Week 2 & Onwards In Moz

Ok, Almighty and all righty then…week 2 and onward has been quite challenging and interesting at the same time. 

Let me begin by stating that Maputo’s increase in cars and traffic is because you can order cars online here from Japan and it gets delivered to your door.  There are old and news cars but the older models can be very cheap from about $500.00 to $1, 500.00.  What is also pretty incredible here is that you can get a cell phone that has 2 sim cardholders just in case you have a sim card from another phone company.  Can you imagine buying a phone in Toronto and putting either a Rogers sim card or a Bell sim card or any sim card you have?!  However, I must say I do miss my ipod no one here walks around with their ipods, you have to actually pay attention to your surroundings and people here do give eachother eye contact.  Everyday you say and are told Bom Dia for good day, Boa Tarde for good afternoon and Boa Noite for good evening.  I realized the other day that I must have said greetings to mostly all complete strangers 50 times in that one day.  This instantly puts you in a great mood and you realize that this is what I do not miss in Toronto the lack of communication around the whole city.  If you do not ask someone here about his or her family before you get down to business you are considered rude.  If you do not have time to stop and chat with someone you are not a nice person.  People will actually yell and belittle you for this.  Of course I love this part about the culture because I truly do love people and this makes me feel so close to everyone and their families here.  I look forward to hearing news about my colleague’s son, daughter or girlfriend. 

I had a flood in my lovely temporary apartment and thank goodness I had a volunteer from the UK staying with me, Andrea - who was only here for 1 week and moving up north for the next 3 months.  Our bide busted and water did not stop flowing out from the pipes.  Everyone told me to bring a good torch, just in case the electricity went out but what I should have brought was a good wrench! Serio!

Anyways, the great thing was that my new roomy and I stayed in a really nice and quaint hotel with an Arabian night theme that had a piscina and air condition. Whoohoooo!  The best 2 days of my life I tell ya!! LOL

So after my 2 nights of bliss and sun bathing every chance I got, Andrea left and I moved into “The Palace” with 3 other volunteers.  The Palace is what every other volunteer call this home because it basically looks like a typical new condominium with new fixtures, nice showers and NO holes in the walls or bad ass bides or crawly friends.  The only drawback to this wonderful new dwelling of mine is that the owner wants her place back and VSO has to find us a new home in 6 weeks.  I will be moving again and hopefully the next stop will be my permanent residence for the long run.  I have gotten use to living out of my suitcase actually and living very basically seems second nature now.  All that recent chaos might have just been one of those quick lessons in life, that no matter what trust and the universe will always take care of you.

I am still taking Portuguese lessons that are going well and at the same time I am still trying to find my ground.  My Portuguese teacher has already asked if we can fall in love & if I can take him back to Canada with me and I can not repeat on this family oriented read article how I responded in sign language and taught him the word in Italian for don’t ever ask me that again.  I told him what it meant in Portuguese and he then asked me to write it down for him.  I did with a smile on my face hahahahahaha!  The British would say Bug Off!

  I don’t know exactly what my role is at my new placement, however they tend to throw a lot of proposals in front of you and ask if you can help them apply for funding for many different projects.  A lot or most of the VSO volunteers end up in fundraising roles for the organization they are placed at.  One of the projects that I agreed to help with is with some of the university students at AEFUM who want help funding a project to attend 4 universities in 4 different municipalities and help raise awareness about the HIV/AIDS epidemic by training, workshops, presentations and handed out condoms.  They want to recruit 20 students from each university, 80 students in total.  I agreed to help them do this but I needed to know some background and I discovered that there are mostly girls and some boys who are prostituting in the universities because they need the money for school, to feed their families etc.  The girls don’t have many choices when it comes to protected sex unless the male decides to wear the condom.  For instance, if a girl denies her husband sex because he will not put on a condom (because you never know or you know where your husband has been) he can literally and physically bring her back home to her family and even though a recent law was passed I think around 2005 or earlier that domestic violence is illegal here it still very much does exist.

Another shocking piece of the puzzle the youth told me was that there is a lot of students that experience sexual harassment with the professors in university.  If a professor asks for sex than the students must give him sex in order fro the student to pass.  So, I asked what about the student going to the “directorio” of the school to report the professor.  The youth looks at me and says very nonchalantly the student wouldn’t do that or they will fail.  Still adamantly I state “But the professor can’t do that it’s not right, why can’t the professor be stopped?”  The youth still looking at me with a puzzled look on his face, “But that is why we want to educate the professors too to use condoms, he replies.”  I replied, “Can we teach the girls to carry guns to school instead?”  Of course with a huge smile on my face hahahahahahaha!!!  The youth replies and shakes his head “No.”  Unfortunately, the realities here are quite gloomy and trust me I will not write that we will promote this behavior by handing out condoms in the proposed proposal.   I was talking to another volunteer about this, she works helping to promote girls in the education field and she says that 10 to 12 year old girls are asked sexually active questions and some respond, “Yes the man I sleep with uses a condom.”   I can’t stop thinking about this situation and how unprotected the children are here and how unfair the little girls are treated here.  I just want to yell at all the women here and say “Stand Up!”

The youth at the centre invited me to a debate at the Ministry of Medicine next week to discuss the injustices in the job market for women.  Bring it on!

A typical day I would like to share that I had in Maputo was when the other day I moved from the hotel to my new place.  That afternoon I was to meet a beautiful Yoga teacher living temporarily in Maputo who was from Kenya, her name is Gatechke.  It started it getting weird when I was in a meeting and NGO’s (non government organizations) were discussing the location of where the organizations logos out to be for the next 10 minutes and I was instantly annoyed and bored.  I wanted to scream “Are we seriously having this conversation, right now?!”  It seems that many people here care more about the titles of their positions or how than can get a better position or if the position will enable for them to travel, if the ministry will hire them or if they know the president, or whose cousin is in the ministry of so and so etc.  Hence the epiphany I had to why all the men work in this field.  There are so many associations here for everything and anything you can imagine.  So after the meeting, while debriefing the events I was anxious to help and I was looking for help to get me started to work because I am starting to get a little stir crazy without being creative and hand on.  I was told that if I thought I was going to be working hands on with children and families like I have for the last 20 years back home that I need to turn around and go back home.  Yes I do understand our roles change here and you have to be “adaptable and flexible” and yes I am very open to all possibilities but I was shocked and hurt.  It was like someone took my paintbrushes away and said you can’t paint but you can have an empty canvas.  Yes we recognize that you have a gift, but we do not want you to use it here.  So I went for lunch with the other volunteers and colleagues and I realized at lunch while everyone was having a conversation about being a messy person or an organized person that I no longer have an identity I can hold onto here, I have been living out of my luggage, moving from place to place, gave up my job, left my friends and family etc.  I can no longer possibly hang on to any identifications, titles, roles or descriptions I have been given myself all these years.  I thought this is friggin harder than I thought, you literally have to let go of all things you never even knew how attached you were to them in the first place.  Oh and it doesn’t even account for all the unhealthy relationships you realize you were in! LOL

I began my long walk to meet Gatechke, and I needed that walk to realize some anxiety that was still in my system.  I meet her in the park and in a very nice area and she asks me if I want to see where her yoga studio is located.  I walk with her and it so happens that the studio is in a crèche/child care.  I am introduced to the owner and we discuss the children with special needs that attend her day care.  I ask if I can come on Monday and discuss a possible volunteering there or maybe doing yoga with the kids there too.  Maria is happy to meet with me then.  Gatecke also offers me to do her yoga class on Monday night in her studio.  I asked Gatechke if I could hug her and she said yes.  I wanted to scream with happiness at the top of my lungs “Thank you UNIVERSE!”