Mozambique '09-'10

New course for summer 2011! "How to hunt for rats 101"

2010-08-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

Rat Hunting instructions:
First you need to sniff the dirt in each rat hole to know where they are most likely hiding and to avoid disappointments. The holes that smell like rat urine are your best bet (see above).
Then you use a hoe to hack through the ground where the smelliest hole leads.

When you think you are getting close, stuff the hole with dry grass and light it on fire and blow the smoke into the hole. This will kill off the straggler rats in outer tunnel leading to the next and help you cut through the rest of the dirt (smoke will keep coming out).
Once you hit the main nest and start pulling the rats out by their tails, you then stun them by smacking them to the ground and when they try to scramble away you and your friends need to grab them and break their necks.

Stay organized. Keep the bodies in a pile and only count them at the end. To do otherwise is bad luck.
Then you boil the rats in a pot and then stack the rats on skewers to dry over a hot fire. These dried/roasted rats can be stored on the skewer for several days. When you feel a craving for rat just throw a few in an earthen pot with some salt and water, bring to a boil and then eat with your chima made of cassava...hair, feet, tripe and all...

other edibles...

2010-08-10T03:36:00.000-07:00

Pet hampsters are also yummy apparently. But they are a rare resource that not many families can afford.

photos

2010-08-10T03:17:00.000-07:00

The rats, now cooked, are ready to be eaten along with cassava (in a form that has been milled by hand into a powder and made into a dark green form of chima called tatarooa (sp?)). Note that the mama rat and baby rats are all together ;)

internet connection has been absolute crap

2010-08-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Sorry for ceasing to exist on-line for quite some time. I returned from the community in Gurue after running our survey. That was grueling - I may have time to write about it later. I have also been waiting to post photos of the rats! ON the 29th I left the community in Gurue and headed to Quelimane to briefly deal with issues in open offices on Friday and then relax over the weekend before heading back into the community in the forest in Maganja. I arrived safely on Monday in the community, but we passed loggers now working in the light of day to take the timber out of the forest. So much timber has been taken since I left in May. I'm just getting a grip on events - major conflicts among different loggers. Am in Maganja villa right now with internet (satellite at an NGO) because the modem that I bought through Mcel has been down - the fiber optic cable had problems again this past month. Tomorrow I head back to the community and then try to get everyone organized for a second survey...while monitoring the conflict in the forest. This is going to be a wild 2 months.
I hope all is well and sorry for abandoning the blog but it has been out of my hands!

back to the community for 20 days

2010-06-30T23:19:00.000-07:00

Well, it's survey time and I'm taking my translating team with me to see what we can accomplish. I should be back on-line on July 21st. Until then!

what's for dinner?

2010-06-29T05:49:00.000-07:00

I am having so much trouble uploading photos. I'm bummed because I have some great photos to share...

Recently, I returned home from walking 18km to see the borders of my community in Gurue district. I asked what was for dinner and peered in the pot: rat. Not just rat meat...but the fur, the tails, feet, head and all...mamas, babies...everything. As my host sister ate the baby rats with her chima, I picked some rat meat out of a leg and gave it a try. The taste is fine, but I couldn't bring myself to eat the fur and other parts. It's also not very appetizing to eat fried egg or anything else while I watch my host sister tear the intestines out of a small rat (she doesn't eat these but her brother does), and then proceed to break the rest of the rat into portions to combine with small amounts of chima.

Yesterday I hunted rats with my host family. We walked into a banana field and found a small burrow in the ground. We began hacking the hole with a hoe. Once the girl in charge (lets call her Rosa) figured out where the main tunnel led, she stuck her hand in the tunnel and pulled out some of the dirt. She smelled it to see if it had a strong odor of rat urine. After several dead ends, she found yet another lead. After digging some more we tore dried mapira leaves off of the standing stalks and shoved these leave in the burrow. We lit a match and blew smoke into the burrow. After about 15 minutes of "smokin' 'em out" (ah, at last the words of G.W. Bush are useful...) we hacked through the burrow further. We followed the trail of smoke as it emerged from the newly cut earth. We gradually encountered the first few rats that had died of smoke inhalation. Further on we encountered the main nest where two pregnant females were living with their other offspring. My host sister found an exit hole and stuffed it with mapira leaves to trap the rats. Rosa began frantically hacking at the burrow and then stopped every so often to shove her hand into the burrow to catch the rats by their tails and fling them to the ground, stunning them while my host family scrambled to catch the rats and break their necks. They flung them into a pile of rat bodies, not stopping to count until the very end of the process. One rat bit my host dad (I sure hope that rat didn't have rabies). By the end of the hunt, we had killed 42 rats (all members of the same extended family). That night we boiled the rats and then skewered them on long wooden sticks. We then placed them over a fire to dry them out to save for future dinners. Each family member ate about 2 rats with their chima that night and the remaining rats can be kept for several days before they are boiled again with a little water and salt.

I explained to my host sister that I don't know too many people that eat rat in the United States. She then asked, "so only black people in America eat rat?" I then clarified that not many people, black or white eat rat, though some people eat squirrel and other animals of similar 'stature'.

One of my friends at my partner organization mentioned the other day that some farmers are buying pesticides at various markets and putting the pesticide in corn meal and then putting this in the burrows in the fields to poison the rats...then these farmers eat the poisoned rats, not realizing that that poison bioaccumulates and ends up in their own bodies. Other problems associated with these rat hunts include uncontrolled fires, when smoking the rats out of their holes accidentally spreads into areas that should not be burned. We also uprooted several banana trees to get to our rats and we dug a tunnel of about 15 meters to find the main nest. I don't know about you...but I prefer banana over rat any day.

walking alone in the forest

2010-06-23T23:34:00.000-07:00

One day back in early May, I had to let various families know that I had returned after doing the survey and wanted to walk with them to map their fields (machambas). So I had a long bike ride that day, stopping at the houses that I needed to to set up an appointment. I passed through a section of forest where it was obvious that back in early April, furtivos or illegal loggers had brought trucks in to pick up timber to haul off to Quelimane and ship to China. I decided to take a detour and investigate the damage. I brought my bicycle into the truck tracks a bit and then set about photographing what the loggers had left behind. They basically cut the tree at its base (about 1 ft from the ground) and then cut just under the crown of the tree. The ground was littered with decaying tree crowns and stumps, the middle trunk sections all missing...except those that had been deemed too skinny by the buyer and owner of the truck. Many trees had been cut only to stay on the ground because they were judged too curvey or to skinny. I wandered into these areas, photographing various plants that I had never seen before, and noting where the tire tracks had turned and carved yet more space through the forest.

Later that day I was sitting with a friend of mine in the community who is in charge of the community's forest concession (which is currently being robbed by the furtivos). I described how I had mapped the furtivo entry points with my GPS, and had photographed evidence of the logging at each entry point and then tried to piece together the growing road network through the forest in my notebook. He seemed pretty excited that someone was paying attention to this devastating process, but he also looked very concerned. "Who were you walking with?" he asked. "Oh, no one, but the families in the area know me, so they let me walk alone in that area and trust that I won't do anything bad," I said. "Well, that's not the issue, we know you aren't robbing our machambas...it's that there are traps in the forest that we set to catch animals to eat," he said. "Oh F@#$," I thought.

There are metal traps that could really clamp your leg/foot and are the number one reason why so many dogs in the village have 3 legs and fresh wounds with bones jutting through where the rest of their leg was. Then there are large contraptions made of special types of wood that the unknowing passerby can get trapped in for days before the owner of the trap comes by to check up on the trap. It takes about 4 men to set one of these up and to open the trap when they want to pry whatever got caught - usually a large gazelle- out. There are signs left in the forest which tell those in the loop that there are traps in the area. They hack some of the bark of the tree with a machete in a certain pattern, or they wrap tall grass around the trunk. I was compeltely unaware of these signs and could have walked into any of these traps as I wandered through the forest mapping and photographing. I thought I only had some of the world's most poisonous snakes to worry about...

International Children's day and...apparently, I'm a virgin

2010-06-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

The 1^st of June is International Children’s Day. This is not a well-known holiday or event in the United States. In the relatively urban areas of Mozambique, children spend an afternoon doing school dances and having a lunch and special celebration. In the rural areas, this holiday wreaks havoc on the academic calendar. Kids in the rural areas basically take charge and assert their collective willpower. In the weeks leading up to the 1^st of June in the community where I stayed in Maganja da Costa district, kids in the 5^th through 7^th grades who normally walk 5km to school decided to stop going to class and dance with the primary school kids in the small school 1km away. The professors stopped holding class for these students, since they didn’t know what to do to bring the children back to school. Every afternoon, kids in 1^st through 4^th grade would end classes early with their professors and begin practicing dance routines for the June 1^st celebrations. Not a whole lot of academic learning took place in the weeks leading up to the holiday (kids normally have class either in the morning or in the afternoon).

On the actual holiday, my host family came to my newly installed door and informed me that unfortunately the wild bird that a man up the road had been raising and that they tried to buy for our special celebration dinner, got away. So they gave me back the $3 worth of Meticais that I had given them and suggested that we use half of the money to buy a hen from our neighbor instead. I agreed, and about half an hour later João (pseudo. for the 14yr. old boy in my host family brought me the live hen). It was my job as the buyer to pick up the hen and feel how heavy it was to see whether I would agree to spend the $1.80 to have it killed. I didn’t see any other chickens running around (it’s a massive chicken slaughter on Christmas, Easter and International Children’s Day here in the community), so I approved the kill and sent the bird to it’s fate.

A few minutes later the chief of the locality’s son rode up on a bicycle and handed me a handwritten invitation on notebook paper. I was a special guest at the festivities today, where the professors had organized a table for the guests to eat a late lunch in a covered area while other families ate in the shade of the mango trees, followed by front row seats for the children’s dances.

When I arrived, the chief greeted me and we waited for the professor to get the attention of the students and their parents, as we crammed into one of the school rooms (it began raining). After a brief greeting by the professor, the chief’s nephew stood and read an open letter to the community about the meaning of the holiday and the goals that he has for the community regarding the wellbeing of the children in the community. The Frelimo govt. has been involved in various programs to reduce the sexual abuse of children in Mozambique. Of particular concern is the high prevalence of teachers who sexually abuse their students. Several Peace Corps Volunteers who teach in local schools have told me that there are professors that are abusing young girls and manipulating the girls’ grades based upon whether they submit to the professor’s advances.

The chief steered away from this topic when his nephew sat down and when he decided to elaborate upon the open letter. He focused on the fact that no one from the community had completed 10^th grade. There are a select few students who have passed 7^th grade (note: this does not guarantee that they can read or write) and who were currently studying in 8^th or 9^th grade in Maganja village, but beyond that the levels of education are very low. He attributed this to the youth’s love of sex and the fact that so many girls were getting pregnant at the age of 14 and up. While he held young teenaged boys accountable too, he mostly proceeded to name specific girls who were currently not studying due to their being pregnant. After putting the burden of lower educational achievement on these visibly pregnant women’s bodies, he then asked me to stand.

Confused, I slowly stood up. He then explained that I was still studying and working to set up my life and work before having children and then asked me if I needed a man. Taking the question literally, I said “no”. He then made a jump of logic…that I must have never had sex to be 27, still in school and without any kids. While a moderate number of condoms are available to the population here, they are more often used as children’s bracelets or balloons than in protecting against STDs or pregnancy. Access to birth control, however, outside of the few traditional methods using specific plants known by curandeiros (“witch doctors”) and some older women for preventing pregnancy, is very limited. Unbeknownst to me, I was suddenly hailed as a 27 year old virgin in front of the entire community without him asking me if this was acceptable or appropriate to say.

When the speeches ended, families brought out their plastic containers and tin bowls and began eating the food that they had brought for the festivities. I tried to sit with my host family to eat a bit of the chicken that I bought, but I was called to the special table for “important guests”, where I was served pork and chicken with spaghetti and rice. The chief had brought me a beer all the way from Maganja but I had to give it to another person at the table, since I do not drink while I’m in the community unless it’s to taste someone’s homemade cachasso and tell them what a nice job they did on their brew.

The dancing began with a series of practiced songs and moves in which older girls did more complicated moves than the lines of younger girls. Some boys also joined the ranks of dancers. Community members placed coins, juice, biscuits and sweets in a bowl in front of the dancers to show their appreciation (the dancers later divided these among themselves). Eventually members of the community joined in some of the dances, but the rain intensified and what would have been a celebration into the late night hours ended at around 6:30pm. Most parents and adults were wasted by that point. The following morning all of the children didn’t show up for school. In the rural areas the kids just collectively decide they need a 2-week vacation after this International Children’s Day. On the first day of playing hookey, the parents are too hung over or drunk to tell their kids to go to school. In the next few days the kids tell their parents that there is no school and the parents, most of whom haven’t completed 4^th grade, believe them and do not force them to go to school. The professors know about this widespread practice in the rural areas and decide not to hold class (discouraging any child who did show up to learn, from coming the next day). After about 2 weeks of this standoff, the chief and other community leaders make announcements in church, so that parents know they need to motivate their kids to go back to school. Eventually classes resume, with kids in the rural areas way behind the national curriculum, a curriculum that they are behind in anyway due to the fact that education in Mozambique is officially only in Portuguese, when these rural kids barely speak Portuguese as a second language and have professors who are from other areas of the country who do not speak the local language.

In total we are talking about 4 weeks of missed opportunities to learn in class in May and June…and the collective willpower of rural students.

Back in Quelimane!

2010-06-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

I made it back to Quelimane in one piece - wow lots of stories to share, including a logging bust in my community, international children's day celebrations, hunting with a spear for rats in my house, why walking alone in the forest is a BAD idea and...looks like I'm staying here until November! Hopefully will post soon.

nerd with a bicycle and a GPS unit

2010-05-16T04:54:00.000-07:00

myth: cell phones are everywhere in Africa

2010-05-16T01:28:00.000-07:00

Above: the view from the one place in my community that has cell phone reception (3 bars)

I keep hearing development consultants and several academics claim that "cell phones are everywhere in Africa" and that they will revolutionize development, business and social relationships. That's fine...but 2 people in the community where I live own cell phones (they are both men who have opportunities to leave the community on many occasions). At times they make the 5km walk from their homes into the footpath leading to the manioc field next to the abandoned house where 3 bars of reception can be achieved (all elsewhere is a dead zone), that is when the district tower that provides this reception (MCel) isn't down. They mostly wait to see if they received any messages or send a 'beep' to key contacts outside of the community with the expectation that the person they beep will call them back, since these 2 men often don't have the money to spend on buying more credit (just enough once every 3 months to keep their cards active). These men ask me for "credito" when I go to Maganja all of the time, and I've helped them out once or twice, but providing this support on a more frequent basis is beyond my budget.

I recently finished up a day of survey work and my translators had already headed back to my house for food. I decided that I would try to access reception, since I had a bicycle [correction: I said that these POS bicycles were Chinese in an earlier post. These HERO bicycles are from India...now that I am an owner of 2 of them I am up close and personal with their 'charming' failings on a daily basis]. At the time I hadn't heard about the cut fiber optic cable that shut down all of communciations in northern Mozambique so this was my 4th futile attempt to connect. On my way back down the footpath I realized that the sunset was gorgeous. I snapped a few photos and ended up being invited to dinner by one of the families that lives in the area. We ate massa de mandioca with a 'caril' made of squash. This family doesn't own a phone, but they find it hilarious that I, the 2 nurses who live at the hospital down the road, the school teachers and the 2 men I mentioned earlier occasionally walk past their house to wave their cell phones in the air, cursing the disappearance of the one site of reception...an activity that is beyond this household's budget and sense of necessity.

why I love my helmet and my sat. phone

2010-05-14T07:07:00.000-07:00

At 7:15am I crashed my motorcycle in the middle of the forest (10km from my community and about 40km from the nearest sizable town). The brush or "capi" is getting so long and and has not been cut in ages (except where loggers are currently stealing the community's valuable precious timber - I'll get to that later). I rode through the first patch fairly easily but the second patch snagged my chain in a spot where the sand was very deep and I skidded and fell. I banged my head hard on the ground and when I realized I was ok I quickly reached over for the kill switch and cut the engine. After a few deep breaths I slid out from under the bike. I was only going about 15-25km/hr, but ended up with a badly bruised shoulder and my shin isn't bleeding but the bone is definitely bruised - I'm heading to Quelimane for an X-ray tomorrow just to make sure. With some effort I managed to push the bike upright and get my gear together. I didn't even want to look at the injuries, I just wanted to get back on and get out of there - but that wasn't going to happen as the bike wouldn't start again after many attempts, changing the spark plug and trying all sorts of tricks with this POS motorcycle that I'd had "fixed" about once every 2 weeks.

Trying to start the bike - a manual start - wasn't fun. I tried walking around to the start side and starting it with my left leg but I couldn't get enough leverage - so I had to use my badly bruised right leg to start it - after about 10 attempts the pain won, so I sat down and let the bike 'rest' for a bit. After trying to start it about 40 minutes later with no luck I called my partner organization (thankfully Mozambican cell phones up North are up and running again, so they could at least receive my call from my satellite phone). They tried to arrange a truck to come get me but no one was available, so they brought a mechanic to me after about 4 hours. He helped me get the bike started again, then I strapped my 30kg pack to his back and drove him, his tool kit and the bag back to Maganja (the organization dropped him off with their car and headed north to do their outreach work for the day). I arrived in Maganja and the mechanic tried to do some more fixing outside the office while I called my friend who is a doctor at the hospital and doesn't work on Fridays. We are taking a trip to Quelimane tomorrow for follow-up, but thankfully, my helmet absorbed the hit to my head and my phone got me out of there in a few hours. I don't want to think about other scenarios. More blogging to come from Quelimane - My plan had been to arrive at the office nice and early to make use of business hours...plans change.

just kidding.

2010-05-06T06:24:00.001-07:00

Due to the "Chama da Unidade" that's raging through the country, the director of the organization where I sometimes work in Maganja da Costa forbade me to head into the community this afternoon. This call for unity began on April 8th, 2010 the day after Mozambican Women's Day. President Armando Guebuza initiated the torch in Nangade district in Cabo Delgado province and the torch is supposed to pass through every district in the country (128) over the course of 70 days (they are running a bit behind schedule apparently). The goal of this massive publicity stunt is to spread a message of national unity, peace and multi-party democracy to support the rule of law in the country.

I did all of my food shopping in the morning (dried fish, baking powder, milk powder, oranges, tomato paste, cooking oil etc.), but once my bag was packed everyone at the office looked worried. The whole town is "agitated" and all along the road that I take to the community there are marching crowds. These crowds are gathering to see important FRELIMO figures and others carry a flaming torch across the country to show unity with the party. I'm stuck here one more night and hopefully the roads will be passable without the need to stop for large crowds along the way (quite dangerous, since I wil be burdened with a 30kg hiking pack and all on my own). I was told I shouldn't even leave the office on foot right now. I'm obeying orders.

and I'm heading out again

2010-05-06T04:43:00.000-07:00

Looks like I needed more time to write as I didn't finish nearly as many stories as I would have liked to. I am heading back to the community today, and should be back on around the 15th. I will try to add more then - it's a shame I can't get photos uploaded, I have some great ones to share...

my door

2010-05-06T03:54:00.001-07:00

Above: the carpenters pose with me with their finished product.

Above: the traditional leader of the community strapping my door to his bicycle with the help of a few other men.

After watching the padre from Maganja da Costa town officiate more than 40 weddings in a single ceremony in my community on April 15^th, I headed up the road to retrieve my motorcycle from the house where I normally store it. The chief of the locality saw me and asked where I planned to travel to for the afternoon. I said that someone had informed me that my new wooden door was ready at the carpenter’s stand about 5km from my house. He asked how I planned to carry a door with a motorcycle. I showed him the rubber straps that I planned to use as ties and he said the only way I would get that door to my house without killing myself was to go by bicycle, and even then it’s no small task. He said he was busy because he had just gotten married earlier that day, but that the mwene or traditional leader should go with me. The mwene and I headed out on our bicycles, since he wanted to check up on a bed that the carpenters were making him.

I decided to finally purchase a door because my research assistants who are from other localities in the district were concerned about safety and theft (I'm really only concerned about theft from a neighborhood cat, who stole my dried fish the other day while I was sleeping, and a couple of dogs who snuck in to lick the dirty plates left in the basin inside my doorway). As they walked to their respective rented houses on their first night in the community they apparently discussed their disbelief that a white foreigner was living within the general population of one of the most rural communities in the district, in a small house with no door, even though my neighbors are rigorous about keeping an eye on the place. I wouldn’t do this if I were living in Maganja town, because thefts are very common in town and it’s easy for not many people to know or care about you. But in my community, the community members and leaders transitioned from letting me sleep in a tent in a covered veranda near the chief’s house, to letting me sleep in my own small house farther away from the chief’s house and into the community proper as long as 4 or 5 teenage girls slept in my “sala” or living room every night…to letting me sleep alone in my house, prepare my own food, wash my own clothes in the river and sweep around my house every morning. The community is generally comfortable with me living in the house and the local catholic church congregation even came by last Sunday to pray in front of my house, sing and sprinkle the inside of the house and all outer sides with holy water (shaken from an empty beer bottle). They also threw holy water on me as I was instructed to stand in the doorway. This essentially confirms that the community considers the house to be mine, though they aren’t worried about me taking anyone’s land away or living there permanently because I have not requested a machamba (field to grow crops in). If I were to do this, the dynamic would change. When the parade of Catholics threw holy water at me in the doorway, I still didn’t have a door (May 2^nd).

Getting back to April 15^th, the mwene and I arrived to see two men who were business partners working on various pieces of umbila hardwood cut from the forest. I had requested a door made in the community to encourage local business rather than bring a door in from the town of Maganja. I later learned that these men in the community who made my door were actually from Maganja…

My door rested against the small workshop made of mud, wood and straw. Right away I knew that the door was too big for my house. I live in a small house that was built by a teenager before he left his parent’s land to marry and build a house on his wife’s family’s land. My host family/neighbors had measured the door’s width and height with me a week earlier in order to place an order with these carpenters. I asked if they followed the measurement and they said yes. The mwene looked anxious to take it and leave after finding out that his bed was not yet ready. A group of men tried to tie the door to my bike but they realized that my bike was missing some key parts that would make it very difficult to carry a door. So we strapped the door to the back of the mwene’s bike and he carried the door all the way back to my house. I asked how much the door cost and they quoted a price nearly double of what I expected. But the mwene didn’t budge to help me negotiate. I said I would only pay that amount if they made me a stool too, since I didn’t have anything to sit on in my house except straw mats. They said they could make the stool.

Later as we pulled in front of my house with the door, my host family asked how much I paid. Unfortunately my host dad had hit the cachasso a little hard earlier in the day and when I told him the ridiculous price I had been charged he went off on a tirade about how he’s in charge of the neighborhood and that he was going to teach that carpenter a lesson. The mwene turned to me and said I was charged that price because I was white - and I replied that I knew this to be the case. We propped the door up against the front of my house and everyone stared in confusion. Why was my door almost 15cm too wide and 20cm too tall? They had sold me a standard door for a standard sized house because it was cheaper for them to make than a custom made small door.

So the door has been sitting beside my house for several weeks. Neighbors seem willing to help me make a wider space in the wall of my house for the door, and I have been paying the carpenter a visit every time I head the 5km in their direction to yell at them and tell them to bring my stool and make me a new, smaller door. Meanwhile, I just bought hinges and other hardware at the market today…for a door that won’t fit, made by dishonest carpenters from Maganja that I thought were from my community. All of this aside, it is preferable to purchase locally made furniture and other wood items to promote the sale of value added products rather than selling off raw cut timber to Chinese and other companies at less than $5 per log...

We’ll see how this plays out over time.

I don't really ride like this...

2010-05-04T08:03:00.000-07:00

got a photo uploaded!

my mistake

2010-05-04T03:12:00.002-07:00

In preparing for administering the first round of my survey in the community in Maganja da Costa district, I spent so much time making sure that I was bringing good research assistants into the community that I neglected to really scrutinize the woman who would cook during the 16 day period. As a group of 3 people it would be impossible for me to do the surveys and cook for everyone. Most of my neighbors in the community have fields to attend to and don’t actually have much experience with cooking the kinds of foods that are more of the norm for people living in the village, so it made sense to bring someone in from Maganja town. An anthropologist spent 2 years living in Maganja town a few years ago and the woman who now takes care of the house that this anthropologist bought found me in the market one day to say that she knew people who could help me out. A 22 year-old woman with a 4 year old child showed up in my “office” in town to jump the line to get the job. She’s in the 12^thgrade at night school. She had her first child at age 15 after an agricultural extension worker who traveled to her town got her pregnant. She later had a second child with another man who later died in a motorcycle accident. Her first child died last year at the age of 6 after getting cerebral malaria. She receives some financial support from the mother of her deceased partner, but she said she wanted to take the next 2 weeks to work really hard for me since school had a 2 week vacation. She went on about how she’d rather cook and clean than have to work the streets for money to support her remaining kid. Prostitutes are people too, so I thought I’d do her a favor and offer her the job.

It turns out she was right, she cooks a great matapa and can make any dried fish taste good. She always had water ready for the research team to wash up, did laundry, collected firewood and kept things organized so that my two research assistants and I could interview families all day and return to a hearty meal or two (we would sometimes cycle up to 18km in a single day getting to some households). But then the kids in the neighborhood would wait until she and the research assistants walked up the road to the housing that I rented for them and the kids would sit around and wait for me to chat. We made shadow animals on the side of my house with a flashlight, made up songs, played cards and gossiped to wind down. The kids told me to notice that the woman who was cooking for me was taking extra special care to use face cream and wear sexy clothes before heading up the road. Instead of keeping the woman research assistant company in a house that scared her a little as we had agreed, this empregada would wander a little further up the road to the community hospital where she would get to sleep in a cement building with an aluminum roof, have access to cleaner water and a mattress…all in exchange for shagging the head male nurse at the hospital. I suppose this wouldn’t have pissed me off if the hospital hadn’t been right across the road from the house of the traditional chief’s mother. This most important community matriarch saw this woman sneaking into the hospital at night and even for some afternoon delights. The kids knew, too and were trying to tell me that she was up to a bit of trouble.

Towards the end of the surveython I let her know that I knew (she seemed surprised that I figured out what she was up to - um hello, there are NO secrets in a community like this and I ain’t doin’ my doctorate in social geography/wannabe anthropology because I am oblivious to what people get up to…). She apologized and that was that. The nurse had left the community for several days by the end of our intensive 16-day stay anyway. This community seems to get new nurses posted to its hospital who promptly leave whenever they get the chance - I suppose it’s hard to meet people of your class and education level if you are stuck serving a community in the middle of a forest.

I thought I was done dealing with the indiscretions of this woman, but then the biggest clusterfuck that I could have ever imagined happened last Friday…right under my nose.

I was told by my affiliate organization to give them a call on the 28^th to make sure that they remembered to come and get my research assistants, the cook and I out of the community at the end of this 16-day period. We planned for an exit on the 29^th or the 30^th. But then a fiber optic cable was cut, rendering the majority of central and northern Mozambique without cell phone communication for 4 weeks - we probably won’t have service until the end of May. This affects TDM office phone and internet services, Mcel and vodacom clients. So no one in Maganja da Costa has cell phone service now, making it impossible for me to confirm our exit, even with my satellite phone. Whose receptionless cell phone would I call?

Friday morning the 30^th rolls around and the empregada is itching to see her kid, and my research assistants are eager to get paid and go home. The idea of spending the weekend in the community is not appealing to any of them, though I planned to go to Maganja with them, pay them, buy some more fish and then spend the weekend in the community. It feels like a relaxing getaway in the country (sometimes) compared with life in the town or city. At least everyone knows me in the community. So I felt pressured to leave the community on my motorcycle early on Friday morning to get my completed surveys locked in a secure filing cabinet and to make sure my colleagues at the organization hadn’t forgotten to come and retrieve us. When I arrived at the office, the car was gone in another locality for the day, and another man who normally might lend his truck was doing work in another area for the whole day. When the director returned he said a higher-up from Maputo was in town trying to push one of their programs along, so their normal plans had all been placed on hold to accommodate this visit. My only option was to buy more “caril” or sauce/fish/meat/beans to go with our rice and chima and head back to the community for us to camp out for the weekend or to rent a truck for the afternoon. I rented the truck at a heavy price.

The guy who would lend me and drive his truck pulled into the organization parking area. We agreed on a price and he emphasized that he was doing me a favor for so “little”. I hopped in the cab of the truck. I could see the ground through holes/cracks in the floor, the smell of leaking gasoline permeated the cab of the truck and a little 4 year old boy stood on the seat between the driver and I holding a bolo de arroz (rice-flour cake) for the whole journey. Two guys who apparently worked with the driver sat in the truck bed. We bought fuel on the side of the road in one of the less established sites and after a good push from 5 or so men the truck finally started. He asked if he could smoke, and I actually preferred the smell of the second hand smoke to the leaking gasoline…and besides, if I was going to die in this POS on wheels it might as well be in a ball of flames. We didn’t say much as we drove the 50km to the community. When we arrived, my research assistants wanted an explanation for why these strangers were there to pick them up and I said we didn’t have time to talk, I was getting them out of the community for the weekend on my dollar so no complaints. They loaded into the truck and I noticed that one of the little girls that is the daughter of my host dad (her mom died) jumped in the back of the truck too. Her dad was there to see her off so I assumed she was hitching a ride to the hospital or to bring something to his uncle in Maganja (since they are technically renting land from him). On our way out of the community the chief of the locality’s wife jumped in the truck too and I said, “ok that’s it for boleias” (free rides).

Feeling relieved to get my mini research team out of the community on the day agreed upon in our contract, something wasn’t sitting right in my mind. What was this little girl (lets call her Bella) doing in the truck bed with everyone else? When we arrived in Maganja I asked, “what’s Bella doing here in Maganja”. It was then that the cook’s irritatingly sweet voice chirped that Bella would stay with her in Maganja to keep her son company while she attended night school and then Bella would go to school in Maganja - she said she asked her dad’s permission and he consented and that she had brought her school certification/card to transfer schools.

I looked her in the eye and said, “you used transportation that I paid for to traffic a child out of the community without my permission, making god knows what kinds of promises to her and her family, when neither I nor Bella’s family know your home or your real intentions!? For all I know you are going to sell this kid to sex traffickers or keep her cooped up in your house away from her family and friends when you don’t have the resources to provide for her. There is no way that this kid is going anywhere with you. She will stay with me tonight and I will bring her back to the community in the morning.”

The community will associate anything that happens to this kid with me, since it was my transport that brought her out of the community. I was so angry. The research assistants looked relieved that I had said something, as apparently they were very concerned that we had brought this kid out of the community and that her dad had consented. But they felt as though it wasn’t their place to step in. I paid the research assistants and the cook. I gave her a pretty generous wad of cash (she did work very hard), partly to shut her up while telling her that I would not be hiring her again because of the shit she pulled and partly to buy her cooperation in leaving the child with me.

At first Bella was very mad at me, that I denied her the promises that the cook had made to her about switching schools and having nice clothes and living in town with this woman. I was worried Bella would run away so I took her to the only restaurant in town and we ate French fries and drank a coca-cola (her first). As we sat in the restaurant we realized that the “Padre” for all of the Catholic churches in the district (the head man) was eating there too. Bella was surprised to see this rather regal figure, whom she had only ever seen in his religious garb during special ceremonies in the community, eating dinner in a baseball cap and jeans, drinking an after-dinner double-shot of whiskey and watching smutty MTV music videos on the restaurant TV. He’s actually a pretty nice guy, though and he cracked a joke about which one of us was the American - I pointed to Bella saying “obviously it’s her”. She seemed so out of place, even in a small town such as Maganja. She had no shoes, wore a capulana and a shirt sewn from another capulana. She carried a small bundle wrapped in a piece of capulana cloth: a notebook and pen, and other items she thought that she would need. She also carried the little glass peanut butter jar that I had given her 2 days earlier. I give the kids empty reusable food containers when I’m in the community because they like to store coins or other goodies inside the containers. But instead of keeping money in the peanut-butter jar, Bella had spent the whole morning grinding peanuts to make her own peanut butter to bring with her on the journey.

She barely touched her coca-cola, so I guessed that in the craziness of the situation, no one had asked her if she needed to pee. I asked and she said yes with a look of relief. I told her to wait and we would head right back to the office. As we entered the office grounds she ran for the bushes, but I called her back and took her inside. She had never used an in-door bathroom before and I so I explained the toilet to her. I showed her photos of my family members on Facebook, which was a pretty surreal experience, since she had never seen a computer before (though she has seen movies screened on the side of a house in the community using a generator). I took her to the coordinator of the organization’s house, where I sometimes stay if I’m crashing in town for the night. His cousin served us some dinner - Bella’s first time sitting in a chair and eating dinner at a table as opposed to a straw mat on the ground next to her house.

She seemed mesmerized by the soap operas on TV, though she couldn’t understand much of them, since her preferred language is Nyaringa and she only speaks a little Portuguese. She slept in a wood frame bed for the first time (as opposed to the straw mat) and woke early the next morning (as is the norm in the community). We ate bread and butter and fried eggs, tea and juice for breakfast and then we headed to the market. I bought her some sandals and then asked her if she needed anything else. She whispered into my ear “jeans,” so we headed to a stall with piles of children’s jeans and she pointed out a pair that she liked. There was nowhere to try anything on so we ducked behind the stall and I wrapped a capula around her while she changed. The first pair had a hole in the knee so we opted for the second, which gave her room to grow. We then headed to my motorcycle and loaded it up for our trip to the community. The night before I had explained to her that I didn’t trust that lady and that these days one had to be very careful about people coming into the community and promising kids things and taking kids away. I’ve blogged on this issue earlier and it’s a serious problem in Mozambique. She understood and seemed relieved to hop on the motorcycle and head home. Just before we left, the cook showed up at the office to give Bella a small bag of hammy-downs as she had apparently promised. The cook looked different now that she was in her chique city clothes (pointy high-heels, with a shiny wig and makeup). She brought her little boy to meet Bella, which Bella liked, but I could tell Bella seemed wary of how different the cook looked here compared with back in the community. As we refueled the motorcycle the chief of the locality showed up on his motorcycle and asked what I was doing with Bella. I explained the situation and he looked relieved that we were heading back to the community. He told me he wanted to speak with her father when he returned to the community later this week. Bella and I drove back and I asked the one nurse who is very well versed in Nyaringa to help me explain very clearly why I had brought her back. Bella’s step-mom looked relieved, as she had questioned Bella’s father after Bella left. Apparently Bella hadn’t brought the right school documents with her so she wouldn’t have been able to attend school in Maganja anyway, and no one knew where this woman lived and there had been no preparations for how to communicate with Bella’s family if Bella became ill. Bella’s dad looked relieved when he saw her - I think he had had second thoughts as well. Bella sat and chatted with her friends all afternoon recounting stories of what she saw in Maganja. She showed off her jeans and sandals and then practiced singing church songs with her friends for the following morning’s chapel service. She danced in church on Sunday morning and her old brother came to my house to say thanks for bringing his sister back. One day when she reaches 8th grade, she may have a chance to live in Maganja to study, but she'll be a bit older, and her family would do well to arrange for her to stay with extended family or others whom they know well to ensure their daughter's safety. Right now she has a community and family that loves her and she needn't be yanked from that support system just yet.

I’m back in Maganja now and with no cell phones and a painfully slow satellite internet service I am unable to upload photos for now. We’ll see how many stories I can post before I head back into the community on Thursday.

Still alive...

2010-05-01T00:04:00.000-07:00

I should be back in the office on Monday, pending no motorcycle disasters. There is so much to say...I'll get writing as soon as I can but for now I have to go back to the community. Most telecommunications are down in the whole of Mozambique. Mcel cell phone service is down TDM ground-based lines are cut off and Vodacom isn't working either. A fiberoptic cable was severed somewhere and it will take a month to fix. I'm on-line via satelitte rigt now because the organization where I work has a dish. Things are very complicated but I'll explain when I can and I will try to upload more photos. In brief: I ate monkey. I crossed crocodile-infested waters on a thin piece of bark to get to some of my survey respondents. My research assistant became ill with malaria and the community ran out of medicine so all they had were quinine injections and the nurse who administered the drug freaked out when my research assistant lost consciousness and started seizing - so I had to hold my assistant's injection site with half of a latex glove (the last piece) and prevent him from falling off of the table. The community is wonderful as usual, but new and crazy situations pop up daily. More to come.

survey time

2010-04-12T05:05:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write so much about Mozambican Women's day, the flooding, my most recent visit to the community in the forest and so much more, but time has been limited.

Tomorrow morning I'm heading back to the community. I'll be driving my motorcycle with a backpack of essentials, trailing the car of my partner organization carrying 2 bicycles, 2 research assistants, 1 empregada (cook), food and supplies for our group for 2 weeks, 100 survey packets, dishes and cooking supplies, over 200 liters of drinking water, mosquito nets, and other items. No one sells tents in Quelimane, so I am renting some space in houses near mine to accommodate the research assistants. The car will drop these people and items off and will hopefully pick us up at the end.

This is alot of logistics and feels like a lot of responsibility. I'm hoping all goes smoothely. Have a good 2 weeks or so!!

Mass marriages on Easter Sunday

2010-04-09T05:54:00.000-07:00

Note: I tried to upload photos, but I only had luck with this one. I will try again when I can…

On Saturday, many men and women in Maganja da Costa headed to the Catholic Church to be baptized. I wasn’t even supposed to be in Maganja on Saturday because I planned to drive my motorcycle to Muzo to stay there for the day and hang out in the community (I’m still waiting on transport to bring my equipment so that I can stay there for more time - cooking equipment, mosquito net, tent, food etc.). But the accelerator on my motorcycle died for the second time right as I pulled away from my friend’s house in Maganja - It was a good thing this happened in Maganja and not somewhere along the road or in the forest. Being stranded is never fun. Predictably, my plans changed. I had an opportunity to access a friend’s electricity and work on finishing up my survey, so I couldn’t watch the ceremony.

After the baptisms many people around town gathered for a celebration. They built a bonfire, but instead of starting it with matches or lighters, everyone was under strict instruction that they could only light the fire using traditional fire-making techniques. Several small groups of people gathered around the bonfire to try their hand at rubbing sticks together with dry grass and creating sparks with rocks and other items. I only learned about this event after the fact, since I was exhausted from getting up early and wanted to save my energy for Easter Sunday. The orphans that sleep in my friend’s kitchen were all at the bonfire, and many people partied into the early morning hours. With so many people in areas other than our neighborhood it was quiet enough to get some sleep (the usual consists of local bars and neighbors blasting music until at least 10:30pm - I know that sounds early, but when you get up with the sunrise that’s late).

On Sunday morning, I put on a capulana and dragged my sometimes shy friend to the church. Although I’m not one of JC’s followers, you really can’t understand Mozambican society without going to church at least a few times. We walked through the market, where a few people were selling fruit and odds an ends, but for the most part the center of town seemed empty.

The chefe de bairro (neighborhood chief/leader) where my friend lives had given me an invitation to attend his wedding at the church on Easter Sunday. He’s a very social guy, with a permanent leg injury. He is a mentor to other disabled residents of Maganja and knows practically everyone in town. I soon learned that he was among at least 50 other couples getting married at the same time in the same church on Sunday. As we arrived people were already crowded into the church but the ceremony hadn’t started just yet.

I asked a few questions of people standing at the door to get a sense of where to stand/sit and we eventually made our way to a section in the middle of the church on the right hand side. A choir danced to drums and marimbas and led singing at the front of the church (the crowd was so packed that we couldn’t see them). As I peered through the crowd towards the center isle, I saw 2 lines of couples facing one another (woman closer to the alter facing the groom who was facing her and the altar, while the groom is back to back with the next bride in the line). The Padre was working his way down the line with a loudspeaker that his assistant in white robes was helping to carry. Each groom and bride said their vows before he moved onto the next. All of the brides wore white dresses, with some wearing veils, some wearing shoes, others didn’t have any. Some dresses had trains that friends helped to carry when each couple went to the altar to take communion later on. We could barely hear the vows from the loudspeaker due to the noisy crowd. Then the Padre walked up and down the line sprinkling holy water on each couple. There were intervals with singing and dancing as the lines switched up to allow other couples to say their vows. Eventually, two men approached me and said they had made a space for me at the front of the church. I asked if someone else didn’t need that seat, and he looked confused before demanding that I follow him.

We made our way through the crowd behind the altar and then around to the left side of the church, facing the altar from the front left. We watched as the Padre returned to the altar to announce on his headset (his microphone and headset actually worked!) that the marriages had been completed. Everyone gave a big cheer and then the service continued with readings, incantations, contribution, communion and young girls and teens dancing down the center aisle. People from the city (Quelimane) were there in their finest clothes, and a range of wealth, poverty and power statuses all prayed and sang in the same space that morning. One young woman wearing unwashed rags, who appeared to be a bit out of it, passed in front of some of the women at the front of the left side who tried to stop her. She continued down the center aisle as the girls were dancing and carrying out the ceremony. A few altar boys rushed to escort her out. It seems some of the poorest of the poor were not welcome - others in a similar state were in the market and on the streets earlier when we passed through town on the way to church.

When the service ended with announcements for the coming week, everyone ventured out of the boiling heat under the shade of trees outside. Eventually different wedding parties organized into groups for marching around town. Several parties loaded into trucks lead by a sedan that had streamers, and followed by several motorcycles.

Eventually everyone went to the houses of those who were just married to drink hard liquor and celebrate.

Rest in Peace Julie Graham

2010-04-05T23:04:00.000-07:00

Julie Graham of J.K. Gibson-Graham just passed away. She was absolutely brilliant.

In limbo in Maganja

2010-04-05T00:57:00.000-07:00

Above: Ing trying to get onto the roof of a friend's house to see the sunset behind her in Maganja.

The week started out slowly. My energy levels have been fairly low while recovering from malaria. Thankfully the second treatment nixed it - I confirmed this on Thursday. We had the meeting at the district government office on Thursday between representatives of the community natural resource committee of the community where I work, local government and members of my two partner organizations. We cobbled together computers, power cords and a projector from various offices and I sat in the back observing my partner organization try to politely explain that corrupt district level members of government had purposely "lost" original documents essential for the community to register their forest rights. The exchanges were polite and I was impressed by the questions raised by all parties present. A plan of action was established and everyone left with a clear idea of the goals and what had to happen to get the process rolling again. Meanwhile everyone skipped work on Friday due to the religious holiday. I met my two research assistants last week and tomorrow I am going to train them in how to carry out my survey. I tried to drive to the community on Saturday to reconnect, but just as I pulled away the acceleration died (cable broke). It being a holiday weekend I had no hope of getting help fixing it. This was after replacing the inner tube on my back tire last Thursday. This motorcycle has spent more time in the shop than on the road. So my plans completely changed as usual. Now that the acceleration is fixed (happened this morning) I may head out to the community on Wednesday...I have a great account of Easter for you, but I will write it tomorrow - I have to finish up the survey!

Human trafficking update

2010-03-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

In the lead up to the World Cup in South Africa there is evidence that trafficking of women as modern-day slaves is in full swing. Click here for the latest on a trafficking network that Mozambican police recently busted.

Back in Maganja

2010-03-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

I'm on the mend more or less and have returned to Maganja da Costa where I will conduct a few interviews and wait to do another malaria blood test on Thursday to see if it's finally gone. Then I'm heading back to the community to catch up with everyone before doing a survey there with research assistants. Fingers crossed - the logistics are just about to get crazy...

more malaria info

2010-03-26T04:20:00.000-07:00

For a recent report on the geographical and demographic differences in deaths due to malaria vs. HIV/AIDS and other illnesses, click here.

Regarding the 1 versus 5 and other "crosses" used to classify malaria (see previous post), a friend of mine who is a doctor says that in adults the number of crosses do not have much significance. In children, the number of crosses can help indicate whether or not a child needs to be hospitalized (even if the child is able to walk around). It can be fun to try to separate the facts from the common myths around here.

On Thursday I took a turn for the worse despite finishing my malaria treatment. In the ER the head doctor tried to give me intravenous quinine. I may write about that hospital visit a bit later. I declined and am now trying a round of antibiotics first. I'm trying to take it easy and refocus on what I'm going to do over the next few weeks. There will be a big meeting between representatives of the community where I work and local government and one of my partner NGOs who just received funding to help the community finalize their documents for control of a large area of forest and to help build a small sawmill. I may have an opportunity to sit in on the meeting, which promises to be a tad heated. There is a tug of war over forest and land rights where I will eventually start living again once I recover from malaria.

Plasmodium falciparum, one cross (+)

2010-03-23T06:15:00.000-07:00

Above: The two "lakes" near my partner organization's office. These are breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

I have malaria. I suppose it started out last Thursday when I had diarrhea…exciting, I know. At first I thought, “well it serves me right for eating so much salad, ice cream and accepting ice cubes in my drinks, or maybe I haven’t been careful enough about my water…” I figured I would wait it out. Taking those over the counter Imodium drugs is generally a bad idea unless you REALLY need to travel. On Saturday, things got worse. I went to the market with one of my organization’s drivers. The director had just bought a large fish weighing nearly 18kgs that he wanted cut up and send to Maputo for friends and family (he’s away at a conference in South Africa - I know, because I translated all of his powerpoint slides from Portuguese to English). After the big fish errand, I was allowed to make use of the car for an hour. We bought wheat flour, corn flour (the kind used to make chima), cooking oil, beans, potatoes, onions, peanuts, tea, sugar, biscuits, a watermelon, rice, and a few other items. One of my main food suppliers for my fieldwork is a Cameroonian guy who speaks fairly fluent French, English and Portuguese. He’s got a small shop in the outdoor Quelimane market with good prices and fairly fresh items, so I’m a loyal customer. As I left another section of the market (fruit and veg.), I hauled my watermelon to the car and suddenly knew I was in trouble. I pleaded with the driver to hurry us home and I barely made it to the can in time. I couldn’t venture too far for the rest of the day.

Then on Sunday, I decided to move my work into one of the offices with air conditioning. I was in the middle of reading a very interesting study on cholera and riots when I knew I had to race back to the can. Too late. Was I a toddler!? Later, I managed to leave my room (in new attire) and access internet for a couple of hours at a café in the afternoon (tissue packs at ready) and by 7:30pm I was exhausted and went to bed.

On Monday morning I began making alternate plans for finally getting back to the community in the forest. My organization doesn’t have a truck that can carry my equipment and my motorcycle at the moment (2 cars are in the shop, 1 is beyond repair in our parking area and the director’s truck bed is too small for the motorcycle). Our original plan was for our driver (lets call him João) to follow me in the director’s truck with all of my equipment as I rode the motorcycle from Quelimane to Maganja, a distance of about 152km, about 50km of which is dirt surface with major potholes and washouts. We would spend the night in Maganja (well, I would stay with a friend and he would stay in Nante where I refuse to stay due to the incident in January). Then on Monday we would drive the 50km to the community (very challenging sand tracks through the forest, but at least I know the road well).

But by the time Saturday rolled around I knew I wasn’t up for many hours of motorcycle driving. I called my other partner organization and they said they could bring me and my motorcycle out to the community this coming Thursday. On Monday I made my way through town to buy bread, bananas, a Sprite, and re-hydration packets. A Toyota Rav4 nearly ran me off the street. An overly eager guy named Abdul lowered his window and asked if I wanted a ride and he asked for my name and phone number in the same breath. I declined the ride, saying I was headed to the pharmacy right down the block, told him my name was Sarah and said I’m new in town and don’t have a phone yet. He wrote his number on a napkin and handed it to me through the window. He said he worked for World Vision (then what was he doing at 10am not working and cruising for girls in town?!). I politely thanked him and headed on my way. After buying my groceries I hailed a bicycle taxi and sat on the seat cushion over the back wheel. Lucky for me, Abdul cruised by one more time, honked his horn, waved and made darn sure that I saw him. Awesome - clearly I prefer balancing my groceries on my knee while sitting on the back of a bicycle to a lift from Abdul…When I got to my bedroom I became extremely tired and napped for 3 hours in the middle of the day.

On Monday night I was working on my survey when I spiked a fever. I walked over to the office, where the accountant (I’ll call him George) was still working away at 6:30 pm with an auditor who is here for 3 days. I said I needed help getting to the hospital. George made some calls. Shortly after, a tall man who claimed to be a friend of the George’s came into the office. I climbed onto the back of this stranger’s motorcycle and we headed to the hospital. Exiting my partner organization’s grounds is a bit interesting. Two lakes up to about 2.5 feet deep have developed in the middle of the road outside our offices with the recent rains. The photo above shows “our lakes” as I like to refer to them when joking with my colleagues. They are much deeper and wider when it rains and little kids like to run and jump onto the back of trucks that sometimes drive through the water - the kids lift their legs trying to a void the water, but sometimes they lose their grip and fall in - I can’t begin to describe the odor of the water… To leave our offices on a motorcycle, one has to drive around the end of the first lake and then onto the sidewalk, being careful not to slam into the occasional trees growing out of the pavement. I’ve gotten quite good at driving a dirt bike on sidewalks.

We arrived at the hospital and headed straight for the lab. I knew something was odd when we were able to walk right into the lab (locked at the front gate) where a lone technician was running blood and other samples through various machines and looking at other samples through a microscope. The smell of formaldehyde made me want to hurl. The tall man sat me down and wrote my name on a piece of paper, signed it and handed it to the technician. The technician pricked my finger (without gloves!) and then smeared my blood on a slide. “40 minutes,” he said. This was too weird, even if I was a little delirious from fever, so I started asking questions. The tall man (who I’ll call Tim) is on the same soccer team as George, the accountant for my organization (the accountant is actually head of the entire club, which runs several teams of different levels and ages). Tim also happens to be an orthopedic doctor at the provincial hospital in Quelimane. He knows practically everyone at the hospital…which is why he could just walk into the lab and tell the technician to run a test right there and then.

After running to the laboratory bathroom to boot, I was told that I have a type of malaria called Plasmodium falciparum, which is particularly nasty. In Mozambique, there are about 5 types of P. falciparum: f+, f++, f+++, f++++, and f+++++, or that’s how it gets marked on the little sheets of paper (I hear that this system isn't always very accurate). The number of crosses does not indicate level of severity. They are just distinct types. Apparently “5 cross malaria” is fairly straight forward to treat, “3 cross malaria” kills very quickly, and “1 cross malaria” is particularly resistant, but people tend to be able to walk around while infected and have slightly less severe symptoms (which is why I can sit up and write a blog entry right now). I have “1 cross malaria” - the definitions are just word of mouth descriptions from people that have had malaria and that have relatives who have had malaria (practically everyone that I know here), so the actual definition of the types might be different than what I have described here.

I followed Tim through another section of the hospital, once the technician had stamped my test result. We passed through the Banco de Socorro (or emergency services) where everyone else who was sick waited (there must have been 40 people). He walked into one of the exam rooms and I waited in the hallway. Within a minute he came out with a standardized prescription sheet that he completed (apparently I’m 22 years old!). We then walked through the orthopedic area of the hospital and out to the hospital pharmacy where we picked up a generic version of Tylenol and Coartem, a malaria treatment specific to P. falciparum. I climbed onto the back of Tim’s motorcycle and we headed back to George’s office. The whole trip took less than an hour, when I had planned on sitting at the banco de socorro for a couple of hours, but being a white foreigner with soccer team captain colleagues changes things I suppose. I had a pretty crazy set of dreams last night and today I am having some ups and downs along with a pounding headache.

George says he won’t let my other partner organization take me to Maganja on Thursday. At the end of 3 days of meds I have to wait a week and do another test to make sure I don’t still have malaria, since this is a resistant strain. There is a clinic in Maganja that can do the test, and I certainly won’t head into the forest on my own until I know I’ve kicked this thing, but I want to try to interview a few people in Maganja while I’m feeling well, then do the test and then move into the community. We’ll see, as George and several others won’t hear of it. No one wants to drag me out of yet another remote area in an emergency (the cholera incident in Gurúe district is still fresh on everyone’s minds around here). Stay tuned for another post about the Zambezi river floods…

Above: The meds and the lab results sheet.

"American" moments

2010-03-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

Above: The Peace Corps Volunteer (left), the coordinator of the organization that I am working with (middle), and me (right).

Many people in the two communities where I have lived have asked really great questions about life in the United States. They have asked: “Do black people live in America?”, “Does everyone own a car?”, “Did you drive to Mozambique from America?”, “Do you grow cassava on your farm - do people eat cassava in the US?”, “What kinds of materials do people use to build their houses?”, “Why is it a different time of day in America right now?” and others. I’ve had fun drawing maps in the sand and getting really flustered when trying to generalize about the US when the cultures in the US are so diverse! Can one describe a ‘typical’ marriage in the US? (well maybe as portrayed in Hollywood…)

As I have walked around in the two communities and in the local towns and provincial capital I have tended to stick out for obvious reasons. But generally I try to go with the flow of things even as I lack the ability to be inconspicuous. Back in December, I was just leaving the house of the coordinator of one of the organizations that I work with when I heard a voice ask, “Do you speak English?” I looked up to see a guy sitting on his porch next to three local kids. As a Filipino-American he stood out in Mozambique too. He will be here for the next 2 years as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) working on HIV/AIDS-related projects with the organization Friends in Global Health. He has had a rough time adjusting. Whereas I look like what Mozambicans think of as American based on what some have seen on TV, this guy gets called “China” by the vast majority of strangers on the street who dare say anything.

Through the weeks and now months of knowing this PCV, I have gradually been introduced to more PVCs…there are quite a few here in Zambézia Province. I cross their paths when they meet up in Quelimane or in other towns such as Gurúè or Mocuba (depending on how many hours they are willing to spend crammed like sardines in a long-haul chapa or mini-bus taxi). These events have changed my experiences from walking solo as a conspicuous American girl around town, to part of a cohort of Americans being well, very American. As a geographer I know that I should say US citizen, but Mozambicans prefer the broader term “American” so I will use it here…

Moment 1: I sat with 3 PVCs at the chicken joint in Quelimane as another PVC who is a tall guy, walked up to our table with a large hiking pack on his back talking rather loudly about recently changing money, how much he changed and how they were going to procure the required booz for the party that night. "Please rob me" should have been painted on his t-shirt.

Moment 2: One PCV who I’m rather partial to since she reminds me of my Aunt Ally (lets call her Jen), discovered a place where we could buy ice cream in 2 or 5 liter cartons. Due to our limited budgets we decided that it would be more economical to buy one of these and share, rather than try to buy individual ice creams somewhere. Ice cream is non-existent in our rural locations, so visiting Quelimane is a chance to stock up on luxuries such as chocolate, peanut butter and even ice cream. The three of us sat down and were faced with a tough decision: a 2 liter tub of vanilla ice cream, or a 5 liter tub of strawberry or milo (milkyway). We decided that we wanted flavor. We asked to have about 3 liters brought out for us to eat, then we would leave the remaining 2 in the tub in the freezer at the restaurant and Jen would take home the remaining 2 to her host family, since they have a freezer. Eating ice cream in Mozambique is done in more of a European style generally, with small cups and small spoons, and small portions. The woman who ran the restaurant/café didn’t know what to do, so she just brought the whole 5 liter tub to our table and let us scoop large portions of ice cream into our bowls…and then again for seconds and thirds. The tub wasn’t placed back in the freezer as we had planned. Jen ended up taking 2 liters of half melted ice cream back home with her. We all had diarrhea for the next 2 days as our intestines tried to remember how to process lactose, or kill off the bacteria that breeds in dairy that repeatedly freezes and then melts in a city with a few power outages once in a while. I’ve never felt more “American” than in that one moment with the 5 liter tub of ice cream in the little café.

Moment 3: About a week ago I left Quelimane early on Saturday morning on a chapa for Mocuba. Many PVCs and a few other guests (most from Finland) were gathering for what was originally going to be a pig roast until we learned that it’s “just not the season”. Luckily I missed the goat sacrifice that ensued at the hands of PVCs who had been there since Friday and a domestic worker or empregado for the host, a Scottish expatriate working for an NGO. The majority of the day consisted of various waves of guests arriving, various team efforts at cooking pizza, guacamole and tortillas all from scratch, and watching Lady Gaga music videos on the Scot’s satellite TV. As the evening settled in, a large plank of plywood had been placed on two hip-level supports. Suddenly there were ping-pong balls and plastic cups everywhere, and the Americans were teaching their Finish and Mozambican guests how to play pong and flip cup. The US vs. “Everywhere else” team trash talking that ensued was pretty horrible/hilarious depending on the mood one was in. I played for Europe to even up the teams and given my England ties…and then we broke it down by gender. I am proud to report that the women won several flip cup races handily, and we for once were just as rowdy as our Mozambican neighbors can be on the weekends in any given urban neighborhood, but with a decidedly “American” flare.

motorcycle fixed!

2010-03-18T08:56:00.000-07:00

My motorcycle is officially no longer leaking gas from the carburetor, the caked red mud has been removed from all parts and the spokes in my rear wheel have been replaced (a few had buckled under the weight of the pack that I carried...at times in addition to a passenger). Our car has broken down, but we might be able to fix it by the end of the week. ETD for the community is probably Tuesday...enough time to put together the basics of my survey, which I should roll out in a few weeks. Fingers crossed! And a belated St. Patty's day...

finally.

2010-03-17T05:04:00.000-07:00

Since my move to Quelimane, I was lied to and told that I had over-stayed my first visa and was scammed for about $250. Then I was told not to initiate the process for my visa extension until the new year. I came into migration in January and was told the director (the only person who can sign off on my visa) was on vacation in Maputo- come back in February. I came back and was told the same thing - come back in March. I came back early on March 8th, and then through the course of going to migration several days in a row they finally put my application through. Then my application was rejected on Monday due to the false claim that I was here on a tourist visa and they couldn't give me a resident visa because of this. This is false, because tourist visas for 6 months don't exist...

I have been to Migration on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, and Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of last week). Then the director (who seems to be a ghost as I've met every single person who works in Migration except him) was unavailable to correct the situation. The director was "ill" again today, so I camped out in the reception of Migration from 8am all morning in protest. Several people tried to call him on my behalf to clarify why my application was correct, legal and legit.

At 11:55am today I received my visa. In total in Maputo and in Quelimane I spent close to 80 hours trying to get this visa. I had a lot of help along the way, but this is astounding.

Problem solved, onto the next thing...

Yesterday afternoon I visited the first community in Maganja da Costa and I plan to return there within the week. I will try to post some fun entries this weekend ;)

happier times

2010-03-15T04:11:00.000-07:00

Today I am posting a photo of the women's versus men's soccer teams that were created on a sunny afternoon in Mocuba during a staff retreat in one of my partner organizations. Some of the men got to be honorary women for the afternoon. My striped uniform team of mostly women ended up winning the match! Those were good times.

Pending a final effort tomorrow morning at the migration office with a representative of my host university, I may be heading to Malawi by the end of the week or to Maputo. After 5 months of obtaining appropriate documents and meetings and "come back tomorrow" s, plus a scam in which an employee of the migration office here in Quelimane tried to convince me that I was here illegally and owed a $1500 fine that he "reduced" to $250, I'm at the end of my 6 month visa with no good result to report on staying for another 6 months. This may mean a trip to Malawi every 30 days for the rest of my research, which is very expensive in terms of getting out of my rural research communities and onto the main roads and up to the border. I'm at my wits end with this one. I'm waiting for major hurdles to stop coming my way this year in Mozambique and between the attempted sexual assault, the evacuation of my study community in Gurue due to cholera and related threats, and now the refusal to grant me a visa extension, I'm getting pretty close to throwing in the towel and pretty deep into my limited budget.

I'm hoping I have better news to report in the next few days. But the phones, fax and internet have been cut at my host institution here in Quelimane, so I may not be able to get on-line for a while. I'm at an internet cafe at the moment that also lacked a connection for the past couple of days.

the worm...

2010-03-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

I don't remember if this was on Thursday or Friday...but I became worried when what I thought was a mosquito bite on my shoulder kept giving me little pangs of pain throughout the day. I looked a little closer and saw that something black appeared to be under the raised bite mark. I sterilized a safety pin and began an excavation. Oddly, this didn't hurt until I had dug a very deep hole into my flesh. I discovered a small black something attached to a white body of some sort and began pulling it out. It was a worm! The darn thing had gradually been building a nest/home in my flesh by severing the nearby nerves, blood vessels and other goodies in there. After dragging the thing out carefully (I was worried it would scramble back in - some do), I put the worm on a piece of paper and then looked at the wound on my shoulder. Big mistake. I had spent too many minutes cross-eyed and focusing intensely on dragging my new parasite friend out of my flesh that when the thought of what just happened finally registered...I booted. It seems to be healing slowly and I'm not sure if I got the whole beast out of there. But after the craziness in Gurue, this was decidedly a good day.

cachasso and the chiefly omen

2010-03-09T04:44:00.000-08:00

Above: the clear liquor drips from the "mutalah" into the "fanta".

On one of my visits to a family in the community in Gurue district, several men and women had gathered around to watch their friend brew cachasso, a hard liquor made from sugar cane and fermented corn, cashew, mangoes or oranges.The man in charge of the brewing explained the whole process, first in Portuguese then in Lomwe. As we moved from one end of the canoe-like "mwajeyah" to the "mpempo" or pipe to the pan filled with fermented sugar cane, I couldn't seem to avoid the smoke. As the smoke kept following me around and around the brewing area, bystanders suddenly began to chatter excitedly. One of the women said that according to local tradition, when the smoke follows someone despite their moving out of the way, it's a sign that that person will be a chief of some sort in the future. Of what I am not sure.

Brewing cachasso is a good source of income in the community, because it's something that people readily pay for and is fairly cheap for locals to buy. What's more, brewing cachasso is a fairly social activity given that it provides an opportunity for fireside chats. But there are also many down sides to alcohol consumption in the community. Having parents getting regularly wasted isn't easy on those who are sober and left to pick up the mess.

The resulting alcohol is not the maize-based beer that I'm used to trying in Swaziland and in parts of rural South Africa. This is above 40% alcohol and when brewed twice can be even stronger! I generally politely taste and then leave the drinking to the usual suspects...

transplanting rice

2010-03-09T02:35:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago in the community in Gurue district I decided to join a group of people working to expand a rice field and transplant rice. After the rice seeds germinate and begin growing, they often begin to crowd each other out in a machamba. It becomes necessary to give the plants more space to their roots and more access to sunlight and nutrients. My host mom insisted that I wear my big rain boots, so I headed to the field with my hoe and boots, wearing a capulana, a hat and a long-sleeved shirt.

When I arrived I found six other people in the most tattered rags I had ever seen. I soon learned that clearing a soaking wet rice field entailed a great deal of muddy projectiles. Every swing of the hoe into the soggy mud sent dark mud splatering on my face. We cleared the weeds away from the top of the soil, then we cut into the soil and lobbed each heavy chunk into the gradually expanding field behind us. The men worked in a line, hacking at the soil and cracking jokes. Occasionally one person would stop to rest and carry the conversation, roll a cigarette with school notebook paper and loose tobacco and smoke or knaw on some sugar cane while the others worked. They shifted this rest from person to person all morning. I started out in the line of men working with my hoe, but after a while they were worried that I would become too tired, so they relegated me to transplanting the rice. Rice transplanting suddenly seemed like a very gendered activity. My host mom walked through her other rice fields to collect plants that were over-crowing one another. She brought piles of rice plants to my host sister and I while we plunged individual plants into the thick mud with our thumbs. The men jokingly sung songs about how they wanted to marry my host sister (she's 15!), so I retorted with a song about why she's too busy to get married right now. Everybody had to stop for a few moments to recover from laughter. My boots sunk into the muck and I almost did a face plant into the field when I couldn't dislodge my boots from the soil. As the sun intensified I realized that I had forgotten my sunscreen. I smeared mud all over my forearms and continued to plant rice. It took nearly a week to dislodge all of the mud that had crammed into my fingernails. But if I ever need to transplant rice I now know what to do thanks to the guidance of these community members...

quick update

2010-03-08T11:55:00.001-08:00

I'm currently in the city of Quelimane trying to regroup and make plans for my return to the first community in Maganja da Costa district. More blog posts and photos to come!

the details

2010-03-08T08:17:00.000-08:00

Above: a view through a corn field across the rolling hills in the community where I was working until March 1st.

I tried to post this once, but the power went out and I lost all of my work at the internet café.

Scholar and activist Joseph Hanlon sends occasional email updates to a list of people interested in current events in Mozambique. He sent the following update on February 22nd, 2010:

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Eight people have been killed in northern Mozambique as local people try to prevent government officials from "spreading cholera".

In Mucoroge, Moma district, Nampula, governor Felismino Tocoli met with local who backed their destruction of a health centre that served 24,000 people. One resident said “we destroyed all the equipment in the hospital because we are tired of dying of cholera”. It was "the only method we found to prevent an outbreak of cholera this year in the region”. About 300 people attacked the health centre on 12 February, destroying medical equipment, smashing the solar panels that provided electricity, and taking the centre’s radio, beds, mattresses and sheets. One person was shot and killed by police, and 10 arrested.

Local people are convinced that health workers are using white power to spread cholera. As we have noted in earlier articles, poor people in the rural north are firmly convinced that the rich want to kill them, and simply cannot accept that government officials, health workers, and even their own community leaders are acting in their interests.

Seven people have died in disturbances in Gurue, Zambezia, including a community leader at Tetete, Lioma, who was accused of collaborating with health activists in order to spread the disease. In Zambezia, 54 people have been arrested in connection with cholera riots, and the police have seized spears, machetes and similar weapons used in the riots.The current cholera outbreak has affected 671 people in Gurue, of whom 19 have died.

In Gurue there are rumours that cholera is spread by a mysterious white powder, left on the ground in public places. Anyone who steps on this powder, it is said, will catch cholera and suffer from acute diarrhoea. In Moma, a woundered rioter, Folgado, speaking from his hospital bed, explained that health activists carry “blue flasks” which contain cholera, and in the health centre “we found two blue flasks of cholera and these would have been distributed to activists”. The Beira daily “Diario de Mocambique” carries a photograph of one of these “blue flasks” – which is in fact a bottle of the water purifier sold under the commercial name “certeza” (“certainty”), easily available in shops throughout the country, and advertised on national television.

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Note: To find Joseph Hanlon's other newsletters on the Web, click here.

I didn't receive the above update, nor have access to any other news reports until I left my community on March 1st.

On Monday, February 22nd, I drove my motorcycle to the community. A colleague working with my collaborating organization escorted me there by driving on his motorcycle. We decided this was necessary given the white powder rumours that had spread to the localities where I work (we had heard about them on the radio and my colleagues had seen reports on Mozambican television). When we arrived, a large group of people had gathered at the Chief of the Locality's building. In order not to draw attention we only stopped briefly to inform the chief of my return and then headed to my host family's place. When we arrived, it was obvious that something was wrong. My neighbor died on Sunday of cholera. Only four days earlier, she had taken the time to cook me a dinner of rice, mushrooms and 2 boiled eggs and bring it to my host family's house where I normally eat with the whole family. On Monday, everyone was just returning from her funeral. She was in her early 50s and was a grandmother with two young grandchildren living in her house because their parents died.

Upon reassurances from other leadership in the community my colleague returned to Gurúè city. I decided to stay in the community and try to keep working. Later that same day, one of the community leaders came to my house looking much stressed. He said the group of people that I saw earlier on my way into the community threatened him and all of the regulos and other leaders. They demanded that the leadership do something about the white powder that they feared was killing people. They also accused me of bringing the powder into the community, or alternatively of me giving the powder to my host dad and him spreading the powder. The leaders stated once again that they knew about my work and that I was not the one bringing powder into the community. The leaders decided to impose a curfew in the community. Between 6pm and 9pm groups of young men in their late teens through 30s would police the community after hours. This “comunitária” would beat up anyone found outside of their proper home after hours and could report names of people found violating the curfew to the chief of the locality. It was tacitly understood that they might be allowed to kill anyone actually found putting powder on people’s doorways.

So beginning that Monday evening, I began living through a new community curfew. On Monday night, a few men were roughed up for brewing cachasso (local homemade hard liquor) far from their homes (at a friend’s house).

On Tuesday morning, word had spread that a 12 year old girl had just died of cholera. Another woman was also sick (she has a young infant to take care of as well as her other 5 children). On Tuesday night one of my friends in the community was found a bit far from his home and was beat up by the comunitária. It became a popular/uneasy joke between parents and their kids - “Put your shirt on and eat your supper or the comunitária will write/beat you up!”

On Wednesday afternoon we heard reports of even more illness in the community.

That afternoon I headed to a few families living about a mile from my house. I had to be escorted by a few male leadership figures in the community, as my host family and the regulos feared for my safety if I walked alone in the community given the powder rumours. On the way to visit these families, we crossed paths with the regulo of the entire locality (he is the most senior traditional leader and generally well-liked) and his wife. They were returning from the funeral of the 12 year old girl who was a member of his extended family. I shook his hand with a traditional greeting. He gave me a dead on stare with a smile, making a little fun of a conversation that we had had about a week earlier…

When I visited his house at that time, it seemed that everyone greeted this senior regulo with their eyes diverted away from him. I asked if this was intentional and explained that I tend to greet people by looking them in the eye as a sign of respect and to show that I don’t have anything to hide. I said I was sorry if looking him directly in the eye was actually offensive in his culture. With that he got up off of his little wooden bench and greeted me a second time, this time looking me straight in the eye with a dead on stare, a wink and then a broad smile. I took a photo of him with his daughter and son-in-law. He asked me to come back and take another photo another day when he had his uniform on. I said I would definitely do so. I planned to visit his house many times, as he is the oldest regulo and has so much knowledge of the community’s history. On Saturday, February 27^th, he died of cholera. I didn’t get a chance to take that photo that he wanted.

Backtracking to Wednesday, February 24^th, after we passed the regulo and his wife, we stopped at a man’s house. I had hoped to draw a family tree with him and talk to him about a sunflower seed project that he was working on. But he was flat out wasted. I could barely make out what he was saying as he slurred every sentence. This frustrated my work, yet amused me, since he is usually a leader in the local Catholic Church and gave such passionate sermons on Sundays, yet couldn’t put a sentence together today.

We stopped by several other houses, and many of the men were drunk there too. I received several piles of gifts with each visit: a giant bunch/stalk of bananas, fresh corn on the cob, dried beans (feijão nhemba), and 3 eggs. As the sun began setting, I urged my escorts to help me wrap up the visits because of the curfew. They nodded and tried to help me say my good byes. But this took longer than expected with half of those present drunk into oblivion. One of the drunken men offered to help me carry some of the food back to my house. He picked up the basket of beans with the eggs nestled on top and carried it on his head. Another man carried the bananas, which were very heavy (my little ‘sister’ in my hose family accidentally dropped them). Unfortunately the drunken man with the beans and eggs spilled a bunch of the beans and smashed an egg on the ground when he lost his balance. He became very apologetic and insisted on finding me another egg to take home. All of us had to stop and wait for him to attempt to find me another egg at his house. We were 20 minutes past the curfew, and I of all people could not be found 1 mile away from my house during the curfew. After about 10 minutes of waiting, I said “My chief will not allow this. I must not be away from my house after 6pm. I’m going.” With that I hauled the load of bananas onto my shoulder and began walking at a very fast pace down the hill, across the small river, then up and down another large hill. My little sister followed, with the escorts trailing behind trying to catch their breath. When I arrived home, my host mom and dad looked very concerned. I said “Good evening…bananas.” Dropped the heavy load on the ground in the outdoor kitchen and then headed to my house. One of my escorts arrived out of breath saying with a chuckle, “that girl is a man! How did she get here so fast?”

On Thursday we heard of more deaths and new illnesses and it began to rain very hard. The comunitária had captured a woman the night before and bound her with rope and took her to the chief of the locality’s building. As they waited for his arrival, her sister called the Gurúè district/city police to help her. They only got as far as a small market area about 15km away, where they arrested a man for spreading rumours about the white powder. They never showed up to help the woman and I didn’t receive any further news. The police, however, banned the comunitária from continuing to operate. As of Thursday evening, the curfew had been cancelled. Meanwhile, cholera cases continued to spring up. Their efforts had not put a stop to the deaths in the community.

On Saturday morning, I left with the girls to help work in the church fields. We worked with our hoes to clear the recently weeded earth of the dead weeds and make rows for planting manioc. When we finished our work, we gathered in small groups to play games in the sand and wait for the men and women to finish chatting in the different groups that had gathered. The mood was sullen and nervous. More people were sick and 3 or 4 school teachers had stopped giving classes at the end of the week and left the community out of fear for their health - many classes would be cancelled on Monday. Then we received word that the regulo of the locality died that morning of severe diarrhea. Everyone who previously didn’t believe the powder rumours suddenly began believing them. Even my host dad, who helped carry the regulo’s body to his brother’s house in preparation for a Sunday funeral, started warning me to look outside my door for powder on the ground if I had to pee in the middle of the night.

News spread that people encountered powder along the road when they carried the regulo’s body to his brother’s house. Anyone who had shoes or boots (not flip-flops) wore them when walking on the road. Some people feared that powder had been spread on their machambas…meaning some people spent valuable time away from the field raising the possibility of hunger later. As I sensed a growing panic, I called another regulo to my house. I asked if people still thought that I brought the powder with me. “Yes, the majority does,” he said. Most of the people in the section of the community where I had been living did not believe these rumours, but so many in the larger locality did that I decided it was no longer safe to stay in the community. The mood could switch at any moment and mobs don’t take long to form. I called my colleagues and they agreed that I needed to leave. But I couldn’t leave on Sunday, because tat was the regulo’s funeral, and leaving would look very bad. I waited through Sunday, unable to leave the area near my house. I met with several leaders and consulted with about 22 people on Sunday (those who stopped by and a few that I met when I went to a neighbor’s to watch my little sister buy some pork. I explained that I was not leaving permanently. That I intended to come back when the cholera stopped and when the rumours stopped. I would wait for an invitation to come back to start my work again. They agreed that this was the best thing to do. I also asked if anyone had notified the health authorities about the cholera situation. The chief of the locality had left the locality to stay with friends/family farther away, but this was interpreted as him fleeing. His failure to attend the funeral of the most important traditional community leader on Sunday was interpreted very negatively. It was unclear if he had reported the cholera deaths to the health authorities (his job). We had seen no health workers arrive in the community. I imagined they were afraid after the Lioma riots and other situations in which health workers had been attacked by mobs believing the health workers were bringing cholera to kill the population. On Thursday, the police learned that the rumor about the powder had shifted yet again. This time it was the health workers who would bring more powder…

I understood why health workers would be hesitant to enter the community, but cholera was working its way through the locality at an alarming rate, with 15 deaths related to diarrhea symptoms and another 8 or 9 sick, including 3 other community leaders who probably were exposed by handling the body of the regulo at his funeral. I asked everyone that I could if they wanted health care workers/support in the community to help deal with the cholera, and every one of them said yes, we need help. My neighbor said “we are dying like chickens”.

I said I would inform the director of health for the district once I arrived in the city. Early on Monday morning, my colleague arrived on his motorcycle after it had rained very hard all Sunday afternoon and into the night. Once again we needed a chicken feather to stop gas leaking from my carburetor. That morning, my host dad said he was sick with diarrhea. I offered to give him a ride to the hospital but he refused. I left with whatever I could carry on my hiking pack. I drove through washed out sections of road, soggy sand, and puddles of water almost 2 feet deep. My boots were mud-soaked inside and out. A small group of young teen boys were gathered near the road near a school, one holding a large knife, and several others that I passed gave surprised/scared/intense stares at me. My colleague said he didn’t dare stop after he saw the stares of some people when I drove by (he drove behind me).

I eventually arrived in Gurúè city. After briefing my colleagues, I went to the district health administrator’s office to report the probable but unconfirmed cholera cases. I also went to the head government official for the district to tell her that I intended to come back, but would be working in Maganja da Costa in the coming weeks until the cholera situation and rumours stopped.

We waited until Tuesday afternoon for a car to arrive. I still had to decide with my colleagues if it was safe to return to the community to get all of my equipment. On Tuesday morning I received word that my host dad’s condition had declined and his eldest daughter was being summoned from Gurúè city to come and help out (they thought he would die). I spent a good part of Tuesday morning crying, convinced that he was dying. I tried to connect with the two people who have cell phones in the community, both of whom were ill when I left with little luck.

On Tuesday afternoon my colleagues and the driver and I had a conference to decide whether or not to go back into the community to retrieve my things. We decided that it was not smart for me to go. My colleagues took on significant risk by driving there, though they were probably the most trusted individuals that could enter the community to give them crucial information that I had learned from the district health administrator. She said that they had sent a car to my community and were chased away by a mob with machetes. I doubt very much that they ever showed up - I would have heard about it. Health workers were terrified to enter the community, so they asked me to pass on a message to arrange with local leaders, sites that would be guaranteed secure where the sick could be brought (such as a school) and then taken from there to a hospital. We had to get this message to the local leaders.

My colleagues were very tense on Wednesday morning. When they returned, they had good news. My host dad pulled through. His kids had overheard me telling a man how to make a basic rehydration solution. They boiled water, let it cool, put a bit of salt, sugar and banana into it and forced him to drink as much as possible. My equipment and my colleagues made it out with no major incidents. They confirmed that I would await the community’s invitation to try again. While the number of cholera cases in my community seemed to slow down (bad timing since my entry and exit correlates with the respective intensifying of and reduction of cholera cases), a family of six died on Tuesday, and the problem continued to plague several sections of the locality. Health workers did manage to get into some of the worst hit areas by Wednesday, but I’m still waiting for more news.

For an analysis of the larger political context of cholera in Mozambique and associated violent incidents and rumours see Joseph Hanlon's article: click here

evacuation

2010-03-01T06:23:00.000-08:00

Well, I tried to write a fairly long explanation for why I had to leave my community, but we are having a huge rain storm in Gurue city right now and the power just cut off. The computers are up and running again but I have to get going.

I will write more when I can, but I had to leave the community for safety reasons. I left this morning on my motorcycle. My plan is to return to Quelimane tomorrow (Tuesday) or Wednesday and I will write about recent events in the community then.

Death powder, politics and risky rumors

2010-03-01T05:44:00.000-08:00

Note: I wrote this on Saturday, February 20^th, but didn’t have an opportunity to post it.

The problem with rumors is that they fire out of control really rapidly. And in Mozambique the rumors that are spreading like wildfire are not just a group of simple-minded country folk getting confused. I read a recent (2009) piece by Joseph Hanlon in the “Briefings” section of the Review of African Political Economy titled “The Panic and Rage of the Poor”. He details why actions such as “Frightened, poor people in Mozambique have killed Red Cross volunteers, a policeman, neighbours and strangers. In the first three months of 2009, at least 20 people were killed in urban lynchings, three were killed for stealing rain, and 16 people died in violence related to cholera,” are directly related to poverty and hunger. I was worried that the violence he details might have direct bearing on my research and safety in the communities, and now it is a reality here in Gurúè district.

Recently, north of Gurúè city in Lioma there have been several deaths. Several young men spread a rumor that local leaders and outsiders had come in the night and spread a powder or “treatment” in the doorways of some houses with the result that a resident of the affected house would die the next day. This was used to explain the recent deaths. A widespread panic has resulted, in which 7 (depending on the accounts) local leaders have been killed in lynchings - they were accused of either personally bringing the powder or supporting its entry into the community. The new Governor of Zambézia Province came to Gurúè this two weeks ago to address this issue and has ordered the police to be on duty throughout the area where panic has ensued.

Recently, one of these “agitators” traveled to visit family farther south where I am staying. He became fairly drunk and started a similar rumor in my locality (larger than the community where I am staying). He heard about a few recent unexplained deaths in the community and said that someone had probably brought a powder into their home to kill them. The rumor spread, and now I (the strange foreigner white lady) could be a possible culprit in these recent deaths of people. The group of people that are helping me get to know the community by walking to its outer limits and by meeting local leaders and visiting key machambas and other sites are nervous for my safety, and everyone has agreed that I can’t walk alone in the community right now. I need male members of the community to walk with me - which brings yet another set of safety considerations into the picture - in order to avoid any dangerous encounters.

One day, we visited several families. On this walk we came to a house where the adults in the house were all in the field. A man in my small entourage went to ask if they had time to chat today or if we could come back. He met with insults from the men in the field - calling those who were with me “people who don’t hoe”, and said other things that I didn’t understand. The man and a group of other concerned community members brought this to the attention of the leadership in the community. The leaders, in an attempt to show that they are in control, made claims that these men and others who were spreading the powder rumors were people counter to the Frelimo party and were just spreading rumors to stir up trouble. That if they committed any illegal acts while stirring up this trouble, that they would call in the police. But as Hanlon recounts, even the police have been attacked when they have tried to intervene in riots over health workers entering communities with cholera outbreaks. The words chlorine and cholera are very similar in Portuguese and in English, and this has led to a really problematic interpretation of health workers bringing chlorine to treat water as ‘health workers bringing cholera’ to put in the water and kill off the population. Cholera is now present in Nampula Province and in Cabo Delgado, and similar riots to those of 2009 are taking place with renewed vigor, especially in Gurúè district.

The situation in my community remains fairly calm, but there is a risk of misinformation being spread. Some people are upset with Frelimo’s victory and increasing political power in the province, as well as continue to suffer from poverty and hunger. This has fueled violent protest from rural and urban poor Mozambicans who see many promises of NGOs and government ministries bringing development and not delivering on those promises of development.

Not wanting to drive my motorcycle alone through the area of the locality where the rumors of the death powder were strongest on Friday, and not wanting to drive with a man on the back of my motorcycle for most of the way through rough roads and remote areas, I called my partner organization. They agreed that this was not a tiny matter and said it was indeed very serious. They sent a man to drive his motorcycle into the community to speak to the local leaders about the recent confusion and then to drive on his motorcycle behind me as I drove mine, back to Gurúè city (see duct tape blog entry for more details). As of right now we are playing this by ear. The situation is delicate. I plan to return to the community on Monday morning (I returned on Monday, February 22^nd). I’m going on my motorcycle with an escort again, but I will check in with community leaders before leaving to make sure that it is fairly safe to do so. [please see update above]

fixing a roof

2010-03-01T05:28:00.000-08:00

When people fix roofs around here, the critters that make their homes in the grass thatching material try to scutter away. This unlucky mouse was caught by the local kids as they watched my neighbor fix her roof. I hear these mice scratching and running between the black plastic and the grass at night.
I asked around and most people in the community here replace the long bunches of grass or "capi" once per year.

duct tape

2010-03-01T05:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve learned 2 things about duct tape while staying in the community. First, it can be fairly effective in taping shut the holes in the large black plastic sheet that serves as a rain guard between the bamboo roof frame structure and the straw roofing material. After it poured for hours while I took shelter and ate my dinner in my host family’s house, I returned to my house to find that rain had leaked through my roof and soaked my bed (the reed mat and any clothes, bedding and other items that I had left there under my mosquito net.). With the help of my headlamp and a good test of my balance on the shaky wooden bedframe I was able to locate several leaks in my roof and create a new covering to protect my bed and direct the rain onto the floor. While most of my things were wet, at least I didn’t have to spend the night with water dripping onto my head.

On the morning of my first scheduled departure from the community (to recharge my phone and back up data in Gurúè city), the guy who came to escort me out of the community noticed that my motorcycle was leaking gasoline from the carburetor. I tried to use duck tape to stop op the hole where the gasoline leaked. After several layers or well-placed tape made it onto the carburetor it seemed that that would do the trick at least until I got to a mechanic. The community members were intrigued by my grey duct tape. I explained that there were books and other publications devoted to listing the many practical uses of duct tape. As the guy started the motorcycle up again, we realized that gasoline tends to dissolve the sticky material in the duct tape, rendering it fairly useless. Then community members said I should try a traditional material instead of my hi-tech tape. A man brought over several chicken feathers. They found one whose fat end was just the right size to plug the leaky hole in the carburetor for the ride. That chicken feather held for 65km of really rough riding until the mechanic dislodged it and set about removing the sand and other items that had invaded the carburetor.

The drive was rather harrowing, given that I was told that assassins might stay near the road and might try to throw me off my motorcycle due to the fear in the community of the possibility of my bringing a death powder into the community (see the death powder blog entry). After several days of rain, the sections of road that were mostly loose sand were nearly impossible to cross. I nearly wiped out in one section, but I regained my balance and found a bicycle path along the side of the road and practically in the bushes that proved more passable. My escort said I drive like I’m in the military - that he couldn’t believe I made it through that terrain with only one major skidding incident. If I ever grow tired of academia I may take up the sport of dirt bike racing, remembering to bring along chicken feathers instead of duct tape on race day.

my new house

2010-03-01T05:00:00.001-08:00

Internet access is much worse in Gurue, so I am only now posting the previous items. More news to follow.

initiation

2010-02-19T05:39:00.000-08:00

On the second day of my stay in my second research community, the women in the community got right down to business. At first they tried to teach me to dance, so that I could join the youth choir on Sunday. Then they realized that I had no idea how to wiggle my hips and shake my butt when they shifted into dances that I don't normally see performed in church...

The women shooed the children away and encouraged them to go play soccer with a ball made of several condoms, rubber string and fabric. They moved my straw mat to an area behind my house (pictures will follow hopefully!) under the shade of a cashew tree. Two women in their 40s asked me if I had had my period yet - I struggled to understand at first, thinking they were asking if I was menstruating right at that moment - I mean of course I've had my first one, I'm 26! They seemed satisfied at this explanation and then more women arrived - some with babies tied to their backs with capulanas, some toothless old ladies, and some very pregnant ladies too.

One woman dislodged the handle of a hoe from the metal end and another woman tore some of the black plastic material that lined the inside of my roof (more on my leaky roof later!). Then they asked me how people initiate sex in the US - now that's a hilarious feat of vocabulary for me - not something I got out of my language classes. All of this happened in Portuguese with some women who are better versed in Portuguese translating to the older women in Lomwe.

Men who were excited to visit the white lady staying in the community kept stopping by to say hello. This interrupted my initiation, as no men are allowed. Apparently the big group initiation with the girls already happened this year, so they felt it very important to get my initiation done as soon as possible - I am behind on this one. The women politely stopped talking and hid the hoe handle and chatted with the men who stopped by. If the men took too long to understand that they needed to come back at another time, eventually one of the women would say we had women's business to take care of and the men would immediately get up and leave.

Now, down to initiation - I am not sure if I am going to share the details of initiation, simply because doing so would spill the beans to men, and women in the community don't talk about initiation with men.

I'll just say that I emerged unscathed, the whole event was hilarious as a form of cultural exchange and now I'm allowed to continue on in the community now that I have passed through this basic rite. I'm still having trouble dancing some of the dances though.

back in Gurue city

2010-02-19T05:37:00.000-08:00

Well I made it back to Gurue "city" from my second research community. I'll try to explain why this was a harrowing trip in a bit.

arrived in Gurue

2010-02-10T00:27:00.000-08:00

I'm having more motorcycle trouble. If I get it fixed then I will arrive in the community this morning (I just found the one operational internet cafe in town - that I know of). I just walked into a pharmacy, where I asked for anti-parasite medicine. The pharmacist asked me some questions, weighed me (I can confirm that I lost 5kgs or 11 lbs in a month) and then proceeded to ask unnecessary questions like if I had a husband, how long I was staying here, etc. 10 minutes later I walked out with a bunch of meds - Tchau worms! I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the motorcycle will run! I hope to check in again on February 19th.

off to Gurúè district

2010-02-08T13:02:00.000-08:00

Above: sun sets over the tea plantations and mountains further in the distance near the town of Gurúè, the seat of the district.

It's a 4 to 5 hour journey to the northern and higher altitude part of the province tomorrow. On Wednesday I will arrive in the second study community in a cooler and wetter climate. It's back to tents/earthen housing, capulanas and a complete lack of privacy for the next month and a half. I'll post when I can. Stay well!

I own a chicken!

2010-02-08T12:13:00.000-08:00

I paid a visit to the regulo (or one type of chief) one afternoon to learn more about the history of his family. After a long chat, a photo session and banter about the US, I said that I had to walk the 4km home through the forest before it got dark (too many mambas crossing the road - I kid you not!). The regulo looked concerned. He asked me to wait a moment. Within seconds his dogs and his adult son and son-in-law were chasing a chicken through the manioc field. They emerged with a young cockerel saying that I could eat him for dinner or wait until breakfast. I thanked them profusely as they tied the chicken's feet together with twine. But as I carried that skinny cockerel all the way home, his bony chest made me think that it might be better to let the young chicken gain a little weight before he became dinner.
I spoke with another chief's nephew and arranged a space in the chicken coop for my new chicken that I decided to call Ralph (long story...my little sis is a fan of chickens). We left him in the chicken coop for the night and then let him roam around the next morning to get used to his new surroundings. He's scheduled for dinner on April 15th, a couple days into my planned return to this community for a second extended stay. Hopefully the predatory birds will leave him alone. There are birds in the bush here that can kill small antelopes. They lure them into a thicket and then gauge out their eyes and then debilitate the animal until it dies (I have yet to see/confirm this, but it's a pretty impressive community tale at that). They had better leave Ralph alone until April.

Christmas and the Teletubby Jesus

2010-02-08T10:49:00.000-08:00

I still haven't had a chance to recount Christmas eve and Christmas day in the community. Most of the people who visit/work in the community who are part of development agencies balked at the idea that I would spend Christmas and New Year's in the community. On Christmas eve my neighbors told me that I had to go to Catholic church service from 2pm until 7pm. When I arrived near the church at 2:30pm, the church was fairly empty except for a few boys practicing the drums. We headed across the road to a woman's house where she was drying a type of wild bean from the "mato". The girls with me set about entertaining this woman's toddler and infant and helping the woman pound the beans lightly before shaking the thin skin-like layers off of the beans.

The woman's husband soon arrived and began helping a friend fix the tube in the back wheel of his bicycle. I often see him repairing the Chinese Hero bikes that are starting to filter into the community.

Eventually at about 3:30pm the singing and drumming began, calling us into the church. The leaders of the church had taken pages from illustrated textbooks and other community information pamphlets published by NGOs and strung them onto twine as streamers. During the dances a man sitting by the door would pull the twine and the whole network of torn pages would flutter above everyone's heads. The service was entirely in Chuabo language, so at times when I didn't understand much, I found it interesting to read about how to build a chicken coop, make hand puppets and always use the latrine or bathroom to urinate from the torn pages hanging closest to my chair. Aside from the leaders in front, I was the only person in the general congregation who was given a wooden chair. This is awkward when women behind me have to peer around or forgo catching the action of the person delivering an animated sermon, but as a special guest I always get the chair.

This service certainly lasted longer than the usual 2-3 hours on a given Sunday. The service included reenactments of baby Jesus being visited by the kings in the manger. A woman who must be in her late teens or early twenties was tapped on the head to her great surprise early in the service. She wore an old shirt that used to belong to a "Libby" in a sorority in the states. A man was also tapped on the head. They had to play Mary and Joseph for the remainder of the service, including the Christmas day service. One of the leaders at the front of the church walked up to the woman and gave her a purple teletubby doll wrapped up in a towel. This was the baby Jesus for the next two days.

We rushed outside in excitement as teens danced around a makeshift manger outside of the church. Then Mary and Joseph were rushed into the church with the teletubby Jesus and sat in front of the congregation for the remainder of the service. I have been improving my dancing skills and at times I get up to dance in the line of girls and young women in the center of the church. At 7pm we emerged exhausted from dancing and all of the excitement for the coming day.

The following morning at 6:30am the regulo's wife stopped by my house to give me a bag of rice for Christmas. I thanked her, embarrassed that I didn't have any food in the house to give her too. My host family and neighbors dressed in clothes that I didn't know they owned (kept only for photos, Christmas or other special occasions). We walked down the road to church and came across the father of one of the girls who likes to walk to church with me. It was 6:45 and he was wasted out of his mind (he later proposed marriage as I pounded grain outside of my house) while he rode rather crookedly by on his bicycle. I said I'd have to chat with his other two wives first and they'd probably say no so he was out of luck.

Church lasted between 7am and 10:30am. Large pots of food had been prepared after the service with more teletubby Jesus appearances. A few women had carried water from the hospital to help wash dishes and hands. An impromptu dancing circle had formed after the performances of a series of more complicated Christmas dances by several kids finished. A woman brought out a bowl of rice and some choice chicken pieces for me to eat. They initially made me sit alone in my wooden chair until I indicated that I wanted to join people. They sat me with the regulo and other important men while the women and children lined up for their portion outside of the house where food was being distributed from buckets. Everyone had been instructed to bring their own plates. I didn't know this, but my neighbors brought extras along, knowing that I'd need a plate too.

After finishing my chicken and rice I ventured into the house where the food buckets were being carefully guarded and a man stood calling out names of people who could come forward for their food (ranked based on church attendance and participation in church activities). There was also a pork option, but some people in the community don't eat pork and the man monitoring the buckets of meat was careful not to mix the two. At first they looked worried that I was asking for more food until I explained that I just wanted to watch the distribution process.

This was a special day, for so many people to eat a little meat with rice instead of mealie meal made from manioc. When it came time for New Year's, everyone had eaten their special items already for Christmas and complained that they had no way of celebrating New Year's. Francine's grandmother was particularly pissed at not having a way to celebrate New Year's, so she looked me in the eye and said "Francine's grandma needs a drink!"

It turns out that the musical director (the guy who teaches the kids how to sing and dance in church) is also they guy who brews the majority of the community's alcohol (well at least he oversees the process). Many people drank to be merry that Christmas afternoon, with some men breaking into an all out brawl that got the local traditional leader dragged in as well.

Every house that I passed on my way back to mine offered me a bit of food if they had it. Others in the community hit me up with the phrase "boa festa", meaning that I had to give them something if I had it. I don't have much cash on me in the community and I don't have a machamba from which I can pluck food and hand it out on special occasions. Bit by bit I have learned to store some of the food that people give me and include extra eggs and rice that I buy in the village, so that I too can participate in the process of giving small gifts to visitors and having something to hand back in return, when I'm presented with peanuts, bananas, eggs, fish or any other item.

All in all, Christmas in the community was a great experience. 7 hours of Catholic church in 2 days, however, and I'm still not a convert, but that's not because of the teletubby.

neighbors and host family

2010-02-08T09:40:00.000-08:00

The photo above isn't very clear, but I'm standing with my neighbors. They put on their best clothes for the photo. When I don't have enough mangoes in my house to serve important visitors such as the regulo's son, they bring out their mangoes in a bowl of water for my visitors. When the supplies run low, they bring out boiled bananas. A man once stopped by to say he was selling eggs. I bought several and gave some of them to my neighbors to thank them for their help earlier. Their son (far right) is very knowledgeable about natural resources in the area and he also loves going to school. Their daughter just moved to her uncle's house and hasn't said why she left so she is not in this picture. Occasionally she stops by to say hello.

"there's still timber here"

2010-02-08T08:43:00.000-08:00

Above: after moderate rain one afternoon, the sky opened up and we enjoyed a rainbow for at least an hour over the forest.

Above: a quick picture taken on the premises of a forest concession within the community where I have been working. The major species desired in this area are: pao ferro, mondzo, muaga, jambire, chanfuta and umbila (local names). This concession, along with others are pressuring the community to reduce its control over a substantial area of forest to allow more logging. I ran into the owners of the concession one day and they were not pleased that I had been living in the community (I'm sure they were thinking that foreigners tend to meddle, which is funny because many people claiming rights to the forests and exporting timber in Mozambique both legally and illegally are foreigners). They commented that if I were to drive a bit to the northeast or near Mocuba I'd find that most of the high-value timber has already been taken...unlike here, where there is still a fair amount of timber. In his eyes, a forest is valuable for the timber (trees?) only...

eating tortoise

2010-02-06T10:41:00.000-08:00

Above: searing the scaly skin off of the tortoise meat. It was then cut into smaller pieces and stewed and served with chima.

Unfortunately, I think I may have recently ate a threatened species. I walked by a friend's house and he invited me to join him for lunch. He had another guest with him that I have wanted to speak with a bit more. This other guest is at the center of a controversy over the recent death of his 5 year old. He accuses another family of using witchcraft to cause the death of his child and is in the middle of resolving the issue in the community justice system.

Keen to hear his perspective on the issue I said I'd taste what they were having. It turned out that they were still in the process of cooking. Ants came from all directions to eat any waste that fell to the ground as my friend removed the meat from a tortoise shell after having cut its head off. These slow-moving animals are fairly easy to scoop up off of the forest and "mato" or bush floor. There is such a shortage of meat in the community that at this time of year tortoises are the only source of meat in a given week. The problem is that the species (I know of about 3 species so far) that are eaten are fairly threatened species (I havn't yet confirmed whether or not the tortoises appear on any international lists of "endangered" or "threatened" species).

The meat was scooped and cut out of the shell and the legs removed. The liver and a few other innards were also put in the bowl of edibles. My friend seared the skin off of the legs to the extent possible over the fire. Afterwards they placed the meat in a pot with water and herbs and onions and stewed the meat. We began discussing the other man's case that he was bringing before the community leaders concerning his child. After an hour or so, which included the preparation of chima, we sat down to try the tortoise stew. It tasted very much like beef, but the liver (offered to me as the special guest) had a pungent smell and taste that I think is much worse than beef or chicken liver.

I had "just a taste" and left the majority of the meat to the men, while I sat and dipped my chima in the sauce.

I've been served tortoise 3 times in the month of January. I just cant get over the little padded foot with long nails sitting in my bowl with my chima or manioc mealie meal. I'm not a fan.

mango season

2010-02-05T21:09:00.000-08:00

Above: two kids hang out and eat some of the mangoes that my friend brought in from her walk in the bush, where houses used to be, but where mango trees remain.

One day I decided to shift away from the usual approach of recording sequential events. Instead I decided to think about all of my observations to date on a few specific themes. I did this for mangoes…

* Right up until Christmas it was really too early for mangoes. After any rain at all, the kids would run out under the mango trees to see if any had fallen to the ground. It was virtually impossible for me to eat a mango in this early stage. Many toddlers and others, feeling very hungry and impatient for the season to begin ate fairly unripe mangoes.

* As the stores of peanuts run out, mangoes become the gift item of choice offered to passers by/visitors in most homes. If you visit a house you will be served with a bowl of mangoes sitting in water along with a cup of water to wash your hands before and after (the mangoes ooze a sticky syrup), and a knife to peel the mangoes so that you don’t have to do so with your teeth…if the household has one on hand.

* People boil mangoes (especially the greener variety). They maintain some of their flavor (losing a bit of their sweetness) after boiling. Doing this kills any bugs which burrow into the mangoes. These bugs give people stomach aches if eaten in raw mangoes.

* Mangoes keep toddlers busy in 2-3 hour church services, but they make a mess of clean church clothes!

* I have seen many young girls running around (between the ages of 5 and 12) with two mangoes placed in their shirts to mimic breasts - hilarious!

* Kids climb all sorts of branches in trees to get mangoes. It seems that passers by are welcome to mangoes in trees on other people’s living space, though there are some limits.

* In a neighboring village their trees produce so many excess mangoes that they make alcohol with the mangoes. The community where I am staying makes this type of alcohol too, but a in a smaller quantity.

* There are many types of mangoes. For example, there is a tree near my house that has fat green mangoes (fewer produced by the tree). These have a sweeter, juicier taste, and though they are a deep green on the outside, they are yellow and ripe on the inside. These are particularly prone to pests, however, and are frequently boiled. The other, more common type of mango here is more yellow in the skin when it is ripe. These mangoes are smaller and more numerous in each tree. They are full of fibers! The third type of mango that I have eaten in Zambézia does not grow in my community. It is sold in Maganja, the district capital. Its shape is maybe that of a kidney, with a narrow hook at the top and a flatter body. Its skin is a yellow/orange/green/red color combination and its flesh is electric orange. It is very sweet and my favorite. All three of these types of mangoes are completely different from the types of mangoes that I’ve seen sold in US stores.

* Many people in the community bring mangoes along as a snack in the machamba, in church, on a journey or even to the river to wash dishes (nice propagation strategy!). They complain of stomach aches from eating too many mangoes. At times I feel sick of mangoes, but by the next day I find myself craving them with renewed intensity. It is difficult to eat just one. Part of the ingenuity of this tree is that people will start by eating just one and then climb a tree nearby for more until they are full, leaving the pits everywhere they walk.

* The skin on my hands continues to peel from the toxins in the mango skins. Using a knife has helped reduce this and prevented the same skin peeling from happening around my lips - it took me a while to figure out that mangoes were the culprit.

* After the boom of ripe mangoes, they started to grow scarce at the end of January, just in time for a long hard month of very little food before the first round of crops begin to yield anything to eat in March and April. I might have recently left the community for Quelimane to transition into the second community farther north and gain a little weight back, but everyone I’ve left behind in the first community is hunkering down for a hungry, hungry month ahead.

Above: Elise's mango and cigarette (rolled with loose tobacco and notebook paper) placed at the side of her rice field for a break (see previous post).

planting rice

2010-02-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

Above: women working their rice fields in a clearing in the forest.

“England, vamos semear arroz,” (England, lets plant rice!) came the voice of the mother of one of the teenaged girls who sleeps in my house with her friends sometimes. I will call this mother Elise. Many people have trouble pronouncing my name at times, preferring to say “inglês”, which means English in Portuguese or they just say “England”. I’m used to hearing her voice at about 4:20 most mornings as she yells at her daughter to wake up and get working in their fields. Their family is relatively poor, as their house is made of lines of wood poles for walls that have not had the spaces filled in with mud. You can see into their house, and this lack of privacy is fairly undesirable to many in the community. At a later date I woke at 4am to hear her confront her husband who was passed out at my neighbor’s house. He had sold some of the family’s manioc to buy alcohol without asking her and without sharing the alcohol with her (she’s fairly wasted most days too). Her husband is a well-known village drunk. She decided to wake him out of his stupor and beat him up for selling their manioc. “What are we going to eat?!” she screamed. The neighbors had to intervene. Her husband is now a skinny guy and one punch to the liver would probably kill him.

After ‘grandma’s’ experiment to see if I could plant peanuts in her field, a few other women began agreeing to let me try working with them in their fields. I asked Elise a few days earlier if I could go to her field to learn how to plant rice. She said sure. The following Monday morning at 4:20, I was the target of her shrill voice calling us to the fields. I put on my rain boots (Wellingtons if you are a Brit), since the women insist that I use them, and I didn’t feel like going barefoot or in sandals after my experience with the ants in the peanut field.

Three girls including Elise’s daughter walked down the road with me, with Elise leading the procession. She insisted on carrying my hoe as well as well as her own. I brought a small backpack with a GPS, camera, water and notebook. After about a 2km we entered a fairly open area surrounded by tall trees and brush. Some of the area consisted of tall grass that had not yet been cleared. A large termite mound dominated one area of the clearing, and someone’s corn field grew farther back from the road. The girls split into different directions. Some of the 14 and 15 year olds (girls and boys) have small fields that they are responsible for adjacent to their parent’s fields. Elise led me to a patch of freshly tilled soil. She said that first we needed to clear the grass and weeds from the rest of the field and till the soil for planting on later days. She set a mango on the ground, as well as the small remnant of her cigarette (for breaks!) and began showing me how to clear the weeds.

Above: the bowl of rice brought along for planting.

I took out my hoe and we began hacking through the tall grass and the roots of the other weeds. Every so often I stopped to carry piles of weeds to the side of the field to be burned later. After about 45 minutes Elise took my hoe away and said I needed to stop. She inspected my hands and sure enough I was developing two fairly large blisters. I said I was used to blistered hands on my rowing team, but my protest was lost on her. She didn’t want to be held responsible for injuring me. I said that I didn’t get to learn how to plant rice. She agreed that we still needed to do this so she picked up the bowl of rice and showed me how to shake the seeds over the area of the field that had been cleared a few days earlier. After the seeds had been sprinkled on the bare ground she picked up my hoe and with the back end of it smacked the ground to spray the soil in many directions to lightly cover the rice. This provides a covering for the rice grains, presumably to avoid birds eating the rice. After we spread the rice on the area that had already been prepped, she asked if she could use my hoe for the remainder of the morning (mine is fairly new and sharp and hers is rounded and dulled after much use). I said sure and then she shoed me off the field. I walked over to other fields nearby where other women were sprinkling rice on the ground and clearing more area as well. The teenagers showed me the fields that they were in charge of and they asked me to take a few photos.

Above: one of the women sprinkling rice over her field.

Some of the other girls decided to escort me home. As we headed down the road they stopped occasionally to use their hoes to dig into the soil in other people’s machambas (fields) to get a type of field rat/mouse out of the tunnels that they have buried. No success that morning, but they were certainly keen to add some meat to their daily diet of manioc mealie meal.

As I visited families that afternoon men and women inevitably noticed my blisters as I shook their hands using the traditional greetings. They looked very worried but I said that it’s a sign of good work and that I’m not mad at anyone for my getting blisters. This seemed to appease them for at least a little while. I’ve had a few other invitations to fields and a few other opportunities to try out different work, but they still happen only rarely…not many Mozambicans from the urban areas stick around to actually participate in working in machambas, let alone foreigners…

body modification & battery acid

2010-02-04T07:19:00.000-08:00

Since my first time down at the river, I noticed that most women have raised scars in the shape of many groups of three small lines on their upper legs, their belly and sometimes on their arms. At times there are individualized designs such as a leaf, a name or a rectangular box with zigzags in the middle. Some women also have three tattooed dark dots in the shape of a triangle on their cheeks, forehead and chin.

At first, girls and women were shy and didn’t talk much about this really common form of body modification in the community. One day a guy who I sometimes sit with to teach him English explained that older women sometimes take girls between the ages of 12 and 17 to the bush and use razors to make the marks. He was quick to explain that each girl is responsible for buying their own razor so as not to spread blood-borne infections, and the women make a balm from herbs to put on the cuts afterwards to help the scarring and stop the bleeding. He also said that the dots on the face were made using the toxin in the shell of the cashew, but that some people have sensitive skin and they can have a reaction. I wrote his version down, expecting the truth to be a bit different, as he’s a guy who doesn’t participate in these rituals/rites.

Many girls initially said that they make the marks with their friends. And I was told that I missed the time when the marks on the face were made in early December.

On Tuesday, January 5^th I left the community on my motorcycle to pick up more food supplies in town (after a long stay over Christmas and the New Year). I stayed in town until the 8^th to work on a report and take care of some things requiring internet. When I returned the girls that normally hang out in my house were scratching new cuts on their legs and bellies. I asked when they got the new marks and they said Wednesday. The older woman who made these marks waited until I left the community to bring a group of at least 15 girls down to the river (not the bush), where she used a razor blade (not sure if there were different blades for each girl…) to cut the three line designs. Instead of an “herbal balm”, she cracked open several Size D batteries and rolled the open batteries over the girls’ open cuts. I’m not sure at what point this tradition switched from the use of herbs to battery acid (am still speaking with traditional leaders and women and girls to get more takes on the practice).

The marks require maintenance every few years and many older women have traces of these marks on their skin, with some choosing not to maintain them because it’s too painful and others continuing to form the scars with their friends or during later ceremonies. Some girls receive the marks on their legs at one time and then get them on their stomach at another time. Slightly older girls often cut large crosses above each breast (with each arm of the cross made of three lines) and others have large scars of different shapes over their sternum.

Another man that I talked to in the community reasoned that men find women with these marks more exciting, and that many women get the marks to prevent their future husband from running off with a woman who has the marks when she doesn’t. He explains that if she already has the marks then that’s one less reason to sleep around with another woman. I asked, “yes, but don’t most men and women sleep around on their partners anyway, marks or no marks?” to which he avoided giving a direct answer.

As a moment of bonding between girls, and between older women and girls, the body modification appears at least at a superficial level to be a valuable experience. In my opinion, many of the marks look pretty cool after they have scarred into raised lines on the skin (as far as I know, no one is losing a clitoris during these ceremonies). But the sketchy information on whether the razor blades are shared, on the use of battery acid, etc. raise some big health concerns. And if that logic that the man presented about this practice preventing a future husband from sleeping around is also commonly considered as a factor among girls deciding whether or not to get the marks…then that’s a tad misleading at best for young girls. The other consideration is the whole issue of consent. These are 12 to 17 yr. olds…are some of them told by parents or elders that they have to get the marks, marks which can be permanent? Can a girl refuse if she doesn’t want to? Do ideas of consent fundamentally conflict with cultural practices, norms and philosophy in the community? I’m still asking around as it’s a touchy subject for many (and for this reason, no photos for now).

my diet...

2010-02-04T07:10:00.001-08:00

Above: me and my brand new machete in the office of one of my partner organizations. The director is camera happy at times, which is great!

One day I thought it'd be fun to just make a list of what I had eaten that day and the day before...

On Tuesday, January 12^th I ate:

- 3 mangoes

- a wild fruit the size of a cherry in the bush ‘mato’ (about 5)

- 3 more mangoes

- other bush fruit found in a tree, but not the one that looks like an orange and can kill you...

- 4 more mangoes

- 1 fried termite

- ½ scrambled egg

- chima (corn mealie meal) and dried minnows (heads, tails and all) fried in soy oil

On Wednesday, January 13^th I ate:

- a handful of cashews (a special gift from the regulo’s wife)

- chima and a tortoise leg

- peanuts

- 4 mangoes

- spaghetti with ¼ onion and 2 sardines in tomato sauce (4 oz. of the 'dines 'n sauce)

I have lost about 10 or 12 lbs. My jeans and trousers as of the end of January won’t stay on without a belt that I’ve pulled in 2 more notches. I’m contemplating buying new trousers, but that’s not in my budget...I could wear capulanas when I'm in the city but sometimes I really just don't want to walk in a restrictive long skirt...and it's trousers only for the motorcycle.

sex jokes, f#$%ing and condoms

2010-02-04T06:55:00.000-08:00

Above: A chameleon that has changed color to appear similar to my capulana. This really has nothing to do with the topic of this post. I just wanted to share the photo.

Being in a predominantly Catholic country, I thought I’d really have to watch my tongue and keep things fairly prudish while I work in the community. But it turns out sex is a pretty common topic for jokes. It’s just that the type of joke doesn’t vary that much. When I’m a guest visiting various homes in an afternoon (after people have eaten lunch and spent the morning in the field, and during the hottest hours of the day) I hear all sorts of jokes. I am constantly asked if I will marry someone in the community and I explain that I can’t because I work in the community. People nod their heads and agree that that could make things complicated…and then the jokes roll out:

Middle-aged man visiting the same house as me one afternoon: “Well you should marry a Mozambican because we have really strong sperm! You’ll be pregnant in no time!”

Other middle-aged man at the same house: “Well I may be 46, but you will find that my penis hasn’t aged at nearly the same pace!”

Man in his early 60s, husband of “grandma” in earlier post about planting peanuts: “Well if and when your friend Francine gets here, I’ll show her a few tricks, especially from behind…how do you say penis in your language?” His wife (“grandma”) interjects: “ yes, send your boyfriend my way and I’ll show him a good time too.”

She’s waiting to hear back about what he thinks of the idea…

Young (18 yrs. old) woman about to go through the rituals with her husband and a curandeiro (traditional healer) to ensure the successful birth and health of their first child: “You are 26 and you don’t have kids yet?! Here, take my husband inside the house right now. He’ll get you pregnant!”

On a Sunday morning I walked with this woman (lets call her Christy) to a church that is closer to Christy’s sister in a neighboring section of the community. We walked an hour and 15 minutes up the road and then spent 3 hours singing and dancing in church. We then continued for an even longer walk towards her sister and aunt’s houses. After a long day of visiting her family and eating mangoes we headed back (we walked 15km that day, and she was 7 months pregnant!). She suddenly brought up that fact that the night before a man had entered my house at about 10:30pm, only to wake the 8 year old girl that also sleeps in my house. She alerted the 16 yr. old that sleeps next to her, the neighbors and me. The man had long gone and ran down the road. My neighbors were up in arms loudly discussing what to do until about midnight. We never found out who he was. We think he was there not to rob my plates and food, but to play around with the 16 yr. old in my house…who sleeps topless on a reed mat with a few capulanas as sheets/bedclothes.

Anyway, Christy says she is convinced that it was one of the 16 yr. old’s lovers. Christy predominantly speaks Chuabo/Nyaringa and she and I sometimes struggle to communicate fully. But she knew the Portuguese word “Fuder” or the verb to f#$% with certainty. She asked me if I like to f#$% and then said she likes to…”I’m pregnant aren’t I!?” she laughed. Her husband had left the community for the day to buy coconuts in the village (several hours by bicycle each way), or so he says. I asked if she trusted him on these journeys. She says she has to, but he probably f#$%’s 60 women a day and she’s not sure how he does it (she turned to smile at me to let me know she was yanking my chain a bit). She’s very clear that, at least with her husband, she doesn’t use a condom. She says for now she only has one lover, her husband, but I sense she has doubts about what her husband gets up to in town.

Above: a girl with a blond doll poses for a photo. She wears the rim of a condom on her wrist as a bracelet (a little hard to see in this photo).

There is a box of free condoms sitting on the front porch of the clinic in the community (but this is a very public place next to the road and right across from one of the most important traditional leaders in the community to be snagging a few condoms if you are trying to be discreet). Most of the children end up taking the condoms and blowing them up as balloons. In the photo above the little girl has the latest fashion among the kids in the community, the circular base of a condom worn as a bracelet on her right wrist (from her perspective)! The other use makes me cringe, but many kids tear up pieces of condoms and use them as a sort of tough chewing gum. They even blow bubbles as they chew the latex with noisy squeaking sounds. I have a feeling not too many condoms are worn by adult community members, which is concerning because the impact of HIV is ever more visible these days.

mushrooming in the 'mato'

2010-02-04T01:15:00.001-08:00

Above: one of the girls who helped locate, explain and gather mushrooms in the morning in the bush or 'mato'.

On Friday, January 22^nd, I woke at 5am. I thought we would be heading into the forest for mushrooms early in the morning and I didn’t want to be late. As I stepped outside of my house I realized that we would be waiting a while. A thick mist concealed the rising sun. Mushrooms start to peak out from under the detritus on the forest floor when the sun is comes out. The kids agreed that we should wait.

I felt pretty tired and decided to make coffee. Pedro (who is Sandie’s son - my neighbors) showed up to chat and to try coffee for the first time. He had school that afternoon (he is 14 and in 5^th grade). I was worried I’d give him a caffeine high so I explained that he could only taste the coffee or he would run around school unable to concentrate. I poured him black instant coffee. He scrunched his nose and said he didn’t like it. Then I added milk powder. He said he liked this better. Then I added sugar…he really liked this combo. I explained that coffee is an entire industry in the US and that people can get REALLY particular about the kind of coffee/combo that they want. Then I made him a cup of boiled water with the milk powder and sugar. He liked this best so we determined that I probably wouldn’t need to serve him coffee again in the future, just milk powder if I had it.

By 8:30 two girls arrived to go mushrooming with Pedro and I. We walked past many fields and crossed a river that had run dry. People here are struggling without access to fresh running water. They had dug a hole into the dry river bed and obtained water, but this was not clean enough to drink. We then veered off before reaching the forest. Instead of continuing into the forest we began searching for mushrooms in an overgrown area that used to contain manioc fields and houses until a new road was built in another section of the community and most people moved to be closer to the road. The soil still showed remnants of the large cultivated mounds for corn and manioc despite there being wild bush species growing in place of food crops. We came across an old house foundation of raised mud and two of the main roof posts. Older cashew and mango trees were further evidence of previous habitation of the area, as well as a few broken clay pots.

Pedro jumped when he saw the first mushroom peaking out from under the leaves near a small tree. This one was called modo munaco in the local dialect or “perna de galinha” in Portuguese (chicken’s leg). I went through the forest floor documenting each mushroom with photographs, writing down their names and learning trivia about their use from Pedro and the two girls. We also documented mushrooms that people don’t eat here. Pedro pointed out several mushrooms that can kill you if eaten - good to know - and explained that if tortoises eat a certain mushroom that people probably eat it (because we eat tortoises - more on that later). And that we don’t eat mushrooms that large snails eat because we don’t eat snails (well not here at least - the second community in the mountains where I will work likes to eat snails…).

Pedro then picked up two mushrooms that hadn’t yet fully expanded into an open form. They looked like little white hard boiled eggs. The greatest part of this was that when he broke open the top of this immature mushroom the center was a golden yellow - egg yolks! When the mushroom completely unfolds/develops it is yellowish orange on top and it is the same modo munaco/chicken’s leg mushroom that we first stumbled upon.

Above: the modo munaco mushroom before it fully expands looks like a hard boiled egg!

By the time we finished our gathering that morning, we had several pots and pans of 7 different types of edible mushrooms. We headed back through the bush to my house where we divided up our mushrooms. It’s common etiquette that if you are helping fill the pot that you get a share of the total pot, which is sorted back near the houses.

Another popular mushroom at this point in the season is called ndegahdegah. I love saying “Let’s eat ndegahdegah!” because it sounds like: “njegahjegah ndegahdegah!”. I laugh because it’s sounds funny, and they laugh because I sound funny when I say it (first, because I’m a white person speaking their language, and second, because I don’t quite pronounce it correctly). Men and women have been returning from the bush and the forest for the past few days with large bucket loads of these big white mushrooms. This is a welcome addition to meals in which people haven’t had meat for weeks. The common phrase here is “não tenho caril” or “I don’t have meat”/anything to go with the thick greenish blob of pounded and cooked manioc that forms the basis of the diet here. When the mushrooms arrive, they are boiled down with a little oil (a few lucky households have an onion to throw in the mix). This adds flavor to the meal and helps the manioc go down.

Above: a teenager carrying ndegahdegah mushrooms and a few dishes. She spends some of her time in the community and some of her time in the nearby town. Hair extensions aren't typical fashion within the community and she stands out at times as a 'city girl'...but she still can recognize the edible mushrooms from the fatal ones...

Termite hunting/gathering

2010-02-03T23:51:00.000-08:00

Above: the forest rat I thought we'd be hunting...I have yet to taste one but have said I'd try it...

I was ready for a before dawn departure into the forest with a group of local boys and their dogs. We planned on hunting fairly large rats with long noses that hide in nests that they make in the ground near and in river beds. I had my tall Wellington’s (rain boots) ready to protect a bit against snake bites and I was keen to try out my new machete on some brush, or to lend it to my neighbor’s son to kill a boa constrictor on the walk. Apparently boa constrictors are quite rare. They aren’t an animal that you can hack at with a machete or throw a knife at. You have to grab its head and saw it off with the machete or so I’ve been told, a task that I prefer to leave up to the boys.

But they never came to wake me up for the hunt. I sat around that morning writing notes and eventually at about 8:30 one of the boys in the neighborhood arrived saying we were going fishing instead. He and his friends sat in front of my house and carefully prepared long grass leaves into stacks. We would first need to gather bait. We ambled up the road and into an area of land that had turned into ‘bush’ or ‘mato’. We approached a termite mound with several tree trunks growing out if it (a common feature in the forest here). The boys had brought hoes with them and they quickly chose spots to dig into the termite mound.

Above: The termite mound - it's huge and this is a comparatively small one as far as I've seen in the forest.

Above: the boys use hoes to find termite tunnels in the mound.

Eventually they reached tunnels that appeared promising. The leader in the group of boys (lets call him Pedro) slowly fed one of the long blades of grass into the tunnel. If termites are present deep in the tunnel (at least 1 ft) then they will attack the intruder with their large black pincers. But this is where the boys have a neat trick. If the intruder is a blade of grass instead of say, your finger, the termites latch onto the blade of grass and within a few seconds you can quickly pull the blade of grass out of the tunnel with the termites still attached. After waiting 2 to 3 seconds Pedro pulled the blade of grass out with about 10 termites attached (this was a moderate catch). He then flicked the termites into the black container that the boys had brought to carry their bait. This is really challenging as you run the risk of getting bitten by the termites (a bite can draw blood). Eventually the termites get the idea and move to other areas of the mound, so every so often the boys have to pick up and dig into new areas of the mound.

Above: Pedro uses a long blade of tough grass into a branch of a termite tunnel to see if we've found a good section of the mound for termites.

Above: termite attacking the intruding blade of grass, now stuck to the grass and removed from the tunnel. Now it's lunch for fish or the villagers.

After gathering a sufficient amount we headed back home to pick up the fishing poles and drop off the hoes. We walked 4km to the river, 1k of which was through the bush and began fishing. More on fishing in a bit…

That evening my neighbor (lets call her Sandie) came to my house to borrow cooking oil. Her children were part of a group of girls that had also been termite hunting that morning. A few minutes later she had a bowl of cooked termites ready for me to try. I tried to ‘close my eyes and think of England’ on this one and had trouble eating more than one. I thanked her for cooking them and gave the rest to the kids who were very excited to eat a few. They are crunchy and parts of the exoskeleton stuck in my teeth, I think a toasted pincer hung on to the inside of my cheek for a while. I think I prefer termites as fish bait rather than food. Earlier in the day a few of the girls showed me that if they remove the heads with pincers carefully they can also eat them raw/live. I distracted them by taking picture of them as they ate termites off of the top of a cooking pot before they crawled away, so as not to have to eat them myself. I was startled when I returned from fishing and the girls had left the top of that cooking pot full of termites sitting in my dish basin. As I searched for a cup to serve a neighbor with water, I suddenly came across a whole lot of live termites in the dish basin in my house - apparently this is standard practice…

Above: a close up shot of a bowl of live termites. They sparkle in the light ;)

Back in Quelimane

2010-01-29T23:47:00.001-08:00

Hi - I'm back in Quelimane and will catch up on the blog ASAP.

Why I love my Swiss Army Knife

2010-01-19T05:02:00.000-08:00

So I was planning on uploading a ton of great stories this time around before my last 10 day stint in the first community in my study (at least until April). But I promised a trusted friend and colleague that I would drive the extra 30km to a town where he is posted for his job. I know the office well and the staff that work there are all really great. I didn't get to my blog (I just learned about the disaster in Haiti...apologies for the following blog entry, which doesn't compare to something like a natural disaster). I worked on a report and then bought a chicken and some food for dinner with my friend at his office (there are usually about 4-5 people there at any given time on various projects). When I got there, everything seemed to be fine - I chatted about my experiences in the communities...I wanted updates on friends, work and family. Then we took a drive to visit some colleagues working on rice farming about 3km away. But I didn't realize that in his mind, this was a romantic drive just before sunset - when he asked if I was interested I said that I was sorry but I wasn't, that I thought he knew I thought he was a great friend and almost big-brother figure in my mind here in Mozambique. I thought that was sufficient. It should be. It's fine to express interest, otherwise how the heck would people ever get together!?

After dinner with him and another colleague, it was time for dessert. I was handed 2 mangoes, but only had a butter knife to peel them with and a bad allergic reaction when I peel them with my mouth. I ran into the guest room for my Swiss Army knife, and peeled the mangoes thinking nothing of it at the time.

After dinner, the other guys headed out to friend's houses or started to prep for sleep in the other rooms. My friend and I continued to talk shop outside on the porch where it was much cooler. But he cornered me at the end of the porch and wouldn't stop grabbing me and trying to push things further. I was very clear that nothing would happen and that he should just give it a rest. It was dark out, driving off in the night isn't safe, especially on a motorcycle. Heading to my bedroom also seemed like a bad idea. As the guard started locking up the grounds for the night, the light banter and talk about work suddenly shifted into a series of threats in Portuguese:

"No one here is going to call for help.
No one will call for help, you understand?
You realize I'm twice your size...what are you going to do?"

Then he shifted to jokes and other banter as the guard returned from the gate. He said the phrases above once more as the guard left the area where he could hear.

I thought: [Where's my knife? Where's my satellite phone? Where are my motorcycle keys?...knife in bedroom...F#$%!, phone in bedroom...F#$%!, motorcycle ke- oh man, he took the motorcycle keys and has them with him so I can't leave...].

So after additional unwanted advances I punched him and headed for my bedroom where I immediately picked up my unopened Swiss Army knife and had my small bag with the phone at arm's length. He followed me into the room and then he first tried to seem friendly, then tried to appear like he was backing off, and then he tried one more time to use his body to intimidate me. I slowly opened my knife so that he could see. He said, "wow, you have courage. I guess I'll go 'sleep'."

As soon as he left I moved the furniture up against the door, turned my sturdiest carabiner into a pseudo 'brass knuckles', called my 2 point people in the US from the window of the room (magic in satellite phone terms) to let them know I wasn't sure about whether he was going to try to come in the room later, or how I would get back to Maganja in the morning and to stay on alert until I could get to a safe place.

I packed my light bag with essentials and got my boots on. I waited on the bed in front my door and the furniture that I piled in front of it, knife in one hand and carabeaner in the other. I figured out how to peel back the rusting mosquito screening and climb out the window if I needed to (I wanted to wait until the morning, however, to see if I could just pretend to be friendly and ride back to Maganja with no incidents until I got my keys back and I got somewhere more public). I waited wide awake until 4:30 am when the sun started to rise and I could walk around getting ready for the trip at a seemingly normal hour (for here).

We exchanged some light banter as he prepped to leave, and then as I walked to the motorcycle, with him and the guard and grounds keeper there...he pretended that I had the key. "Ok let's go, where's the key?" he said. I said, "You have the key." He then said "oh, yeah I must have brought it in and put it in the fridge last night" (I guess that's where he keeps his motorcycle key??) and he walked inside and pretended to get the key out of the fridge, when it was clearly in his pocket.

On the ride back to Maganja with me on the back with my backpack, he started to ask why I was angry with him...and started groping my leg and acting like nothing was wrong. We finally arrived in Maganja, where he picked up his motorcycle and left me to take mine to be stored at my other affiliation's office for the day. I walked to another friend's house (a Peace Corps volunteer) and asked for a place to sleep. I'm only now getting back to the office and I missed a day of blogging and normal work. I was supposed to head back to the community this afternoon, but a 2 hour motorcycle ride on challenging roads after an all-nighter seems like a bad idea. I'm going to stay here until tomorrow afternoon and then head back to the community until January 29th, when I will move back to Quelimane and take about a week to prep for moving into the second community.

So I'm fine. I'm tired. I was robbed of a day of work. I experienced a really bad loss of control of a situation, and I'm thanking my lucky stars for my knife, my phone, and that that POS finally backed off and gave up. And I'm really upset that a person that I thought I could trust violated that trust...I need to rely on so many people here to make this research happen, so it's a hard moment for me to rethink who to trust and who not to ...it's just hard to know sometimes.

So no time for pictures or my other great stories (I have so many things to post!) - I may try tomorrow morning.

Back to the community!

2010-01-08T00:02:00.000-08:00

Ok, my visit to the town was too short. Now I'm loaded up with about 75lbs. of food supplies (things are tough right now in the community) and other gear for the 2 hour ride back to the forest. It rained heavily here for the past 2 days, so the roads are going to be full of surprises.
I bought a machete this morning - it will be riding on the back of my motorcycle with me today. Fun photos to follow around Jan. 18th when I am back in town. Stay well!

Cashew & cachasso

2010-01-07T05:47:00.001-08:00

Above: Two great examples of cashew fruit and attached nuts. The outer shell of the nut is fairly toxic. People generally roast the unshelled cashew, and then break open the shell to extract the meat. Cashew provides a bit of cash to families who have one or two trees near their house. There are other areas of the district that are larger-scale production operations (some older trees) and some newer cashew development projects. The fruit is edible but has a fairly astringent taste in my opinion and a very strong smell.

Above: I can't get this photo to load in the proper position. But the red bucket has dried/fermented cashew fruit, and the silver pot has fairly fresh cashew fruit. The empty silver pot sits atop chopped sugar cane, and the blue bucket has mashed sugar cane that is mashed with a giant mortar and pestle "pilar". These ingredients are used for making a type of "whiskey" or what they call "cachasso", a stiff drink that packs a punch!

Above: I look on as the women of this household supplement their income by making cachasso.

It's rainy season!

2010-01-07T00:40:00.000-08:00

Planting peanuts with "grandma"

2010-01-06T03:18:00.000-08:00

Early on Tuesday morning (December 22nd) my neighbor told me that I should walk the 7km to one of the many Catholic churches in the locality to watch the baptisms that were going to be done by the priest that day. As I put away my notes and my thermos of tea, an important matriarchal figure in the community stopped by my house. She had a basin of seeds on her head, a small container of water and a hoe over her shoulder. She doesn't speak much Portuguese at all. She picked up my hoe and handed it to me saying "peanuts - let's go". So I decided not to go to the Baptisms and to follow this woman who I am going to call "Grandma". She has a great sense of humor and is patiently waiting for me to learn more Lomwe so that we can chat. She is probably 5'3" tall and insisted on carrying my hoe as well as hers. She has had 12 children, 6 of whom have died and I think she's in her fifties. She sometimes fills the role of midwife in the community and she often ends up taking over meetings that begin with men leading the conversation. After a 1km walk with her marching ahead of me, we entered a section of forest that had been cleared and prepped for planting. It had rained the day before, the second time this season, which is the signal to get to the field and plant peanuts.

"Grandma" set her basin of seeds down and started digging holes in the the soft soil. She indicated that I should follow her and put one peanut in each hole. I did as I was told and followed her every step of the way. I kept up, occasionally needing to run back to the bundle with the peanuts to restock. When I attempted to cover the holes she very sternly told me to stop because she personally had to inspect each hole in the ground to see that I had not messed anything up. A hole missing a seed or a hole with 2 seeds was unacceptable and she wasn't about to have some strange woman create problems in her peanut crop for the season. She re-traced her steps, covering each hole with the loosened soil with her bare feet. The ants were angry that we were destroying their nests and ran furiously over our feet, occasionally stopping to give us a good pinch. I danced across the field in my sandals yelping at times (fierce little suckers), while "grandma" grinned and didn't flinch a bit. I asked if I could dig the holes for a while and she said yes, since sweat was dripping down her face after only 15 minutes of work. I began to dig in a similar fashion and seemed to be covering some good ground. After about 20 minutes she told me to stop because if I spent too much time hoeing the field then my back would ache. She told me to hurry up and take a few photos before going back to my house. She was very concerned that I would hurt myself in her field and that she would be held accountable. Several other women have expressed this same concern when I have asked to work with them in their fields in the morning. Only recently have more women opened up to the idea and have let me come and watch or come and work side by side with them. A few have been impressed that I knew how to weed with a hoe and how to plant anything (here's to a childhood in rural upstate New York!), others laugh at how what I do is different, and others are still holding out until they hear from other women that I haven't destroyed their crops.

As a token of thanks for my work in her field "grandma" walked to one side of the field and gave me some fresh sugar cane. I walked back along the road back to my house and split the sugar cane with a few children who were busy playing cards. "Grandma" stayed in her field for the next 3 hours. Maybe next time she'll let me stay longer...

Fixing radios and snorting cigarettes

2010-01-06T02:03:00.000-08:00

One day I stopped by the traditional leader's house. He had a guest who was fixing two radios in exchange for some cash, a bite to eat and a few cigarettes. As I hung out in this group of men on a lazy and hot afternoon, I couldn't control my laughter when the guy fixing the radio stopped his work to smoke a cigarette. He brought the cigarette to his nose, inhaled through his nose and then exhaled the smoke through his mouth. I don't know why, but it had me in stitches. I had to explain to them that I was learning something new everyday in the community. The guys erupted in laughter and explained that not everybody smokes like this guy and then we continued to watch the radio-fixing process unfold.

Laundry

2010-01-05T23:27:00.000-08:00

While sitting outside my house I can hear what seem to be gunshots from the river. But the loud bangs echoing from the river are not gunshots. It's laundry time. The river is fairly stagnant at the beginning of this rainy season in which so little rain has fallen to date. The boys and men bathe and wash their clothes on one side of the bridge in a part of the river which is less protected from a direct line of sight from the road than the other side where the women bathe, wash dishes and their clothes. As Natalie took me around the bend to the women's section of the river, she took a footpath to the other side of the river (or the deposition side) of the bend where there is a lot of sand. She unloaded the tall stack of pots and pans from the top of her head and began scrubbing the soot off of the pans with the sand. She left me with another girl on the rocky (erosion) side of the river which provides a hard and fairly dirt-free surface to wash clothes. This other girl showed me how to soak my clothes in the water, then scrub the soap on the clothes using the rocky bank and then she whipped the clothes against the rocks with a loud bang. Laundry is a brutal process of whacking our clothes against the rocks to get the soap through the whole item and to scrub the dirt out. Then we rinsed, wrung the clothes and stacked them on a stone to be hung next to our neighbor's house up the hill. Soap is a rare luxury here, so the kids all jumped at the opportunity to help me figure out how to wash clothes using their methods in the hope that they could use the soap to wash a shirt and then use a little to take their bath or put on their own clothes. Soap can be bought in bulk in foot-long 1.5 inch wide tan-colored or white bars (white bars use coconut oil and are better quality) for 15 MZN (white) or 10 MZN (tan) a piece ($0.50 or $0.33 respectively). People who ride their bikes the long 50km to town often buy a few sticks and then bring them back to the community to be cut into small portions and sold at 1.5 MZN a piece.

Most women and kids might have a set of special occasion clothes that they keep safe in their house for Christmas or photos or weddings. And then there is the 1 or 2 sets of clothes that they work in everyday. At some point each person will head to the river, bathe and wash this only set of clothing and lay the clothing articles out to dry as they swim. These are tough times, but they are better than during the war, when no one could buy clothes, so they took the bark off of trees and pounded the bark into a workable material to make into clothes.

There are many snails that wander in and out of the river, and occasionally the local cattle are driven to the river for a drink. Little toddlers play in teh sand banks, do the family dishes and bathe with little to no adult supervision and the water is not running. I swam in the water once, and I'm waiting for the day that I come down with Schistosomiasis (see this CDC link). I have decided not to swim in it again and not to bathe in the river (my other option is not that great either) ...but I basically have to do my laundry in the river. Every time droplets of water fly into my eye from a kid near me smacking her shirt against the rocks and as I wash my own clothes, I keep imagining the little worms that my body is becoming host to.

At night, people try to avoid the river, since this is when they tell me the snakes (green mambas for example) come out to feed. The other day an elderly woman was accused of using/sending a snake to kill 2 children in the river at dusk as they finished bathing. The witchcraft claims are running wild here, and I'll have more on that later. I'm not sure exactly what happened because I was visiting my neighbors when this occurred, but this woman is apparently very mean and has tried to kill other people as well. During this particular evening the two children encountered a mamba - luckily they managed to get away from the snake. I'm not sure if she was nearby when this happened, but everyone is convinced that that snake was from her.

I've moved!

2010-01-05T21:47:00.000-08:00

Initially I lived in my tent in a "verandinha", diminutive for veranda, a covered area with one complete mud wall and three walls that are less than waist high (see previous post). But this verandinha was on the chief of the locality's land and the verandinha itself is typically used for community leader meetings. I needed to disassociate from the seat of power in the community to get some more honest answers from people who may not want to talk about certian topics if they think I'm going to tell the chief. So I sat down with the chief a few weeks ago and explained why I needed to move. Initially they had refused to let me live anywhere else, partly to keep tabs on me but also for security. The leaders were worried about the dangers of living farther into the community, since there are a few people from outside of the community who pass through from time to time that have shady reputations. There are also a few local drunks who cause trouble sometimes. It took some convincing, but a week later I moved into this little house. This type of house is not a normal family-sized home. It is a home constructed by a teenage guy for him to have his own space (near his parent's house) to hang out with friends before he marries and moves to his wife's parent's land. This house was built in 2005 and in 2006/07 the guy who built it moved to the neighboring community to build a new home for his new family. He has painted a few phrases in Portuguese and English on the walls to distinguish the bedroom from the sitting room ("sithin rooom" and "sweet dreams"). I have three roomies - mandated by the chief and my neighbors, since they don't want me to live alone. One is the girl who is helping me out - she is new too. Susan went back to Maganja (the district capital - a small town) to visit her mother for the holidays. This other girl (lets call her Erica) is pretty shy and not very confident with her Portuguese, so it's a challenge at times as she gradually speaks more Portuguese and I gradually speak more Chuabo or Nyaringa. Her friends, are my neighbor's kids. One girl (lets call her Natalie) has a tough time at home, as both her parents are alcoholics (have you ever tried to record a genealogy, when the majority of the family sitting around at 9am on a Monday morning telling you about their family are wasted? - yikes!), so she has jumped at the opportunity to hang out with her friends in my house and sleep in the "sithin room" with Erica and my other neighbor (lets call her Tina) every night. They are 16, 15 and 14 respectively. My other roomates include prehistoric insects that look like fat scorpions with no tail, but with big pincers in front and long antennae for moving around in dark spaces, and rats! This hasn't been so bad, since the girls kill the insects - I threw a knife at the rat but missed so he's going to stay a while. The house is really cool during the day if I take a nap on a straw mat near the door with an occasional breeze coming through (it's hard to find cool spots when the temperature keeps hitting between 90 and 105 most days). At night it's definitely cooler outside, but my tent (without rain guard) inside keeps the mosquitos at bay, so I sweat for a couple of hours trying to fall asleep. The girls constantly giggle in the next room making up rhymes and songs and gossiping about boys they like in the nearby community.

Eating boa constrictor

2010-01-05T03:08:00.000-08:00

The chief of the locality hurried to my tent in the ("verandinha") early on Saturday morning (Dec. 19th). He asked me to hop on the back of his bicycle. As we careened down the hill toward the bridge, I had to jump off the bike. The average height of guys here is about 5'4" or 5'6" and the chief was having trouble steering and keeping control of the Chinese "Hero" bike, which was too big for him and not sturdy enough to carry me. I chased him up the hill. I took my flipflops off and ran barefoot after the bicycle until we turned into a footpath that opened into a front yard area of a house. Other community leaders were there ahead of us. After our greetings a man went inside the house and brought out a large silver bowl. The bowl was full of chunks of a boa constrictor that this man had killed with a machete on his walk through the forest early that morning. They propped the head onto the chunks of the body for this photo. Each chunk of meat sold for 10 MZN or about $0.33 and the chiefs and community leaders were excited to buy this fairly rare delicacy. They were expecially keen to split up the innards for stewing (ask me for that photo sometime...). Later in the day we sat around and ate the cooked chunks of meat with a light sauce and mealie meal (corn). Chewy. A young 14 year old told me later that day that he has killed 2 boa constrictors with his machete when he was walking through the forest in the last 2 months.

On the topic of machetes: I was in the hospital visiting the nurse before heading to church (the Wednesday before Christmas) and it started to rain. I thought it would be a heavy rain, but a quick one. Glad to wash the dirt off my face I danced in the rain a bit and then asked the nurse to put my bag inside out of the rain. As we were heading back outside I noticed that the visibility had drastically reduced. A few moments later I realized the lightning and thunder were almost simultaneous. I said we had better get inside because in 40 seconds we'd be in the center of the storm. The two girls who were with me chose to stay outside while the nurse (a guy in his late twenties) came inside to close the windows. Then the 75mi/hr gusts of wind hit us hard. I crouched inside in what I thought were the strongest walls of the clinic away from the windows. The girls couldn't get inside because they couldn't open the doors against the wind. After about 10 terrifying minutes , the wind died down and I eventually ventured outside as the rain continued. A tree had been ripped out of the ground and the tops have been ripped off of papaya trees, with many unripe papayas on the ground (gone to the pigs unfortunately). The local school lost its metal roof, and a few giant mango and cashew trees had been snapped in half. I walked to the chief's hut, where some of my equipment is stored and grabbed my rainjacket so that I could continue on to church. I stopped at the traditional leader's house where his oldest daughter was sitting with her baby and three other todlers on the front porch area. After my greetings I tried to keep walking down the road but I had to turn around and intervene. A 5-year-old was sitting on the porch with a machete trying to crack open a size D triple 7 brand battery. I explained to this woman that batteries have chemicals in them that can make children sick. She picked up the battery and threw it into the road (others will pick them up and play with them) and continued to let the 5-year-old play with the machete.

Ing's at the community

2009-12-26T13:33:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

Just to keep everyone up to date - Ing got safely to the community last Friday. She gave us a call on Christmas day on her Satellite phone and she seems to be doing fine. Next time she posts she'll have some great stories to tell you. One features a teletubby doll and the other a 5 year old with a machete. :)

- Little sis.

off to the community again!

2009-12-17T20:37:00.000-08:00

Barring any further problems with the motorcycle...I am leaving for the community today. This trip has me on edge a bit (I'll be carrying a 16 yr. old on the back of the motorcycle with about 40lbs of equipment. We'll see how that goes on the sand...

I won't be on internet until January 5th. But I hope to get a few posts up at around that time. Happy new year a bit early!

my crib...

2009-12-17T06:49:00.001-08:00

fish fun

2009-12-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

I'm back from Mocuba now. I had a great opportunity to meet other people involved in HIV education and supporting people living in rural areas of Zambézia Province. The after lunch activity consisted of a guys against girls soccer game, with a few guys donning the honorary role of "female for the match" since they outnmbered the women present at he conference/retreat.

Now I'm back in Maganja trying to regroup and figure out if my motorcycle is going to be fixed in time for my return to the community tomorrow morning.

The picture above was from a walk that the girl helping me get oriented in the community (lets call her Susan) took me and her friend on to visit one of the community leader's newborn granddaughter. We took a few side tours through the forest to check out which plants are useful around the house, which plants are edible and how to name each of them (in Chuabo, Nharinga and Lomwe and maybe Portuguese of there is a Portuguese term). It turns out that all four languages are commonly used in this community. We stayed to chat at the community leader's house for several hours (this leader is the "regulo" for the entire locality - there are multiple leadership roles present in communities after the wars and the regulo was a position created by the Portuguese that at times conflicted with the actual traditional leadership structures within communities). During our meeting we received the usual gift to visitors of unshelled peanuts in a bowl (many!). I gave the regulo a few lemons that I had brought from Quelimane, and we settled into discussions about traditions in the US, where I'm from, whether or not I would consider marrying his 23 yr. old son...the usual. I also took a few family photos with the new baby. Upon leaving the regulo asked me to find him some batteries (his radio is out), and gave us a bowl with two fish. On our walk home, Susan's friend who is about 11 years old wanted us to take several silly photos with the fish and show them to my friends in the US, so enjoy this one!

Francine

2009-12-15T04:51:00.000-08:00

Not the most flattering photo...
I'm back in Maganja for a couple of days - actually going to Mocuba to meet with the national director and regional coordinator for an organization that I just recently partnered with. The community is great. I arrived on the motorcycle with my supplies carried by the organization's car (following me to make sure I didnt crash on my first drive on sand - it's difficult!).

On the second day of my stay in the community a baby girl was born - the husband was so concerned with making sure I felt welcome as we sat under the mango tree in front of his house I was truly surprised when the village midwife ran out of the neighboring house with a bundle and a baby - showing all of us the newest member of the community before sitting on the porch to monitor it's health. The mother and father asked me to give the baby a name - and I said I'd think of one. Shortly after the mother was having problems with hemorhaging so we gathered several bucycles to get her to the clinic 4km away. The following morning I stopped by to check on the mother and her baby and they continued to insist that I name the baby. I asked if they had any ideas for names and maybe I could help them pick one...they wanted one that I thought of, so I told them I knew a woman who was really pretty, was going to be a doctor someday (phd or MD tbd) and who is nice to the point that most people feel really comfortable talking to her...the father and mother were very keen for their baby to have the name of this woman, so I saw the registered nurse write Francine on the official birth certificate and that was that!

I will write more if I get the chance - it's touch and go before this meeting and my motorcycle broke this morning (no acceleration) - so I had to be picked up by a truck (not cheap). we'll see if the ride back to the community brings better luck. I also spent all morning in a machamba (field) preparing the soil with my new hoe for planting peanuts in a few days...

onwards

2009-12-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

It looks like that 5th day won't make it onto the blog for some time. I leave in less than 6 hours and have to sleep for some of this time. There have just been too many interviews and applications to take care of this week. I don't think I've gotten more than 6 hours of sleep for any of the past 5 nights. I have just established a second research affiliation here in Zambezia and they have internet...With any luck, I will be able to post updates every 2 weeks or so when I drive my dirt bike to the local town (50km from the community).

I will try to send texts and brief information through Eric and Ralph in-between these trips to town (somehow...given that there is no cell reception for miles). We'll see.
In the latest news, I bought wellies (rubber rain boots)today to keep my feet happy in the rain and tomorrow I will finally be buying that hoe to work in the machambas (fields).

Day 4, Gurúè

2009-12-08T13:42:00.000-08:00

Above: The office has a great view of the nearby mountains and the tea plantations. I was staring at these mountains when I spotted a new friend hanging in the tree.

We spent the majority of last Thursday getting from Mocuba to Gurúè on pretty terrible roads. We said our goodbyes to Sophia and picked up another coordinator who typically works in Gurúè. Up until the town of Errego/Ile, the road was paved in some areas, only to have huge potholes suddenly appear that wreaked havoc on our car and our very old tires (we already had to repair one in Maganja da Costa). Large trucks rip through this area, contributing to these massive potholes. It is actually better for the car to drive off of the road altogether (along either side). Once past Errego the road is very nicely paved. The crops started to shift from a predominance of manioc to more maize, fewer and fewer cashew trees and much less closed canopy forest.

Upon arriving in Gurúè I noticed the elevation change and cooler temperature right away. The humidity was still fairly intense. We drove over to the local government office and I met the second in command, a woman with a busy schedule that day. We were lucky to catch her on her lunch break. No shenanigans this time. She wanted some copies of my paperwork and then we were off to prepare for our community visit the following morning.

I am running out of time to describe this past trip as a new trip is fast approaching. This Thursday I should be heading back to Maganja to finalize my local research approval and an affiliation with another organization. Then on Friday morning I wil begin my first long stay in the first community. It will also be my first try at getting there by motorcycle (with Paulo driving in the truck behind me with my equipment). Fingers crossed.
I will try to post one more entry about the third community visit (Day 5) and a great evening drive into the tea plantation, if I manage to get packed in time...

Above: I didn't think they could get much bigger and it turns out I was very very wrong. At about 4.5 to 5 inches including leg length I am beginning to wonder if this spider eats birds. This spider hung out in a group of three in a giant web connected to a mango tree. If anyone can identify my three spider friends in this blog I am very keen to know their scientific names. I'm working on getting the local names as well.

...and on to Gurúè we went

2009-12-05T13:38:00.001-08:00

.
The road towards Gurúè (the town and the district) and Mount Namuli, the second tallest mountain in Mozambique.

Day 3, Mocuba district…and the timber mafia

2009-12-05T12:51:00.001-08:00

[Eve and Adam]

Paulo (our driver) and I set out early in the morning for the town of Mocuba to meet another coordinator for the organization. We left António to manage things in Maganja da Costa.

In Mocuba, the district coordinator (let’s call her Sophia) took me to the district administration office where I met one of the higher-ups in local government. I showed him a timeline of the research and spoke about what I hoped to do over the next few months. At first he asked great questions, better than most other government officials up to this point. “What good will this do for people here?” “How are we going to find out about the results of the study?” “You aren’t just focusing on women only are you?” These are all great critical questions, so I answered each of them with excitement. But then the conversation shifted. He began talking about his own career and education goals now that he is thinking about getting a Masters…which was fine…and then he shifted to asking me if I was married, how old I was and how many kids I wanted aqnd was very keen to make sure he had my exact email and phone number. The nerve! He must have been in his early fifties…but every guy of that age who has hit on me in Mozambique has said they were 46. For some reason 46 is apparently what these guys think will be acceptable for someone of my age to date…I kept my composure and waited for my official stamp of approval to work in the district and was happy to move on with the rest of the day.

I don’t have any photos for this day, because of the extreme intensity of the situation that unfolded in the community that we visited. Only the following morning, when we drank juice at an outdoor restaurant area waiting for the coordinator that would take us to Gurúè district did I have time to snap the photo above.

Back to the community visit. We picked up a woman who was a leader on the community council from a house in Mocuba. She would gather the community leaders so that we could have a chat about the possibility of my staying in the community.

The meeting quickly turned very uncomfortable and stressful. In a basic exercise to see if community members had heard anything about the different laws, their statement that they knew nothing of the land law (when they have already completed the delimitation process and have their certificate), made Sophia, a short but very tough lady, ask more questions to find out what was going on. She discovered that a man from Maputo who makes money by connecting communities to timber buyers and organizes logging in the community was linked up to Chinese buyers in a scheme that is most likely illegal. The community was being paid next to nothing for timber that has great value (they have a legal right to 22% of the proceeds if they form an association to manage the receipt and use of the money). Upon discovering that this man (who is likely linked up to the timber mafia operating throughout the country), Sophia proceeded to lecture him in front of community leaders and members (her job is to inform communities about the law and if certain practices are breaking the law). By association with Sophia who was scolding this probable timber mafia member, it could be a fairly dangerous endeavor to staying in the community. While the case is very interesting and relevant to the problem of current deforestation in Mozambique, I cannot stay in the community to conduct any sort of ethnography as an outsider with no history there. Click here for a report published in 2006 concerning illegal logging in Mozambique (the title is rather unfortunate/racist). An update was recently published but I can’t find an on-line link at the moment. The update was titled “Tristezas Tropicais: “Não há mais Madeira!” [Tropical Sadnesses: There isn’t any more wood!”].