* * * * * *
Monday, March 16I woke up around 4:30. The birds were chirping. Usually my cat would meow for a few minutes at my bedside until I opened a space in my mosquito net for him to jump in and cuddle. This was the first morning in a long while without any meowing and jumping and cuddling.
I laid there for 15 minutes mentally drafting the speech I’d give at my school. You will see Professor Jacob for English class today. I will be in Maputo this week. I am going with the other members of my organization to renew our visas. Everything should be fine, but if not, Professor Jacob will carry on with my classes. I practiced it over and over. The Portuguese was simple enough that I knew I’d be able to say it without thinking.
I rolled over and looked at my phone. Our cohort’s group chat had a message from Kathryn.
“Y’all it’s over. Peace Corps is evacuating all posts,” she said. Then there were two photos, screenshots from Director Jody Olsen’s announcement on the Peace Corps website.
I read Kathryn’s message and the official announcement a few times. Then I sat up in bed and read it a few more times.
“Oh my...God,” I whispered to no one.
I kept reading it, not comprehending what the words were telling me.
“Oh, my God,” I said again.
No one had responded to Kathryn’s message yet. Was this real? Why was no one responding? Most of us are up by 5am. Was anyone else seeing this? Oh my God.
I jumped out of bed and started walking around my house, still reading the announcement from Jody Olsen.
Unfortunately, it has become clear in the last 48 hours...
I have made the difficult decision...
We are acting now to safeguard your well-being...
Logistically challenging operations...
Grateful for your service....
I grabbed my keys off the top of my fridge and fumbled opening my front door. It was still dark outside. And cool. I turned on my kitchen light. I swept my front step. I read the announcement again.
Very stressful time...
Evacuations are difficult, emotionally draining experiences...
But I’d already had the most difficult, emotionally draining two days I could ever remember having. I just finished the most difficult, emotionally draining experience of my life.
Oh my God oh my God oh my God oh myGodohmyGod.
I started running around my house. Should I repack everything? What did I pack? What didn’t I pack? I didn’t think I was actually leaving. Oh my God.
I opened my trunk and stared at the neatly organized medical supplies and school supplies and the giant stack of important Peace Corps documents I’d been collecting and saving for seven months. I grabbed my extra shampoo and the envelope we got on site announcement day and slammed the trunk shut.
I unzipped my “worst case scenario” duffle bag—now my “this is happening it’s happening right now” bag—and exchanged a big Hydro Flask for my mini pilão. I’d rather make peanut butter at home than drink cold water.
People started responding to Kathyrn’s message. Other people were seeing this now. This was real. I texted Julia and Jonė. I was shaking. The sun was beginning to rise. Tia Guida walked by my door, starting her morning routine of sweeping the yard.
“Bom dia, Mana Sarah!” she called out to me, as she did every single morning when she swept the yard.
I couldn’t speak. I waved.
She walked over and asked when I’d like her to take that second bag. And what time I was hoping to catch a chapa. Numbly, and without thinking, I pulled a plastic chair out onto my front step. I started to explain. Things had changed. All of a sudden. I was leaving, really leaving. Not the visas. That virus. I didn’t have a lot of information. I just found out.
She sat down in the plastic chair and started to cry. Oh, I thought, crying. Huh. Nope, no time for crying.
We talked for a few more minutes. “I had wanted to catch an 8:00 chapa, but I think I need until 9:00 now,” I said. She collected herself and went back to sweeping the yard.
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| The view from my front step as Tia Guida sweeps the yard. |
We agreed one of us needed to call Ellen. Questions were starting to fly in our group chat as more people woke up and saw the news. Why hadn’t we heard anything from Mozambique staff? Why were we going off of an announcement online, public to the whole world? Should everyone stick to the travel plans they received on Saturday? What do we tell people at site, for those of us who aren’t already on the way? When do we leave the country?
I called Ellen at 5:50. My notes are sparse. I got the impression that visa progress was out the window, and that this could very likely goodbye, forever. She said this was what the meeting with all Africa Peace Corps countries was about late Sunday night. Everyone should continue getting to Maputo as planned. She’d be sending out an email to everyone very soon.
I hung up with her and called Julia and Jonė back to relay everything Ellen said. I don’t remember that phone call at all. I wrote in my notes that they both had flights at 9:00.
To arrive at my school by 6:45, I ideally needed to leave around 6:25. Ellen called me back at 6:30 as I was throwing on my long blue dress.
She asked how we knew.
I told her about the message on the Peace Corps website. She said she hadn’t been sure when Jody Olsen’s announcement was going out. Oh. She and Lindsay, the Training Director, were working on a long email to send to everyone. Okay. Great.
I paused before leaving my house and quickly grabbed a decorative head scarf, a canvas bag with apples on the outside, and my well-worn deck of cards.
Jacob had been pulled to help with something over at the church and I couldn’t wait any longer to walk to school with him and tell him. I started racing along the winding path past the corn fields towards school. I scrapped the speech I’d written in bed two hours ago and came up with something new along the way.
I responded to some messages as I walked the final stretch across the large yard outside the high school, then I put my phone away in my bag. It was 6:50, and students were just lining up for the national anthem and school announcements. Everything always ran a little slowly on Mondays.
Professor Vieira, the school’s chemistry teacher, was the only teacher there when I arrived. He was about to address the students when I walked up.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
He said good morning and nodded. I took a few steps away from the students and turned my back to them, indicating, no, I need to talk to you right now.
He turned away from them and leaned down to listen. Professor Vieira is very tall.
“In two hours, I am going to Maputo,” I said, “and I am not coming back.” I tried to keep my voice calm and steady and direct. “Because of the coronavirus, Peace Corps is bringing all of the volunteers in the world back to the United States.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I don’t...I just found out an hour ago,” I said, filling the dead air.
“And you have to leave right now?” he asked.
“Yes. Jacob is taking my classes,” I responded. “I know after the anthem you’re going to ask if I have any announcements. This is my announcement. I wanted to tell you before I tell them.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding. A beat while we both stared at the ground. “Okay,” he repeated. We turned around to face the 300 students standing in five straight lines.
Professor Vieira asked which class’s turn it was to lead the anthem. Every student mumbled a different number until someone shouted, “9ª2!” (nona dois!) loudly enough to convince the masses. “9ª2, go ahead,” he said.
Yumi from 9ª2 rose to the task. “Atenção. Pátria Amada,” she said loudly, calling everyone’s attention. Then she sang the first line.
“Na memória de África e do Mundo...”
The entire school joined in.
“Pátria bela dos que ousaram lutar...”
I started to sing along but quickly realized this was too dangerous. I silently mouthed the words, breathless, suddenly aware that if I tried to make a sound, I’d burst into tears.
My mind flashed back to a Tom e Jerry língua class one afternoon at Cat’s house in Namaacha. Nércio had asked us to memorize the national anthem for homework. We’d been singing it everyday at the start of class and had gotten decent with the tune, but we still didn’t know all of the words by heart. It had been almost four full weeks and he wanted us to have the lyrics down before we transitioned on to our new language groups. We stood up at the start of class to sing and we couldn’t make it through the first verse without pulling out our língua manuals to peak at the words. Nércio—for the first time ever—was visibly disappointed in us, and that hurt. During the 30 minute break in class when we’d usually drink our juice boxes and go for a walk, we decided to hunker down. We waited for Nércio to head outside, and then we sang the anthem over and over and over again, determined to have it memorized by the next morning. We assigned ourselves each one verse to take the lead on: if everyone else stumbled over the words of the second verse, for example, at least Maya would be guaranteed to know it and could pull us along. We practiced it again and again, and then we did a silly take in crazy, high-pitched tones. Nércio walked in on that version and we all laughed like crazy. We sang it perfectly the next day, Nércio was blown away, and it was one of our proudest moments.
I was in the front row at our swear-in ceremony where we had to sing the Mozambican and American national anthems. We practiced as a full cohort only a few times before the big day. We were nervous. There were television cameras. Lindsay had said this short ceremony would be the most formal event of our entire Peace Corps service. When we stood up to sing, the only thing I could hear was my heart pounding. I stared straight ahead and tried with all of my might to sing every word correctly. I’ve been told we did a fine job.
Singing Mozambique’s national anthem—just like washing my clothes by hand and cutting vegetables without a cutting board and speaking Portuguese and getting up in front of a class of 80 students and living on my own and every other routine thing I learned how to do in Mozambique—began as an impossible challenge that, with hard work over time and the unconditional support from people who knew more than I did, eventually became second nature. I sang the national anthem every day at school, sometimes twice a day, when I’d arrive at the start of morning classes and leave just as the afternoon students were holding their opening school meeting. It was familiar.
Familiar, also, were the faces I looked into as I stared out at the crowd of singing, uniformed students in neat lines with their arms at their sides. When I first found out I’d be teaching over 300 students across 5 classes, I was overwhelmed; I doubted I’d ever be able to learn names and get to know anyone on an individual, personal level. But within the first few weeks, leaders and troublemakers emerged and I quickly knew the names of the 10 or so people in each class who either always raised their hands or always acted out. Disciplining and praising led to name memorizing. I started to learn the names of the middle-of-the-road, quiet students, too.
I looked out and saw Chénia, an 8th grader and neighbor that I met my first week at site who routinely came by my house to color and read and play with my cat and make pasta. She’d get embarrassed when she accidentally called me Mana Sarah in school, because in school I was supposed to be Professora Sarah. I told her it was alright; I was her mana before I was her professora. I saw Dulce, a 9th grader who everyone looks up to because she is poised and smart and kind. She ran up to me on the day before our first English test when she saw me writing review questions on the board to warn me that students would copy the answers and cheat. I assured her those weren’t the exact questions from the test, and she breathed a sigh of relief and returned to her seat. She loves school and she loves structure and she was always looking out for me. Also in the crowd were Henriques and Ilércio and Joseph, three 8th grade boys who sat in the back of the classroom and had an uncanny ability to both drive me insane and make me laugh, and they prided themselves on doing both, every day. There was Solomone, a quiet and confident 9th grader who has an excellent grasp of the basics of English because of the intervention, I learned one day, of another Peace Corps Volunteer—Lizzy—who was his 8th grade teacher in Manica Province.
I saw Florinda, an 8th grader who has different colored pens and takes very organized, very pretty notes, and who lives near Tio João and said hi to me in church every Sunday. She was standing near Emídio, who wears a black cotton knit vest over his white button down shirt even though black cotton knit vests are very much not a part of the school uniform. He also uses an old leather briefcase instead of a backpack, and he speaks very good English. Nélio was standing at the back of 9ª3’s line. He makes a whole lot of noise in the classroom but knows when to focus and when to focus everyone around him. If he didn’t understand a direction I’d given or an explanation I’d shared, he’d loudly interrupt, saying, “Teach?” because he knew he was never the only one who was confused. He is charming and knows it. Maria was standing in front of him. I’m not sure I ever once heard Maria’s voice, but she was eager to write on the board and would always wave me over and point to her notebook, showing me completed, accurate exercises.
There were so many other students who made me smile on days that went very well and who made me yell on days that went very poorly. There were also many, many students whose names I could not tell you for a million dollars. I was not an amazing English teacher, and I know that. I got better each day, though, and I also know that—but it would be a lie to say that in the first few weeks of school I did much more than just get by. It was only right towards the end that things were really starting to click. It was also only right towards the end that I was beginning to think about extra curriculars, because I finally had gotten the teaching thing down well enough and I knew which students would be great leaders in an English Theatre club and who would benefit from girls’ empowerment programming. But I never got there with any of that. Potential built and built and went nowhere. So as the national anthem drew to a close and I looked out at my students, I saw so many bright, wonderful faces that were fine before me and would continue to be fine without me. But, boy, we could’ve made something great.
The students drew out the last few notes of the final refrain—“O Patria Amada, vamos vencer”—and then Yumi jumped back in to lead the teacher greeting. The students greeted us and asked how we were doing, Vieira said we were in fine health, thank you, and he started giving the Monday announcements. My heart was racing as I silently repeated my little speech over and over again in my head, trying to breathe, trying not to cry.
“Finally, we have a very sad announcement,” Professor Vieira said in his booming voice. I cleared my throat to speak. But he continued.
“As you can see, Professora Sarah is not in her bata today,” he said. That’s right, good point, I’m not, I thought to myself. “That is because she, unfortunately, has to leave us today. Because of this coronavirus that we have heard about, her government has made the decision to bring her back home to her family,” he explained, “along with all of the other volunteers here in Mozambique and in the world. This just goes to show us how serious this virus is.” Oh my God, he’s doing it for me, he’s just doing it, I thought. And he’s doing it so well. I had never been so relieved to have a man step in and speak for me.
He said some more things about the importance of staying healthy and that I’d be missed very much. I tried to look beyond everyone’s faces as he spoke. I could feel hundreds of shocked, confused eyes trying to meet mine.
When Vieira finished and asked if I had anything I’d like to add, everyone broke protocol and split from their five neat lines into a large clump, because they knew I wouldn’t be as loud as he had been. I reiterated how sudden this was and how sad I was to be leaving, and I explained the logistics of Professor Jacob taking over morning English classes for the foreseeable future. I thanked them. I was quick and to the point and tried to keep emotion out of it. It ended on a weird, sad note.
I could tell Vieira was about to send them to the classrooms, and I jumped in with one more thing. “Professor Jacob has the bean bottles,” I shouted, “and he knows how the beans work.” I was met with oohs and ahhs. “And when you fill those bottles? He’s going to tell me. And I will send American food from America, I’ll find a way,” I said, still not knowing what I meant by American food. “But you have to fill the bottles, okay?” They nodded and cheered and Vieira sent them off to their classrooms. This was a better note to end on.
I stuck around for a few minutes saying goodbye to my students. I was about to leave the last group I was chatting with when Adélia sauntered up to me. She and I had a wonderful rapport. She is smart and funny and confident and the other kids in her class respect her like crazy, both because of her character and because she’s four years older than most of the other 8th graders. She also happened to study English in South Africa for 10 years. She was an asset and a friend. I noted that she hadn’t been there for the anthem or for the announcements. “Are you coming to class?” she asked. I explained the situation. “Oh,” she replied.
The previous week, we’d had elections for the “chefe de turma” in each class, which is basically the class president but with more responsibility than any American high school class president I’ve ever known. Adélia was edged out by Ércio, a rowdy class clown with a streak of disciplinary issues. But the popular vote is the popular vote in these elections, I suppose. I was bitter about it and I knew she was, too. “You know you’re the leader of your class, right?” I said to her in English, to the confusion of the other students standing around us. “I’m sorry that you’re not the chefe de turma, and you should be, obviously. It’s not fair. But don’t let that keep you from leading, okay? You don’t need that title to be a leader.” She nodded. She asked me if I’d come back after the virus went away. I said, honestly, I didn’t know. She nodded some more, taking it all in. We said a few more things in English that went over everyone else’s heads, and then she ran off to class. I started walking across the yard for the very last time.
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| I didn’t take lots of pictures of my school. Everything is in a long row: this is view from the last classroom looking all the way down towards the office. Between the big tree and the small bell way off in the distance, you can just barely see the flag pole where everyone stands for the anthem and announcements. |
I crossed the street and made my way through the yard of the elementary school. I walked up to the door of the small administrative building. A kid was walking out the door carrying a broom when I approached. “Is the director here?” I asked him. He said yes.
“Ohh, Mana Sarah!” Tio João said as I quietly knocked on the door of his office. “Xipi had a good night last night. We fed him the fish. Getting ready to catch the chapa?”
I sat down in the chair across from his desk, crying. I’d exhausted all of the professionalism and stoicism I could manage back at the high school in front of my students. I just sat there crying.
I explained through my tears how everything had suddenly changed. I wasn’t leaving just for the week. I was going and not coming back. It was no longer about the visas. My government was worried about borders closing. They were pulling all the volunteers in the world. I’d just found out a few hours ago.
The rest of the conversation is sort of blurry. He said how much they’d miss me, that I’d become a member of the family and that it would be strange with me suddenly gone. I thanked him for everything he’d done for me, saying there was no way I could ever thank him enough. He asked about the things in my house. “We went to Maputo, you bought that fridge!” he said. I told him Peace Corps would sort it out, and that they’d likely be in touch with him. I was taking some things with me but not a lot. He got hung up on this point, on all of the physical things I had to leave behind. I told him that I couldn’t even think about any of that—I was too sad about everything else I was leaving behind. “Okay,” he said, dropping it. He told me he’d send photos of Xipi playing with the kids so that I could continue to watch them all grow up, together. He walked me outside.
It occurred to me, as we said our final goodbye, that we were standing in the exact spot where I’d met him on my second day at site. That was less than three months ago. It was way too soon for things to come full circle.
“You’d just gotten used to the heat!” was one of the last things he said to me. “I know! It’s so cold back home right now!” I said in reply. (This was the first time it crossed my mind that I would very soon be returning home to New England in March. There were so many things to be sad about.) We laughed, I shook his hand, and I left.
I stopped crying for two minutes to take a phone call from Ellen as I walked home past the corn fields. I updated Julia and Jonė and put out the call for questions so we could compile an email to send to staff. It was almost 8am.
“Bom dia, Marlene,” I said as I walked into her family’s yard. She was outside doing laundry. She and Rudy both have school in the afternoon. She said Xipi had just been running around, and that she’d go find him. I said I couldn’t stay long, and asked if Rudy was home.
We went inside and I told them what the new situation was. I was crying a lot, and so were they. Xipi wandered into the room and started gnawing on my hand.
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| Xipi on the living room couch next to purple rosary beads. Rudy is a young man of his word: he had been praying for me. |
Marlene walked me halfway to my house. “Remember my very first day here, when you and Jenifa walked me to the market and showed me everything in town?” I asked when we stopped walking. “Yes,” she smiled. “That was very important for me,” I said. “I’ll never forget how you welcomed me.” We hugged. She turned and followed the short path back home.
I cried as I finished my own short walk back home. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
I passed my front door and walked straight to Jacob’s house. He and Betinha were there. They both hadn’t gone into school. I was relieved. I explained that I had to leave in an hour, and that everything had changed. Betinha was silent. Jacob was shocked. “Oh my God,” he said in Portuguese and then in English.
I ran back over to my house to finish tidying everything up. I wrapped up the mug I bought with Anabela on my first day and used every morning for tea and tucked it away in one of my bags. I swept and put the curtains down and locked the windows—all except one, which I couldn’t get to shut—and I tossed the little bit of water I had sitting in my kitchen water bucket. I unplugged my fridge, which was empty. I threw all of the food items I had—sugar and tea and flour and some raw peanuts and beans and spices—into a plastic bag and brought them over to Jacob’s house. Tia Guida texted me asking if I was still around because the Chefe de Posto (the mayor) wanted to come and say goodbye. How does she already know? I told her to come. It hit me that the whole town would know I was gone before noon.
I grabbed the neighbor kids’ notebook, the bag of crayons, and all of the Portuguese storybooks and brought them over to Betinha. I didn’t really say much, I just handed them to her and she nodded and took them. Most of the neighbor kids studied in the morning so they were all off at school. I grabbed my three tennis balls and ran over to find Max, who was too young for school, and gave them to him. I quickly explained to his mother that I was leaving. I ran back to my house.
My pai from Namaacha called me. He said he’d heard we were all leaving, all of a sudden. I confirmed that was the case. I told him I was so sad. We agreed to talk more later in the week before I left the country. I texted Kátia to let her know everything had changed, and that I was so sorry.
The Chefe de Posto pulled up and she and Tia Guida jumped out of her truck. Jacob emerged from his house and we all stood around the yard talking for a few minutes. We talked about the gravity of this virus and how bad it would get when it arrived in Mozambique. She said so many people would die. This was a very surreal conversation; it felt unimaginable that in a span of a few hours, I had gone from listening to the birds outside my window before dawn to standing in a tight, somber circle with my host family and my town’s most esteemed leader nodding along to a discussion in Portuguese about a global pandemic that was causing my government to pull me from my life and my employment and would soon upend or destroy many, many more lives both here and back home. This couldn’t be reality. How was this reality?
I adored the Chefe de Posto. Our paths had crossed a number of times in my short few months at site, and I was always grateful to be in a room with her and to listen to her speak. The first day I met her, she told me she thought it was wonderful I was unmarried and living alone—I’d be a great example for young girls of a single, working woman. She was an example to me for the same reasons. Also on that first day, she shared some of the main issues my students would be facing in and outside of the classroom, and she asked if I had any intention to do health and leadership programming specifically for girls in the community. I was thrilled to see our priorities align so perfectly. I was set to attend a “training of trainers” in Gaza Province with a counterpart from the hospital in order to get a girls’ [REDES] youth group off the ground. It was scheduled for the first weekend in April.
“I hope you take back the lessons you learned from the strong Mozambican women you met over here,” the Chefe de Posto said, smiling. Then she tapped our elbows—she was making sure not to shake hands or have too much physical contact, per the CDC’s advice—and rode off in her truck. Tia Guida asked if there was anything she could do for me. I had two eggs left to my name, and no other food. She made an omelette in an instant and I ate it as quickly as I could. I looked at the time. It was almost 9:00.
I raced over to the bathroom, took my quickest ever (and last ever) bucket bath, and threw on a change of clean clothes. I brought my packed bags outside onto my porch, took a few photos of the inside of my house, grabbed a brand new capulana I’d just bought in Maputo two weeks prior, and went to shut my door for the last time. I noticed the angel hanging next to my door that my mom had sent me in a care package back in December—it had a bell, a reference to It’s a Wonderful Life, and she’d sent it because she knew I’d be spending Christmas away from family for the first time and would thus also not be watching It’s a Wonderful Life at their side for the first time—and I quickly grabbed it off the wall and then locked the door.
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| A last minute, wholly insufficient gift. |
Jacob and Guida grabbed my bags. We started walking towards the main road.
Anasha’s uncle was outside her house as we passed. “Going on a trip, Mana Sarah?” he asked cheerfully. I gave him the short version. He said he hoped I’d be back eventually. I said I hoped so, too.
Betinha had just been elected the chefe de turma of her 9th grade class, and this delighted me to no end. I told her again how proud I was that she was stepping into this leadership position, and that I knew she’d do a wonderful job, as we walked out to the road. I had stopped crying for a minute and was nervously filling the empty space with frantic last thoughts. She remained very quiet. She seemed to be shocked by it all.
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| Tia Guida and Tio Jacob leading the way out to the main road. |
But it was looking like this trip to the city would indeed be a burden. The chapa was gone. We stopped a few other trucks to ask where they were headed, but either no one had space or no one was Maputo-bound.
A car with an older South African couple started coming down the road. Guida nudged me. I flagged them down. “Do you speak English?” I said, knowing they did. They said they weren’t going to Maputo, just to their nearby farm. Guida told me to ask them to take us just down the road to where another road joined with this one and we might find more cars. I asked, and they told me to get in the back. We threw my bags in the back of the truck, Guida jumped in, and I followed. Jacob said he was going to head back to the house with Betinha and get ready for school. I leaned down and shook his hand as the truck started kicking up dust and pulled away.
The couple dropped us at the other road and the woman asked me through her window where I was from and what I was doing in town. “I was a Peace Corps Volunteer here,” I said. “I’m being evacuated.” She wished me well.
We waited for 20 minutes or so, asking every car that passed if they were going to the city. (There are never many cars.) Suddenly Guida starting nudging me, excited. “Another white person!” she shouted, and I quickly waved at the car. It stopped and the window rolled down. To my surprise, it was a familiar face. It was Jan, the South African man who owns the restaurant where Sérgio and I had gone for lunch during his site visit the previous Wednesday. We’d literally just met for the first time a few days ago.
“Sarah!” he said, equally surprised to see me.
“Where are you going?”
“Maputo.”
“Can I come with you?”
“Hop in.”
I threw my bags in the back seat and gave Guida one last hug. “You’ll have to come back,” she said. “We never got to do that baking day.” I thanked her again and apologized again and thanked her one more time. I got in the front seat and we pulled away.
“So, how are you?” Jan said.
“Not great, Jan,” I replied. And I proceeded to tell him everything.
The road from my site into the city is bumpy and messy and takes a while via chapa, but in a nicer car like Jan’s, it’s not too bad. After explaining all that had happened in the past few days and once we were onto paved highway getting closer to the city, I was able to breathe just a little bit for the first time since I’d read Kathryn’s message before dawn. I caught up on some texts from friends and sent an email to staff with consolidated questions from our cohort. Julia and Jonė were both in the air as I was in the car.
A new text came through: “Hey are there any announcements from the Peace Corps re: coronavirus?”
It was my mom. Oh God, my mom, I thought. It was to her couch that I’d be returning. I hadn’t even thought about telling anyone from back home yet. My mind was entirely consumed with the shock of leaving, and I hadn’t yet considered facing the shock of returning. It was still so early on the East Coast.
I waited a few minutes to respond. This time around with the visa stress, I’d kept my mom completely in the dark. I’d given no indication that anything was going on, and I hadn’t mentioned I’d be in Maputo this week. I figured she already knew the answer to her question, though.
“I’ll be on a flight home within the week. It’s over. The last 72 hours have been an absolute nightmare. I’m okay. I’ll catch you up within the next few days, either from the hotel in Maputo or, you know, our living room,” I finally responded. “I’m sure you’ve seen the press release, which is why you’re asking,” I added.
“It was a brief news item on NPR at 5am just now. Then I read the press release,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Classic NPR,” I said.
“It was all I needed to bolt me upright in bed...”
“Well we both got bolted up from bed with the same news today!”
Jan insisted on driving me all the way to the hotel where our cohort was meeting, which was an incredible favor. He carried my bags into the reception desk, gave me a hug, and then drove off to his actual destination across town. You know how they say people come in and out of your life for a reason? Jan appeared in my life and then disappeared from my life in record time, but he managed to ease a heavy weight off my shoulders on perhaps the heaviest, weightiest day of my life. Anyway.
I checked in at the front desk and walked to my room. I learned I was roommates with Alicia, a fellow Southern volunteer, and texted her to ask when she’d be arriving. She said she was still a few hours away. Alicia and I had been hotel roommates in the past. It’d be good to see her.
My mom was texting asking questions about how we were getting back, questions I didn’t have the answer to. It was almost 6:00 back home. I called her, and we talked for just over an hour. I explained everything. Everything. Day by day, detail by detail, just like in these blog posts. It’s a lot.
Here, in the present day, in quarantine, I just recently put in my old SIM card to get my U.S. number back. My mom texted me as a test and I scrolled up to see the last messages I’d sent her before I changed my number and migrated over to WhatsApp for all communication back in the fall. I was texting her from my hotel room in Philadelphia late at night after Staging had ended on August 27th, 2019. We were leaving for the airport at 3am, I think. Julia was asleep in the bed next to me and I was hiding under the covers of my own bed, crying. I was so, so scared.
They’d told us at Staging to send a message to a trusted loved one regarding what we wanted them to say to us if at some point in our service we approached them saying we wanted to go home. If we got to a point where we were overwhelmed and wanted to quit, who would we reach out to? And what would we want them to say? We should let them know in advance, while we were still full of hope and the goals of the Peace Corps were still shiny, exciting, new dreams just ahead of us.
But I wasn’t full of hope. I was tired and scared and not quite sure of what I was doing with my life. I’d been thinking about what they’d said at Staging all day and now I was texting my loved one but I couldn’t come up with anything. Here’s what I said, each thought its own stressed, singular message:
They told us to tell our loved ones what to say if we tell you we want to come home.
And honestly, I don’t know what I want you to say.
I guess tell me that I’ll be okay.
I know that right now, stressed and scared and overwhelmed, is not the mind space where I should know what I want you to tell me.
I think they want us to ask you to tell us not to come home.
Because that’s the right answer.
But, I don’t know.
Use your judgement.
It is so funny to me now, everything I didn’t know.
None of this mattered because I never told my mom I wanted to go home because I never, at any point in my time in Mozambique, wanted to go home. In all honesty, I can’t say I ever even felt homesick. The few times when our visas scared us into thinking we might have to go home early only reaffirmed for me that I’d want nothing less in the world. Mozambique became my home, and I couldn’t imagine ever texting my mom asking her to convince me to stay. I wanted nothing more than to stay in my home.
So I never had that conversation with my mom, but suddenly I found myself having a conversation that neither of us were prepared for.
I didn’t know what I wanted her to say when I got back home.
I didn’t know how I would feel, how I would react, or how I would go on. I had changed a lot in the past seven months and I hadn’t yet gotten to the stage of growth where I figured out how I would fit in back home. I didn’t want to be going home.
I asked her to be patient with me, because I was once again tired and scared and not quite sure of what I was doing with my life. But this time, I was crying a lot more.
I took a very long shower.
I went outside to explore. We were in, essentially, a resort. Rooms were in separate, small houses, and the restaurant and conference room were a five minute walk away past the swimming pool and playground and gym. It is the closest hotel to the Peace Corps office, which is located in the fancy part of the city full of embassies. Rich foreigners stay at this hotel. We needed to be close to the office to sort out our visas issues so we needed to be there, or at least that was the initial thinking before everything changed. Now, it was just a perk.
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| The hotel was a quiet, sprawling small community that felt utopic and looked like the set of The Good Place—you know, a show about where people go once their lives have ended? That eerie but obvious comparison was remarked upon by a number of people and, Christ Almighty, was a little too on the nose. |
Cooper K. and Rachel and Levi and I went to lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant and shared happy stories from the past three months and sad stories from earlier that day. It was comforting and relaxing to be together and laugh together and understand each other. We walked to an art market and wandered around buying little crafts and earrings and keychains because suddenly we’d need souvenirs from Mozambique.
When we got back to the hotel, many more people had arrived. I heard Noah’s loud laugh from very far away and my eyes filled with tears. “Really?” Cooper asked. “Yeah, I’m a mess,” I said. I was.
I went to the pool and hugged Noah and Richard and Elo and saw Cat was in the water and laid down on the ground at the edge of the pool and held her hands, giggling and probably crying. Julia and Lauren swam over and we all chatted for a bit. Cooper J. pointed me in the direction of his room where I found Cole and Brendan and hung out with them for a while. Bittersweet doesn’t even begin to describe it all.
We gathered as a full cohort at the hotel restaurant for dinner.
At some point during this day, Julia and Jonė and I started collecting individual airport codes so that Mary Jayne could start booking domestic flights home for everyone.
I only vaguely remember dinner but I know I hung out with Kathryn and talked to my friend Domingos from site over the phone at some point. I don’t remember anything after that. I imagine that means I slept.
Tuesday, March 17
Hotel breakfast was at 7:00. We had a town hall with all staff in the conference room at 8:30 to lay out the logistics of the next few days. A logistics session would be good, I figured. Having a plan and having something to do would be nice. Monday was the most emotional, draining day of my life, and a nice logistics-heavy day would at least ensure I wouldn’t cry as much.
I was incorrect. With every new person from staff who got up and spoke, my eyes filled with tears. The logistics were overwhelming. Logistics made everything so much more real, and the more real it got, the more devastated I felt. The evacuation order called for all volunteers worldwide to COS, or complete the official “Close of Service” process. This is an involved process. My COS date should have been November 25, 2021. Suddenly, it was tomorrow. And there was so much to do. And I couldn’t stop crying.
(Perhaps here is a good place to mention: I’m not much of a crier. I can count on one hand the number of times I’d cried in Mozambique before all of this, so the fact that I was crying so much—and especially in front of other people—was out of character for me and only made me feel more overwhelmed. It was very strange to not recognize what was happening around me and suddenly not recognize myself, too. Absolutely everything was out of my control, including my reaction to everything.)
I took notes because that’s what I do and that’s all I could do. Lindsay gave an overview of everything we’d have to get done over the next few days and talked about the projected timeline of actually leaving the country. They’d have to get our passports out of Migrations. Headquarters was working on potentially chartering flights. We likely wouldn’t leave at the same time as the other two cohorts (30 and 31, both health cohorts). It was looking like Friday or Saturday for us.
Lindsay passed out our COS checklist and Mary Jayne started explaining all the boxes. There was no time for a final LPI, so our Portuguese level from the end of training would have to suffice for official records even though our Portuguese had significantly improved in the past four months. None of us had opened grants for secondary projects because we hadn’t gotten there yet, so we could ignore that section. We could cross out the Country Director section because Ellen would not have time to sit for an exit interview with every single PCV in country (with our cohort and the two health cohorts above us, there were around 110 volunteers being evacuated). Everything else, though, we had to get done as soon as possible.
We had to empty our bank accounts, then close the accounts in person, then return April’s prorated living allowance—the exact amount we’d owe back would depend on when we actually departed—as well as settle any debts we left at site, like paying our rent or paying our language tutors. We had a packet full of administrative forms to sign off on—pages and pages acknowledging the end of our insurance coverage and the end of our special passport validity, giving a forwarding address for our mail and leaving instructions for packages that arrived after our departure, and waiving or maintaining restrictions on our records for future employers.
Dr. Isadora, the head PCMO, got up and explained what our medical tasks would look like over the next few days and weeks. We had, again, a number of forms to fill out, and we each needed to visit a nurse and then a doctor in the office to check our vitals and review any changes to our medical history. We’d receive 100mL of hand sanitizer, a pair of gloves, and a mask for the trip home. It would not be possible for everyone to have a final physical exam before leaving Mozambique, so we’d need to schedule one back in the U.S. We’d need to get labs done and fill a prescription for our terminal malaria medication back in the U.S., too. The procedure for doing so was laid out in another packet that explained our COS health benefits: two months of short-term, transitional insurance and a few vouchers for service-related medical expenses. Before we could complete any of our medical tasks back home, though, we would first need to self-quarantine for two weeks, wherever that may be possible. Isadora explained all of this so calmly that for a brief moment I almost thought everything would be okay. Brief moment.
“This is taking away the best part of my job,” Sérgio said when he stood up to explain our programming tasks. Site visits were the best part of his job, he explained, and he was crushed that he hardly got to visit anyone from our cohort—just Molly and me in Maputo Province, less than a week ago. He or Gelane, the Program Manager for the North, would need to meet with each of us individually to discuss officially closing out our sites. We would hand in our keys and explain what we’d left in our houses and what we’d like them to do with it all. Before meeting with our PM, we had to complete two documents: a site report and a DOS. The site report is the large, detailed packet that trainees receive on site announcement day that lays out every piece of information about our sites, from geographical descriptions and what is available at the market to chapa schedules and phone numbers of important contacts in our communities. The DOS, or Description of Service, is an official document that forever serves as a statement and verification of our time spent in the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps manual says the DOS “describes the Volunteer’s training and overseas activities in non-evaluative terms,” and it sure does. It puts a cold, formal button on the end of service.
Sérgio also shared that we would need to complete the VRF (Volunteer Report Form) as soon as we could when we got back to the U.S. to ensure our work does not go unreported to local staff as well as Headquarters and Congress and all the other Peace Corps stakeholders. Grumbling ensued—because the VRF is famously a very clunky system, because this was yet another gigantic task being thrown our direction only 24 hours after we’d learned that our lives were being uprooted, and because so much of the VRF asks questions about projects we didn’t get to complete—and Sérgio paused, then said, “You can’t tell me that you didn’t do anything.” Even though we did not serve very long, we still had stories to report. We still had made an impact in some small way. Three weeks after having heard this comment, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. But I can assure you that, in the moment? It definitely made me cry.
There were lots of follow-up questions for everybody. When pressed on a timeline that just didn’t exist yet, Mary Jayne gave me the title for my notes that day, the last page of notes in my old training notebook that was just about filled with every formal thing I learned in Mozambique, from how to speak Portuguese and how to clean vegetables to how to take a malaria test and how to teach English. Mary Jayne said that there was some precedent we were working with in terms of Peace Corps evacuations, but at the end of the day, “No one’s ever evacuated the world.”
We spent the next few hours crammed inside the office filling out forms and writing documents and taking our turns visiting Admin and Programming and PCMO. The medical forms were the easiest to complete, much easier than the site report: Did you experience repeated episodes of back or neck pain at site? is a yes or no question. Please provide information on any movers and shakers within your host school or wider community that you recommend your replacement get to know for work-related efforts...is not.
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| Couches and mailboxes in the volunteer lounge in the Maputo office. Out of frame are two more computers and two giant bookshelves, home to PCV-donated books from over the years. |
After lunch, we all made our way back to the office. Cat and I continued working on our various forms and documents outside so that we had both fresh air and space to breathe it. We listened to sad Dylan songs and talked about it all and made jokes about it all. We talked about our good friends at site. We talked about our favorite meals to make at site. We talked about teaching. We talked about the kitties we both left behind. We talked about what we might do with our lives. We had no idea what we might do with our lives.
I managed to get through some of the DOS, but I found the site report to be so, so hard. A large part of me thought that it was a futile task; after all that had happened in the past few weeks and days, I was not convinced there would be a future Peace Corps volunteer at my site—because, really, who knows what’ll happen with the program—so why should I labor over writing a document that no one will ever read? But a small voice in me kept saying: but what if there is a future volunteer? A future volunteer who picks up their life and moves to Mozambique and spends weeks and weeks in training dreaming of where they’ll end up and receives that brown envelope on site announcement day and reads this document from me about the beautiful, wonderful people and places and things awaiting them at their incredible site? The volunteer before me, Rachel, left behind a very detailed, very thorough and thoughtful site report and it filled me with such excitement and hope on site announcement day and every day after that when I read her words over and over again, trying to picture what my life would look like in a few short weeks. Even though I felt so hopeless about the future, the idea that I could give that same gift of a great site report to a young, wide-eyed trainee somewhere down the line—that was important. I felt obligated to spend some time on it.
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| Cat and I sat in those chairs on the left to work on our documents. This photo is from our swear-in day in November—Bri and Alli, Moz 29 PCVs who were in town for their regularly scheduled COS conference, snap a quick selfie after taking a photo of the Training and Programming teams. |
Space opened up at PCMO and Cat and I both went in to complete those steps. A nurse took my blood pressure and weighed and measured me, then handed me my Yellow Fever WHO card, a thing that was so important to secure last spring but that I’d forgotten existed since the moment I handed it to PCMO upon arrival in country. We waited to speak with one of the doctors. Isadora opened her door and called me in. She copied down what the nurse had recorded, and told me I’d lost exactly 10 pounds since orientation in August, which was strange and surprising to me. She said she could reweigh me if I thought it was incorrect, but I said no, thank you very much, I’ll take it. I handed her all of my forms. She ran down the various vaccines I’d received throughout training and how long they would last me, and then she started to explain the terminal malaria prophylaxis and anti-schistosomiasis medication I’d have to take when I got back home. I could feel myself getting very overwhelmed. I asked her to stop and repeat everything. I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote it all down—there was no way I’d remember how long my Typhoid vaccine was good for otherwise—as she slowly, patiently explained it all again, waiting for me to sort through it all and helping me with the spelling of the harder prescription names.
Isadora asked if there was anything else. I cried a little bit trying to thank her for everything; I felt so safe and cared for throughout service because of her, and I remember telling my mom back in August that she needn’t worry about anything because I was in amazing hands with Dr. Isadora. I was really bummed she wouldn’t be my doctor anymore. At the next national VAC meeting that was scheduled for April, we were going to have a subcommittee to present all medical related issues in a separate meeting just with Isadora. I jumped at the chance to be on that subcommittee, because I loved learning from her throughout training and was thrilled for the opportunity to work closely with her. She’s smart and thoughtful and impressive like no one I’ve ever met. I think Isadora is one of my favorite people I’ve ever met. Yeah, that’s it. It was very sad to suddenly have to say goodbye to her.
Cat and I ran into Lindsay as we left PCMO and were headed for Admin. Lindsay said she was going to the hotel and we probably should, too—the U.S. Ambassador would be arriving soon to meet with us all—so we decided to drop Admin until the next day and walked over to the hotel. We all assembled in the conference room and stood as Ambassador Hearne entered with Ellen. He spoke for a few minutes about how hard they’d worked towards resolving the visa issues this time, and how resilient we had all been, and how no one saw it ending this way but that we’d all discover new paths and find success wherever we headed next. He took a few questions and then had to leave for another meeting about our passports. Ellen stuck around for a while briefing us on the progress of booking flights and what reinstatement might look like, if that turned out to be possible.
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| As we headed to the conference room to speak with the ambassador, Cole, Maggie, and Cooper K. were walking just ahead of us cheerfully laughing about something and Cat and I remarked on how nice they looked set against the pretty afternoon clouds, and I took this photo. |
Dúlia called me. Tio João had talked to her. I knew I’d need to talk to her, but I was dreading it. I paced along the sidewalk in front the restaurant running through everything all over again. To my absolute shock, I didn’t cry at all; explaining the insanity was becoming routine. I told her that I’d left a canvas bag with an apple print for her with Marlene at their parents’ house. My dear friend Emily had given me that bag before I left last summer—she came across it one day, and seeing the apple pattern, thought it’d be cute for me to have as a teacher—and on the first day I met Dúlia, she was wearing a pretty capulana with a similar apple pattern on it. I soon learned that was her go-to capulana, and I tucked away the thought in my mind that I should give her that canvas bag for a birthday or when I eventually left. A gift from one good friend passed on to another good friend. I wish I could’ve said goodbye to Dúlia in person. We promised to stay in touch.
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| The day I met Dúlia and she showed me the river. |
My room key didn’t work when we finally went our separate ways to go to sleep, so I trekked over to the main office to get a replacement, then quietly went into my room and slept for three or four hours.
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| From Luciana: a happy polaroid of our big group at the Ethiopian restaurant. |
People wanted to go to Namaacha to say goodbye to our host families from training. Cat texted me at 7:00 asking if I was going. “Maybe I’ll regret it in a month but the thought of getting out there and back today is...too much,” I said. I’d left on a good note with them and knew we could stay in touch. There was still so much to do here. By 7:05 I was already exhausted. Julia and Jonė and I finalized the bank groups for the day and then I showered and met Cat for breakfast.
After breakfast, I continued working on my DOS and site report by the conference room at the hotel with Cooper J. and Cole. I made minimal progress. The three of us were in the 11:00 bank group and walked outside to wait for the Peace Corps van with the rest of the small group.
“I heard VAC knows how and when we’re leaving the country,” someone said to me when we joined the other 11:00 bank folks. This was news to me. I sent a message to our VACas group and Julia confirmed she had just heard—we were moving to a different hotel across the city tomorrow, then flying on Sunday to JFK via Nairobi, Kenya. Moz 30 and 31 had arrived at that other hotel last night, and they’d do the same flight route as us, but leave before us on Friday. Mary Jayne was still working on booking domestic flights for everyone out of JFK and she’d send an email with all of this information to our full cohort soon.
Following their minimal prying, I told the other people in the 11:00 bank group. I was worn out from having information. Mary Jayne sent her email along quickly enough.
Everything at the bank was an absolute mess. Without all of us PCVs, there was already a line out the door. We were stuck there for hours. I felt claustrophobic and sick and—as it was my new thing, apparently—I was on the verge of breaking down in tears at every second. Cooper J. suggested we go for a walk to buy water at one point, and he and I wandered for a few blocks looking for bottled water and trading stories about teaching. I think he could tell I needed to walk and breathe, and I appreciated those couple of minutes a whole lot.
After many hours and having missed lunch at the hotel, it was my turn to go in and close my account with a teller. This was ultimately not too difficult—I just had to sign some papers and take the cash I had left—but the aggressive finality of it, just like the aggressive finality of writing and signing documents that suddenly described my Peace Corps service in the past tense, multiplied the emotional toll that any ordinary bank trip would have by a million.
Cole and I finished at the same time and split a txopela (mini taxi thing) back to the hotel. We passed a man selling côco lanho, a type of fresh coconuts that were never at my site, and I muttered something like, “There’s another thing I never got to try,” and Cole quickly shut me down, reminding me that we weren’t going anywhere until Sunday. “There is still time,” he said, correctly.
I sat in my room for a while working on my DOS and site report. I still hadn’t finished, but I knew I should get to the office before they closed for the day to at least complete my Admin tasks, so I stopped where I was and ran over. It was almost 5pm, but the office was still bustling—the other two cohorts had arrived and they were all frantically trying to complete the same tasks as us, but in less time. I waited in various lines to visit all of the Admin people and get everything done. I ran into a number of familiar faces from Moz 30 and 31—other VAC members, Maputo neighbors and friends, and PCVs who had visited us during training—and I found a new reason to be sad: I felt so sad for all of them. At least our cohort somewhat operated under the assumption that everything might fall apart at any time; this had completely blindsided everyone else.
I finally finished and was ready to leave when Ellen saw me and pulled me into her office. She threw a ton of information my way: they were planning a modified COS ceremony for anyone who wanted to participate and it would be nice if each cohort had one or two people get up and speak, the ambassador might make it for that ceremony, Lindsay had pulled two presentations from previous COS conferences that we could lead at the hotel for our cohort on Friday morning and if we got a list of people who were interested they could get the hotel to provide snacks for a coffee break, and Peace Corps might not be able to provide transportation to the airport so we should be sure to keep everyone organized when we left on Sunday. She also gave me two thank you cards to have the cohort fill out for the ambassador and the Deputy Chief of Mission at the embassy, who’d worked really hard for our group throughout the past few months. She handed me a bag of board games for us to have at the hotel for when our documents expired and we could no longer leave. I nodded along and took the cards and the games and told her I’d figure everything out. I was so tired and so hungry. I never did anything with the thank you cards.
It was dark when I got back to the hotel. I found Noah and Kevin and Nick leaving for dinner and joined them. We walked to an Indian restaurant that was probably driving distance away, and we joined a bigger group at a long table. It was delicious and fun, but by the end of dinner we were all hardly awake. It had been another one of the longest days of our lives.
We piled into three taxis and made our way across town to the hotel.
Back at the hotel I had a very difficult, very productive conversation with a dear friend, and then I went to Cat’s room and laid on her bed crying about it until I physically couldn’t stay awake to cry any longer.
I went to my room and crawled under the covers and slept.
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