Update 5

It’s a beautiful Saturday morning. I’ve just set dough to rise in the sun on the porch and am listening to kids play on the new swing I have hanging in the yard. It was put up last week by my neighbor, Simão, and John after John came up with the brilliant idea. Meg and John spent 10 days here with me. On Tuesday, May 6, we had a very tearful goodbye in the Beira airport. (The Beira airport is one of my favorite and least favorite places in Mozambique: it is spacious with lots of dark wood and a cafeteria where you can eat grilled cheese sandwiches or sit on the balcony overlooking the runway. You can watch people walk to and from their flights and watch the planes take off and land. It is a place to welcome friends and family when they visit. The only problem is that at the end of their visit you have to return to the airport with them-after you watch the plane disppear you have to walk away and it is a lonely walk, the memories of which make me panic stricken every time I think of or come near the airport.)

It was so wonderful having them here. We spent most of our time in my community, doing the things I normally do here. We spent lots of time playing with the kids in the yard, visited the work site where the classroom and chicken coop are slowly going up, visited the carpenter to check on progress, visited friends in the community, held Tuesday and Friday knitting classes, went to Gondola and Chimoio for supplies, made chima and matapa with Suzana, went to church, and went for lots of walks and runs. It was a little surreal to look out and see Meg in the the yard in the middle of a huge game of Ring around the Rosie, first slow and then fast, then quietly and then loudly. Or to be huddled sick on my bed with Meg on Primeiro de Maio (Labor Day) while John was boldly out wandering and celebrating in the village with community-member Chingolima (and imagining what they’d been talking about and doing for over two hours). We also got to spend a few days at the coast, on a tiny peninsula where a river meets the sea, full of white sand, palm trees, sea beans, and reed huts.

Along with lots of clothes and art and school supplies, Meg and John brought with them a suitcase full of yarn collected and given by friends from home. At our Tuesday knitting meeting we presented the yarn to the women—they were so excited to see all the different colors and textures. Amongst themselves they agreed to finish our supply of local yarn before delving into the new stuff—each woman has to turn in three sets of baby booties and hats in three different models before she can select some of the new yarn. Then, she can decide if she wants to continue to make baby booties and hats, or maybe try a sweater or adult hat. Since then, the women have been excitedly selecting the donated yarn to start new, and more ambitious projects. Every week they come to my house and show me what they’ve accomplished and I’m shocked at the progress they’ve made.

For a number of reasons I had been away from site a lot in the 4-5 weeks before Meg and John’s arrival. In April was the REDES conference (Raparigas em Desenvolvimento, Educação e Saúde or, in English, Girls in Development, Education and Health), a national Mozambican girls’ conference, which I helped to coordinate. It consisted of 54 girls from all over Mozambique, 17 Mozambican professors, and 14 Peace Corps volunteers who came together for a week and talked about issues concerning women’s empowerment, sexual and reproductive health, healthy relationships, communication and negotiation, and small community projects. The weeks leading up to the conference and during the conference I spent most of my time in Chimoio, where it was held, getting ready and preparing the conference center. Though stressful at times (I didn’t sleep much during the conference), I think it was overall very successful and I feel proud of what I was able to accomplish, in Portuguese, in Mozambique. And now that I have some logistical planning under my belt, I’m thinking my future career might include planning weddings. (In English. In the states.)

Planning the conference slowed project things down a bit in my community. I wasn’t sure it was possible for them to go any slower than they were already going, but, as it turns out, my time away from the community enabled things to move along at an even more leisurely pace. Hence, we are still in the process of constructing the classroom and renovating the chicken coop. But in the meantime we are knitting and next week we start the health component. Each week we will hold health classes during the knitting class—to teach some basics on nutrition, female sexual and reproductive health, and HIV. This will hopefully promote interesting and productive discussion amongst the women while they are working. I hope that discussion will lead to questions that can be asked without embarrassment and where women can receive good and accurate information about their health.

I’ve been talking with two Peace Corps volunteers who live nearby on possibly collaborating with them on the health component of the project. They came and visited our knitting group on Friday and as we sat amongst the women, knitting and chatting, ideas were flying about how to integrate health concepts into our sessions, strengthen the small business component, and perhaps most exciting, focus on the cross-cultural potential of the project. I love the idea of what happens when women get together and knit—I love that this happens all over the world and how powerful it can be as a social network. It serves as an important part of society and gives women space to exchange ideas and information and support each other. I think there’s a lot of potential in continuing to connect this world with that world (whatever “this” and “that” means to you, we’re all part of one world, right?) through a common activity.

That’s a little update on the project and what’s been going on in general here over the past few months. To end, I’d like to share a moment.

On one of the last nights I spent with Meg and John in my community we cooked a Mozambican dish with Suzana and Simão, matapa and chima, and all had dinner on my veranda. While preparing it, I mostly stayed in the kitchen, watching over the kale that was being cooked with ground up peanuts, coconut milk (all completely fresh ingredients), tomatoes and onions, and chatted with Mami, Suzana’s one and a half year old niece who’s been staying with her. Suzana would come in periodically to check on the food and tell me what next step to take in its preparation. Simão sat on the porch chatting with a Peace Corps volunteer friend who was visiting, Amelia and some other neighborhood locals played on the new swing, and Meg and John sat in the yard on little wooden benches around a cooking fire with Suzana. There were three large rocks placed there, on which sat the big metal cooking pot to make chima, heavy cornmeal that is the staple food here, eaten twice a day in most households. A scene similar to this has occurred with all my visitors and it is always a little bit magical. Suzana sits outside with them, without me, and, across language and cultural barriers, teaches them to make Mozambican food, something she is intimately familiar with in her everyday life. She is a natural teacher and in these moments I always hear laughter ringing out. From inside the kitchen I could tell when Meg or John were trying their hand at scooping the chima into “balls” and taking them from the cooking pot to the serving dish: first the quiet concentration and then the burst of laughter from all three as Meg and John realized how difficult and precise the process is. Suzana does it swiftly and confidently, making perfect rounded mounds of chima that miraculously stay together and don’t stick, while Meg and John did it slowly and clumsily, the technique being new and foreign, the result being oddly shaped heaps, not totally staying together and kind of sticking to each other. (But still VERY tasty. And definitely not any better than I could do.) It’s hard not to love the joy that Suzana gets from watching them try.

The meal was served on a straw mat in the dim warm light of my verandah. We all sat at the edges of the mat, legs tucked underneath us. John made a toast, thanking Suzana and Simão for the opportunity to get to know them. We ate with our hands and drank cokes and fantas as a special treat. By that time Mami was sound asleep on my bed just inside. As always, Suzana, who quietly had made the entire meal through close oversite of the food in the kitchen and the chima-making process outside, complimented all the cooks, giving the credit to us and calling special attention to Meg and John’s expert ability to make chima.