HOME.

So, this week for the BloggingAbroad.org blog challenge, I was supposed to write about my home. You all have already seen pictures of my house, so I didn’t want to recap that again. Instead, I wanted to use this platform to discuss whether or not my house here, the place where I sleep and I eat and I bathe, has yet become my home.What does the word “home” mean? Is it different than the word “house”? Let’s look at the definitions:

Home: The place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.

House: A building for human habitation, especially one that is lived in by a family or small group of people. 

The definitions aren’t very different, but the connotations that accompany each word are. The way we typically use the word house in English is to refer to the physical structure purposed with giving people shelter. Home is the comfort, familiarity and memories that come with living in the same house for a long time. 

There are also two words similar to this in Portuguese:  Casa, house, and lar, home. However, casa and lar are not used in the same way that house and home are used in English. Casa refers to the house of your family, where you grew up, or where a single (unmarried) person currently lives. Lar specifically refers to the house you move into with your spouse after you marry. So a person doesn’t have a lar until they get married, whereas everyone who has nightly shelter has a casa of some kind. Further, your casa as a child is your parents’ lar. Your lar as husband and wife will be your children’s casa until they get married and move into a lar of their own. Do you follow?

So, in Portuguese, the transition between casa and lar is pretty straightforward. It’s my casa until my hubby and I move into our lar together. However, in English, the difference between house and home is based more on feelings and less on timeline/life events. When does a house become a home? In American culture, it is entirely possible for a person to make a house into their home without getting married, right? But if holy matrimony isn’t the thing that helps to know when our house becomes a home, then what is it? 

It is when there are 18 pictures on the fridge, stuck on there with 18 magnets you bought as gifts for other people but never gave to them? Is it when at least 4% of the carpet is spotted with tinges from the crackle of the fireplace? When you finally remember which switch in the bathroom is for the fan and which is for the light 24x in a row? When there are more framed pictures on the walls of your kids/dogs/friends than of actual artwork (or blank space)? When the microwave has gunk splatter that’s just going to be there forever, and you’ve officially given up the scrubbing battle? Or when every single piece of home decor is just the way you want it (for now)?

Yes, I am a math person. I like concrete measurements of progress much more than abstract ones. But, this idea of house to home can’t really be measured in the way that math nerds like to measure. It just becomes a home when it does.

Which leads me to my next question: I’m NINE DAYS away from hitting the “year-in-Moz” mark, and I wonder if my house in Manjacaze has yet become my home. I haven’t gotten married, so it’s for sure a casa and not a lar. But, in English, is it a house or a home?

Is it the place where I sleep and I eat and I bathe, or is the the place where I live live? 

I think, after much time settling in, it has become my home, and here’s why:

• I haven’t locked my keys inside my room since the first month living there.
• My room has pictures of Lucy and family and encouraging hand-written letters from home that I refer to on a daily basis.
• We have a place to put coffee grounds and eggshells to improve the quality of the soil in the garden. When I go to other volunteers’ houses, I feel weird throwing eggshells and coffee grounds away.
• I have a morning routine that is flawless: It allows time for bath water to boil, for coffee to be made and drank, to almost forget something important and have to come back for it, and time to snuggle with Amêndoa.
• Tess and I have our specific chairs we sit at when we eat/study/watch Grey’s. Mine is the one on the far side of the table, facing the door. Hers is the chair on the left side of the table. 
• I have a drinking water routine: I boil water in the morning, put it in a pot to cool during the day, and put it in my water filter at night. It filters overnight so that every morning I am greeted with clean, drinkable water.  
• I have become used to people that work with/for the nuns coming in and out of our yard at all hours. Wether it be to replace part of our reed fence with cement blocks, the orphans feeding the pigs, or Mamá Amélia coming to water the garden, I simply say hi and continue with my day. 

That being said, I think that home in English not only refers to the structure itself, but to the community as well. So, what makes a city a home city? I think even in English, a home city is where your family lives, or where you grew up (or both). For me, it’s the place that makes me reminisce about senior prom; Thursday night volleyball games; lung-burning track practices; my first feels-like-you-got-punched-in-the-gut break-up; Rueben the English Bulldog; my mom and my dad and I all living in one house together even though they had been divorced for 14 years; prohibited basement drinking parties; and Thanksgiving dinners. In that sense, Brecksville/Independence, OH definitely is my home city, and Manjacaze never will be. 

But the comfort level I feel here, in this city even only after 10 months of living here, is pretty amazing. I think it would take just as long to feel comfortable moving to a new city within the United States, so I’d say I’m doing ok considering I’m halfway around the globe and very few people here know anything about American culture besides for Hollywood’s portrayal of it. 

And surprisingly, only after 10 months, there are already things to reminisce about, that bring a smile to my face when I think “remember when…”

• Remember when we didn’t have a house to live in and Alex and I were sharing a super small room, with two twin-sized beds and all of our luggage?
• Remember when the first batch of puppies was here to greet us when we arrived?
• Remember when we took the longest way possible to walk to school because we didn’t know the shortcut…and it was the middle of summer…and that damn road had no shade…and it was awfully hot even at 8am?
• Remember when my shower actually worked? oh…that’s a sad one because now it doesn’t. Bucket baths every day…
• Remember our first Christmas here, with sparklers and puppies and a mini-christmas tree and Jameson and Cards Against Humanity?
• Remember when we didn’t have school for a week because nobody could find the keys to the classrooms?
• Remember when I was semi-afraid of Valiente (our gardner)?
• Remember when Amêndoa caught a chicken but didn’t kill it so we had to wander around the neighborhood trying to find its owner? (We never found the owner). 
• Remember when I thought it was an ok idea to hand wash 30+ pieces of clothing at once? Ha, yeah right. Now 10 is my limit. 
• Remember Project Runway nights? We would watch multiple episodes of Project Runway and eat an entire pan of cake. It. Was. Awesome. 

Puppies Round 1

The anonymous chicken and the convicted murderer.

Puppies and Christmas Tree

Sparklers on Christmas

And finally, I don’t think it would be right to talk about the word home without talking about the most important thing that makes a house a home: Family. I have that here, for sure.

Adozinda (our maid) is part of the Manjababes Residence family. She is always looking for ways to help us keep the house in tip top shape. She washes my socks even when I don’t give them to her. She washes the curtains in the living room without having to be asked. She deep cleans our fridge at least once a month. She brings her 3-year-old son over and I lend her books to help him learn Portuguese. He knows me by name and absolutely loves Amêndoa. He can now count to four. 

Mamá Amélia is the woman that comes over every day to water the garden, and she too is part of the Manjababes Residence family. The nuns use food from the garden to feed themselves, the orphans and the nuns-in-training. She always stops and chats (and chats and chats and chats) if I’m home when she arrives. She always leaves veggies on the table for us.  She helps find and cover holes that Amêndoa makes in the reed fence as an attempt to escape the yard. She once told me that even though I’m pretty, that’s not what matters. What matters more is that my heart is pretty, and she knows that it is. 

Valiente is part of the Manjababes Residence family. He tells me good morning every morning. He got mad when I didn’t know there was a well in our yard until two days ago…and proved that the water was drinkable by drinking it straight out of the bucket. When I make cake I ask him to try it and he always says it’s good, even if it’s burnt. 

Mana Tess, the Health Volunteer that lives here, is also a part of the Manjababes Residence family. She’s the person I nerd out to when I think of a creative way to teach a lesson. She’s the person I bitch to when something annoys me to an irrational extent. She lets me make fun of her poor peanut butter making skills. We practice yoga together every night. She understands how annoying it is to be sexually harassed by Mozambican men every day, and what it feels like to not have the right words in the right language to say what you want to say. When I excitedly showed her my new tattoo 17x in one day, she didn’t roll her eyes. We are to each other a daily reminder that progress here is being made, but that it’s still ok to feel lost sometimes.

Mindo, Adozina's son

Mamá Amélia

So, is my house my home? I think in many ways it is. While Manjacaze will never be my home city, the house where I live is also the house that keeps many of my PC Moz memories, and where my current Manjababe family lives. And on the ridiculous, happy, sad, blissful, frustrating journey that is Peace Corps, I’m so grateful to have a home here. 

My Why

I decided to participate in a blogging challenge hosted by blogginabroad.org. Each week for the next 10 weeks, I will be given a prompt to respond to. I’m excited to be encourage to dig into new and different perspectives, and have the opportunity to view my experiences here through slightly different weekly filters. 

The first prompt is called “Your Why” and the goal is to recap the reason I came to Mozambique as a Peace Corps volunteer in the first place. This is especially fitting because I’m 17 days out from being here for an entire year. 

When I decided to join the Peace Corps, I wanted to….drum roll please…make a difference! 

But first, I should give you a little bit of background on why I wanted Africa, and why I was willing to commit to two years:

In 2009, I traveled to Lesotho with a group of service-oriented Wittenberg students, led by an RPCV and one of the best teachers I’ve had the privilege to learn from, Dr. Scott Rosenberg. During this trip, we built playgrounds; painted the walls of kids’ rooms in orphanages; moved cinderblocks up a hill so that the foundation of a house could be made; dug put latrines and constructed chicken coops. As I said, we were a group of 30 college students all really wanting to make a difference. And, we left feeling like we had. 

Playground: Check.

Panted Walls: Check. 

Cinderblocks: Check. 

Latrines: Check.

Chicken Coops: Check.

Chicken Coops.

Playgrounds.

Then, I returned to Lesotho for two weeks in 2014 with a group of Bloom Africa voluntourists. Andrew Steele (a student who was part of the 2009 Lesotho group and founder of BLOOM), brought 7 of us with him on a two-week trip to check in on some projects.We were also able to revisit some of the work started by our 2009 group. I was really, really, really hoping to see young kids playing on the playgrounds we made and kids living in the rooms that we painted and chickens growing healthily in the coops that we built. 

Buuuuut they weren’t. The playgrounds were no longer there, and I assumed that community members took the wood and used it for more critical projects. There were no chickens living in our chicken coops because the coops didn’t hold up. We didn’t check in on the orphanages to know if the kids loved the colorfully painted walls, but in retrospect they were probably too worried about their next meal or dose of ARVs (AIDS medicine) to really “appreciate” the artwork. To say the least, I was super bummed. I wanted to come back and see evidence that our ’09 group did indeed make a difference. And instead I was just irritated, angry and disappointed. We spent most of the 2014 trip having conversations with different community members and learning—from the residents—which directions our projects should take in order to be both beneficial and sustainable. 

It was at the end of that 2014 trip that I realized: If I’m really going to make the impact I desire to make through international service, I’m going to have to live in a community for longer than one month—longer than 6 months, really—to understand the people and culture and needs well enough to respond. So, between early 2014 and mid-2015, I had a voice in the back of my head whispering “Peace Corps Peace Corps Peace Corps”. Two years sounds like both a very long time, and a very short time, depending on the way you look at it. Two years away from family, friend, Lucy, and an actual income: long time. Two years to learn and understand the perspective and needs of a community well enough to be able to create sustainable, outcome-reaching projects and see them through: not that long…perhaps, even, too short. 

I wanted to live somewhere long enough to be able to immerse myself in the culture, the people and the day-to-day. I had been to Lesotho twice, and although the country captured my heart, the longest period of time I was there was a month…and that’s definitely not long enough to truly know a place. 

So I did it. I applied and jumped through 1,000 medical clearance hoops and quit my job and sold my stuff and moved to Mozambique. Why? To make a difference, duh! But more specifically, to live in a community long enough to become part of it. To introduce new ways of teaching that can be fun, engaging and relatable. To learn from the residents what they need and why. To see firsthand the capacities they have and challenges they face. To work alongside active, motivated community members in order to create sustainable projects that directly respond to those needs and challenges. 

So here I am, quickly nearing the “year in Moz” mark. 

1. Am I on my way to completing my Why? 

2. Is my Why still the same, or has it changed? 

3. Is my Why even feasible? 

Answers: Yes, I think so. Kind of. Yes, definitely. 

My Why hasn’t really changed. Each day I strive to make some progress, even if very little, on understanding my neighbors, students and colleagues. I try to embrace the culture, accept it and respond the challenges through the lens of Manjacaze’s culture (although more often than not it’s way more frustrating than it sounds). Because I’ve been trying to do that for about a year now, projects have started taking shape organically, lead not only by me, but by other community members as well. 

Evidence to make me believe I am completing my Why, albeit slowly:

My Students are Learning.

I came to class as Princess Sohcahtoa on Tuesday, in order to teach the trigonometric functions Sin, Cos, Tan. Sohcahtoa is an acronym to remember which sides of a right triangle work with which functions: Sin: Opposite Hypotenuse Cosine: Adjacent Hypotenuse Tangent Opposite Adjacent. SOHCAHTOA. Get it? So, I showed up as Princesa Sohcahtoa and explained how I obtained my royal name. It had to do with surprising my father, the king, with my vast knowledge of right triangles. The students LOVED it. They laughed, they joked, and most importantly, they answered all of my subsequent practice questions correctly. They told me that they had learned about Sin Cos Tan in previous years, but this time they would surely not forget it. 

Princesa Sohcahtoa

I Don’t Get as Mad When Kids are Don’t Show Up to Meetings.

I have an English Theater group, and we have written a short (10-minute-or-less) script, in English on the theme “Empower Girls, Empower the World”. We will participate in a competition against groups from different cities in Gaza at the end of September. During the meeting when we wrote the script, it wasn’t prohibitive if a student didn’t show up…we would just write their lines without them. However, now that we have everything written and are needing to practice, everyone should to be present. At first, I would get really frustrated with students who came late or just didn’t come at all. I would think it was demonstrative of lacking respect for myself, my counterpart, Filipe, and the rest of the group. 

Then, last week, only 4 students out of 8 showed up to practice. We couldn’t do anything. We sat around for an hour and waited and when nobody else showed up, everyone went home, nothing accomplished. These damn kids have no respect, I thought.

Then the next day at school, I talked to the 4 that didn’t show up, and here is why they didn’t show up:

Nélcia’s mom made her start cooking dinner and wouldn’t let her leave. 

Merídio was on his way out the door when his father told him to go fetch water.

Ramiro was sick with what he thought was Malaria.

Evinêlia was too embarrassed to come because she thinks she doesn’t speak as well as the rest of the students in our group.

After hearing these reasons for their absence (note, I didn’t say excuses), I realized that this had nothing to do with their lack of respect, and everything to do with cultural priorities. After school hours (for these students it’s 7am-12pm), they have an obligation to help keep things running smoothly around the house. Everyone works hard to make sure that their families are fed and clean and have a place to sleep. For Nélcia and Merídio, domestic responsibilities trumped extracurricular activities that day, and probably always will.  Ramiro doesn’t use a mosquito net because his dad took the one he got for free at the hospital and now uses it to catch fish. His family doesn’t have the funds to buy another one. When I talked to Evinêlia, she said that she knows the boys are better than her at English and she didn’t want to be embarrassed. Also, I’m pretty sure she has a crush on another group member, which doesn’t help (think back to your high school days…). I tried to explain to her that the reason she wanted to participate in the first place was to practice speaking and learn more words. She said she thought that she wanted to but now she has too much fear of messing up. Although I wanted so badly to convince her to stick with it, I could tell her mind was made up. Her feelings are a reflection of what happens on a daily basis in the classroom: boys volunteer to answer questions more because they have more confidence. Although I don’t agree with her quitting because she’s nervous, I understand why she did. The theme is “Empower Girls, Empower the World” because it’s a message that needs to be heard and acted upon. 

That day taught me to be more patient with my students and to give them the benefit of the doubt. It reminded me to filter the situation through the lens of this culture instead of projecting my American perspective on my Mozambican students’ actions. 

English Theater Practice: Filipe and Merídio.

I Challenged Stela to Dream Big, and She Accepted. 

Currently Peace Corps is putting a huge focus on girls’ education because girls face many challenges that hinder them from finishing secondary school. As I’ve written about before, girls drop out for a plethora of reasons, including (but not limited to) pregnancy, premature marriage, domestic responsibilities, or financial trouble. The odds really are against them.

In digging deeper into the issue of female drop-outs, I noticed something interesting, yet very sad: girls don’t have high expectations for themselves. On some occasions when I have asked a girl what she wants to do after secondary school, a few girls have told me they want to be a nurse or a teacher or a lawyer. One student, Berta, wants to be a journalist. However, this is not the norm: many of them say “I don’t know” or “I want to have a family” or “I’m going to be a mother”. Girls don’t get exposure to possibilities for their futures outside of what they see here in Manjacaze every day. They see women in the market selling vegetables and calamidades (second-hand clothing); they see women on the street selling bread; they see women in the fields cultivating crops; they see women carting water on their heads from the pump to their homes; they see women with children on their backs and in their arms and walking next to them holding their hands. They see a group of Mães sitting under a big tree once a week learning Portuguese because they missed out on an education when they were younger. They see women as nuns, which is positive, but being a nun goes against so many societal expectations here: nuns won’t get married and have babies, and that is pretty much the definition of a Mozambican female’s responsibility. I imagine that choosing not to do that feels scary and foreign to many girls. 

I miss living in a world where kids are challenged to push themselves, to dream big, to think outside the box. To set goals and work their butts off to achieve them. Here, the mentality is more “this is what my mom did, and this is what my mom’s mom did, so this is what I’m going to do too”. 

Then one day, I found an opportunity to push that envelope. I was dropping off a capulana at a local seamstress’s shop, and we started chatting. I was still very new to Manjacaze and I didn’t know Stela very well. I asked her if she was from Manjacaze; she said no, that she was from Maputo (the country’s capital) and that she moved to Manjacaze to get married. She said that she never planned to be a seamstress and sell second-hand clothes, but since she got married and moved here, she really didn’t have a choice. “There aren’t as many opportunities for work here as there are in Maputo”, she said. She had regret in her voice, as if she missed out on a “better life”, even though she very much loves her husband and has three beautiful children.

I said, “Well, you’re still young. If you could do anything as a profession, what would it be?”

And, after a few minutes of thinking, she replied, “I didn’t plan to be a seamstress, but now since I am one, I’m fine with it.”

WOMP WOMP.

So, I pushed. “Ok, but that’s not what I asked. I said, if you had your choice of doing anything, what would it be? Don’t think em realidade, just pensar grande. Think big.

She thought a little while longer, a smile came upon her face, and she finally said, “well, I actually like being a seamstress now. And I think I’m good at it. What I would really love is to keep learning and getting better at what I do. Then, I would want to sell my dresses outside of Manjacaze and tal vez (perhaps) maybe even outside of Mozambique. I would like for women from anywhere to feel beautiful in my dresses”. 

Now we’re talkin’ girlfriend! 

I told her that was an awesome dream, and I don’t think very far out of reach. She looked at me like I was nuts. 

I asked, “if you were presented with the opportunity to work really really hard to make that happen, would you be willing to? I mean…really really hard.”

She said, “yes of course! You cannot be good at something or have success without hard work. I would give it my maximum”.

That conversation allowed me to see a sparkle in her eye, which is very rare around this town. For one small second, I saw hope, ambition and a desire for more than right now. I was inspired.

Now, Stela and I are currently working to start up an Etsy store so that she can sell her handmade dresses in the States. When I came to her with the idea she cried, and told me she would trust me to lead us in the right direction and follow with strength. Before the day was over, she was already drawing up ideas for dresses. We decided on a name for our store: S&S Mozambelleza (S&S for Stela and Sarah, and Mozambelleza because belleza means ‘beauty’ in Portuguese). We then chose our material, and now Stela is in the process of creating 4 different looks. After the looks are complete and models (our friends) are photographed, S&S Moz will officially open for business.  

I am so excited to support Stela in realizing her big dream. I want not only Stela, but other girls I work with, to understand that Big Things can’t happen unless you Dream Big. 

Stela hard at work with her youngest child on her back.

Stela, her son and me picking out dress fabric.

To end, after about a year here in Mozambique, my Why continues to drive my daily work. Whether it be students, friends, seamstresses, I feel like somebody around here is always teaching me something, and I try to respond with my own teaching as well. 

Am I “saving the world”? Nah, I don’t think so. But am I bringing joy, inspiration, and embarrassingly adorable math nerdiness to my community? I think yes. And that’s all I really need to keep me going.