Weird

I shake hands with a man a see around a lot. He is happy to see me and greets me in Shitswa, I stammer my response. He holds the handshake as we continue our greeting. How are you? How did you sleep? What are you doing right now? He begins to rub my hand. What are you buying in the market today? What are you doing this weekend? The stroking continues and his hands are callused and tough and that fact that I know this gives me the creeps. He's still petting my hand as I pull away, stifling an anglo-saxon impulse to scream "GETOFFA ME!!" and run away. The smile on his face never wavers.

And that's completely normal. The only thing different about it was how earnestly happy he was to shake my hand. I am still shaking it off when I leave the market. A group of women walk by carrying big baskets of fish, huge basins of water (water is really heavy fyi), bundles of wood, on their heads. On their heads! A little girl of maybe six follows the train with a baby tied to her back and just her mother's cell phone perched delicately on her own head. She's in obviously in training, but manages to wave at me without dropping either the infant or the phone. The women can do this for miles, all the while greeting everyone they pass and never spilling a drop. Men do it too, it's just more efficient to carry large amounts of weight that way. I saw a woman walking down the street with an unopened dvd player on her head. Another time with a bundle of machetes.

And nosepicking, my god! It's one of those things that isn't even on their radar. A kid will be asking a question in class and the whole time jamming his finger up to the second knuckle into his nostril, working it around to find the sneaky, hidden boogers.. A colleague, an adult, will be talking to you about nothing as he massages his brain through his nose, his finger nearly gone as he asks about your weekend. I earnestly hope they don't notice the look on my face. My boss in a meeting, a nun for christ's sake, with her whole hand in her nose. What is she hoping to find?

But I'm weird too. My teacher's smock, called a "bata", apparently got so dirty by Mozambican standards that a kid in class raised his hand and said more or less, "Teacher Colin, I don't want to offend you at all, but I mean come on."
"What?" I said, honestly confused, "What is it?"
"Your bata," he replied, "it's dirty." Mozambicans are very, very tidy people.
I had another conversation where several of my colleagues marvelled at my arm and leg hair (Mozambicans have very little and often no body hair at all). "It's so long!" they blurted incredulously, "It's...orange!"
"So are my eyelashes" I replied. At this they looked closely at my eyes for a moment and amazed, disbelieving laughter broke out.

Another wierd thing about me is that I have no native language. Or rather, my native language is my national language. Here, the native language is Shitswa and is representative of this and only a few other communities, spoken by less than a million people. One has a native language and learns the national language for things like business, travel and school. One's native language is representative of who he or she is, where he or she is from, a part of their identity. Language, literally the words you use to communicate, are specific to you and only a relatively few others relative to the country or the world at large. But me? My language is the most common language on earth, and so to a Mozambican part of my identity is just missing. It isn't a part of how I conceive of myself. That, I think, is the weirdest thing about me.

While you're away

The Escolinha in front of my house continues. The little ones have stopped trying to escape, even when I hold the gate open to provoke them. Now my new favorite thing about Escolinha is the little girl who is afraid of white people. Every time she sees me she breaks out into ridiculous cartoon tears, frozen to the spot staring at me in pure terror. I wave and smile at her. It always makes me laugh and I look forward to it whenever I leave my house. Is that bad?

The Peace Corps has many mantras and catchphrases. One of the many is "things at home happen while you're away." Prepare yourself, we were told, for life at home to change. Your friends may change, move on or move away, one volunteer's sister got breast implants. My family moved away from my childhood home.

As you may recall I live on a catholic Mission with an Italian priest and two Italian lay people. One of them, we'll call her Katherine, has been living in Mozambique for ten years with the Priest. Here they have built a mission, a professional school that is the first of its kind in the region, and in just a few months complete construction on a massive church. Last Friday she found out her father was near death. She left for the airport that night and was on a plane to Italy early the next morning.

It was explained to me that she is an only child. If her father survives he will likely be in a vegetative or low-functioning state. In this event she will likely need to stay in Italy to help care for him. If her father does die her elderly mother will be left more or less alone and she would more than likely need to stay in Italy to be with her.

Abroad for more than ten years. Late one afternoon disaster at home and her life changes faster than she can get on a plane. I was talking to the other lay person, and trying to imagine what could possibly be going through her head. How do you manage one of life's hairpin turns? This on top of leaving a life you have known for so long, to return to a life that you left behind. I have my own petty insecurities about not having friends to return to, how would it be after ten years?

But things happen and life at home does not stop without us. It is the ultimate nightmare for us. We were given presentations on the logistics, what the Peace Corps will do under what circumstances. We have all had the odd nightmare or cold chill when the thinking of that plane ride home. It's easy to forget about, which is a merciful characteristic of being human. But life is not fair, and it doesn't call ahead to clear your schedule.

In the end, you the only thing you can hope for is luck.

I hired a woman to do my laundry, probably the best decision I have ever made. Booyah!

The Globe

Sitting in my teacher's lounge is a globe of the world. I have an opening in my schedule and because I don't really have any friends I often sit in front of the globe and poke it. Mozambique is indeed pretty close to the opposite side of the earth as California. Sometimes it makes me feel inconcievable far from my home. It also makes the earth seem really small.

On this globe sits every country of the world in a different color and their major cities and capitals. With one strange exception: The United States. Every state has its own color, with every state capital and major city. It's the only country on earth displaying this feature, on a globe in a teacher's lounge in Mozambique.

Teaching is hard.

Preschool and the Mafia

The last weeks have been madness. From the blandness of my first weeks, slowly creeping by without a central theme, the last few have been a relative blur. I am a teacher now.

The challenges are epic. To teach English to overcrowded classes when they have sometimes as many as 12 other subjects and I get them for only 2 forty-five minute periods a week. Add to that no textbooks and poor English teaching in the past and I have my work cut out for me. At the beginning of the week my lesson plans bomb, only towards the end do they really shape up into quality lessons

But I don't want to write about that for now. I have two years to develop accurate pictures and generalizations.

In front of my house every day the mission puts on "Escolinha" or "little school" meaning preschool. There they learn Portuguese (remember that the people in my village do not speak Portuguese at home) and get used to the idea of being in a class and following a teacher's directions etc.

Escolinha just started, and there was a lot of crying. Moms had to stay and reassure their kids, and teachers had to coax them into the group. But the best part from a spectator's standpoint was not the crying kids, it was the children taking matters into their own hands...

Escape! There are perpetually a small group of intrepid four year olds who have no intention whatsoever of being subject to this Escolinha nonsense. They hover near the gate, and when it opens, bang! They're off. They sprint/waddle as small children do out of the mission and down the street. Do they know their way home? Obviously that concern is not as pressing as the idea of spending several hours among strange adults. It's hilarious how they watch the gate out of the corner of their eye, inching closer as a stranger approaches, praying that this will be the one. "Come back here right now!" The teacher shouts at them, but it only spurs them on in their furious sprint/waddle to freedom.

Secondly, the Italians. The Peace Corps presence in my village is dwarfed by the army of Italians doing aid work here. We affectionately refer to them as the Mafia, a jibe that they accept congenially. I've never met I real life Italian before coming here, but they are just about how they are made out to be. Lots of gesticulating when they talk, outrageous multi-course meals that we can never finish, and constant welcoming. "You are part of the family now" my friend Sam says over and over patting my on the back over and over.

They've all been doing aid work for years. Sam was in Sudan. Alberto has been here in Mozambique for five years. Others Kenya, Latin America--they're pros all. They add an interesting flavor to my life here.

Quick pause, a student just stopped by to say hi. Weird...

Anyways the Italians. Out here, far from home, just like me. But better at it than me, and welcoming to boot.

So life here is changing. The novelty of my life is wearing down, creating a new comfort and a new anxiety. There was a moment a few days ago when I thought about the career abroad like the Italians have had. A life of new languages and new peoples and new challenges. For a moment I thought about it. It passed just as quickly, but the fact that it crossed my mind I think represents something, a small checkpoint in my evolution.

''con" whatever

Mango season is ending. Months of the best mangoes anyone has ever eaten is drawing to a close. It fills my heart with sadness and apprehension for the next month or so when we only have bananas. But hope springs eternal, and orange season is just over the horizon. Anyways…

I survived.

The first week of school came and went, and I survived. Learning by doing at it’s most raw.

My first day was the roughest. I have six classes in a row on Monday, and after the first one I was certain I had never been so exhausted in my life. My brain was fried, my Portuguese all but gone. I didn’t know how I’d make it through the next periods. By the fourth period I was numb from my feet (did you know teachers have to stay standing ALL DAY?! It’s crazy!) to my brain, which was about as good as a baked potato.

The high point of the day was when I saw on my schedule a class abbreviated “Con,” short for “cozinha” for the kids learning how to be cooks (my school is a professional school). I was thirty minutes into the lesson, I had already introduced myself and the class rules, I thought things were going pretty well. Then a colleague entered. “So it’s my time, eh?” he said. No, I explained, he was either thirty minutes too late or fifteen too early. No, he explained, “Con” stands for “Contabilidade” which are the kids studying to be accountants, not cozinha.

I sprinted across the school and tried to cram my lesson into 15 minutes for the accounting kids who had been sitting in their classroom without a teacher for the better part of an hour.

All day I was ready for a unified insurrection from my classes. I expected mutiny, but more than that I got confusion. Not from me (to clarify: I was confused all day) but from them. At one point I asked them to introduce themselves to three other people in the class in English. I figured this to be a relatively easy and fun exercise, allowing them to get up and maybe goof around a little bit. What I got was forty blank stares.

I explained three more times what they should do, and eventually a handful of the 40-student class tentatively stood up or turned to a neighbor. I was flabbergasted. What had I done wrong? I asked my Italian neighbors who work with the school, and they said that it was probably because they had never done anything like that before.

“They just came from primary school,” my neighbor explained, “they were trained to sit still, memorize and repeat.” A miserable fate indeed, but it makes their confusion (and mine) more understandable. This in conjunction with it being their first day of high school, me being their first crazy American teacher, and on top of all that me asking them to do something that they had never done before.

I am now “Teacher Colin,” a name that follows me through the streets as I walk to the market, on my way out of mass, as I nap on the beach. The title bears some responsibility, but I am grateful to finally have a real job and challenges to occupy my life. My sitemate said that a student referred to me as “gangster,” and it’s hearing things like this that get you through the day.

Moments of Clarity

A family friend wrote to me:

"One question, if you don't mind: How long did it take, once you started walking on African soil, before the fact that you were actually 1/2 world away from the familiarity and comforts of home, in a country that you knew little about; how long before the reality of the situation dawned on you?"

When I first saw the question I thought my answer would snap into my mind. But it didn't. I recall moments where that realization sprung into my consciousness, but those moments have by no means passed. I'm pretty sure they are getting more frequent and noticeably stronger.

Today was my first day at work. I'm not teaching yet, it was just an hour and a half meet n' greet. I was talking to one of my colleagues, and she said, "So you are here for two years, yeah?"
"Yep, two years," I said almost boringly, because I say it so much.
"That's a long time!" she said, in a bright and friendly way.
"Whoa," I said as the realization washed over me, "That IS a long time."
"Er...yes it is," she replied, probably thinking I was a bit of an idiot for not having considered this before. But this is how they come, out of the blue more or less.

I'm working construction at my school, more just helping out and learning a few things. It's very, VERY hot here. I retreated to the water fountain every five minutes, though the other workers never complained, and I saw them take only one water break the whole time I was there. Standing in the shade at the end of the day, my clothes soaked with sweat, I dreamt of a cold gatorade. "Whoa," I thought, "I won't get another cold gatorade for...whoa."

A couple weeks ago when I got my first care package I was thrilled. A package all the way from home, and I even recognized my friend's handwriting. As I held the package in my hands I realized that this thing had come all the way around the world, literally thousands of miles, over an ocean and across a continent and a half. All the way from home. Whoa.

Christmas Eve, sitting in my little house post-robbery. Feeling more homesick than I ever have in my life. When would I see my family again? When would I sit in our living room on Christmas morning again?

Walking through my village with my only friend (Don't worry mom, I have more now) and him saying, "Here we are, in Mozambique." Mozambique, I thought. Here we are.

After we get sworn in as bona-fide Peace Corps Volunteers at the American Embassy I'm talking to my dad on the phone. He's going to see Avatar on IMAX 3D with my brother. I'm so jealous! I tell my friend from Arkansas and he blurts in excitement, "I know! My dad is doing the same thing, I'm so jealous!!"

I arrive at my host family's house. I speak maybe ten words of Portuguese. I take my first shower out of a bucket in their bathroom. As I pour warm water over my head I think to myself, "This is pretty weird."

We break the clouds descending into Johannesburg, where we have a short layover before Maputo. I'm a few seats away from the window, but I crane my neck to get a peek. It's the first time I have ever seen Africa. "Pretty crazy, huh?" The volunteer next to me says, observing what I'm sure is a look of stunned stupidity plastered across my face.

I'm packing up in my grandparents house, it's past midnight. Do I have what I need? What if I forget something? What do they wear there? What if I get robbed? Will I be ok? I look in the mirror and my face is white (whiter than usual, ok? give me a break). My palms are sweating. Two years? In Mozambique? Two years?

I’m lying in my dorm room for my summer job, staring at my ceiling, the acceptance letter from the Peace Corps laying open on my desk, with a pit in my stomach the size of a peach. I am gonna do this, I think.

The realizations come more now, or rather when they come now I can begin to accept their permanency. For the first time I can kind of sort of almost nearly understand that I am building a life here. They don't scare me as much. But just as quickly as they come, they go. It's hard to focus on thoughts so gigantic for more than a little while.

The other day I peered down at my feet and gave them a good look. You really don’t do this as often as you think, and because mine are usually filthy it’s all the more reason not to. It was after a shower so I thought it odd when I noticed a strange line across my feet…it was a tan line! “Oh my god!” I shouted to no one (I live alone). But there it was, my sandals tanned cleanly across both feet. I haven’t had a new tan line in…well let’s just say I’ve been rocking this t-shirt tan since the 80s (back when it was cool). And you never thought the words “Colin” and “tan” could be used in the same sentence, you ignoramus. A brand new me for a brand new decade.

And sitting not a few inches from my newly tanned feet was a gigantic tarantula. “OH MY GOD!” I shouted to no one and spent a good half a minute frozen in place planning my next move. It sat there twitching its mandibles, certainly calculating how to creep into my bed in the night, or leap onto my face while in the shower, or hide under my chair while I played guitar. But I wouldn’t be bullied by this creature of the underworld, I decided to go for the kill, but the little devils are quick and he darted away. After a few minutes of me shouting and stamping in my bathroom I eventually lost the little demon. Do I want to see it again? Do I want to live on in ignorance?

So if you couldn’t tell I lead a life of thrills here on the Indian Ocean. Every day I make life or death decisions, beans and rice or just beans? Eggs scrambled or fried? Should I jog north on the beach or south? I spend a lot of time in front of the mirror making faces. Just kidding; I don’t own a mirror.

The kicker is my job hasn’t started yet, and won’t for another couple of days. I’ve done an ok job at occupying myself. My Portuguese is improving, I play the guitar, I sketch, exercise, I’m learning some Mozambican dishes, I kill about two hours in the market every day bothering people.

But the thing is, and I guess my ultimate point is, they aren’t bothered. You can just stand there and talk to a vender and they’ll just as soon talk to you too, or offer you a chair. Mozambican conversations have a whole different rhythm. “How are you?” moves onto to “how is your family?” and then “how did you rest last night” which can morph into “how did you awake this morning?” These drawn out salutations are accompanied by the world’s longest handshakes. They WILL NOT LET GO, not until about half way through an entire conversation, and you can let go all you want and they’ll just go ahead and hold on. It’s a sign of welcome, I know, but coming from America I am tempted to wrench free and ask them not to touch me.

But get this, there is no word for awkward. The closest word we’ve found in Portuguese Is “uncomfortable,” but that is just not the same as awkward. Awkwardness in America is a friggin institution. Entire sitcoms and a slew of movies are all based on the sour taste of awkwardness. Freed from this idea conversations have a different cadence. A lot of silence can pass and the interlocutors will patiently wait it out. Yesterday after a particularly long silence my friend announced with a refreshed sigh “This is Mozambique.”
“I know,” I replied, “I’ve lived here for four months.” (A stupid thing to say, I admit it)
“Yes, but here it is!” He declared triumphantly as if pulling a veil off the entire country before our eyes. And I was honestly jealous at how he took in the moment, in zen, completely unaffected by the creeping awkwardness that confined me.

Later that night I sat in my house, making faces at the part of the wall I imagine I will someday put a mirror, lamenting awkwardness. I thought about how many conversations I had ruined by being “awkward.” Long hours of meditation were interrupted by seeing something dart across the floor out of the corner of my eye…

Soon I’ll have a cool watch tan too.