Home Sweet Home

It feels like I’ve been here in Chicumbane forever, but in a good way.

Moving was a stressful ordeal, as always. Ilidio showed up at 10am with a Peace Corps truck, which we piled up precariously high with everything I own in Mozambique. It was quite an intense game of Tetris to fit everything in the bed of the truck, but we managed to get everything in one trip. On the way to Chicumbane, we had to stop several times to check on everything in the back. At one point, I saw something flapping around in the side mirror and, alarmed, I demanded a halt on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Turns out, it was a roll of toilet paper that had come undone and was waving cheerfully in the breeze. We continued on our way, but not until I had removed the ridiculous streamers.

When we arrived at my house, my landlady and my empregada were there waiting for me, as well as a few of my colleagues from new organization CACHES who helped take everything out of the car. There was no time to rest, however, because immediately after, Ilidio and I went to the CACHES office with the coworkers, where we all had a little meeting. Then, a quick lunch with Ilidio at a nearby barraca (we were starving, and had been snacking on my Snickers bars on the drive to Chicumbane), and a meeting with my other org Tsembeka. (I will talk about my new orgs in a later blog post, once I get a general idea of what they do and what I will be doing.)

During both meetings with my organizations, Ilidio stressed the point that I am, well, ME. I’m not the previous volunteer Emily, or the volunteer before her (Meghan?)… I am a Peace Corps volunteer as well, but I am my own person with my own strengths and my own personality. I really appreciated this emphasis because I’m nervous about expectations placed on me. Whereas I was the first health volunteer in Chimundo, and had to “blaze my own path through the wilderness,” here in Chicumbane I’m living in someone else’s shadow. Kind of like how in the movie “The Devil Wears Prada,” the main character Andrea is still constantly called “Emily,” her predecessor, until she proves her worth. Even the predecessor’s name is the same!

When I tell other volunteers about moving to Chicumbane, their immediate reaction is, “Oh, Emily’s site?” Or when Ilidio and I got to Chibuto and had to meet someone in the community, our reference point was “Emily’s house.” I spent most of the first night in Chicumbane de-Emily-fying the house, not because I have anything against her (she’s actually been a great help through our email contact) but because well, it’s my house now, my space, my site, and my work.

The dogs are adjusting quite well to the move. (No more fence to keep them confined!) At first, they were a little freaked out and looked ready to bolt from the yard when I let them out of the crate… But once they discovered the grass next to the house, they were sold. Watching them weakly meander around sniffing the ground immediately after exiting the crate, was actually pretty amusing. They had both gotten sick during the ride (probably the bumpy unpaved route to get to the house from the main road) and were both soggy and disoriented, foaming slightly at the mouth. Mel had a dangling pendulum of drool hanging from her mouth, which reminded me of her first (and only other) car ride in her life, the day she arrived at my house as a sad little puppy with drool dripping off her chin then as well. The first night in Chicumbane, while I stayed up unpacking and organizing, both puppies fell fast asleep on the towels I laid out in my room and actually snored.

The craziness of moving lay not in the packing up (I defeated procrastination in college, and now actually begin things almost absurdly in advance), or in the actual moving (although that was not a walk in the park), but in the UNpacking of everything. The extensive bits and pieces that filled up my old house (easily two or three times as large as this house) in conjunction with the furniture and miscellaneous Emily belongings already here, made everything hectic. I felt as if my life had become one of those memory card games, where you flip over a card and think you know where the matching one is but of course, it’s not that one. However, once everything was squared away and look! I can actually see the floor again!, I was surprised at how easily I adjusted to my new home. This small, three room cement and canico house, which shares a yard with another family, actually fits my mental picture of “the Peace Corps experience” better than the last.

Of course, it’s also taken me a while to get oriented in my neighborhood. When Yoko came by to visit briefly on her way to Maputo, I had to ask the neighbor girl to walk me to the chapa stop to meet her. On the way back, I noticed a trail of orange peels on the ground leading from the market to the little street my house is on. Once Yoko left and I was forced to navigate the route again, I pulled a move from Hansel and Gretel and followed the orange peels all the way home. J