Life in Chiure

Now that I have been at site for a little over a month, I am finally getting to know the ins and outs of daily living in Chiure. My day starts out at around 5:30 every morning, which sounds super early in American terms but here I am one of the last ones in my neighborhood out of bed. I always start to hear the world waking up outside my window around 4am. So I wake up, do my workout routine, take my bath, enjoy a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee (which I have finally perfected just when it is getting too hot out to really enjoy), apply my daily layer of sun screen, and then head to the office.

Moving in to my house!

My first week at site I was following my counterpart around the hospital and learning how things run there. I spent a good part of the week in the maternity wing, observing consultations and looking through record books to search for women who have not been coming back for their HIV treatment for the duration of their pregnancy. The transmission of HIV from mother to child is very preventable as long as the women follow medical advice and consistently follow treatment. The problem comes with the difficulties a lot of the women face in getting to the hospital to pick up their medications. They are only allowed to receive a one month supply at a time, making it so they must return to the hospital rather frequently. This seems like a small price to pay to avoid infecting your unborn child, but the tasks of daily living and the fact that many women must travel more than 50K on foot to their nearest health center makes it a daunting task for many.

The mother also must remain on treatment during the time she is breastfeeding the child as breast mild is another form of transmission. Once the child eats normal food for the first time, it is crucial that the mother not go back to breast feeding the child because small cuts can form in the child's throat which the milk can then enter. This also seems very uncomplicated on the surface, but what happens when the mother switches the child to normal food and then a few weeks later no longer has resources to feed her child. Her only option to get her child the nutrition he/she needs is to go back to breast feeding the child. And this just barely touches the surface of the complications many people face with HIV treatment. Things always seem simple on the surface until the true reality of the situation becomes exposed.

One day I was in the hospital I spent in the lab. This was one of my favorite days I must say. I learned all about malaria tests, the different types of malaria, and HIV testing. I even did a handful of HIV tests myself. Out of the 5 tests I did, 2 of them were positive. This is when it hit me how much of a prevalence the virus really has here. It is one thing to hear all about it in an information session, but it is a completely different feeling to be sitting right there, with the patients waiting outside the door as you run the test that could impact the rest of their life.



Wiwanana Office

So after my time in the hospital, I began working with my other organization Wiwanana. So far, here I have spent most of my time in the office. I have been trying to learn as much about the organization as possible. Their goal is to serve the really rural, remote areas in the district. They go house to house and evaluate living conditions, mainly concerned with water treatment, latrines, hygiene, mosquito nets, really anything involved in healthy every day living. I have not had a chance yet to do any hands on activities with this organization yet, but hopefully I can dive in sometime in the near future.



After work I stop by the market on my walk home and buy things for dinner. When I get home, my neighborhood kids are always waiting for me on my porch. I usually spend an hour or two hanging out with them, talking, laughing, enjoying each others company. This is probably my favorite part of
the entire day :)

Then I send them all home and start making dinner. The process of cooking here has been an interesting thing to try to figure out and is defiantly something I am still working on. I have an electric stove but every time I use my pan that doesn't have a rubber handle, the pan shocks me! I have to put the pan on the stove, get it all set to go, then plug the stove in, let everything cook, then unplug the stove before I touch the pan again to take it off. Since cooking is something I never did much of before I came, and ingredients here are also different than at home, every night of cooking seems like an experiment. The main things I cook tend to be pasta with tomato sauce (the one thing I seem to have mastered the best!), some mixture of veggies cooked and put over rice, or the stand by peanut butter sandwich. I have also started to throw tuna in with my pasta or veggies for a little protein. I never liked tuna back home, but it is growing on me now! Rice and beans were my favorite meal by the end of training, but I haven't quite mastered how to make those successfully yet. I know, it seems like it should be really simple, but it just never turns out as good as my host moms did! I never realized how much I would miss her cooking.

So after dinner, I clean up and then usually just go to bed. Days start early and end early here. The sun starts to rise probably around 4am, then is already starting to go down on my walk home from work around 4:30 and it is dark by about 6 or 6:30. I don't like leaving my house after dark, and the doors usually get locked up right after dinner. This is the first time in a long time I am able to sleep a good 10 hours every night without feeling guilty like there is something else I need to be getting done. I am defiantly enjoying that part of Mozambique :)

Culture Shock

I have always been a little confused by the idea of culture shock. I have never felt ‘shocked’ by a culture, that just makes it sound so dramatic! Learning about different ways of life is half the fun of traveling..But anyhow, here is the list of rather strange things about Africa I have experienced so far. I will just call them cultural findings instead of culture shock:

 

1) Every single morning all of my neighbors are out sweeping the dirt in front of there yard, all hunched over using shrub branches to do it. This I will never understand.

 

2) Any kid over the age of 5 can carry a giant bucket of water on their head or an infant child on their back better than I can

 

3) No one is taken off guard by a spider the size of my palm... or by a 12 year old boy driving a motorcycle down the road with his 2 yr old brother sitting in front of him

 

4) Two questions that come up within the first few minutes of meeting someone, whether in a professional work setting or just on the side of the street, are you married? why not? and do you like to drink? how much? I gave up explaining why I am not married, there is no use.

 

5) PDA is very uncommon here, although it is not at all uncommon to see two friends, both boys or both girls, whether they are 5 or 55 walking down the street holding hands. I have also had my male supervisor just hold on to my hand for several minutes at a time while talking, something that would be very awkward at home but is completely normal here

 

6) It is completely acceptable for male teachers to go to the school soccer game on a Saturday afternoon and just get completely wasted and act very inappropriately.

 

7) Teachers get away with not showing up to work all the time. In fact, it is very uncommon for the students to have a full day of school because chances are a teacher or two will not show up

 

8) I never appreciated how American culture and school systems put such an emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving skills until I got here. Discussions will go in circles with things being repeated over and over and then end before any type of conclusion is met.

 

9) People know how to work for money! It is amazing what someone will do for the equivalents of a dollar, from carrying my mattress on their head down the side of the street for the 25 min walk back to my house, to fetching water to fill a 100L tub in the dark when the water pump is also a 25 min walk away

 

10) I have never seen adults so concerned about snack times in my life! A meeting never starts until the break for snack time is determined.

 

11) I have never seen people who have so little want to give like Mozambiquans are willing to. You go in to a house where the family is struggling to feed themselves, and every time without fail you will always be offered bread or tea or papaya or crackers, every time! It amazes me.

 

12) Watch out for electric stoves, they will shock you through the pan!!! Learned that the hard way

 

13) Bucket baths really aren't that bad, especially when you get to take one under the amazing star lit sky! Id take a warm bucket bath over a cold shower any day of the week. 

 

14) If you bite into something crunchy in your bread, just swallow as quick as you can and pretend it didn't happen. This will happen with almost every piece of bread you eat... dirt, beetles, ants, you never know, just think of it as a little protein boost 😉

 

15)  The words clean and sanitary take on a whole new definition here. Ants get in your container of coffee, just pick out the ones you can see and act like it never happened. Your feet are covered in dirt and dust and grim ALL the time, get used to it! 100 ants crawling on you while you sleep, just be happy it isn't a rat! Life goes on 

 

16) Cold water, well cold anything for that matter, is a luxury so don't keep taking those things for granted!

 

17) Personal space, privacy, what’s that??

 

18) People will never stop being amazed that my hair looks different when it is wet, and apparently it isn't weird at all to come up to a complete stranger and start petting their head

 

19) There is an entire coastline filled with beautiful, remote, non-tourist invaded beaches in this country and I plan to explore as many of them as possible!

 

20)  Adding coconut milk to your cooking instantly makes any dish taste 5 times better, and Mozambiquan’s got that one down!