The Best Things and the Worst Things, Part II

Something really important that Mozambique has taught me so far is that the best things are oftentimes the most subtle, and if you try to move too fast you might miss something beautiful. It has also taught me that the worst things are usually fleeting, and are the things I will roll my eyes and laugh at….and more importantly, if you don’t do the rolling eyes/laughing thing "too soon", you’ll go nuts with frustration. So, here are more best and worst things that my first month at site has brought me:

Our second weekend in Manjacaze, the nuns had an event. Three nuns had achieved the highest level of nunnery and were having a “profissão”, where they essentially decided to give up their lives to the church, accepted God as their one and only husband, and vowed that all of their actions moving forward would demonstrate this commitment. It was beautiful, and a big f-ing deal. The nuns at the house in Manjacaze started cooking and freezing food weeks in advance for the festa (party) that would follow the ceremony. The night before the party, irmãs (sisters) started cooking at 11pm and did not stop until food was served around 3pm the next day. Do that math, please: 16 hours of cooking. SIXTEEN. (I can barely make it one hour of cooking before giving up and eating straight peanut butter for dinner. #iamanadult) The party was on a Saturday and the service lasted from 9am-1pm, then the party afterwards lasted from 1pm until after 5pm (when we left). There was lots of food and refreshments and gift-giving and dancing and celebrating. There had to be over 200 people there, from not only other cities in Mozambique but also from South Africa and Portugal. All of whom were celebrating the lifelong accomplishments and future commitments of these three beautiful irmãs. I even saw one of the celebrated irmas receive a pair of red lacy underwear as a gift, but I probably shouldn’t be posting that on the internet for just anyone to read. #toolate The tables were all decorated with color-coordinated center pieces and napkins. There was more Fanta than a person could shake a stick at. The irmãs danced for many hours. Kids ate dessert until they were going to explode, and then ate some more. Girls posed for photographs and giggled sillily when they saw themselves in a digital photo. Families met. Everyone celebrated. It was a beautiful and joyful and I’m so glad to have been a part of it. The best thing.

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At our house we have a veranda, which looks like a pavilion with tile flooring, a tin roof, and no walls. It’s the perfect place to workout because you don’t have to do burpees in the sand and rain isn’t an excuse to miss a workout. #totesbrades But, the pavilion is right next to the gate, which allows other people to peek into our quintal (yard) if they feel like being nosey. Well, it turns out that doing Insanity (a workout video that requires one to flail around until your heart rate increases a bunch and you can’t breathe) is not a thing that Mozambicans are used to seeing. So, at least one time per 40 minute Insanity video, we have an audience watching us sweat and gasp for air and do more squat jumps than probably is healthy. And to be honest, some days I don’t really mind. I’m like, okay, I get it: when you watch something on tv you don’t copy what the people are doing…this is weird. But other days, I really need to be able to zone out and sweat and forget that I’m in such a foreign place. I need Sarah time and having people watch me partake in Sarah time ruins the point of Sarah time. Trying to pretend there is nobody watching me doesn’t work. And on those days, when I need it the most but am not getting what are maybe the most important and necessary 40 minutes of my day, working out with a Mozambican audience is the worst thing.

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We spent the last few weeks going to work at our school in the morning to help them with end-of-the-year things such as inputting final grades, counting up the number of students who passed/failed, calculating other percentages of specific student populations, and getting to know our colleagues. Some of the best conversations—and most culturally insightful—have come about at unexpected times in the middle of calculating how many 12th grade girls passed math this year (or perhaps another variation of that statistic). Not only do these conversations help me gain a better understanding of Mozambican culture, values, etc., but they also help me build my Portuguese vocabulary—talking about politics, marriage and discrimination requires a different vocabulary than the usual: “I’m Sarah. I’m a volunteer. I will teach math at the Secondary School of Manjacaze. I will live here for two years. I am from the United States. I don’t eat meat. Chicken is meat. So is fish. I don’t want to talk about my diet any more. No I don’t want to marry you. Yes I’m sure I don’t want to marry you. You don’t even know my name, why do you want to marry me? That’s not a good reason. Thank you bye.” Okay I diverged a lot so let’s get back on track. With my colleagues, I have talked about the Mozambican double-standards within a relationship (man can and do cheat but women absolutely cannot and will not). When I told one of my colleagues that if a man I was with cheated on me, I would say tchau (bye) and there would be no more conversation about it, he told me, “you would be saying tchau every day” (because men cheating is so common here). And they laughed and laughed and laughed. I also learned that Mozambicans consider Eminem black because of his mad rapping skills; they consider Beyonce to be a Mozambican because she dances like Mozambicans in one of her music videos (we watched it together during this conversation, and they have a point). I learned that marrying within your class is very important (i.e. if you are a teacher you cannot marry someone who works in the fields). I learned that a good sense of humor translates across languages and cultures. I learned that even if my colleagues don’t understand something that I do or believe in, they will not disrespect me because of it. I learned that they think of America as this faraway paradise, and cannot learn enough about it. We’ve talked about immigration, discrimination, and the fact that we have a black president. I learned they they think all Americans are afraid of Muslims and they don’t understand why. Similarly,  they love to share their ideas about Mozambican culture, and I can tell they truly appreciate my desire to learn about it. Finally, and quite humorously, it’s extremely hard for them to understand why a person would leave America to come live in Mozambique…and work for free. I can explain a lot of things about America to you. And a lot of things about American culture. And the reasons behind many decisions that I make. However, this one is pretty freaking hard to translate. So instead I just laugh as say “no sei” (I don’t know) and they laugh too. And we move onto another thought-provoking topic, such as Eminem being black or how Mozambicans break in a new bed. #awkward #yesthathappened No matter how these conversations come about, or what ridiculous turn they take, or even the fact that sometimes I don’t understand half of what’s being said…they are authentic, insightful and organic. A true cultural exchange. And that is the best thing.


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Before coming to site, my roommate Alex and I bought a “stoven”. It is a stove and an oven put together—picture a toaster oven with two electric burners on top. However, upon getting to site we learned that it would be much better to have a gas stove so that when power goes out we can still cook things. So we bought a gas stove too. At that point we had spent about 4,000MT on each thing and we definitely didn’t need both. We decided to make a day trip to Maputo from Manjacaze to return the stoven and get 4,000MT back to spend on things we actually could use in our house. The trip there was great. Bbeca knows a chapa driver named Vitorino that picked us up from our house at 4am and we made it there in 3.5 hours. Considering chapas usually stop a whole bunch on the way to the destination, 3.5 hours is pretty much unheard of. So we get there, take two more chapas within the city to actually get to the store, return the stoven, buy some new things that we need (toilet brushes and super glue, for example) and start the journey back to Manjacaze. We called Vitorino, but he had already left. One of his friends met us at the main chapa stop in Maputo to pick us up, telling us that Vitorino had called him, that he was going back to Manjacaze, and that we could ride with him. We were grateful, got in the car, and [thought] we were headed home, to be there in about 4 hours. Well, we thought wrong. And it was the worst thing. We spent from 12:45-3:30 driving around Maputo helping other Mozambicans run their errands. That’s almost three hours. Sitting in a van with a bajillion other people, stopping and going on really shitty dirt roads. The only thing I had eaten that day was a dark chocolate bar and a Coke Zero. I was crabby and over it…and we hadn’t even left Maputo.  Imagine people piling in a kid-napper-sized van with at least 20 people. Plus a bunch stuff—giant bags of maize flour, tools for working in the fields, bags and boxes and all the things. At one point there was a rope tied to a box, through a window, over the outside of the van, through the other side of the window and tied to a door handle. I couldn’t even. Then we finally leave Maputo—headed back to Manjacaze after 3 hours of nonsense—and about 30 minutes outside of the city the wheel of the van breaks. They spend about 30 minutes fixing it (none of them are mechanics and gosh knows if it was actually fixed) and then we were on the road again. And four hours later we got home. What should have been a 4 hour trip turned into a 7.5 hour trip, and neither Alex nor I could do a single thing about it. Except ride along, silently, hoping that sooner rather than later this damn driver would decide to actually take us home. It was the worst thing. 

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There is a word in the local language that means a couple of different things. Mulungo in Changana means "white person" or "rich person". It is very common to hear that word when walking by a group of Mozambicans because there are I think 5 white people in all of Manjacaze (~30,000 people). So, you'll hear a bunch of words that you don't understand in Changana, sprinkled heavily with mulungo, and you know they're talking about you. And at first I thought it wouldn't bother me because yes, I am white, and compared to most, I'm on the richer side of the poor-rich scale, even just living on the Peace Corps monthly stipend. But after a while it really started to bother me. I am not just a mulungo. I am a person. I have a name. I am living here in your community for two years and I will be teaching your students. I am not a tourist. I am not a visitor. I do not have unlimited income. I live on a budget that makes second think spending 100MT ($2) on cheese. Roaches run through my reed walls at night. When your power goes out, so does mine. Water is just as valuable to me as it is to you. I don't have shady streets to walk on, either. I love and I feel and I care. I enjoy learning and growing and sharing. I want to know you. Do you want to know me? I am not mulungo, I am Sarah.
Because I clearly don't speak Changana, most people who talk about me probably don't realize that I know that mulungo refers to me. But I do. And one day I decided to say something about it. There were a group of kids hanging out in front of a house (in the front yard, on the front porch and even some chillin' on the roof). As Alex and I walked by, the kids started shouting "mulungo! mulungo! mulungo!" at us. It was the worst. Without thinking, I responded: "Não sou mulungo. Eu tenho nome. Eu sou Sarah." I am not Mulungo. I have a name. I am Sarah.
Quiet. I think the silence was part "oh shit she understood us" and part "what do we say to that?". Once they processed through what I had said, they started shouting again. But this time: "Sarah! Sarah! Mana Sarah!". I said obrigada (thank you) and waved. They smiled and waved back. I like to think I taught them a little lesson that day...that there is more to a white person than skin color or deep pockets. I felt proud of myself for speaking up. Alex and I laughed about it. And it was the best thing. 

Honorable mentions:

The Worst Things:

• Dozing off the first night in my new bed in my own room and a cockroach tickles my toe. Ew. The worst thing.
• Going to the market to get bajias (kind of like falafel but cheaper and made with more oil), and all the mães are sold out.  Shucks I'm hungry. The worst thing.
• The dog escaping and bringing back a chicken. Bbeca having to capture it in a plastic bag and try to find out which neighbor it belongs to. Poor Chicken. The worst thing.
• A 3-hour long ATM line. Really? The worst thing.
• Your chefe de secretaria (head of the school office) flirting/making sexual jokes with you every time you talk to him. Stop it. The worst thing.
• Waiting at the school for three hours just to be told you can leave for ferias (vacation). Why are we here? The worst thing. 
• Breaking out in a rash similar to Poison Ivy, which was caused by mango sap. C'mon it's mango season. The worst thing.
• Seeing that in a class of 55 10th graders, only one boy passed math. One. The worst thing.

The Best Things:

• Visiting other people's sites and feeling like yours is the best. Suckers!! The best thing.
• Learning that the head of police in Manjacaze is a woman. The school director (male) didn't sit until she told him to. You go girl. The best thing.
• Running water. Need I say more? The best thing.
• Cold water. Necessary especially on the 100+ days. The best thing.
• Getting free rides home with your colleagues (note: the roads we walk are not shaded). Air conditioning and music. The best thing.
• When a criança (child) on the street finally calls me Mana Sarah (instead of Mana Rebbeca). I'm me, not her. The best thing.
• When the mãe in the market that sells bananas gives you extra for free to keep your business. Banana smoothies! The best thing. 
• When a colleague asks how long I've been learning Portuguese and I say 3 months. And he is impressed with how well I speak. Sim, eu falo Portugués. (Yes, I speak Portuguese). The best thing. 
• When the mãe that cooks lunch at the school remembers I don't eat meat and has an egg waiting for me. No meat. The best thing. 
• When another volunteer says the weirdest never have I ever: "Never have I ever not used a stencil and loved it." Laugh until you cry. The best thing.
• When I realized that the two women I live with are strong, beautiful, selfless and really want to understand me, even if they don't quite yet. We will get there. Lifelong friends. The best thing.