July

Hello, will not be writing much because I must be leaving the city for site and it may be a little difficult to get back. But the end of my vacation with Laura went well. We traveled through Malawi and Zambia and finished with a wonderful trip to Victoria Falls National Park (it costs $ to get in). Zambia is the most religious country I have ever visited. Restaurants were call "In God We Trust", tv shows praised the almighty at the end of the show, and Zambians would thank god after every sentence in a conversation (a little exaggeration). It was a real nice country, and has a good opportunity to make their goal of being a middle-income country by 2020. It was also a very expensive place to visit. Vic Falls was breathtaking. Though I have never seen any of the other 7 natural wonders of the world, I have a feeling this is the best, for the reason that you actually feel the power of nature. Luckily we went during the rainy season and the water rushed over the falls at 1 billion gallons a second (someone might want to double check that statement) and on the Zambian side you actually walk extremely close to the falls and get absolutely soaked; it was wonderful. Also, a little dangerous.

Work is going slow, but we should start building our community health center this week. Then I have to paint a world map with HIV prevalence for each country on the side of the building and I believe a group of teens from the district high school will come to my community with their Peace Corps Volunteer and paint a mural on the inside. So that is about it, I leave Mozambique November 5th and will be home hopefully the 6th! Great news, and I believe Laura has permitted me to go hunting in Luzerne for a few days, so I ask we all thank her for that. Bye

Laura's Thoughts

Bryan and I thought it would be fun if I wrote on his blog what my thoughts and impressions have been thus far in the trip. Excuse me for any poor grammar or ramblings, I just woke up from a nap.

The Blantyre Airport in Malawi is AWESOME! This was the first time I had a window seat and as we are beginning to descend I could not see a runway, it's definitely unlike any other airport. According to the guy next to me who was a South African living in Malawi for 20 years, the airport was built by the British and is the oldest in Malawi. I have not fact-checked him because he said it with enough confidence for me to believe him. The best part was when we landed everyone coming to greet us off the airplane were on the second story open air part of the building waving hello. It was like in a movie when a ship leaves port and everyone waves goodbye but so much better because we were all coming.

Our transportation so far has been pretty good. We've been lucky to have window seats or be in the front on chapas. My first full day hear we were in the front of a big semi that had an open back for 8 hours. We were the first people picked up so we were really fortunate as it was so hot that day. There was a family picked up later in the day and I was shocked at how little babies don't die in the back like that with just the sun beating down on them. Cars have the right of way and when you're not in a city the people on the side of the road will disappear into the crops and tall grass on the side to let you pass. Mind you most don't have shoes on and they also go to the bathroom there.

If you are ever travelling abroad and it is up to Bryan to teach you how to be socially appropriate, seek alternate guidance. What were the two things Bryan told me about Mozambicans; 1 - men hold hands in public but they are not gay, 2 - people pick their nose in public. So it's my first night in Mozambique and we are staying with another PCV, Charlotte who was very nice and welcoming. She is introducing me to the family who owns her house and the first person I meet is a girl about 14 and I stick my hand out and say "To do bom" (part of my ever-expanding portuguese). Bryan then immediately injects, "Uh, kiss her on both cheeks. Don't be rude!" I do as he says right away and after a few more introductions we talk about this lack of prepardness and his argument was that I studied in France. So now I'm under the impression that what happens in France should be applied to all of Portugal's former colonies.

Okay now onto Bryan's village, Mugulama. I am very impressed with his knowledge of the place and how to get around and his language skills. I actually like his site best, probably because we've spent the most time there, but it is nice. You shower outside and look at a mountain. I've had my best 4 showers in my life in Mugulama. Actually based on the 3 indoor showers I've seen at other PCVs houses, outdoor ones are far superior. They are cleaner and smell better because they're not in the same place as the toilet. The water heats up because the sun beats down on it and you might have an amazing view like Bryan.
We met a chefe, un-elected mayor of the city, on one of the days there and Bryan introduced me as his esposa, easier than fiancee. I said my few Lomwe words and then the two talked in Portuguese. The chefe is new and may not really understand Bryan's job, this is my attempt to make undeserved excuses for him. Apparantly he said to Bryan with me right there, "So this is your wife and you married her there (the US) and then you came here and now she's visiting and then she'll leave and you'll marry here." You could see how offended Bryan was, didn't even need to speak Portuguese, the chefe tried to change the subject but the situation was wierd and a great example of everything Bryan's been talking about.
Bryan's neighbor, the poeple who own the house, think they are on spring break. Every night they have reggae music playing loud so we can hear it crystal clear inside Bryan's house. They bought a solar energy panel that they place on top of their mud hut and it is wired to car batteries that provides the energy to play their cassette tape. Wow genius you might say. This is also the family who doesn't send their kids to school and who's wife came to the house one day when I was there asking for 100 mets to go to Nampula's hospital because she's too sick be treated in Mugulama. But don't worry about the family because the men are on Spring Break every night. Can you sense the sarcasm?
Bryan and I took a HIV test on Wednesday because it's the big market day so there's also alot of people at the hospital and we wented to be good examples. It's funny, because there is no reason why I would have it, but you're still nervous those few minutes waiting for the results. Both negative.
Bryan's maid is nice and her son Rosario is very cute and about the same size as my neice Claire who is 6 months younger. But she is stronger than I will ever be. We went with her one day to do laundry and she's carrying the big bucket on her head with our wet clothes and her baby on her back for a 20 minute walk in the heat and in barefeet. Yeah, I was winded with no child on my back, nothing on my head.
Bryan made me kill a chicken, I don't want to talk about it.

We went to Ilha de Mocambique, this island of the coast and it was nice. In the guide book it was described as part ghost town, but really the whole nation is. More so in heavily populated areas, but you'll be driving down the road and there will be shells of former portuguese building with no roof and vegetation inside again. Bryan says some of these are just now giant toilets.

We then spent 3 gorgoeus days and nights on the coast of the Indian Ocean. On our second day there we helped pull in fish from the ocean for like 45 minutes. We saw many different types of fish but only could name the blowfish because it was pretty obvious. The last night there two other PCVs, Jamie and Nea came and stayed with us and I won 2 games of Settlers, Bryan hates when I win. There was two dogs there, one that belonged to the Mozambican family, Rambo and then another stray who was trying to knock up Rambo. Even the female dogs don't get a choice who to sleep with. But Bryan did not like the other dog, it growled at me when I was trying to get back inside from going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Bryan said the dog was in the attack position and didn't want to leave the room so he told me to go to the house and wake the woman and her kids and just say, "Licenca" (excuse-me) until she woke-up and say "cao" (dog) over and over so she would understand. I said "Licenca" until she came to the door and than "Cao, grrrr, door, cao" she sent her sons and they scared it away. But the whole next day when ever they saw the dog the would attack it, I felt so bad for it.

Okay we are in Nampula now and are staying in a nice hotel tonight with real showers and toilets and cnn. Tomorrow we are headed back to site for a few more days and then on to Victoria Falls. I'll share pictures when I'm home. I hope everyone is doing well and taking care, love you guys and see everyone soon!

March

Taking a break from writing my 2009 PEPFAR grant for Peace Corps. We are going to a build a health education center on the hospital grounds; mostly to give the group of volunteers a place to develop and implement community health programs (but according to Sarah Palin, community organizers do not actually have responsibilities). We are going to paint a world map on the outside of the health center and I decided to paint each country according to their HIV prevalence. I think it will be good to put Mozambique and Sub-Saharan Africa in perspective for the village members. As our first community health program, the group of volunteers will be traveling and visiting their neighbors in their respective zones to identify as many orphans as possible, along with their caretakers. Many will be from parents, or just one, who have died due to AIDS, but also will cover children who lost parents during our latest cholera outbreak in January, among other reasons for children becoming orphaned. We would like to eventually put a number of orphans and their caretakers through a perma culture training to provide these families with the opportunity to try a low-cost, high-benefit type of farming. Perma culture seeks to utilize a small area of land and yield a large amount of food; and since food security is incredibly important for large families in rural, Sub-Saharan Africa, we believe this is a good opportunity to experiment with this new method of farming/gardening. We will also be teaching these community members how to make fertilizer, only using locally available, free resources, enabling them to improve the quality of their soil. In January, I began a garden and compost pile at my house, and the results are mixed, but I learned a lot for the next pilot project I’ll do with the orphans and their caretakers.

At site, nothing really is new. I got a new cook/maid. It is the lady whose son I named Rosario, and she is doing well. Her beans are wonderful. My American doctor, Pamela, is leaving this week for the states and just wanted to thank her for everything she has done for me, from allowing me to use her computer for work, to bringing me cookies on Mondays at my site. I will miss you and Riley and hopefully run into you two in other places around the world. Good luck with your next adventure.

So the Pope went to Africa, said condoms promote promiscuity, and left. Laura and I have a dog, her name is Maddy, when we are getting ready to leave the house (and I think Laura now does this) we stop, turn to Maddy, tell her we love her and “don’t be stupid!”. Apparently, I will now have to stop, turn to Maddy, and tell her and the Pope not to be stupid. What an f’n embarrassment.

Obama said he bowled as well as people in the Special Olympics (or something to that effect). Not quite at the level of the Pope’s blatant ignorance, because he won’t be responsible for the deaths of many people, but horrible nonetheless. You are an idiot for the rest of the week Mr. President.

If I seem presumptuous in my liberal usage of personal insults, I try to only seek the absolute, most brainless personal actions to state my opinion about; I believe these two qualify.

Mount Namuli, July

Mount Namuli, July

Mount Namuli, July

Mount Namuli, July

Year 2

Hello, first time I have written since September, it was really busy between september and december before I went home. We concluded our program in the community. We did 137 health speeches in the 19 primary schools in Mugulama and almost 6,000 students with less than 15 years of age who heard, for the first time, explicit information about HIV and other sicknesses. Do not get me wrong, do I think most of them retained the information they heard? Prolly not. But you have to start somewhere. We went to 90 religious institutions and about 4,000 people heard our health speeches and everything went really well; we openly talked about condoms, fidelity and abstinence within those institutions. At the hospital, the ladies who are volunteers in our group visited the ladies in the morning who weigh their babies and they explained the method of transmission of PMTCT and, since they are having sex...for reproductive purposes I am sure, how important it is to know their status and talk to their partners. At the hospital we talked to over 2,000 women in a one month span. Finally, the volunteers went to their respective markets and talked with about 3,000 people over 37 days.
So that sums up our first year project. We were able to buy new bikes and repair old bikes of all my group of volunteers. The volunteers and the community seemed to enjoy their interactions and since the end of July we have had over 1,600 HIV tests. This is an incredibly large amount, given the demographic, economic and cultural situation of Mugulama.

On a personal note, my second year has brought about new challenges, both in terms of my work and my continous integration into my community. I would like to move beyond my work with the volunteers and began building a foundation with those people living with HIV. My group is doing a lot of training this year to build their capacities and hopefully will become an association with the government. But I am not sure many people who are starting treatment or just tested positive will have their fright disappear within their conscience in the next 9 months. So I have been thinking of using this year to build my volunteers a community and health education center, where many programs will be dedicated to HIV information and community mobilization. For those people in counseling and treatment at the hospital, it would be good to begin getting to know them on a personal level, so I can understand their situation in a more sympathetic fashion and to help the integration of a new volunteer next year, who will prolly be working with them more than I. At a training by Peace Corps we were taught a technique of farming called perma culture. This is based on the idea of digging extra deep into the ground and planting certain foods in a particular fashion to yield a large amount of food from a small area. This is important because the patients can make this type of garden, enabling them to stay closer to home and save their energy. Most of these patients have farms far away and use a lot of energy, usually working on empty stomachs while taking ARV's, and many times these farms do not yield an equal amount of food for the time spent cultivating. Myself and our social assistant from FGH, Natalie, are going to use a little bit of money were are receiving from FGH to build a smal perma culture pilot farm just outside of the grounds of the hospital. We are going to plant food that is vital to the nutritional intake of the patients receiving treatment. We are also going to teach some of those who would like to know, how to make fertilizer out of material that is free and available in our community. I have already begun a small farm at my house and began making fertilizer 4 weeks ago. Hopefully it will be ready in about 2 months.

Like I began to say early, life in my community still brings about some odd and rather straining difficulties. I though my patience could be not be tested more, but the more I realize it, I still have a long way to mature, apparently. For those of you who know me well, I never really had patience. The humility aspect is also depressing. Being stared at or laughed at or embarassed is rather difficult sometimes, even for those of us who have a good sense of humor. The toughest thing for anyone to accept, especially men, is being corrected in public. And here, at the same as being the most famous person in your community, you are also a complete nobody within your structural work environment, i.e. ministry of health. I thought I would be seen more as a community member than sometimes I feel. Don't get me wrong, my neighbors and colleagues and the leaders of the community embrace my presence and love the occasional normal talk and it is never an atmosphere of abnormalcy when I am with them. But others, it is still a foreign idea that I live there, among then. My buddy Jimmy, sitting here at the computer next me is trying to reassure me that it is just they joy in hearing a foreigner try to speak their language, and i guess he is right. But I just like when my old neighbor comes by ever morning and says the normal morning compliments in the local language and then she walks away like it wasn't anything special. It makes you feel good. Like you belong. But I am sure it is just a feeling telling me there is more I must learn and understand before I come to conclusions that could damper my mood and mentality.