The Kindness of Strangers

Peace Corps staff member Ilidio arrives in Chimundo on Thursday for a site visit. This is Peace Corps’ first encounter with escolinha director Irma Monica and Irma Monica’s first encounter with Peace Corps, and unfortunately it doesn’t go as well as any of us expect. While the African sun goes down and the air becomes chilly, we all sit down to talk about my role as a volunteer at the escolinha, but cannot seem to reach any sort of mutual understanding. They ask me what I want to do here, and I tell them plainly, “Organizational Development.” I want to help build the echolina’s organizational capacity from within. I want to help them create a monthly and annual budget, and revise their current outdated documents- the escolinha’s mission and vision statements, learning objectives, preschool curriculum, employee time cards and job descriptions, and more.

Irma Monica says she cannot make any promises. It’s not her area, she says, and she doesn’t have the time. She has a garden to cultivate, new buildings to construct, the existing buildings to clean up. She is working to give the escolinha a “new face,” and the internal stuff is just not her priority.

After the meeting, as Ilidio is giving me a ride to XaiXai to hang out with Jess before she moves to Cabo Delgado (the northernmost province of Mozambique), we discuss my work situation. It’s not looking good. Irma doesn’t seem open to working with me and would rather me just babysit children all day, as I have been doing. Ilidio, to my complete surprise, asks me if I would be open to moving sites.

To suddenly pick up and move, after six months of community and workplace integration, not to mention the Herculean effort of setting up my house? It never crossed my mind. I say the first thing that comes to mind: “Only if I can bring my dogs.” Ilidio laughs, but it’s true. How can I leave XimaXima and Mel, my canine children, homeless in a society that won’t care for them to the extent that I have? Peace Corps certainly isn’t going to fly two full grown dogs anywhere, and I can just imagine trying to transport them into a chapa and all the terror and chaos they would instill among the other passengers.

I remember stepping into my dirty, empty house for the very first time, and crying in the face of all the work that needed to be done. A dining room table, a bed frame and comfy mattress, kitchen shelves, a backyard fence, an herb garden, a super expensive fridge, a bookcase/dresser and two rambunctious puppies later, my house is finally my home. To say that the Peace Corps settling-in allowance I received in the beginning to set up my house wasn’t enough is an understatement. I’ve spent time, money, and tremendous effort in the past months, and I’ve come too far to just bail out at the first sign of adversity.

Peace Corps places so much emphasis on community integration, but will readily pull a volunteer out of his/her community without so much as a chance to say goodbye. Jess had one morning to pack up her things and leave for good. Even so, her case is a little different, as her evacuation is an issue of her safety.

While I think it would be interesting to experience a different part of Mozambique, a new community, and a different kind of work, the reality is that moving is so, so complicated. The more I think about it, the answer is no, no I don’t want to move if I have a choice.

I spend the night in XaiXai with Jess. The next morning, Friday, as Jess and Ilidio are heading back to Chibuto to pick up the rest of Jess’s belongings, they drop me off at an intersection of the EN1 (National Highway). I am heading for Tofo beach in Inhambane province to spend the weekend with another volunteer Drew, and his sister and her husband, who are doing a crazy 4-month trip around the world and are in Mozambique for a week. It’s not so hard to boleia alone. The first car I flag stops; it’s a huge semi carrying cement and the driver asks me how much I can pay to ride with him. I tell him I’m a volunteer without much money and I put on my best poker face as I thank him anyway and wave him off. He looks at me for a minute, sighs, and then tells me to get in.

There’s another guy in the passenger seat, so I am relegated to the back of the cab, where I sit on a dirty-looking mattress and pass the 6 or so hours by laying my head on my duffle bag and dozing off. The truck, weighed down with bags of cement, goes about 40km an hour and continuously bounces me on the mattress, but I make it to Maxixe eventually and the guys even buy me a cold soda on the way.

In Maxixe, I take a ferry ride into Inhambane and meet up with Drew and gang. A 15-minute chapa ride is all it takes to get to Tofo, where we have rented a house. It’s a fantastic house, too, close to the beach and fully furnished with 4 beds (with mosquito nets!), a kitchen, and (OH MY GOD) a hot running shower. We spend the weekend hanging out at the beach and exploring the small Tofo market where I buy capulana pajama pants, a capulana halter dress, local piripiri (hot sauce), colorful cloth batiks, and several painted wooden plates that the man engraved for free. By the way, I am the queen of bartering. The trick is to lay down a price lower than their seemingly final offer, and then walk away if they don’t accept. Ninety percent of the time they’ll find you later and mumble fine, you can buy it for the price you want. I’ve got quite a collection of souvenirs already in my suitcase.

I wake up several times the first night to find that the mosquitoes have discovered a hole at the top of the bed net and are serving themselves to a buffet on my face and arms. The bastards hang out on the net next to my bed and pillow and wait for me to turn out the lights again before resuming their party. I hunt them all down with a vengeance but it’s too late- in the morning I have no less than five large itchy bumps on my forehead, making me feel once again like an acne-peppered teenager. In addition, I’ve got two bites on my left shoulder, one on my back, three on my right hand, and two on my wrist. I coat myself in bug spray and carefully tuck in the net the next night, and sleep like a baby, with the sound of ocean (and not the buzzing of mosquitoes) lulling me to sleep.

Sunday, we ferry back across into Maxixe and go our separate ways- Drew and his visitors back north to Vilanculos, and I back to Chibuto in Gaza. The trip home is a bit lonelier, as cars don’t seem to want to stop and pick me up, and I really wish I had a travel buddy. After the discouragement of being passed by about 20 cars, I am finally picked up by a Mozambican man and his son, a toddler drinking a giant juice box who won’t talk to me but just stares at me the entire time with soulful eyes. The man offers to drive me to a police stop where he has friends who can have passing cars pull over and ask them to give me a ride.

On the way, we talk about all sorts of things and I am impressed with his knowledge of politics and economics. He has just returned from studying abroad in France and living in Portugal for many years, so he is not your typical geography-oblivious Mozambican. I also give him infinite points for not being creepy in any way.

As he speaks, I can sense the love and pride he has for his country, even as he acknowledges Mozambique’s shortcomings. We talk a little about my work as a volunteer and he agrees that Mozambique, as well as the continent of Africa as a whole, is increasingly donor-dependent when it should be working towards sustainability and self-sufficiency. We talk about the rise of the Euro, and the decline of the American dollar.

We enter a fascinating discussion about the rising Chinese presence in Mozambique. He explains that more and more Chinese are immigrating to Mozambique to seek economic opportunity and to escape overpopulation. The division between poor and rich China is significant, so it’s mainly the poor Chinese who come to sell cheap Chinese wares to an equally poor population. The social conditions and climate are not so different between the two countries, so it’s not a particularly difficult adjustment. Plus, Chinese development of Mozambique means access to Africa’s natural resources, such as wood.

The man, Pedro, drives me about 15 minutes further than his own destination. He asks me if I want to be dropped at a chapa stop, to which I respond no, I don’t have much money because I’m a volunteer. It’s too complicated to explain that boleia-ing is my preferred way of travel because it’s easier and faster and saves money and prevents me from being squished in an overcrowded chapa for long periods of time. As we arrive at the police stop, Pedro smiles at his son and says in a conspirational whisper, “We’re going to help our friend get home.” He pulls out a couple of bills from his pocket and offers them to me. I refuse, but he insists. “You’re here helping my country. A lot of Mozambicans take it for granted that foreigners come to our country to help us when in reality, we need to help them too.” I tell him that he has already helped me by driving me here. He says that when he studied in Europe and had very little money, other people were kind to him and helped him. I can’t tell him I actually do have money to get home, without sounding like a liar. He presses the money into my hand, and asks one of the policeman to help me find a ride back to Chibuto.

I want to slyly slip the money into grocery bag between the seats, but the kid (who apparently has a Chinese name) is watching me, still sipping his juice. I get out of the car, with not enough words of gratitude to thank Pedro, and he gives me his phone number to contact him if I ever pass through Maxixe again and need any sort of help. He makes me promise to text him and let him know when I get home safe.

The policemen offer me a chair and converse with me some more as we wait for cars to pass. A bus headed to Maputo approaches, and they all agree, “This one.” They flag the car down and ask the driver to take me. When the cobrador refuses for less than 250mt, the four policemen get indignant and begin arguing with him while I sit and stare. Finally they compromise on 200mt, and they send me on my way. As I get in the bus, I turn back to find all the policemen waving jovially at me and telling me to come back soon.

In the past few months, I’ve experienced an escalating disillusionment about being here in Mozambique but it seems that really all it takes is the kindness of a couple of strangers to (excuse the cliché) restore my faith in humanity and lend me a sense of optimism. If little Pedro grows up to be like his father, the future of Mozambique looks pretty good.