These are mostly pictures of Francelino's brothers, sisters, and cousins, but the kids here are just so cute and love having their pictures taken! I figured everyone would enjoy these...
Friday, May 25, 2012
Third World Challenges
Lately things have been going well with work here, however I can't help but be constantly reminded of how the simplest tasks can be so complicated here!
About a month ago Francelino was visiting and the TV hadn't been working well so we took it to Xai-Xai to get it fixed. So clearly there are no fancy Best Buy-like stores with professionals that do this sort of thing. There are places where some guys run their own little business out of a straw and wooden booth. They rehabilitate TVs with one soldering iron, some coolant fluids that they squirt out of an old soda bottle, and old parts that they take out of old broken TVs. You also have to negotiate your price with them. It helps that I don't have to do a lot of this alone because as a white person they always try to overcharge me. Once we decided on the price, they opened up the TV, messed around a little, and in 10 minutes had it fixing without a problem. Feeling that we were ripped off since they fixed it so fast, Francelino made them agree to give us a verbal guarantee, in case the TV stopped working again. They agreed to give us a 2 month guarantee and we were on our way. The next day he went back to school, and hours later the TV stopped working again.
Unfortunately this meant that I would have to take it back by myself to get it fixed. This is no tiny TV and it's rather heavy so it's not easy for me to carry it more than 10 feet.
Luckily, the first time Francelino asked his cousin to go with me. After arriving and letting the guys there tinker with the TV for a while, it was clear that this was going to be no easy task. I ended up leaving it there and planned to come back the next day. Over the course of 2 weeks I went back maybe 3 or 4 times. Two times they closed early, once I went and sat for hours, but it still wasn't finished. My patience was waning!
Finally it was ready to be picked up and I had to go by myself. I found a boy near the market with a wheelbarrow who agreed to cart the TV to the chapa stop for 10 mets. Luckily I got a front seat in the chapa and was able to rest the TV on my knees. Once I got to Chongoene, I called Francelino's mom and she sent one of the kids out with a wheelbarrow so I could wheel it back home.
Since then it has worked well! I find myself missing customer service, phone calls when things are ready to be picked up, and having a personal vehicle to transport things around in! It makes things so much easier!
I also went to visit a neaby volunteer's school on Wednesday. It's about 13 kilometers away, but the transportation is so reliable here that I left myself an hour to arrive. I gauged it about right because 50 minutes later I was arriving. She works at a higher education school where the students live in dormitories at the school. We have workshops coming up for our JUNTOS groups and I wanted to run a workshop there over three days. The school agreed and we worked out the financial agreement. The workshop will invite approximately 50 students and have 3 days of activities and educational sessions about HIV and AIDS, sexual reproduction, puberty, self-esteem, leadership, and domestic violence. The workshop that I will be running at that school should take place in 3 weeks and I am busy planning the food, materials, etc! It's a lot of work, but it should be really fun!
There will be 16 workshops run throughout the country in the next few months and all of the participants get t-shirts. I was in Maputo last week to pick up the t-shirts from the place where we ordered them. Along with the national financial coordinator, we sorted the t-shirts by size, re-packaged them and then dropped some by the airport to fly them thousands of kilometers to various places around the country. I took all of the southern shirts with me and will be distributing them to the different areas this weekend.
I always think of home and miss friends and family, but I am keeping busy here and things are going well. Until next time!
Sunday, April 22, 2012
World Malaria Day!
This week we had a week of school vacation, marking the end of the first trimester. Somehow I felt like I was more busy all this week and suddenly it's Sunday and I have to lesson plan and get ready to go back to class on Monday! I spent most of the week working with my JUNTOS group at school which is an extracurricular theater group. With my students' input, I had organized activities with them to commemorate World Malaria Day (April 25th). For Friday the 20th, we invited another theater group to our school. We had a theater technical trainer there who worked with the kids to better their theater skills and to give them ideas about communicating certain issues or topics to the community. Each group came prepared with a skit about malaria and in the afternoon each group rehearsed their skit and received critiques and commentary from the other. After a long day of activities, we ended and the participants stayed for a while and played soccer before heading home.
On Saturday, the groups arrived bright and early at the health center in Chongoene. We were told to get their early to present so that we could catch people waiting in line to be treated before the hospital opened. The theory was that no sick patient would sit and watch skits if it was their turn to see the doctor. We were a little bit concerned about patients not wanting to move to be able to watch the skits more closely with the fear that they would lose their spot in line. Two of my students decided to go explain to the people waiting that we would be presenting skits for them and the students handed out pieces of paper with numbers on them corresponding to each person's place in line so they wouldn't lose the order if they moved. Surprisingly, the people waiting at the hospital caught on very quickly to this idea and there were a continuous stream of people asking for numbers so that they wouldn't miss out! We didn't exactly start our skits on time ( I mean, this is Mozambique), but then again the health center didn't open on time either, which worked in our favor. Each group entered and presented their skit and then a member of a third group gave a short informational talk about how malaria is caused, how to prevent malaria, and what to do if you get sick. I didn't catch everything he said because it was all in the local dialect, but I understood enough to know that he got all of the main points right.
The skits presented focused on the use of mosquito nets when sleeping, clean living conditions in and around the house (i.e. no standing water), vulnerability of pregnant women and children under 5 to the disease, and the importance of seeking treatment at a hospital instead of by a traditional healer.
We had a pretty good turnout and even when the health center opened everyone stayed outside and watched until the presentation was completely over.
It was great for the kids to have an opportunity to present to members of the community and to work with youth from other communities on this project as well. They are all so motivated and enthusiastic and I hope that we can work with other groups to reach out to the community many more times this year.
Malaria is the 2nd leading cause of death from infectious diseases in Africa, after HIV/AIDS. This is a disease that affects so many people in Sub-Saharan Africa and so much can be accomplished by educating people about prevention methods and treatment! By giving communities the tools and resources to reduce malaria infection and deaths caused by malaria, we can save millions of lives.
On Saturday, the groups arrived bright and early at the health center in Chongoene. We were told to get their early to present so that we could catch people waiting in line to be treated before the hospital opened. The theory was that no sick patient would sit and watch skits if it was their turn to see the doctor. We were a little bit concerned about patients not wanting to move to be able to watch the skits more closely with the fear that they would lose their spot in line. Two of my students decided to go explain to the people waiting that we would be presenting skits for them and the students handed out pieces of paper with numbers on them corresponding to each person's place in line so they wouldn't lose the order if they moved. Surprisingly, the people waiting at the hospital caught on very quickly to this idea and there were a continuous stream of people asking for numbers so that they wouldn't miss out! We didn't exactly start our skits on time ( I mean, this is Mozambique), but then again the health center didn't open on time either, which worked in our favor. Each group entered and presented their skit and then a member of a third group gave a short informational talk about how malaria is caused, how to prevent malaria, and what to do if you get sick. I didn't catch everything he said because it was all in the local dialect, but I understood enough to know that he got all of the main points right.
The skits presented focused on the use of mosquito nets when sleeping, clean living conditions in and around the house (i.e. no standing water), vulnerability of pregnant women and children under 5 to the disease, and the importance of seeking treatment at a hospital instead of by a traditional healer.
We had a pretty good turnout and even when the health center opened everyone stayed outside and watched until the presentation was completely over.
It was great for the kids to have an opportunity to present to members of the community and to work with youth from other communities on this project as well. They are all so motivated and enthusiastic and I hope that we can work with other groups to reach out to the community many more times this year.
Malaria is the 2nd leading cause of death from infectious diseases in Africa, after HIV/AIDS. This is a disease that affects so many people in Sub-Saharan Africa and so much can be accomplished by educating people about prevention methods and treatment! By giving communities the tools and resources to reduce malaria infection and deaths caused by malaria, we can save millions of lives.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Catching up for lost time!
Many apologies for my faithful blog-readers. I do realize that it's been about 2 months since my last post. I'll try to sum up what's been going on and give you a few tidbits that you may find interesting.
Francelino got into a teacher training institute. It is a year long program that prepares students to be teachers in primary or secondary schools up to the 10th grade level. He is in the English Teacher's program so he is being trained to be an English teacher here in Mozambique. The location where he took the entrance exams and interviews is only about 20 minutes from Chongoene, but once you are accepted to the program they can send you anywhere! They sent him to a school in Homoine, Inhambane which is about a 6-7 hour trip from here. It was exciting news to hear that he had gotten into school because higher education here is unattainable for most people, but it was sad that he was headed so far away! He lives at the school with all of the other students and I'll be heading up to visit him for the first time on Friday!
It was difficult at first to re-adjust to being all on my own again. I had gotten so used to always having someone around to talk to and to be with, and now he's gone! I still spend a lot of time with his family and his little brothers and sisters are fun to play with around the house. I try to keep myself busy with lesson planning and other activities in my town.
I got my flu shot yesterday Peace Corps style! They pulled up in a car in front of my school, I hopped in the car, got the shot, hopped out, and they were off! It was so convenient that they came through my area instead of me having to make the trip to the capital to get a shot!
I sometimes show movies to Francelino's little brothers and sisters on my computer in the afternoons. They get stuck on one movie for a while and eventually move onto the next one. The first movie that they loved was UP. Every day they would ask me in Portuguese, "Can we watch the movie with the balloons?". They catch onto the dialogue in movies pretty quickly too. Their most recent favorite film is The Sound of Music. They have been yodeling around the house and yelling Lieutenant! at each other which is pretty entertaining. I think they like it because of the songs.
We are almost through our first trimester of the school year. End of trimester exams start on Thursday and continue into next week. We will have a week off in April, and since we have no Peace Corps conferences, I have a free week where I haven't even decided what I'll do with it yet.
I frequently stay after school with my theater group and let them ask me questions about the United States. The kids in the group are between 16 and 21 years old and love hearing about airplanes, the food we eat, schools, universities, driving a car, and other things that they can only dream about here. Sometimes I wish I could just take them all back with me!
The second year of service is definitely tougher than the first. I can see a lot of the same problems at my school as we had last year, and although I spoke up and tried to present a solution last year, I can see that no change was made to try to resolve said problems. The thing you have to do as a volunteer is take one day at a time and know that you can't change everything!
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Lobolo
Last week I attended my first Lobolo with Francelino. Lobolo is a ceremony practiced in most parts of Mozambique before marriage. Before the marriage is agreed upon the bride's family name's a "price" that they want to receive for the marriage of their daughter. The father of the bride and the father of the groom decide upon this "price" before the lobolo ceremony. This payment of sorts can be in the form of money, clothing, shoes, alcohol, soda, goats, pigs, chickens, cows, or a combination of any of the above (and more). At the beginning of the ceremony the two fathers take off their shoes and sit on a grass mat with their legs straight and opened and the bottom of the feet touching the bottom of the other's feet (see picture). They then pull out a list of the agreed upon items and they are presented very slowly and carefully. The money is diligently counted out for everyone to see and the bride's father must approve of every item before moving on. At the lobolo I was at the groom's family provided 20,000 meticais (almost $700 US), which is a LOT of money in Mozambique! They also had a dress, gold necklace, and gold earrings for the bride to be, a full suit with hat, shoes, and cane included for the bride's brother, capulanas and other clothing for the bride and her mother, several cases of soda and beer, at least 10 liters of wine, a chicken, a goat, and some homemade liquor. It was quite the event! The bride to be and her brother then went and put the clothes on and paraded around in them for a while. After the ceremony there was much gift giving by the invitees and the day was concluded with a meal. Events like this really take the whole day. We arrived there at 9am and didn't leave until 5pm, and we were one of the first to leave! Enjoy the pictures of the event!
Friday, January 27, 2012
Storm Pictures
Photos of the destruction done to my school by the tropical storm which hit us last week.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
On Sunday of this week (yesterday) we were supposed to go to Maputo for a week long mid service conference. This is the first time that we get to see all of the volunteers in our group since training (a year ago). We also are supposed to have medical check-ups and training sessions designed to support us in our second year. Due to the tropical storm earlier this week, apparently Mozambican government officials decided to open a dam in the southern region to prevent flooding in that area. As a result, the water released flooded a road, the ONLY road to be exact, that goes from my province to Maputo, the capital. The 10 volunteers in my region who were stranded met in two different cities to wait for instructions from Peace Corps. Peace Corps sent two cars out in the morning in an attempt to find an alternate route. They bushwhacked for 8 hours on old paths used for transporting coal and wood and failed to get to us. In their own words "mission possible turned impossible". After waiting around all day we were told to go home or at least to a volunteer's house nearby for the night. Now we are starting day two of our mission. Apparently there is a train that can take us through the flooded zone so that we can get to Maputo. Some volunteers managed to get on it last night and we heard that it took them 12 hours, even though by car it's only a 100km stretch. We have to travel just over 2 hours to get to the town where the train leaves from so we will find out soon if our trip to Maputo will be possible. Wish us luck!
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