A dog eat dog world

There are few things more disheartening than coming home from a weeklong conference only to find a giant hole in your backyard fence and your beautiful garden completely destroyed. Half the plant beds are dug up, toys are scattered about, paw prints lead in and out of the enclosed area. The surviving plants are all trampled and sickly, except for the tomato plants that miraculously escaped the massacre and have grown into a jungle in your absence. Oh, and the one basil plant that you have managed to cultivate in the past two months. At least that’s still standing.
All the evidence points to your puppies who, of course, are really no longer puppies, as witnessed by the fact that they can easily leap over the chicken wire you put up to guard the plants. But the moment you glare menacingly at them, they roll over onto their backs with a guilty look that could melt ice. “Sorry mommy,” they whine while pathetically wagging their tails. And the moment you turn your back they shoot out of the backyard like rockets, leaving you to patch up the caniço fence.

So yeah… that was my welcome home. Fortunately, everything else was still intact. Whenever I am away from my house I worry about my things getting stolen, rain leaking inside, when really I should be worried about all the damage my bored dogs will do.
But being home is nice. It rained all day the day after I got back, so I busted out my sweatpants for the first time since being in Africa and worked on my semi-annual Volunteer Report Form (VRF) while drinking tea. It made me nostalgic for coffee shops and my college paper-writing days.
In the evening I went over to Yoko, the Japanese volunteer’s, house and she taught me how to use her sewing machine, which was actually really fun. We are currently making a capulana dress together, with the additional help of a dress pattern. (After coming back from Maputo with two capulana dresses and a capulana purse, I’m beginning to think I have a problem. To curb my spending, I am going to attempt to make my own capulana clothes… But we’ll see how that goes.)
During dinner, which consisted of a delicious Japanese dish made of pork, cabbage, and okra, Yoko and I talked about some of the differences between Peace Corps and JICA. She asked me if Peace Corps has a good reputation in the States and I said oh yes; it’s a very well known and respected program throughout the country. I told her returned volunteers have a lot to boost their resume with and can receive grad school credit for their service. She explained to me that in Japan, JICA does not have a great reputation and that a common criticism of it is that young people go abroad to just waste time and dick around when they can’t find real jobs back home (and it’s actually HARDER for them to find jobs when they go back!). Also, JICA volunteers, like Peace Corps volunteers, receive a monthly living allowance from the government; critics of JICA say that the money could be better spent elsewhere. After the earthquake disaster and resulting chaos, JICA volunteers were essentially prohibited from keeping a blog because the government was afraid of further backlash against JICA.
All of this is extremely interesting to me because I couldn’t imagine serving here for two years without the unanimous support I have received from family, friends, and even strangers. In fact, before I left I never heard a single word of discouragement when I said I wanted to join Peace Corps. (Well, except for one girl I met in Vegas who told me her brother had served in the Peace Corps in Mozambique and then said, “When I went to visit him I stayed at the beach resorts, and those are pretty nice, but most places in Mozambique don’t have air conditioning or electricity or anything. You are going to want to kill yourself. There is like nothing there.”)
The spirit of volunteerism is very much nurtured and encouraged in American culture, but this is not the case in all countries. A third world country like Mozambique, for example, is often on the receiving end of volunteer and funding services, a “donor dependent country,” if you will. They have been receiving foreign aid for so long that it’s become ingrained in many of the systems that run the country. Organizations, my little escolinha included, would collapse without the help of outside money because there isn’t much set up for sustainability. When I first arrived at site, I asked Erica and Alycia’s empregada what she thought of Americans in general. She responded, “I think it’s good that you guys come and give us employment.” I asked her what would happen if one day Peace Corps volunteers were no longer sent to Chimundo. She said she didn’t know… And then she said, half jokingly, “I’d probably starve.”
Volunteerism itself is somewhat of a strange concept to Mozambicans. Even when I explain that I am a volunteer, people still comment, “You must make a lot of money.” When I tell them that no, I receive just enough to live on, they insist, “But you’ll get a lot of money when you go back to America, right?” It’s quite a challenge to overcome these preconceptions.
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Erica and Alycia are still in Maputo until Wednesday so my aggregate number of mouths to feed (excluding my own) is currently totaling SEVEN: five dogs and two cats. I may have forgotten to mention that Erica and Alycia have been housing a new dog, a shiny black puppy named Mulandi (which means “black person” in Changana). Mulandi is actually extremely wary of humans and has not even warmed up to my, or Erica and Alycia’s presence, although she has somewhat gotten used to us. It’s an interesting situation because E/A have attempted to give her away several times, but she always finds her way back to their house.
I mentioned before that both our households have sort of a reputation for adopting unwanted puppies in the neighborhood. (It’s how I ended up with XimaXima, and how E/A got their dog Bop.) But I’m not sure that I’ve really explained Mozambicans’ attitudes towards dogs, or animals in general.
A few months ago, the neighborhood children showed up with three adorable puppies from the same litter and asked us to take care of them, which we refused. I was very adamant about not letting any of them enter my house or eat my dogs’ food, but E/A did not take the same preventative measures and eventually all three pups ended up living in their veranda. Meanwhile, we would occasionally take them back to their rightful families and ask the parents to please take care of their own dogs, but to no avail. The dogs would follow us right back to Erica/ Alycia’s. Our next tactic, after this went on for a few weeks, was to try to give the dogs away to our friends and acquaintances in other communities. I successfully gave one to a shop owner in Chibuto, and the other two were supposedly to be picked up the following day by someone else. When the next morning arrived, the puppies were nowhere to be found, and they did not return the following day.
What we found out later, was that a neighbor had taken the two puppies and killed them because they had been eating her chickens. We were horrified. How could someone kill two innocent puppies? And without saying anything to us? They would have been placed in good homes if she had only waited another day. And besides, they wouldn’t have had to eat chickens had they been getting fed by their owners.
The child who we heard this from, the “owner” of one of the murdered puppies, told it to us as if he were commenting on the weather, matter-of-factly and without reaction. The neighbor had asked him to pay for the chickens his dog had eaten. He, being just a child, was unable to do so and thus gave the woman permission to take his dog and get rid of it. It’s a sad, sad story. Any American child would cry endlessly about losing a pet. But here, that’s just life. Animals are kept to serve a purpose, be it to provide milk or food, to chase away rodents, or to guard the house.