Six months in

I’ve hit the six month mark, and looking at it from here it all of a sudden doesn’t seem like I’ll be here that long. In the beginning I thought the end would never come, but recently time has gone fast. For me, the biggest noticeable change is how quickly something can become a normal part of life. I don’t think twice anymore about bucket baths, cockroaches, or walking into my neighbor’s yard and eating dinner. It’s just what you do, and it’s only when I talk to someone from home or get together with other volunteers that we stop to think “oh yeah, this isn’t how I used to do things”. Of course it’s better this way: I’m no longer pining for things I miss—mostly. It’s amazing how adaptable we can be, and how quickly something becomes our normal life. There are things—small things—that I realize I’m forgetting about the States. When I first got here one of the old volunteers asked me how Maputo seemed different to me than a US city, because it looked to her, after a year here, like an American city. My reaction was “what?! This looks nothing like any American city I’ve ever been to”. Well, I realized after my last trip to Maputo that now it is I who can’t really tell the difference.

I’m still learning that you really just never never never know what you would do in someone’s position unless you’re actually, literally, in it. I know that’s easy to say, but I still catch myself saying “I wouldn’t do that” or “when I’m put in position x I’ll do y”. When I went on a site visit in training to another volunteer who had already been here for year, she told me about her box of worm-infested oatmeal and how she sifted out the worms, cooked it, and ate it. And I was thinking “Ew. A. I’m going to be careful to make sure that bugs can’t get in my food and B. I would have just thrown it out.” Well, three months later, finding some weird kind of bug and its larvae all over my pasta, I took them off, cooked it, and ate it. Because, guess what, it’s impossible to keep the bugs out of your food, they’re everywhere, you can’t throw out everything, and anyway you don’t want to waste the food. But of course I didn’t know any of that, let alone lived that reality, until later, and after I had prematurely made the judgment call. And this was with another volunteer, someone with whom I have a lot more in common than the average person I interact with everyday. I just have to come to terms with the fact that there are some things I will never be able to truly understand, because at the end of the day I will never have anywhere close to the same life experience as a Mozambican. But, nevertheless, this ties back to things becoming normal: I am suddenly used to, and in some cases even taking pleasure in, things that I would have considered an inconvenience.

Maputo for regionals was great. The highlight might have been sitting on the sidewalk at an ice cream shop eating a huge ice cream sundae that, incidentally, cost roughly as much as I normally spend on food for a week (about $8). It was also probably my weekly calorie content as well. The week after next I’ll be going to Chimoio, in the center of Mozambique, about a day’s trip away. I’m helping with a conference run by Peace Corps volunteers for students in secondary schools that come from around the country to learn how to execute a year-long theater, community art, journalism, or photography project on living a healthy life, gender equality, and other life-skills. I spent last week helping write the curriculum that they’ll follow after they come back from the conference, and am really excited for the actual thing, as apparently it was amazing last year. Apparently the kids come out of it so empowered and excited and it’s really cool to see. I’m also excited to see some more of the country.

Hope things are well at home! With six months down I’ll see everyone before we know it.