After getting to my little town almost a month ago exactly, work has been pretty scarce. With the exception of meeting the school director, the pedagogical director, and a few other important people around town, since classes don’t start until February 4th, and I won’t even know what grade I’ll be teaching until January 31st, it’s been a lot of time for me to spend however I wanted. Since most of the teachers are out of town on summer férias, that’s turned into a few random trips out of town for me. 

Just a few weeks ago the brother of one of the teachers in town knocked on my door saying one of his dogs was acting kinda funny and killed another of the dogs. He wanted me to take a picture of the dead puppy with my smartphone so he could show his brother (who is still out of town) what happened to the dogs. I probably should’ve been more cautious from the start, given everything he said, but I know this teacher has been a friend to volunteers before me, so I wanted to help however I could in such a sad situation. When I got there, the brother also asked me to take a picture of a bite mark on the back of the dog that was acting strange, and as I bent down to take the picture, the dog swung around and bit my leg. The bite mark itself wasn’t bad, not worth more than a little antibiotic ointment, but given the behavior of the dog, this won me the first two trips of my recent series of travels, up to sunny Nampula City, for post-exposure rabies shots. (I’d been vaccinated, but the rabies vaccine isn’t a cure-all, rabies is fast-acting and really damaging if left unattended, so despite getting vaccinated beforehand, I still needed post-exposure shots). 

There are three main ways to travel around Mozambique, machimbombo, chapa, and boleia; bus, minibus, and hitchhiking. On any of these trips I usually just go with whatever stops for me first (that I feel safe riding in), which for going up to Nampula meant getting a boleia. This is probably where my mom is getting worried reading this, but I promise you mom, boleias are the safest, cheapest, fastest way to travel in Mozambique. It’s even recommended by the Peace Corps, and they’re pretty uptight about what modes of transportation you can use. Volunteers have gotten administrative separation and sent home after riding on ‘open back’ chapas where you ride in a truck bed, or by catching a ride on a motorcycle, so it being recommended by Safety and Security actually means a lot. Unlike back in the states where hitchhiking isn’t something most people do, catching a boleia is super common and more formalized than in the US, and the hand signs are a little different. To flag down a driver, you hold your hand out and flap your fingers to the ground. I’ve also seen people point to the sky kinda elvis disco dance style to mean they’re going a long distance, but nobody really expects me to catch a boleia to travel within my town, so I usually stick to the floppy fingers.

Then as a driver you have your own set of hand signs you can throw. If you put a flat hand on top of a fist that means that your car is full.

And if you make a circle with your finger that means that you’re just staying in the area. I’ve also found that driving past somebody is a clear signal that you’re not picking them up. 

Despite the whole rabies thing, I really enjoyed the couple trips it afforded me. Nampula’s a fantastic city. It’s the second largest in Mozambique, after the capital, Maputo. It’s not that far from me so it’s also nestled among my little mountains, which I’m always happy to see out on the horizon. It has a really gorgeous catholic church in the middle of town, and it’s very active, with lots of hustle and bustle. But in all honesty it’s so nice mainly just because it’s a city. It has cafes and grocery stores, and Peace Corps has an office there with a lounge and comfy couches and wifi. As much as I’d love to show you pictures of the city, besides the picture I used as the header, looking back at my photos on my phone they’re mostly just pictures of pizzas, coffee, and hamburgers. I’d never think little capitalist delights like a grocery store with rows of packaged, processed food would make me feel so at home, but I felt like I did when my parents took me to the dollar store as a kid, staring wide eyed at all isles and isles of things you could buy.

After the Nampula excursions, a few volunteers from Zambézia decided to meet up in Quilemane, a smaller city down in the southern tip of the province right by the coast. For a trip that long we decided to opt for a big machimbombo. They’re comfortable if you can get a seat and much more reliable with timing (though we’re talking relatively here, we’re still in Mozambique). Sadly all the seats were taken by the time the bus made it down to my town, so I was sitting in the isle for the trip, but it wasn’t so bad. Quilemane, similarly to Nampula, was a very cool city, but mostly my friends and I sat around coffee shops or restaurants playing cards and trading stories about our sites. Peace Corps is hard. You get lots of unwanted attention at site (especially if you’re a female volunteer) and anonymity is something you have to leave behind in America. Speaking Portuguese 24/7 is draining, making it especially hard when Mozambican culture is much more extroverted than you’re accustomed to, and there’s an expectation for you to be socializing and spending time with people, and staying in your house alone is seen as incredibly weird, if not rude. Having the opportunity to take a weekend off with some other volunteers, being able to talk about those things and have people who are in the same boat there to listen was super nice, and worth sitting on the floor of a bus for a few hours.

Lastly, just earlier this week I went to the nearest town with a population of more than just a couple thousand to buy some wood and construction supplies to make shelves so I don’t have to keep living out of my suitcase. The town wasn’t much to write home about besides a nice lunch with a couple volunteers that live there. On the way back though, I took the slowest, least comfortable, but most readily available way of getting around here in Mozambique, a chapa. In a chapa, all of the luggage bigger than a backpack (aka my big planks of wood) go strapped on top, and all the passengers get squeezed in the back. Every chapa I’ve been in has a wood plank drilled in right behind the driver in that serves as a sad excuse for a bench, and either by bad luck or cruel divine intervention, that always seems to be where I end up. Chapa drivers, to get as much money out of the ride as possible, will refuse to leave until they’ve stuffed as many sardines in their tin can of a car as they possibly can, making for some cramped legs and poor butt circulation. I’ve heard of times where chapas will wait hours for the last few passengers to roll around, or of cases when the other riders will pool together and buy the last few seats just so the driver will leave. It’s really no fun, but it gets you from A to B, and they’re strap stuff to the roof for ya, which is more than you can ask from a boliea.