Life is a Cookie

I'm asking my coworker for the 50th time whether we have a space locked down for the Peace Corps 50th Anniversary mural we are set to start work on next week, and if he has started working on the design. "Yeah, I'm working on it," He says, "No problem." "I'd like a design completed by this Friday," I say. "No problem" Is his response. I'm exasperated. "You always say no problem to everything," I chide. He looks at me with a wide, toothy grin and says, "With me, there's never a problem. The day I say there is a problem, then you know we really have a problem on our hands. For me, life is a cookie. Simple. Never loses its flavor, even in the middle."
I'm not exactly sure what that all means, but I like cookies. And I like life. So… Sounds good to me.
For a while, I had a phantom chicken living in my latrine. I would notice three-pronged prints in the sand, but never so much as a feather. Then one day, I discovered a small white egg in the corner of the latrine. I picked it up but then laden with guilt, and unsure of what to do with it, I put it back. The next day, still no mama chicken. I began to fear that a snake might find the egg, and that suddenly I'd have to deal with a serpent living in my latrine, so I gave the egg to my neighbor. Two days later, I opened my latrine door in the morning to find a disgruntled white chicken, just as startled as I was. It flew out in a whirlwind of feathers, exciting my dogs, who chased the poor distressed hen down the street squawking the entire way. Regardless, my latrine must be an appealing place to give birth, because later in the afternoon I found egg #2. I considered hatching it, but could think of no way to raise it outside of the house without my dogs eating it. So… I ate it for breakfast. I felt extremely guilty as I cracked it open over a hot pan, like I was aborting a baby chicken. I was also terrified a fetus would plop out, which would have undoubtedly made me puke. It was fine though, tasted normal. (Why wouldn't it?) I admit, I still feel pangs of guilt. Poor fluffy white chick that never was….
Also, the egg probably wasn't mine to eat. The mama chicken DID use my latrine as a birthing spot… TWICE. But I really don't know how fowl ownership works around here, especially since chickens roam freely. Sometimes they will have ribbons tied on their wings or legs, but the majority don't have any visible marking. And who owns the baby chicks? I assume the owner of the hen? All I know is, my stomach now owns the egg that I found in my latrine. Sorry, neighbor. (Ps. No new eggs since. The chicken must have abandoned my bathroom. Lately, though, with Mel pregnant I've been wondering how viable it would be for me to set up her birthing nest there, for shade and privacy.)
These days, work is going fantastically well. My knowledge and expertise seems to be in high demand. The activistas from Tsembeka raved about my first HIV training, and began insisting that I accompany them to their weekly childrens support groups to teach the kids. Which means, of course, that I have to continue insisting right back that I am not here to do things for them, I am here to do things with them and to teach them to be self-sufficient. "Oh but Mana Vivienne," They whine, "We're busy right now You're so much better at it. We haven't practiced. We don't remember how to do it. We're going to mess up the game." A million and one excused later, I'm still refusing to be the one to carry out the activity. I've set them up for complete success, with facilitator guides, visuals, props. (For our recent event for children, I created an entire Nutrition game with 40 cards of different kinds of food- drawn by hand, colored, labeled, cut out, ready to be categorized by food group.) I've spent hours sitting outside with Tsembeka activists, doing icebreaker activities, running over instructions on how to implement these things I'm teaching them. I guess now what I need to do, is work on their confidence in facilitating.
The other day, though, I sat in on one of Tsembeka's prayer meetings (It is, after all, a religious organization) and was a little surprised at some of the things I observed. Activists who I've always considered reserved or quiet, transformed into fiery orators when it comes to the word of God.
I'm always a bit taken aback by how vocal religion in Africa is, and how communal even. For example, we began and ended the meeting by praying. Normal, right? But unlike in the States, where usually one person prays for everyone or everyone prays silently to themselves, Mozambicans all start praying loudly at the same time and there's quite a chatter in the room for about five minutes and then suddenly it just dies down. I kept opening my eyes to observe everything, but everyone else seemed completely absorbed in their prayers. One lady kept sobbing "Yesu!" (Jesus) and the woman to my right kept spontaneously clapping her hands, a thunderous and unexpected clap that always made me jump. The coordinator (the only man at the meeting), next to me, was the only one praying in Portuguese, and his usual mild voice had transformed into the booming emphatic voice of a preacher.
After praying, the meeting commenced with every person standing up and saying something (in Changana, but translated to me by the coordinator) about how good God has been to the organization, and how we must ask His blessing and His help to continue forward in our mission, and how we must continue to listen and to serve Him. In between speakers, everyone would sing a church song (also in Changana). All in all, the meeting lasted about two hours and would probably have continued had the coordinator asked to wrap up because of another meeting. Near the end, the women sang a song and began dancing vigorously, grabbing objects (purses, notebooks, chairs) and placing them on their heads as they shimmied and swayed around the room. I must have looked confused, because the coordinator leaned over to explain to me that the song asks "How are you going to enter Heaven with that burden that you carry?"
It's getting hotter by the day. I am not looking forward to the upcoming months of intense heat. I survived one year already, so this will be my last of cruel African summer. Mosquitoes are multiplying, attracted to the lights I keep on. My white walls are dotted with smashed mosquito corpses, a disgusting "mural" of sorts that I'm too lazy to clean. The emergence of more bugs (increasing number of dead cockroaches I'm finding around the house too) means… GIANT SPIDERS. I'm not even kidding. They're the size of my hand, and I find one or two a day. (I have an idea for the title of a novel, set in Africa: 'In the Time of the Overgrown Spiders.' Would you read it?) I try living harmoniously with them, as Yoko does, (I scream whenever I see one in her house, she comes shoos it back into its hiding space, and informs me, "I just had a talk with him. We agreed he wouldn't come back out until our visitor Vivienne leaves.") but sometimes they make me so uncomfortable that I grab my Baygone (insect killer) can and go to town. Spiders need more Baygone to kill, and they take longer to die. One I sprayed in the kitchen crawled into my room and onto my mosquito net, so now when I'm laying in bed I have to look up at the body of a big dead spider. I'd rather not touch it, even still, so when Kevin arrives in a few months I'll ask him to dispose of the skeleton. That's what boyfriends are for, right?