The Things In My House

On Wednesday, March 11, I had a site visit from my Program Manager Sérgio. He came with Miambo, the Peace Corps driver who helped me move into my site back in December, to check in on how life was going at site: the two of them observed a 9th grade English class I taught, they spoke with my Pedagogical Director and fellow teachers, they chatted with Jacob, they visited my house to see that everything was in order and up to standards, and then they took me out to lunch before making the bumpy drive back to Maputo.

The site visit ran perfectly. The class they sat in on was the best class I’ve ever taught in my life. The students were spooked to have visitors in the room, so they were on their best behaviors. I planned a very engaging, participatory lesson, and everyone was engaged and everyone participated. Sérgio said I appeared very calm and confident the entire time, and he loved that I focused my energy building up the girls in the room until they started participating more than the boys. When they visited my house, the only issue was a broken mosquito net on one of my windows. I assured them I’d get it fixed immediately. I ate my first ever meal at my town’s restaurant (and met the owner, a South African farm owner named Jan). Sérgio and Miambo and I gossiped about all the necessary gossip for a few hours, and then they left. After what had been a few stressful, challenging weeks, I suddenly felt like a successful, good Volunteer.

Because I knew they were coming, I spent a bit of time organizing my house. It wasn’t a mess before their visit, but it wasn’t pristine, either; this was a good excuse to shuffle papers and stack dishes and roll all of my clothes into neat lines. When they left and I walked back into my very clean house, it occurred to me I should take some photos. Fellow PCV Cole had just posted a long, wonderful blog post about his house and his town that was full of photos, and I figured I could do something similar. So I walked around my house and my yard capturing the simple scenes that were the backdrop to my everyday life at site. I planned to spend the next week taking photos of my school and my market and my church and all the other scenes that filled up my days. I wrote a note in my phone for what these blog entries would be called: “Things in my House” and “Things in my Town.”

I don’t think there will be a “Things in my Town” post. And now this post isn’t what it was going to be, because all of a sudden nothing—absolutely nothing—is close to what it was ever going to be.

But anyway.

This is a full view of my house. Jacob and Guida’s house is to the right, and the majority of my neighbor kid friends live in two houses on the left.

There are three equally sized rooms in my house: my bedroom to the right, the kitchen in the middle, and a third room to the left that serves as a storage room and/or living room, depending on the day.

Here’s my bedroom.

This is the other side of my bedroom. Back in January I designed a piece of furniture and gave my sketch to our local carpenter. A few weeks later, it was in my house and I finally had somewhere to put all of my clothes. (Until then, my clothes had been sitting on hanging triangular shelves I’d made out of cardboard from the box my refrigerator came in. Those shelves lasted a month*, and then I reused the cardboard for those triangles of sentimental things hanging on the side with the small mirror.)

*Actually 26 days, for the one and only one person reading this who cares about that detail.

Here’s my kitchen, standing from my bedroom door. The deep green and blue basins on the left are my “sink.”

The other part of the kitchen, facing my bedroom door.

This is the third room. There’s a lot of random things in here: all of my school supplies and medical supplies in that big trunk (center, left) and then all of my home goods essentials like an iron and bleach and toilet paper on that strange shelving structure. There’s a giant bag of rice and a giant container of oil. Two backup water containers for when the water doesn’t run from the spigot in the yard (or is too dirty to use). I drank more soda at site than I normally would—I enjoyed having an excuse to walk to Valdim’s and chat with him and his family, and whenever a visitor appeared at my door it was nice to have cold soda around to offer—and I kept all of the bottles. I didn’t want to throw away perfectly good bottles, and knew they’d serve as good arts and crafts fodder somewhere down the line.

On the table are various books and papers representing the core of my day-to day-work: 2-week curriculum planning sheets, a stack of corrected 8th and 9th grade English tests, one lesson planning notebook with a pink folder (with more tests) on top, and then books for my various children. The stack of Portuguese picture books sits atop a notebook that I bought in Maputo and designated the property of my neighbor kids. Two rules for the drawing notebook: only 2 pages (front and back) can be used in one calendar day—whether that’s one person who uses all of them or 20 people who share them, it doesn’t matter to me; working together and taking turns and compromising is key—and the other rule is that you have to write your name next to your drawing, because we want to be able to look back on the drawing notebook and see what we’ve created and be proud of what we’ve created. The black notebook under the crayons is my notebook for English tutoring. It is full of practice sentences and grammar structure explanations written out for anyone who’d stop by my house asking for help.

Here’s a closeup of the neighbor kids’ notebook and the storybook that inspired one of the drawings.

Here’s a thing that arrived in my house in early February. His name is Xipi, based on the Changana word for cat (xipixi). I got him from Dúlia and her family. I have so many cute photos of him climbing mango trees and curled up on his blue sheet on top of clothes in my bedroom and drinking out of his big water bowl under my water filter in the kitchen, but I like this one the best. It was taken on my birthday when I was talking on the phone with Cat (no relation).

Part of my house isn’t inside my house. The bathroom is a little walk away, a small cement structure on the other side of Jacob and Guida’s house. During his site visit, Sérgio remarked that the bathroom was very far away from the house. Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me that the short walk was, indeed, a bit out of the ordinary. Outside of the bathroom is also the laundry zone. Pictured here are a whole bunch of socks and underwear I’d washed and was drying on the fence by Jacob’s garden.

The bathroom itself is a very, very tight space. The door doesn’t open all the way, because a big basin sits in the corner holding water for toilet flushing purposes. But here is the best picture I could manage. I’d stand in a bucket in that open space to take a bath, then drain the soapy water down the small hole against the back wall.

Here’s a thing that’s not in my house but always outside my house, in the back by the tangerine and lemon trees: these two old wheelbarrows. They give the back of my house character. This non-window also provides the house with absolutely no air circulation whatsoever.

For more on that non-window, here’s a closeup of the texture of the outside of my house. It is so weird and wonderful. The house was initially all thatch (like the non-window shows), but then Jacob and Guida covered it up with cement many years ago. There are various layers of cement in different places, which lead to the strange texture and varying colors.

So that is what my house looked like on Wednesday, March 11.

* * * * * *

And this is what my house looked like at 9am on Monday, March 16.

My bedroom.

The other side of my bedroom.

 My kitchen.

The other part of the kitchen.

The third room.

Xipi, no longer in the house. At his new house.

The outside.

The things I took with me.

I had a matter of hours to pack up my house and leave once Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen released the announcement that Peace Corps Volunteer activities would be suspended and all PCVs worldwide would be evacuated due to COVID-19. I’ll provide a full rundown of the timeline in another post. But it was very little time.

And once I was confronted with a very short window to pack up and leave, I realized the things in my house didn’t matter to me one bit. I didn’t care about any of the things in my house. The clothes and the soda bottles and the dishes and the papers and the books and the food and the medical supplies. And the sponges and the pens and the notebooks and the shoes and the water bottles and the buckets. Everything. Everything was suddenly so dumb and meaningless. The things in my house were just things. The people who walked through my house and played cards on my front step and chatted with me in my plastic chairs and cooked food in my pots and colored in the neighbor kids’ notebook and studied outside on Saturday mornings and took my English tests and hugged my cat and taught me how to love and live and just plain exist in my new life in Mozambique—those people? Those people mattered. Those relationships mattered. The things didn’t matter.

But I couldn’t pack up the people and the relationships and everything that mattered. I had to leave everything that mattered behind. And I had to do it abruptly and painfully and in a way that left me and everyone else feeling shattered and shocked and cheated and more than a bit broken.

* * * * * *

“Let’s talk about the things in your house.”

It was Thursday, March 19, and I was crying in Sérgio’s office. I had been crying since Monday. I couldn’t stop crying.

I ran down a list of the things in my house and gave him my keys. I told him everything could go. He asked for names and numbers. I gave him Jacob’s number and João’s number and Kátia’s number. I paused.

“Can I give you the names of two children?” I asked. “I don’t know their parents or their last names. But they were my friends and they live in the two houses next door. You’ll find them.”

He scribbled Anasha (9) and Nirma (11) in his notebook.

We chatted for a few minutes and tearfully made our way to the end of the meeting, and then he signed my COS (Close of Service) checklist. His was the last signature I’d needed to make everything official. I went downstairs to Mary Jayne’s office and turned in the piece of paper, another thing that should have meant so much but now was just a thing that didn’t matter to me at all.

* * * * * *

I imagine Sérgio will go to my site this week or next week to finish getting rid of the things in my house and formally close out my site. It’s what he needs to do next.

I’m going to spend this week and next week closing out this blog, as it is what I need to do next.

I can’t promise pretty or polished posts (like, what is even going ON with the inconsistencies in tense in this one) but I’m sure I’ll dump a lot of messy feelings and memories and reflections on here in an attempt to preserve and process everything that just happened. And then, I guess, I’ll move on. Look for something else that matters. Start over, or something like that. Whatever that means.