican Tri-Border Point

Sunday is typically our only day off of the week. After a Saturday night running the pool table at a local bar (and winning beers for a betting friend in the process), I woke up early (as in around 4:30) to the rumble of the backup generator for the bank next door. It’s about fifteen feet outside of my open bedroom windows and normally only turns on during power outages (which happen daily but usually last just minutes). On this particular weekend, whoever runs the bank had forgotten to buy more electricity credits; the power grid was on, but the bank was forced to run continuously on generator power until Monday. Doesn’t make for a great Sunday morning sleep-in. Not to worry though, a breakfast of bread and tea and a few glasses of water later, I was tying up my hiking boots, ready to trek off with a big group of Americans to the “Tres Fronteras,” the mountaintop meeting point of the South African, Swazi, and Mozambican borders.

No sooner had I finished tying my boots when my 22 year-old cousin, Neto, sauntered into my room asking me where I was headed and if I would like to meet his friends. “Sure,” I replied, “when?” “Right now,” he says. He leads me out to his room (a separate concrete block off of the main house) where I find two of his friends pouring shots of “Hankey Bannister” scotch whiskey. Keep in my mind that it’s a few minutes past 8 am at this point. Working through the bottle of whiskey, the three of them engage me in a babbling conversation about being best friends and about how I had to hang out with them, drink multiple bottles of whiskey, and learn how friends be friends in Mozambique. By the time I escape to go on my hike (about 45 minutes later) the bottle is empty and I’m five shots deep. So much for having a restful Sunday…

I set off in the morning sun with 20+ other Peace Corps kids on a gravel road headed due west out of town. A couple hours and a few thorn scratches later, we’re posing for photos on top of a big rock pile that marks the intersection of the borders of South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique. We were rewarded with cool mountain breezes and sweeping views into all three countries. The group splintered on the decent and I ended up with three friends (the Spades crew – see “Afternoon Tea” photo - the four of us get made fun of for playing Spades all the time with the same teams that started at 5 am on the floor of the JFK ticketing area in September…) wandering down a steep and bushy part of the mountain side. Taking an unorthodox path home would have meant additional hours roasting in the midday sun were it not for a pickup truck driving by as we made it back out to the road. We hopped in the back and waved to the others as we blew by them on our way back into Namaacha.

Sunburned, tired, and hung-over (from my morning “friendship shots”), I wolfed down a plate of rice and matapa (greens stewed in a thick sauce of coconut milk and mashed peanuts – yummy!) and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later feeling rested, recovered, and ready to relax the rest of the Sunday away. I set out to type up this blog post in Word when, low and behold, Neto and his buddy Michele whistle to me from the street to join them. Before I know it, we’re sitting at a barraca filling each other’s glasses with another bottle of Hankey Bannister. A heaping tray of xima (flour boiled in water until it becomes a flavorless but filling paste resembling mashed potatoes), slabs of grilled beef, and tomato-onion salad joins our whiskey bottle a little while later. We tear the tray to shreds, ripping at the beef barehanded. Over the next few hours, Neto and I chat about his girlfriend (16 years-old; he found out this week that he got her pregnant; scary times in Neto’s world) and about life in Mozambique in general.

I would like to interject here for a moment:

Having moved around a lot over the last few years, I continue to find it remarkable how eager people seem to be to engage in pretty intimate conversation if you show yourself open to it. From truckers on the Pan-American Highway in the Atacama Desert, to bunk mates on Chinese sleeper-trains, to people wandering the same piece of beach in San Francisco, to old American friends, to a Mozambican host cousin with a recently pregnant girlfriend, and everyone in between, most people (young or old, rich or poor) are asking themselves pretty much the same questions. That shouldn’t be particularly surprising – pickup any great book and list some themes – but I guess I’m kind of struck by how eager people have been to engage me (or is it me with them… regardless, it’s reciprocated) in these conversations yet how, outwardly, people often seem so set on convincing those around them that they carry a great degree of certainty in their decisions. I don’t mean this as a critique of choosing a definite path for yourself so much as I’m trying to point out that if, across the board, everyone is asking the same questions, why do so many people seem to go to such lengths to sell their “certainty” to each other? Wouldn’t asking yourself questions be a lot less scary if everyone around you wasn’t pretending that they had fixed answers? That’s not to say that people should just float around in “a nebulous world of uncertainty” (cheers to Mr. Woll on that one). It’s just to say that if people were less keen on trying to convince others of the certainty of their decisions, maybe everyone around them wouldn’t feel the need to try so hard to come to any fixed conclusions; if we all stopped bullshitting each other, it would be a lot easier to stop bullshitting ourselves (and vice-a-versa). In that sense, I’ve been very lucky to have spent the last several years scampering around the world running into countless great conversations that have allowed me to feel pretty comfortable running around the world running into countless great conversations. “Estamos juntos,” translation: “we are together,” is a common goodbye here in Mozambique - it seems kind of fitting here.

Anyway…

Bottle number two of Hankey Bannister is soon followed by bottle number three. This bottle is followed by an additional group of Mozambican friends and another whopping tray of xima, meat, and salad. By the time we stumble out of the barraca around 9 pm (roughly five hours later), I’m steering Neto down the street by his shoulders. After a short delay climbing into the back of a covered pickup-bed to help a drunk cop break into his own car to drive home, we wander back into town (I live dead-center in the middle of town), swing by some shady friends’ spots, and return to Neto’s room to cap the night off. Two of Neto’s friends and I leave him asleep sitting up on his bed and I head back into the house to eat the grilled chicken my sister has left out for me from dinner (I was still hungry?). The end. Estamos juntos.