Tom e Jerry

We have two ducks at our house and their names are Tom and Jerry.

This is Tom and Jerry:

Left to right: Jerry (female duck) and Tom (male duck).

But this is not a post about Tom and Jerry, the ducks.

This is a post about the Grupo de Tom e Jerry, my Portuguese língua group for the first four weeks of training and some of the most special people I’ve met in Mozambique.

We did our first Language Proficiency Interview (LPI) when we arrived in Maputo for orientation. We took turns speaking one-on-one with a professor for about 20 minutes (or as long as we could last). When I sat for mine, my professor greeted me and asked me how I was and what my job would be with the Peace Corps. He then asked me to describe my family back home in the United States, talk about what I like to do in my free time, and share stories about different places I’ve traveled to in my life. I successfully answered the “how are you” question and then I tapped out; for the rest of our time together, I stammered some Spanish words and apologized a lot. I felt embarrassed during and terrible afterwards.

The purpose of this interview was to measure our level of Portuguese upon entering training and more or less to confirm that the box we checked in a survey over the summer (beginner!) was not a gross underestimate or overestimate of our language skills. Based on the results of these interviews, we were divided into small groups for Portuguese classes.

We learned our groups upon our arrival in the training village: I was with Cat, Maya, and Noah, and our professor, or LCF (Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitator), was named Nércio. We briefly gathered to introduce ourselves and organize a schedule for the next month. Language classes take place at our homestay houses, so we decided we would spend the first week at my house, then Noah’s, then Maya’s, and then Cat’s.

The next morning as I was having breakfast, Nércio knocked on my door, armed with a whiteboard and a stack of books. He was 20 minutes early for our 7:30 start time, but insisted I take my time eating breakfast as he arranged the chairs in our dining room for class. I quickly chugged my scalding tea and helped move the furniture. I would’ve made awkward small talk, but I didn’t yet know how.

The others arrived and we began class as we would begin every class, by singing the Mozambican national anthem. We did not happen to know the Mozambican national anthem, but we stood with our arms at our sides and stumbled through the lyrics in our língua book, trying to stick to the tune that Nércio played from his phone. After that, Nércio hung a papel gigante of the Portuguese alphabet on my dining room wall, and we practiced reciting it. We learned why “ç” exists and how to pronounce words with “nh” and “guei” and “ão” in them. We talked about peanut butter and tea and bread and firefighters, for some reason. We went over the basic verb conjugations with chamar-se and were told to write 10 sentences using each conjugation for homework. We named our WhatsApp group after the two ducks who live in my yard. We didn’t speak any English.

As we discovered that first day, the results of our LPIs were remarkably accurate: Cat, Maya, Noah, and I all came into our small group with truly the very same level of Portuguese. We all had backgrounds in Spanish from high school or college but were by no means fluent, and we had done minimal self-study over the summer to prepare for training. Our apprehensions about vocabulary acquisition and memorizing new verb endings were similar, too. Partly because of this and partly because of the nature of our personalities and learning styles, we hit it off with a fun, vulnerable, and strong rapport right from the start. We were all excited to learn and excited to learn together. Dictionaries, their pages dog-eared, would fly across the table, and important grammar rules scribbled in notebooks became communal during and after class. We were enthusiastic and never competitive, which was perhaps the most valuable part of our learning atmosphere. We understood from the beginning that after training ends, everyone is going off on their own to work and teach and learn and live, and each of us will be personally accountable for our level of Portuguese every day in every interaction we have. In a little over a month, we will be multiple provinces (and multiple days’ trips) away from nearly everyone in our cohort, so it doesn’t matter who masters the subjunctive mood first or who can recite every preposition. To compete against other volunteers working towards the same goal robs everyone of the opportunity to have each other as a wealth of resources and a support system. And guess what we learned to be true here in Mozambique, just like everywhere else in the world? Working together and lifting one another up is a beautiful, productive way to foster growth and progress.

A typical sight during a break in língua: books and papers haphazardly overlapping, lots of notes on the whiteboard and in our books, and of course, cookies. 

Another key component in our group dynamic was our ability to laugh—at ourselves, or with one another, but never at one another. When we were all on a different key singing the national anthem, we’d try to wait until the end of the song, and then we’d burst out laughing. One day we were practicing numbers and went around in a circle saying what time it was on Nércio’s watch and we kept mixing up 14 and 40, and it was hilarious to us all. If Maya correctly guessed a hard word we hadn’t yet learned, she’d break into a very subtle, very joyous celebratory dance in her chair and it’d crack us all up. When we learned the parts of the body, we split into pairs to draw half of a person on a big sheet of paper, and then we taped the two together. When Cat and I stepped back to look at our drawing, we laughed until we had tears in our eyes. It was terrible. When we combined them together, it was even funnier.

Our beautiful, accurate depiction of the human body.

The word for the pronoun “I” in Portuguese is “eu,” and it is sort of pronounced like “yo” in Spanish, but sort of not. All of us—but particularly Noah and I—struggled with the pronunciation at first (I’m still never confident with it) and Nércio would semi-teasingly, semi-sincerely correct us every time we mispronounced it. It became a bit of a game that is still going on, much to the confusion of anyone outside of our group who happens to catch it: whenever one of us says “eu,” someone else will repeat “eu” right back (whether it is initially said correctly or not, it doesn’t matter), and then we’ll both giggle. One morning early on, we discussed the concept of “mano” and “mana” here in Mozambique, which are endearing terms of respect either placed in front of your name or used in place of your name all together. In my family, I am “Mana Sarah” or “Mana,” but never just Sarah. It is generally used by someone younger speaking to someone older, but sometimes it goes both directions. Nércio asked us if we had an equivalent in the United States, and we couldn’t come up with anything. He pushed us, asking if any of us had younger siblings. Noah has a younger brother. “When your brother addresses you, does he just say Noah, or does he add another word, like Mano Noah?” A perfect setup. “Estúpido Noah?” Noah replied. Nércio was bent over laughing for a good three minutes, and all of us joined along.

Nércio excelled at building off of our high, positive energy, and was oftentimes the first to get us laughing at the start of class with a funny story about his childhood or by recounting an adventure with his family from the weekend. He’d join in the silliness at times, but he always knew when to rein us in and focus us with content and structure. We were all able to thrive in this upbeat, fast-paced learning environment. Even on days when my brain just wouldn’t process Portuguese or I felt confused or overwhelmed or frustrated with my own learning, this group kept me positive and kept me laughing.

Our training manual breaks down the division of time for our three months here in the training village. These hours get shifted a bit based on changes in schedule week to week, but the goal is for us to sit for at least 134 hours of Portuguese classes. Most of those hours happen in the first month, when language acquisition is most critical. Occasionally we will have informal língua in bigger groups at the Hub where we play games with other members of our language level, but the majority of the time we have língua at our homestay houses. We sit in the dining room or the living room or out back in the yard or right on the front porch with a small whiteboard, lots of books, and lots of determination. It feels and looks like Chidi’s ethics lessons in The Good Place: we huddle with our friends in makeshift classrooms in our homes for hours on end, taking copious notes and throwing endless questions at our overqualified professors. Instead of moral philosophy, it’s survival Portuguese, and instead of the Soul Squad, we are Tom e Jerry.

(A word about our talented professors. All of the LCFs have impressive resumes—most have multiple degrees from Mozambique’s top universities, are scholars of Portuguese, English, and other languages, and have worked either as college professors, high school teachers, or translators and interpreters for big companies or government organizations. They are all fluent in English but pretend not to be. Some will occasionally drop an English word in class if it expedites specific understanding, but others never break. I’ve never heard Nércio speak a word of English.)

Formal língua is supplemented with activities, trips, and events (giving the Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitators the “C” in LCF) here in the village and around the province. Way back during our second week here, we made our triumphant return to the capital city of Maputo and this time we didn’t just stay in a hotel. Cat, Maya, Noah, and I walked a step behind Nércio as he took us on a whirlwind tour of the city. We learned how to ride a machibombo (a Greyhound-sized bus that acts like a public transport in any major city), how to ride a chapa (a much smaller van-sized bus that somehow fits roughly as many people as a Greyhound-sized bus), how bargain for a bacela, or a little bonus, at the market, and how to order a meal at a restaurant. We visited Maputo’s Railway Museum, explored an 18th-century fort-turned museum near the water, bought capulanas (colorful local fabric used for clothes, towels, tablecloths, and anything else) at a big, beautiful shop, walked through the Botanical Garden that was packed with wedding parties, stopped for photos with the giant statue of Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, on the Independence Plaza, and met up with the whole group of trainees on the sidewalk outside of the Catholic Cathedral. We had so much fun, we laughed a lot, and at every turn—just like everywhere in Mozambique—we were confronted with the legacy of colonialism.

Following our leader, crossing multiple lanes of traffic.

An art piece at an exhibit inside Fortaleza de Maputo. See more from the artist here.

Cat and Nércio pose with Samora Machel.

Our crew waiting for lunch at an Indian restaurant.

The following week, we partook in a long-standing training tradition: a full day of cross-cultural cooking with our families. Because we were studying at Maya’s house that week, her family hosted our exchange of Mozambican and American meals. The mães (well, my mãe, Cat’s mãe, Maya’s mãe, Noah’s pai, Nércio, and the TEFL technical trainer, Reis) taught us how to ralar côco (grate coconut), pilar e peneirar amendoim (grind and sift peanuts), matar e depenar frango (kill and de-feather a chicken), acender carvão (light a charcoal fire), descanscar e cortar mboa, ou folhas de aboboreira (peel and cut mboa, or pumpkin leaves), and fazer xima (make xima, a flour + water concoction often used in place of rice with the consistency of overcooked mashed potatoes and the taste of, well, flour mixed with water (I’ll continue to try, but so far, I just can’t get on board)). In return, we shared the important American tradition of eating breakfast at random times of the day by preparing pancakes, hashbrowns, and scrambled eggs with vegetables.

Cat, master of hashbrowns.

Me, master of egg scrambling.

Maya, master of crushed peanut sifting, pauses in the shade.

Noah, master of chicken prep, protects our food from bugs.

Nércio, master of Portuguese turned master of pancakes.

It was an excellent day. Noah killed the chicken, Cat helped him remove the feathers and clean it out, and Maya and I reflected on our vegetarianism while cutting veggies at a safe distance. The mães gently chastised us women for not automatically sitting sidesaddle when we sat down to grate coconut, we all laughed when Noah’s pai told him he needed to be stronger at crushing peanuts like he had been the other day, and Nércio quickly got on board with pancake prep and took over the pouring and flipping responsibilities. After hours of cooking, we sat down for an absurdly large and delicious lunch and then cleaned the dozens of plates and cups and pans used to make the day a success. We worked well and ate well as a big, loud, fun team.

Noah and his pai, Maya and her mãe, Nércio, Cat and her mãe, and me with my mãe after a long, hot, beautiful day.

In place of afternoon tutoring, where we work one-on-one with an LCF (different from our own) to practice Portuguese speaking and grammar, every Thursday or Friday we have Ngoma Time, another opportunity for cross-cultural exchange. Each week, three or four língua groups present an element of American culture to the LCFs and training staff, other PCTs, and visiting guests or mães. Usually a local group (a band, a dance team, a poet, etc.) or the LCFs or a group of mães share a piece of Mozambican culture in return. Nércio informed us that we would be the first group to go. What could we do? We heard another group was planning to host a rock-paper-scissors tournament, and we knew we had to beat that. We sat around brainstorming for a while and reflecting on how little we share in common, culturally, though we are all Americans; Cat is from Arizona, Maya is from Florida, Noah is from California, and I am from Massachusetts. We started with the basics: apple pie, Uncle Sam, baseball. After exploring a few avenues—Is it too hackneyed to do The Electric Slide? Should we even touch politics?—we decided to stick with the basics. Apple pie and Uncle Sam are not the most interactive, but we could do baseball.

We split up our roles: Noah would pitch, I’d coach the batters, Cat would organize the infield and outfield, and Maya would work the crowd selling peanuts and getting the wave going. We all had baseball caps, but lacked the three essential components of a successful baseball game: a ball, a bat, and bases. Luckily, Peace Corps is all about improvisation and ingenuity with limited materials. Frisbees and hats served as bases, we found a large stick with even weight for a bat, and I made a surprisingly bouncy and effective ball out of a ball of twine, a bandana, and five hair ties. We messed around with it for a few minutes and it started to come undone, but then Noah suggested we wrap it in clear packing tape we found at the Hub. We took another practice swing and the ball soared. It was perfect.

I am still very proud of this accomplishment.

We got up at Ngoma Time and spent a few minutes stumbling through an explanation of the rules of baseball (this was early on, and our Portuguese was still pretty rough), but then we gave up and just said, “Vamos jogar!” (Let’s play!) We grabbed some trainees and LCFs and scattered onto our makeshift field. Maya organized the crowd and quickly got a chorus of Take Me Out to the Ballgame going. Noah set out the bases and Cat got the outfield in position. The first batter, LCF Ernesto, stepped up to the plate and I realized I didn’t have the vocabulary for swing, get your back elbow up, choke up on the bat, or any of the essential baseball batter terms. I could ask if he was right-handed or left-handed and demonstrate a stance, though, and in my back pocket I had my mother’s classic piece of advice from her years of coaching me in softball: swing level, as if the bat is sliding across a table. Como uma mesa. Noah did a crazy wind-up, Ernesto made contact, he was safe at first, and the crowd went wild. We played for a few more batters, and then our time was up and we moved on to the rock-paper-scissors tournament (which ended up being awesome as well). We felt on top of the world.

Baseball caps, a bat, and a ball. Uncle Sam would be proud.

During Week 4 of training, there is another LPI to measure our growth and to ensure we are on track to meet the minimum language level needed in order to swear in. Growth measurement and accountability is all well and good, but the downside to this LPI is that after we are all re-evaluated, the language groups get reshuffled. We were nervous. The morning of the LPI, we sat in Cat’s house practicing responding to interview-style questions. As we wrapped up, Nércio gave us a speech about how proud he was of all of us, and he thanked us for being such a fun, hardworking group. He reminded us that even if we get split up, we’ll always have this special little community; we’ll always have Tom e Jerry.

I was very pleased with how my LPI went. This time around, I was able to hold an actual conversation, speak about the past in grammatically correct sentences, and even be self-deprecating when I had trouble saying certain things (YOU try explaining what you studied at NYU Gallatin in Portuguese). In less than a month, I had gone from one-word responses to relatively complex, thoughtful sentences. To my excitement and surprise, I scored Intermediate-Mid, the minimum needed by Week 13.

The Language and Cross-Cultural Coordinator (LCC) posted our new language groups on the wall of the Hub two days later. We all flocked to the papers like middle schoolers crowding around an audition callback list on a bulletin board in a Disney movie. Nércio would now be working with the most advanced group, our three fluent Portuguese speakers. Noah and I were together in a new group with a new LCF. Cat and Maya were together in a different group with a different LCF. Tom went one way, and Jerry went the other.

Our new groups are FINE. Never the same, but fine.

But just as Nércio said, we do still have Tom e Jerry. We go for long walks to the market together and vent about our problems or share funny stories from our families and our new língua groups. We eat lunch together in the middle of long training days and get a beer every now and then on the weekends. A few weeks ago, all of the trainees and training staff hiked to Tres Fronteiras, the point where the borders of Mozambique, Eswatini, and South Africa meet. We made sure to get a photo with Nércio before we hiked back down. We find excuses to work together in big groups and shout REUNIÃO! (reunion!) once we all arrive. Our WhatsApp group is still as active as ever.

On top of a mountain overlooking three international borders, still laughing.

We reunited to serve as clean-up crew after a long morning of cooking at the Hub in celebration of Teacher Appreciation Day a few weekends ago.

I’ve made excellent friends here in PST. I’m sure as the solitary years of service go on, some long-distance friendships may drift apart while others may grow stronger. But the Grupo de Tom e Jerry? We’re in it for the long haul.

As for the real Tom and Jerry—the ducks, that is: they started laying eggs a few weeks after our language groups were reshuffled, and my mãe says six ducklings are set to hatch just before we finish training and head to our permanent sites.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, to be sure.

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.