Water, WiFi, Fish

There is water here. There is not WiFi here. I eat here.

These were the three most frequent questions I received in the months leading up to my departure for the Peace Corps:

1. Can you drink the water there?
2. Will you be able to use your phone?
3. What will you eat?

I recognize that these questions came from a place of concern, and for that reason, I appreciated them. But these questions also came from a lack of information on the part of Americans about so many places in the world, and specifically Africa. We grow up hearing one story of Africa, and it is based in media and imagery and literature and broad, sweeping generalizations. We watched this TED Talk during a training session the other day about this idea of single stories, and even if you’ve seen it before, it is worth a rewatch:

If I told someone I was moving to Mozambique for two years, they often did not know where that was—and I’ll be honest, when I received my assignment, neither did I! I’m an uninformed American, too—and when I would respond that it is located in Southern Africa, immediately those three questions came out: Water!? Phone?! Food!? Before I left, I didn’t have real answers to those questions. I only had the information I had scraped together from the Peace Corps website, random Reddit posts, blogs from volunteers past, and lots of assumptions.

After having been here for just about a month, I now have informed answers to those questions. So here, for everyone who asked, are my way-more-updated responses.

[To avoid perpetuating any generalizations, though, I’ll go out of my way to note: this is all based on my experience the past few weeks and does not mean anyone else in Africa, in Mozambique, in this town, or even on the street where I live has had or will have this same experience. This is what I’ve learned, filtered through language and interpretation and my perspective. Okay.]

Water

Before we left our orientation hotel in Maputo, we were taught how to set up, use, and maintain the water filter that Peace Corps Mozambique provides to each trainee and volunteer. Assembling the filter is very self-explanatory, and the crucial part is that every opening is tightly sealed to ensure that clean water remains clean. There are two methods to cleaning water: bleaching and boiling. To use bleach, you put cool water into the top of the filter, wait for it to all drip down to the bottom, and then add 2 drops of bleach per liter of water. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes, and then it is good to drink. I use the boiling method: bring water to a rolling boil for at least 3-5 minutes, and then cover and let cool. Put it in the filter, and once it goes through, it is fine for drinking. We clean our filters once every two weeks by disassembling and scrubbing each part with soap and water. The candles (the part that actually does the filtering) must sit in a bleach solution (10 drops of bleach to one liter of water) for 15 minutes. The filter holds a lot of water, and we have consistent access to treated water at the Hub every day, so I don’t find myself filtering water all that often. Sometimes we have bottled water with dinner, too, so there are lots of opportunities for me to not be responsible for cleaning every sip of water I take each day. That’ll change when I’m off on my own at site, but for now, it’s nice.

Assembling my water filter on my first day in my new home.

What my bright white candles look like after a few weeks of strong filtering.

We don’t have running water in our home, which appears to be the norm in our neighborhood, so instead we have lots of vessels that hold lots of water: buckets, larger buckets, a barrel, an old tub, and a really big water holding thing. This is how my mãe explained the process of getting water in our home: When it rains, water collects in a reservoir that serves this district within our province. Water moves to nearby tanks that store the water for our community. Once a week, water goes from the tanks to the tap in our yard through underground pipes. The water usually shows up on Saturdays, and we attach a hose to the tap and fill up the buckets and the larger buckets and the barrel and the old tub and the big water holding thing. We also water the garden. My family pays the municipal government monthly for access to this water. Not everyone pays this way and gets water this way—I can’t speak to how families who don’t have a tap in their yard get their water.

Let’s follow the water. Here’s the water tap in our yard on a Saturday.

The hose is going across our front yard, around the old tub, and onto the porch.

The hose is headed into the bathroom window.

Inside the bathroom, the hose fills up one of our large buckets. 

The other half of the bathroom, with two other large buckets, three smaller buckets (the size used for showering and doing laundry) and our dump flush toilet.

Back out on the porch, it’s our really big water holding thing!

It hadn’t rained all year here before September. In 2015 and 2016, it didn’t rain at all. The reservoir went dry, and people had to travel very far to get water—I’m not sure exactly where, but realistically you needed a car and it cost a lot of money. It was a very, very stressful two years. My mãe used to raise chickens in our yard and sell them at the market, but as she said, “Chickens are very thirsty.” They drink so much water. So when there wasn’t a lot of water, she had to give up her chicken operation.

It is remarkable how little water you really need to do so many things. Taking a shower? Half a bucket. Doing a full day’s dishes? Maybe a full bucket, on a particularly messy day. Need to flush the toilet? Use some of the leftover water from your shower. Done with that water you used to clean tomatoes? Sprinkle it in the garden so that more will grow. The resourcefulness of my family continues to amaze and inspire me every single day. Everything can be conserved or reused and repurposed again and again, even water.

Me washing my clothes with three different buckets of, you guessed it, water: soapy, less soapy, and not soapy.

WiFi

We were gifted two local SIM cards on our second day in Maputo: one for Vodacom and one for Movitel, the two most popular phone companies in Mozambique. We were encouraged to use Vodacom for training (because the signal is usually better in this part of the country) but hold onto the other SIM card if we move somewhere with different reception. I have a Verizon phone that was locked and wouldn’t accept the new SIM card, but after some remarkably (and let me stress, remarkably) quick communication between my uncle and Verizon’s customer support, I got the phone remotely unlocked and it has been working fine since.

In a conference call we had with Peace Corps staff back in July, someone asked about phones and data and internet access, and I remember very clearly the answer being something to the effect of, “It’s so easy! You buy credit anywhere, at a market or from a neighbor or just on the street, and then convert it to data and use your phone like normal!” This, of course, made absolutely no sense and only made me feel more confused about what to expect.

But here’s the thing: it does work exactly like that, and it’s pretty cool. You buy little slips of credit that have a scratch-off code on the back, from anywhere: the market is a great place, and there are other stands on the main road in town, but my neighbor two doors down also sells credit out of her home. Anywhere means anywhere. You scratch off the back to reveal the code, and then dial a sequence of numbers and that code into your phone to upload that credit to your account. (You dial as if you’re making a phone call, but it unlocks a series of steps to make changes to your account instead of calling anyone.) That credit now makes your phone work as a telephone: you can place and receive calls and text messages. To use the internet or any apps that require data, you have to convert your credit into megabytes of data—that’s another sequence of numbers and simple series of steps. The most cost effective thing seems to be to buy a limited amount of data that will expire after a week, and then use it. If you go through it too quickly, buy and convert some more! Or if you have too much and don’t want to lose it, buy a new weekly package to bump the sum over to the next week.

100 MT of credit with a code I already used. This little piece of thick paper is roughly 1/4 inch tall and 2 inches wide.

Credit is cheap. It’s basically the only thing I consistently buy with my training living allowance. Apps like Instagram and Facebook use a lot of data, so I’ve enjoyed phasing them out of my routine in favor of WhatsApp and data-free Portuguese study. I’m still trying to find the most cost effective way to download lots of podcasts. It’s a learning process, but a very intuitive one.

The two codes I use most frequently: one to check my data balance, and one to prompt the process of converting more credit to data.

Ultimately, there is no WiFi. But that’s okay: there are work-arounds for WiFi. (And it’s not that WiFi doesn’t exist here, it just isn’t common to have in your home or find in a restaurant, especially somewhere outside of the city. In Maputo, there is a big public park with strong, free WiFi. It varies depending on where you are, just like everywhere in the world.) To post this very blog post, I am using data on my phone to create a hotspot for my computer to reach the internet. I am being smart and conserving, though, just as I do with water: I’ll do as much as I can offline (typing in a word document, airdropping photos from my phone to my computer) before I really need to connect and start using data (to upload photos to this site, navigate through different pages, and then actually publish). Though there was an adjustment period, I have now gotten into the habit of using my phone less frequently and more efficiently (most of the time).

Fish

We were given a “Homestay Portuguese Cheat Sheet” before the trip to our training village with the essential words and phrases we’d need to get us through the first few days before our language started to pick up. Good afternoon. Boa tarde. Are we going to church on Sunday? Vamos a igreja no domingo? My stomach hurts. Minha barriga dói. Stuff like that.

Then there was one interesting sentence, under the “Food Basics” section. Eu não posso comer peixe todos os dias! I can’t eat fish every day!

No matter the inflection—I CAN’T eat fish every day! I can’t eat FISH every day! I can’t eat fish EVERY day!—I’ve neither wanted nor needed to say that sentence ever in my life. Why was this on the essential list of Portuguese phrases? We laughed and laughed and laughed on the bus ride out here.

A month in, two things have turned out to be true:

1. That is, in fact, an essential sentence to know in Portuguese in Mozambique.
2. I can, in fact, eat fish every day.

I have been a vegetarian for a little over 10 years. No meat, no fish. There are certain Peace Corps sites where it is simply not feasible (or at least really, really hard) to be a vegetarian. In other countries, it is the norm; it varies across the world, of course. It is very possible to be a pretty strict vegetarian in Mozambique, and we have a number of vegetarians and even a vegan in our group who all appear to be doing just fine. Even though I knew vegetarianism wouldn’t be a gigantic issue, I wanted to err on the side of being less difficult and start eating fish again. I practiced a bit over the summer with fish & chips from Kelly’s in Medford and shrimp cocktail from Costco and salmon at my cousin Erin’s house and other tame, controlled fish meals at various places in the greater Boston area. I remembered that I liked fish quite a bit! I felt prepared.

Then I sat down for dinner on my first night with my homestay family and saw this:

Actual photo of my first dinner with my family.*

I definitely was not ready to eat fish here. It was a mess: I had no idea how to use my fork, I couldn’t navigate around the bones, and I wasn’t sure how much of the skin I should eat. I ate so many bones. I did not want to eat the bones; I just literally didn’t know how not to. There were so many bones.

But luckily, I was able to practice by proceeding to eat fish every single day for either lunch or dinner: fried fish, baked fish, fish coated in flour and then fried, fish chopped up into a potato salad, fish in small pieces, fish in very large pieces, fish fried inside on the stove, fish fried outside over the fire. All of the fish. I’ve come to enjoy it quite a bit, and I’m glad to have a consistent source of protein.

*Okay, what it actually looks like eating fish in my house.

My mãe was insistent that I learn how to gut and clean a fish so that I’d be able to continue to eat fish every single day when I live on my own. I was resistant at first. Yes, I understand that cleaning and preparing the fish is an essential component of the cooking process—but I am a privileged 22-year-old who has been a vegetarian by choice for many years and has never needed to be so intimately involved in the process of my own food preparation! And it’s gross! I knew I had to put my privilege in check and get my hands covered in fish guts, but I didn’t do it the first time my mãe encouraged me to join her. She reached into the murky red water and picked up a fish by its head, gripping its mouth in her fingers, and in a high voice said, “Sarah, Sarah! Help clean me!” And, look—moving a fish’s mouth to make it overtly mock someone is OBJECTIVELY FUNNY IN ANY LANGUAGE OR CULTURE. But I just felt so uncomfortable. It was a lot for me. It was hard to eat dinner that night.

A few days later, my mãe brought out a bucket to clean fish and I asked to help. She raised an eyebrow. You sure? I was sure. I jumped in and got to slicing and tugging and sloshing. And yes, it was gross. But I also enjoyed it in a very unexpected way. Once the dead fish was in my hands, I felt the responsibility to adequately cleanse it of its weird fish insides and outsides. If this fish is transitioning into a new role in this world—my meal—I owe it my gratitude by properly preparing it for that transition: that means giving care and attention to how I cut it and how I clean it and how I handle it. As my mãe taught me, it is not aggressive, but gentle. It honestly feels respectful. I felt so much more comfortable eating dinner after having more deeply understood its benevolent preparation. I was not anticipating such a spiritual awakening and connection with a bucket of dead fish, but I guess this is what enlightenment looks like.

My mãe preparing two fish.

No waste: the neighbor kitten enjoys the parts of the fish we won’t eat.

I eat things other than fish, too: lots rice and xima and pasta and potatoes, a good amount of salad, Mozambican dishes with leafy greens and peanuts and coconuts, loads of fresh tomatoes and eggplant and cabbage and peppers and cucumbers and beets and onions and carrots, and there are always bananas or oranges or papayas around the house for snacking. For breakfast, I started out eating bread with peanut butter, which was fine, but then I mentioned to my mãe that I love eating eggs and since then I’ve made a fried egg sandwich almost every morning. There are familiar foods and very new foods, and I’m content with what I eat each day.

A typical view in our kitchen: many, many tomatoes, white onions, green onion, carrots, peppers, lemon, cucumbers, beets, cassava, coconut, and a bag of green beans.

Cleaning fresh vegetables is a process involving bleach and patience, much like water filtration.

An early morning egg sandwich before training.

In Review

Water? Yes, and there are many steps involved.

WiFi? No. But there’s plenty of data.

Fish? Fish.

Mãe Means Mother

My mãe was waving her phone in my face, smiling and nodding, urging me to take it.

“Alô?”

“Oh, hey, we can talk in English.”

“Oh! Okay. . . . And who is this?”

Unbeknownst to me, I was speaking with Rachel, the volunteer who moved out of my house a few weeks ago. She lived with my homestay family for her three months of training with the Moz 31 health cohort, and now she is living at site on her own.

“I want you to know that you have, hands down, the BEST homestay family in Peace Corps. I know everyone says that, but for you, it’s true,” Rachel told me over the phone. My mãe was beaming watching our conversation unfold from the other couch. “Mãe is so patient and kind and gentle,” Rachel went on. I looked at my mãe and smiled, beginning to put together the pieces that had led to this conversation: Yesterday, as we sat on the porch removing the shells from peanuts in a large basket, I watched my mãe shuffle through some papers and pull up an old PC homestay assignment sheet. She underlined a phone number and told me something about a former volunteer—I thought she was telling me that she was going to visit her at her site, or that the volunteer was coming to visit the village—I said something like, “Que bom!” and continued shelling peanuts.

But in that moment on the couch, it all made sense. My mãe had gone out of her way to facilitate a conversation with a fellow volunteer who was literally in my position, in this training, in this house, just a few weeks ago. She made it a point to spark a connection I didn’t know I had the chance to make. Rachel said this happened when she arrived, too, and she was confused at first, too. We chatted for a few minutes, and then the phone bounced around the room so that everyone could catch up. I was in awe, but as Rachel indicated, it was par for the course.

The Hub, from afar.

We arrived in our training village on Sunday morning in two chapas, like at the airport. We pulled right up to the Hub—the heart of the training center—got out, and walked into the open-air structure. All of our mães stood on the opposite side of the room, singing. After a few numbers, the mães unrolled small strips of paper. We were instructed to walk around the room, looking for the paper with our name. I scanned a few faces and papers before coming upon mine: Gilda, my mom for the next three months.

I smiled and approached her and said, “Eu sou Sarah.”

“Sarah? Sarah!”

She gave me a big hug and then immediately grabbed my left hand, our fingers interlocking. “Vamos,” she said, and I was swept away from the other volunteers and into her direct care before I could blink.

The main road in our bairro, facing NW, away from the training center and towards my house.

I exhausted 100% of my Portuguese on the walk from the Hub to our house. My name is Sarah. How are you? I am good. It is nice to meet you. Where do you live? Here? Okay. When we arrived, I met the rest of the family. I have one sister, Jú, who is two years my senior. On that first day, there were four little cousins running around, but they only happened to be visiting the day I arrived. (A few days later once my Portuguese had expanded, I learned that they actually live just down the road.) I also have a pai, but he works in Maputo and wasn’t there initially. Two days he’s here, two days he’s gone. I have a brother, as well, who is a college student in Maputo and visits on school breaks. So most of the time, it is me, Jú, and Mãe.

We had been told that our mães are encouraged to treat us like children: though we are adults and know how to eat, clean ourselves, and take care of a house, we have no idea how to eat, clean ourselves, and take care of a house in Mozambique. The first thing my mãe taught me was how to wash my hands. The kitchen sink is a double sink with a bucket in each half. We both put soap on our hands and scrubbed, using a little water from the left bucket. We rinsed in the left bucket, dipped our hands in the right one, and then dried off with a dish towel. Success! Hand washing in the kitchen follows the same rules as dish washing, which is exactly the same as Girl Scouts taught me: scrub and rinse with soapy, dirty water, and then dunk in a clean water-and-bleach mixture.

We then ate a small salad (lettuce, tomato, and slices of raw onion with oil, vinegar, and salt) in the dining room while a Portuguese-dubbed version of Mickey Mouse Club House played in the background for the kids. I shared a few Portuguese-Spanish-jibberish thoughts, but mostly just quietly ate my onions and listened to Portuguese Donald Duck. After eating, we washed our dishes (scrub, rinse, dunk) and then went into my room to begin unpacking my bags and assembling my bed. My sheets were at the very bottom of my largest backpack, so I took every other item out and put it on my table, learning lots of vocabulary along the way. (Notebook! Sweater! A bag of underwear! Sim, sim!) Mãe and Jú left me to finish unpacking, and then we ate another meal, some sort of vegetable soup. I broke the news to them that I am a vegetarian. My mãe was surprised and said that though she has hosted nine previous volunteers, she has never had a vegetarian. But I shouldn’t feel bad; she is eager to learn, just like me.

My bedroom, before I had fully unpacked (and properly unfurled my mosquito net).

I sat down to show them photos of my family and friends and immediately realized I had absolutely no family vocabulary beyond mother, father, sister, brother. I learned quickly, though. (Aunt? Uncle? Cousin’s daughter who I call cousin? Exactly who is Mina?) Mãe noticed the globe stress balls that we had at my going away party in one photo with Aunt Marie and she remembered that I had one in my big backpack. I grabbed it from my room and used it to point to Boston and New York. That afternoon, we took a quick tour of the village with the current volunteers, Jackie and Nikia, and then came back home for dinner. Before eating, I took my first bucket bath—more on that another time—and then after eating and cleaning, my mãe sat down with me on my bed to explain the morning routine.

She proposed I wake up at 6:30am, put water on to boil, and then go back to sleep for 10-15 minutes while it boils. Get back up, put some boiling water in a bucket with a little cold water (to make warm water) and then put the rest in a thermos for tea. Take a bath, get dressed, drink tea and eat bread with peanut butter or plain butter, take crackers and juice for my mid-morning snack, and then walk to the Hub for training, which begins promptly at 7:30am. With my very little Portuguese, I tried to express that I didn’t think I would have enough time to accomplish all of that in an hour on my very first day. This thought was not getting across, and she kept repeating the proposed order of events. She even wrote it down, because she was worried I was confused. Eventually I got across my concern, and we amended the plan to begin at 6am. She gave me a big hug and wished me a good night’s sleep, and I woke up a few hours later and got to boiling and bathing and bread-ing.

My morning routine, as written by Mãe at the bottom of a sheet of notes from orientation.

I have been living here six days. I speak in sentences now. I wash the dishes each night with Jú. I take a bath twice a day, when I wake up and before dinner. (It’s usually around 7:30pm when my mãe looks at me from across the room and gently says, “There’s a bucket in the bathroom that you can use to bathe.” It’s never direct, it’s always slightly indirect, which is incredibly sweet. Remember how bathing is a thing? You can do that, you know. I am still not used to showering at night so every day I need this reminder.) I watch the news and many, many soap operas after dinner. I filter my water in my bedroom and put my trash in the only trashcan, the one outside the house. I sleep under a mosquito net and take a malaria pill each night. I learn dozens of new words and ideas every day, each time I interact with someone. Everything has become so normal and so comfortable so quickly.

I expected the transition of moving into someone’s home to be much more awkward than it has been. For me, I am in a brand new country in a brand new part of the world doing things and saying things and eating things I have never experienced before. For my family, though, this is normal. They have had Peace Corps volunteers in their home fairly regularly for the past 7 or 8 years. They anticipate my problems and communicate across cultures and languages with ease. They are comfortable, so I am comfortable. They practice hospitality and community and warmth so well.

The view out the kitchen door early in the morning.

I met my pai a few days ago. I was sitting on the couch after training and a man walked in the living room and sat down next to me. I said hello and he said hello. We shook hands. He looked stern. My mother leaned in and said to him, “This is your new daughter, Sarah.” His face completely changed. “Sarah? Okay!” He shook my hand for about forty-five seconds, telling me how glad he was to meet me. He’s funny and kind and smart and never gives me a straight answer when I ask silly questions, which I appreciate. He quizzes me on vocabulary around the house and pokes fun at me when I screw up. He left for Maputo after two days and bid me farewell. I told him that when he returns, I will be fluent in Portuguese. We’ll see.

Jú loves to cook and loves to sing. She recently graduated college as an elementary school teacher, though she isn’t working in a school currently. She is a constant, bright presence around the house. She says she doesn’t know any English but there have been a few moments where she “guesses” words correctly. Jú took me to a neighbor’s house to buy phone credits and took me on an adventure to buy bread at a market and watch the sunset. She is fiercely independent and, as far as I can tell, can do everything.

I have known my mãe for less than a week but she is already one of the most important people I will meet in this life, I know it. She teaches me things without being condescending and flips through my dictionary with me when I am struggling with words. She is so, so smart and I trust her so much. We are good at small talk and joking and understanding each other even though my Portuguese proficiency is pretty low. We were watching the Pope leave Mozambique today during lunch, and she asked me what it’s like to fly. She has never been on an airplane, but pledged she will go on one when I get married. She wants me to grow, which is why she feeds me so much bread at every meal every day. We had a formal opening of training at the Hub on the second day and while we waited for a representative from the local government to show up, the mães sang songs in their seats. At one point, a few mães got up to dance and mine beelined for me across the room, took my hand, and started dancing with me. In an instant, everyone was on their feet, dancing with their mães. My mãe knows how to start a movement.

I took down Rachel’s phone number so that we could keep in touch and continue our conversation at a later date. “Please enjoy your time in training so much,” she told me before we wrapped up. “I know you just got there and you’re like, but I want to see the rest of Mozambique! I know, I know. But just enjoy these three months.” I get the sense that I will.