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.