That Brown Envelope

Bobby McFerrin was blasting over the speaker in the Hub:

In your life expect some trouble,

When you worry you make it double,

But don't worry, be happy.

Everyone was milling about. Some people were sitting inside clutching their water bottles and cellphones, while others were just outside, holding onto their friends’ shoulders. We had used a balloon during a medical session earlier that day, and a few people were standing in a circle tapping the balloon to keep it in the air. Some people stared at the ground silently; others chatted about absolutely anything. Still others nervously paced or swayed to the gentle music.

It soon will pass, whatever it is,

Don’t worry, be happy.

I pulled out my phone and hit record on my camera. I panned across the room, capturing the balloon and the chatter and the water bottles and the tense shoulders and the music and the silence. Another trainee, Abby, passed through the frame just as she declared to no one in particular, “My insides are falling out.”

Don’t worry.

It was site announcement day. Though most of us had known that we were headed for Peace Corps in Mozambique for close to a year, and though we had already been living here for just about two months, until that afternoon a few weeks ago, we still had no idea where in the country we would spend the next two years of our lives. And Mozambique is huge, making the weight of this unknown similarly great. It took some time to wrap my head around just how big this country really is, but this image drove the point home: the coastline of Mozambique is about 1600 miles, which is the same distance from Maine to Florida. I could be placed in Georgia or I could be placed in New Hampshire—and those would be two very different placements geographically, culturally, and politically. Same thing here: the provinces of Inhambane and Nampula are two very different placements.

Earlier that week, we each sat for a short interview with one of the two Education Program Managers (our future supervisors: there’s one for the northern provinces and one for the southern provinces) to briefly discuss our preferences for sites. Ultimately, we had very little control over our placement, and few of us played into the illusion that our merely saying, “I want to be near the mountains!” would materialize an idyllic high school perfectly situated at the top of the prettiest mountain in the country. There are a million factors that go into site placements and our input ranks pretty low on that list (and that’s fair, and that’s fine). In my interview I talked about this flexibility and the conversation led to discussing my willingness to open a new site or serve in a religious school. I didn’t lobby for the North or the South or for the mountains or the beach, because I really didn’t have a preference; what’s more, the superstitious part of me felt that if I expressed one desire, I would instantly receive the opposite. Though we had learned a great deal about the country and pros and cons of placements in different provinces throughout training, I actively worked to stay as neutral as possible in terms of my preferences.

So there we were, the Thursday of our eighth week in training, pacing around the Hub as the seemingly endless wait finally drew to a close. Trying not to worry; trying to be happy.

And what we were actually waiting for couldn’t have been more alluring: the whole training staff was outside constructing a gigantic map of Mozambique out of rocks and ash, complete with accurate borders, province names in huge letters, rocks denoting capital cities, and slips of paper that marked all of our future sites. We had heard there would be a big map, but no one was expecting it to be quite so big.

A handful of LCFs lay out the South of Mozambique.

It was really hard to capture. Really hard. But trust me, the map was big.

Finally, the map was finished. The final touch was to place 53 envelopes around the edge of the ash, each one with a unique name written on the outside and a unique future written on the inside.

We gathered inside the Hub to chat for a few minutes, but our Program Managers quickly realized that none of us could focus for a single second longer. “Vão,” they said. Go.

We ran outside and began circling the map looking for our names. The LCFs stood under the biggest tree in the Hub’s yard and sang a comforting song in a local language—I have no idea what the words were, but it was beautiful and warm. After doing half a lap around, I found my name and stood patiently at my envelope. We had agreed to wait until everyone had found their names before making the big move. “Zac, get over here!” “Emily! I see you!” “Molly, yours is over there.” “Brendan!” Eventually, we all arrived in our spots. We counted to three, leaned down, and picked up the brown envelopes that contained the first details of the next two years of our lives.

Waiting for the last few folks to find their spot around the map.

The anxious view looking down.

Meaningful envelope message: enhanced.

I waited a moment and watched everyone open their envelopes. Faces lit up with excitement, confusion, relief. Everyone shuffled the papers inside, trying to take everything in at once. People ran to their spots on the map, grinning and jumping and frantically looking around to see where everyone else was headed.

When I opened my envelope, at first I couldn’t make sense of what I was reading. I saw my name, province, town, and high school highlighted in yellow on a big list. After a few seconds, the words came into focus: Maputo Province. Oh. That’s where I am now. Oh, oh. I read the name of my site and my school. A small town. Okay, okay. I don’t know where that is. It must be close. Oh. My heart sank a little bit. I was nervous. I flipped through the other papers, not actually reading anything written on them, and numbly walked through the frenzy of trainees racing to far-off places near Malawi and on the coast and up in the North all the way to the very bottom of the map where I stood at my site under the shade of the big tree next to the singing LCFs. I kept trying to read the other papers. I couldn’t process anything.

I gave up trying to read and started looking around at the new image the map presented: a giant, life-sized picture of the fragmentation of Moz 32. Everyone suddenly seemed so far away. Our tight, unified cohort was suddenly a scattered collection of individuals.

From the South looking North, everyone decodes the first few details of their sites.

The LCF’s song ended and Nércio walked up to me and asked about my site. I said the name and he started describing it well, saying lots of positive things, but none of it registered. Either in Portuguese or English or a mix of both, I interrupted him and said, “I’m so sorry, I just can’t understand Portuguese right now.” He put his hand on my shoulder and laughed. “Tá bom.” It’s fine. Cat came running up to me and we hurriedly yelled details at each other.

“Maputo. Small town. English.”

“Inhambane. Near the beach. Math.”

We turned to Nércio, who was chuckling at our anxious conversation. We wanted a number. He looked at the maps from our envelopes and did some quick math. “8 hours, or 9. Maybe more.” We nodded and nodded. Okay. Good. That’s good. That’s close. He nodded with us, probably getting a kick out of seeing us look more serious than we ever had in all of our hours of língua class together. His laughter broke through our anxiety, and our shoulders dropped. I exhaled for the first time that day.

We were then able to have an actual conversation in Portuguese. He said glowing things about both of our sites. I started reading through my packet again and the details started to sink it. The picture painted was simple, but the descriptions thorough. I began to smile a lot.

Then we all ate more food than anyone would ever need to eat. Fried pockets of meat and veggies and fish, egg rolls upon egg rolls, and a few giant cakes. This is not the training staff’s first rodeo; they know that there is nothing better for a group of young Americans stressed out of their minds than instant, easy access to a few liters of strawberry soda and a plate full of chocolate cake. We ate and chatted and pointed to maps for a few hours. We kept hugging each other as if we hadn’t seen one another in weeks; those ten minutes of reading our packets alone felt like a lifetime.

Food.

Map.

Noah, our cohort’s northern-most volunteer, points out the distance between our two sites. (I am second most southern.)

After we polished off all of the food and had regurgitated the details contained in our envelopes to a few dozen other trainees, we gathered back inside the Hub for a talent show. There was singing (Cory), dancing (Caitlin & Kirsten, Samara), slack-lining (Noah), a xima-eating contest (Abby vs. Aza vs. Maggie vs. Rachel), short form improv (Emily, Ted, me) and a timely rendition of Weekend Update (Cooper, Brendan) complete with a spot-on Stefon impression (Cole). The room was electric. We channeled all of our absurdly heightened emotions from the day into performing and laughing and cheering and celebrating one another. Anxiety became support, right in that space.

Live from the Hub...it’s Cooper, Cole, and Brendan making some funnies.

By the time the day ended and we were bound for home, my perspective on my site had completely turned around. There’s a simple explanation as to why I didn’t know how to respond to my site placement at first: no one expects to be placed in Maputo. That’s not to say that it’s a bad province, or that people do not have incredibly successful and meaningful experiences of service there; of course it’s not, and of course they do. It is the smallest province (that we serve in: technically the national capital city of Maputo constitutes its own province and the smallest one at that) and therefore has the smallest number of volunteers. Only three people from our cohort will be in the whole province. But more than on a statistical level, people don’t expect to be placed in Maputo Province because it doesn’t quite feel like any other site placement. Going to sites means leaving training, spreading your wings, and seeing the rest of this giant, gorgeous country. So to be placed a few hours down the road feels...a little off. But as the letter on the outside of our envelopes said, sites are about people and relationships, not views or locations or things. One advantage, I’m finding, is that Maputo Province volunteers learn that lesson pretty quickly.

I learned it that very same day, when I went home to my family. I walked in with my envelope in hand. Mãe, Pai, and Jú were sitting in the living room. “How are you?” I asked. “We are good,” my mãe said eagerly, “especially now that I see my daughter has that brown envelope.” I sat on the couch with them and smiled. I knew I had good news and I wanted to do my best to drag it out. Leading up to this day, my mãe had sat me down a number of times to tell me stories about how different volunteers of hers had reacted to their site placements. Some were overjoyed, and she celebrated with them. Some cried for hours and she comforted them. She reminded me again and again that she would be there for me no matter how I reacted.

“Mana Sarah, are you feeling happy?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.

My smile grew. “Mãe, I am feeling very happy.”

I opened my envelope and took out the map that had all of our names pointing to our various sites. They scanned it for a few moments. Jú found my name first. She gasped. “Maputooo!” she yelled. Mãe snatched the paper and focused in on the South. “Really? Really?” Then she saw it. She threw the paper down and looked in my eyes, her face glowing. “Manaaaa!!”

I have found that it is rare, in real life, for people to be filled with so much joy that they know not what to do with themselves and can only resort to hugging and simultaneously jumping up and down, yelling and laughing and panting almost to the point of tears. I experienced that joy that day, and it was real. We hugged and jumped and yelled for a number of minutes. Jú kept saying, “Our prayers were heard!” And my mãe kept repeating, “My daughter will be close. My daughter will be close!” These homestay families pour so much love and patience and time into raising us to be functioning adults, and then we disappear, sometimes forever. To know that their daughter will be close enough to come back and visit—or, perhaps more importantly, that I will be close enough for them to come visit me—is, truly, a prayer answered. I hadn’t realized it beforehand, but now I know I would have taken the hottest, most humid site with no access to fruit and only access to chicken if it meant I could give them that gift of proximity and joy. I very quickly learned that nothing else mattered.

Mãe and Jú study the map looking for familiar names. 

But luckily, I don’t have that site. I still haven’t been there, so there are many unanswered questions, but here's what I do know about my future home. It is a very small, rural town about 3 hours northwest of Maputo City and just a few kilometers from the South Africa border. The next closest town (which has a Health PCV, my closest American neighbor) is an hour away down a bumpy dirt road. I have to travel the road to that town to pick up another bus or car to get to Maputo City or anywhere else. My school is small: it has five classrooms and one library, 15 teachers, and 400-500 students. They have had 8th, 9th, and 10th grades for a while, and this year they added 11th. When the new school year begins at the end of January, they will have a 12th grade for the first time. The director requested someone who could teach Geography or English and who could coach sports, especially basketball, outside of school. I will live in a dependencia, essentially a small guest house, in the yard of the only other English teacher and his family. The market always has tomatoes, onions, and bananas, and depending on the time of year, it may have various other fruits and vegetables. There are a couple of stores that have essentials like rice and beans and flour. There are a few small, informal restaurants. There is an ATM but no bank. A big river runs through the heart of town that serves as a major water source and my pai has reminded me almost every day that there are crocodiles in the river and thus I should never take a bath in the river. There was only one Peace Corps Volunteer there before me from 2016-2018 and the community is excited about the prospect of receiving a second volunteer.

I am excited to receive them, too.

At the end of the day we helped clear the rocks. The ash outline of the map, and the excitement of this day, stuck around for a few more weeks.