My Room

Here's a photo of my new digs. As you can see, my room is awesome. In fact, it's arguably bigger than my room in San Francisco for which I used to pay 800 bucks a month.

Shout out to my Mennonite friends: 50 points if you can find the John Howard Yoder book in this picture.

Also, I promised Lauren to take more photos of my host family, but they don't like taking pictures until they are dressed to the nines. Which is convenient, because Mozambicans love getting dressed up and will often do it when they travel and go to church. I'll take some pics on Sunday and post em next week.

Your brother,
Stephen

My Mailing Address

I should probably warn you that mail takes at least a month to get here. Sometimes it never comes. I am still waiting on some shirts that my parents sent me two weeks ago. Because of this, don't bother sending me anything valuable or perishable if, that is, you want to send anything at all. If you do decide send something despite all the warnings, pictures would be HUGE.

Also, we only check the mail about once a week, cause we never get mail anyway.

Here's my mailing address for Tete:

Stephen Esaki
Igreja Menonita
C.P. 165
Tete, Mozambique


Your brother,
Stephen

My Back Yard

I've been totally slacking on my photos. Here's the view from my backyard.

My Work

I’ve been reading this book that Jon (my MCC coworker) loaned me called When Helping Hurts. In it Miriam Adeney tells a story she once heard that I think is relevant to our work here:

Elephant And Mouse were best friends. One day Elephant said, “Mouse, let’s have a party!” Animals gathered from far and near. They ate. They drank. They sang. And they danced. And nobody celebrated more and danced harder than Elephant. After the party was over, Elephant exclaimed, “Mouse, did you ever go to a better party? What a blast!” But Mouse did not answer. “Mouse, where are you?” Elephant called. But Mouse did not answer. He looked around for his friend, and then shrank back in horror. There at the Elephant’s feet lay Mouse. His little body was ground into the dirt. He had been smashed by the big feet of his exuberant friend, Elephant. “Sometimes, that is what it is like to do mission with you Americans, “the African storyteller commented. “Is is like dancing with an Elephant.”

I guess as upper-middleclass American service workers in a foreign field, we are pretty guilty of this. Most of the time, we are trying to fit square pegs into round holes. We’ve got this baggage on how we think things should run, because these ways work so well in the West. And it’s not like I am telling you this with any authority. Shoot, I didn’t even know this was a problem until it was explained to me when I got here. I totally thought I was gonna do this great work, be some great guy, and leave.

We’ve got big hearts, but also big feet.

In our work, we are constantly running this risk.

So our work in Tete is to work alongside the Christian Council of Mozambique to work with communities who we think could benefit from added water security in the form of sand dams. CCM is the face of Christianity in Mozambique, it is highly respected and known to do good work. We’ve been given funding from this awesome organization called the Canadian Foodgrains Bank to provide sand dams that ultimately help to bolster food security in the country. The Mennonite Central Committee’s role in this is to represent the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, to transfer the money, and to provide technical engineering support.

I think the projects are amazing. I don’t have pictures of before and after just yet, but sand dams bring farming to areas that previously had none. It’s transformational.

The problem is that we are elephants. The challenge to CCM is that we need to select communities that can actually benefit from these sand dams. Which means many things. These communities need to use the dams, care for the dams, continue to want to fix the dams, and want to plant upstream of the dams. As embarrassing as this is, we’ve already got sand dams built that aren’t used by the communities in just the two years we’ve been doing the work here. We need these people to view their dams not projects they are doing for us. This is complicated by the fact that we provide food for work, which we distribute to each worker, since the construction is hard work. We should give this food. I think it is entirely right to give this food, but it only makes the community ownership problem worse, because they think they are getting paid to do our work.

Boy, this is hard work. Help, anyone?

Your brother,
Stephen

My First Joke in Portuguese

I know I already told some of you this story already, but here's the story of my first joke in Portuguese. The story goes like this:

I was sitting in the living room with my host dad watching the evening news, which had spent its whole time covering the riot that was happening in Maputo (the capital city).
There were some videos on the news showing people looting stores. In one of the videos there was this woman running away with like five colorful big plastic buckets upside down over her head. She makes it like 100 yards, when the other rioters around her notice what's going on and they pull the buckets off her head and each try to get a bucket of their own.

I turn to my host dad and in terrible portuguese I say, "In America during riots, people steal televisions; In Mozambique during riots, people steal plastic buckets."

He busted up laughing and I was totally proud of myself for the rest of the night.

The thing about that story though, is that it actually explains a lot about the social-economic background here in Mozambique. The riot in Maputo was over the cost of bread and transportation that have been rising recently. I think it costs something like 5 Meticals for a single serving of bread and something like 10 Meticals to go somewhere around a mile on chapa (usually some beat up old toyota van ran privately instead of a bus system). The exchange rate is something like 37 Mets to the US Dollar and the average Mozambican makes somewhere around 40 US Dollars a month. So say you have a family of five and you are the average Mozambican. And each person eats a single serving of bread a day. There goes half your income.

Ok, so why buckets? Buckets are hugely important to life in Mozambique as they are used to wash clothes, flush toilets, do dishes, and bathe. And since water service is intermittent, water storage is pretty important.

Also, there was pretty heavy vandalism because of the riots, which is unfortunate because there were millions of dollars lost while the country just doesn't have millions of dollars to spare. I think Moz is like seventh from the bottom on the list of countries ranked on the Human Development Index.

Crazy, right?

Your brother,
Stephen

Sand Fleas

I don't know what they look like exactly, but sand fleas are these little insects that apparently burrow into your foot and live under your skin.

The reason I am telling you this is because I had noticed a bump on my big toe for a few days now and I was freaking out about. I was worried that it was some sort of staph infection or something. I even emailed my doc Jennifer and uncle Paul about this. For a few days I've been worrying over what it was, because it didn't hurt or itch. Anyway, I was messing with the bump last night when my host brother noticed it and pointed it out to the whole family. Everyone gathered around my foot and after some portuguese-english dictionary use, it was decided that I had a sand flea. They said they come from Maputo or Beira (they don't live in Tete) and that my 'muito grande' sand flea looked like it had been in there for five days.

So, five days ago I was in Beira visiting an orphanage with Melanie and Priscila. Later that night we ended up hanging out with one of the workers there, Heather, who told us that she had just removed a sand flea from her foot and that they are common at the orphanage because of the animals and the younger kids don't take the best care of their feet.

I woke up this morning to find that the little guy in my foot was actually a little gal, because she had ripped a slit in my skin and started laying eggs in the dried blood along the toe nail. So of course, I'm freaking out that the eggs had fallen into my bed or that I'll have a family of these guys in my foot. Thankfully, my host sister gets a needle out and cuts away the skin around the flea and pulls it out.

Over the next hour the hypochondriac in me starts inspecting every bump on my body and I show every one of em to my host mom who has a hearty laugh at my expense.

Bem Vindo Mocambique, eh?

Your brother,
Stephen

My New Home

I don't even know where to begin the comparisons between the states and Tete. There really is none. I'll try to highlight some of the aspects of life that I think are pretty unusual - but I bet there are a surprising number of similarities that I am just taking for granted. Life is more difficult here, but it's pretty darn pleasant overall. I don't have any pictures yet, but they will come. I promise.

I live with a Mozambican middle class family. But it helps to remember that middle class here looks vastly different than the middle class in the states. We live in a concrete house with a tin roof. But we have neighbors with much less. That was a hard concept for me to grasp and I guess it still is tough for me. Our middle class and theirs are not even close. Their middle class seriously looks like those commercials you see for those sponsor a child programs. Seriously.

We have electricity but no running water. I've tried to help with fetching the water a few times. The spigot where we get the water from is in someone's front yard. Right next to that spigot lives some chicken, pidgeons, a family of ducks, some goats, and a pig. Kinda gross, but I filter my water - so no worries there (although my canteen that i use smells terrible on the inside right now for some reason).

We have two TVs but no refrigerator. Pai has a 50cc motorcycle, but it seems to be used only for going to town to pick up supplies for the family store that is operated right in front of the house in a grass shack (seriously).

We take bucket showers, which are surprisingly pleasant especially when the water is boiled in the kettle first. Far and away the best thing about bucket showers in Mozambique is that they are frequent. It seems pretty wasteful to take more than a shower a day coming from the states, but in Moz it's actually a great way to keep up hygiene and cool off in the summer. Which are incredibly important here.

The family has a bathroom sink and a toilet, both of which are not plumbed. They are pretty useless. Except at night, when it's too dark to pee outside. Only pee is allowed in the toilet for now. It sounds weird but this all makes sense because Tete is built on a gigantic rock. Water from flush toilets would have nowhere to go since infiltration of wastewater through the subsurface just isn't possible.

The family cooks with a little charcoal stove called a Fugao which makes the food delicious, but the kitchen unbearably hot. I can't imagine what it'll be like in the summer months. This morning, i woke up smelling a fire outside that was being used to warm hot water for my bath and later that same fire was used to fry fish. Again, delicious but crazy inconvenient.

Apparently even the people who have lived in Tete their whole lives also think it's a very hot place. There's a guy in my office who looks like Kanye West. Here's a quote from him, "They should send all the bad people to Tete, so that they can practice for Hell." Ridiculous!

Also, the concept of time here is very loose. My language teacher is 20 minutes late, which is why I finally have time to do some blogging.

He's here so I gotta go. Your brother,
Stephen