Mozambique

Nothing like taking a week-long vacation two weeks after starting a new job. We joined Lewis & Ruby and three of their Peace Corps buddies for a relaxing beach trip in Tofo, Mozambique. Unlike Swaziland, Tofo was warm and sunny the entire time, fresh seafood was everywhere, and the people spoke Portuguese! (I like to pretend I speak Portuguese because it’s so close to Spanish.)

The party bus left before dawn and dropped us in Tofo
late afternoon.

We rented a house overlooking the sea, and it was perfect. 

The first of several amazing meals on the deck. (Sorry, Ruby, I didn't take many pics to choose from!)

Witnessed an awesome wedding while we were sipping beers: the whole wedding party jumped out the back of
two pick-ups, they got married on the beach, sang and danced back to the trucks, and drove off

A local cook invited us to his house for a private dinner. Lovely end to a lovely trip.

Guba

Back in Swaziland, we moved into our “house” and started our “job.” I use quotations because our house is actually a tool shed and our job doesn’t pay. But since we enjoy the work and we have no rent, bills, insurance, debt, or taxes to worry about, I think it’s a pretty good gig.

Our teeny tiny "house"

The nursery

Guba is a nonprofit started 5 years ago by an English couple. They offer free permaculture training to low-income Swazis, to empower them to rise out of poverty by growing their own food and living sustainably. Every year they select thirty participants who spend a week each month at Guba, learning how to garden, compost, mulch, filter gray water, raise chickens, etc. Then Guba staff members visit every homestead every month to support their progress. It’s the most intensive, hands-on permaculture training I’ve seen and it seems to be very effective. 

We arrived at Guba just in time to attend the graduation ceremony of their first group of participants. Everyone was joyful. There were hours of speeches and songs, mostly in SiSwati, but it was clear without translation that the trainees were grateful and proud. We walked there from the bus with one graduate who told us in English that this was the best thing that ever happened to her. She said there are no words to describe what a positive impact Guba has had on her family.

Part of the Guba team

Building the new training center

So we felt great about who we were working for, but then we started and didn’t know what our role was. Training doesn’t start again until January, and everyone’s main focus now is construction: building a new training center, a new kitchen, and volunteer accommodations.

The Volunteer Accommodations - you think it'll be ready by the time we leave?

Now we’ve got an idea of how this place runs and we basically choose to work on whatever projects interest us, or start something new. My main project has been planting a food forest. A food forest is like a regular forest, with a canopy, understory, vines, etc., but everything in it is edible – fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, grape vines, and perennial vegetables on the ground. It’s a permaculturist’s heaven; a consistent source of free, diverse food that requires almost no maintenance and makes a positive impact on the environment instead of a negative one. It improves soil quality, invites birds and small animals, provides shade, etc., etc. Guba has a large area of land set aside for this, so they asked me to research available trees and come up with a design that considers each tree’s needs regarding sun and wind exposure, water, soil quality, and spacing.  So far I’ve designed and planted one section of the forest. On a typical day I spend a few hours inside, researching and designing, then a few hours planting trees in the soil.

We quickly realized that TK gets antsy if he spends more than 10 minutes on a computer, and Microsoft Excel makes him crazy. So he works almost entirely outdoors, mostly planting and taking care of the animals. He’s in charge of the experimental chicken coop, which has four separated fields planted at intervals with different grains and vegetables. The idea is to learn which plants can coexist with chickens and how big they need to grow first to adequately feed the chickens without being trampled or ravaged by them.

TK's latest idea is to build a solar dryer for drying fruit.

Lewis and Ruby pay us a visit and we make it as white trash as possible:
sipping beers mid-afternoon, sitting on tires outside our trailer :)

So that’s what we’ve been up to the past couple months. It’s nice to have regular work hours again, but also the flexibility to take time off whenever we want. For things like Mozambique!

Kruger

Visiting Kruger Game Reserve is like driving through The Lion King. We drove all day for three days, stopping every time we spotted something amazing just roaming around. And we only saw a small portion of the park – it’s the size of Belgium.

Antelope

We camped in our tent, stopping at a new campsite every night. We made one big oversight in planning this trip: the website said all campsites had kitchen facilities, so we brought enough groceries for three dinners and road snacks. When we got there we discovered that “kitchen facilities” means “table with hot plate.” No pots and pans, no utensils, no plates. So we ate bread and cheese with a side of trail mix for three days.

Wild dogs are a rare spotting but we were lucky to run across a pack
of them hunting down an antelope.

In fact, the whole camping experience was unenjoyable. The sites were full, but we were the only ones camping in a tent. Everyone around us had RVs with patio furniture and many even surrounded their plots with mesh fences to complete the illusion that they were still in suburbia. Women brought their curling irons. To each his own, but nothing’s more annoying than having to endure your neighbors’ drunken singing, laughing and shouting in Afrikaans while you’re trying to sleep. I think everyone there was at least twenty years older than us; you’d think it’d be quiet by 2am. No.

But the drives were awesome. We saw tons of incredible, beautiful animals that’d we’d never seen before. I got over my fear of driving on the left side. I had “Hakuna Matata” and “When I was a Young Warthog” stuck in my head the whole time. (Previously it was Shakira’s “Waka waka” from looking around South Africa, and “This land is your land” back in the redwoods.)

Pumba!

My favorite moment was sitting up on this ledge and watching a herd of elephants graze below us at sunset.

We could never get close to a hippo out of water.

We glimpsed the elusive white rhino. Or was it black rhino? I mix them up since they're both gray...

This lone bull gave us an angry farewell. We fled out the gates before he could charge at the car.

Swaziland

Smaller than New Jersey

We made it to Swaziland! (Two months ago.) 

At first we stayed with Lewis and Ruby, getting a feel of what Peace Corps Swaziland is like. It’s fairly similar to Peace Corps Paraguay: rural site down a long dirt road, in a poor, land-locked country no one’s heard of, doing development work with locals who are generally indifferent about working on projects, but very friendly. The food here is just as bland and unhealthy as in Paraguay (mealie meal/pap instead of mandioca), unless of course you’re eating at Ruby’s, where it’s the opposite of bland and unhealthy. There’s one aspect of Swazi life that I think makes “community integration” much more difficult: Swazis don’t drink! How would we have bonded with our neighbors in Paraguay if we didn’t get sloshed together at Sunday asados?

Walking through Lewis & Ruby's site. I guess I'm going for the 12-year-old Mormon look.

We helped Lewis and Ruby work on their school library, ate a bunch of good meals, and at night we bundled up to watch movies or play games. I had no idea Swaziland would be so cold! 

We got one siSwati lesson from their tutor, a sweet 20 year old girl who also gave us Swazi names. She named TK Musa, which means mercy/compassion, and me Thandeka, meaning loved/lovely.  Lewis’ name here is Mandla, meaning strength, and Ruby is Ngobile, meaning winner.

They have an awesome garden

After a couple of weeks of chilling with them, we ventured out to do something touristy and visited Mlilwane Game Reserve. We saw our first zebras, wildebeest, and warthogs!

When we went to visit the farm/NGO where we would be working and living for six months, the house they were building for volunteers still looked like this:

They needed another week to put together some temporary accommodation for us, so we rented a car and headed to Kruger National Park in South Africa. We saw tons of animals there, which means I took tons of photos, so I’ll do a separate post on that!

Home...

Oregon Coast

Between South America and Africa we spent one month in the good old USA, mostly in Oregon with TK’s family.

Somehow I didn’t take a single picture in Oregon, except once at the coast. Maybe setting down the camera is a side effect of feeling at home after so much travelling. Whatever “home” means. The first time I came back after two and a half years in Paraguay, I felt like an alien observing strange human behavior, stupefied by America’s wide highways packed with huge vehicles holding one person each. I never expected to cringe at the sight of someone using paper towels to wipe a counter, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that would send me into distraught reflections on mankind. Not to say that a few years in Paraguay turned me into a native, or that one place is better than the other. A good chunk of my Peace Corps service was spent wrapping my head around the Paraguayan psyche and their customs that initially seemed absurd, i.e. the general avoidance/fear of spending any time alone, and the preference of many adults to live with their parents for their entire lives, and even the little things like their use of a tablecloth instead of a napkin to wipe their mouths with. I grew to love Paraguay, but I could never feel completely at home there, not least of all because every walk through any public space brought on long, unabashed stares from children and adults alike, usually accompanied by hisses, whistles, “que lindas son tus ojos,” and “kuna poraaa.” That gets really old after three years. But then I returned to the U.S. to realize that American customs are no less absurd. (Try explaining Halloween to a foreigner.) One thing Peace Corps does is make you feel precariously connected to two different worlds and somewhat estranged from everybody in both, except for those few crazy RPCVs who did it all with you.

Anyway, since that first bout of reverse culture shock, it has become less jolting to go back and forth between North and South America. This last visit was, more than anything, incredibly comfortable. We thoroughly enjoyed English conversations with family and friends, carpet, hot hot showers, good food and drinks, and not being stared at ever. By the end of it I felt so at home in Oregon that I was as melancholy as I was excited about moving to Swaziland.

During our U.S. trip (or was it our U.S. return from a South America trip?) we took a mini road trip down to the Redwood Forest. I LOVED it there. We camped in the car and hiked on trails that wound through the biggest, tallest trees on earth. Beautiful.

Amelia really loves her cows :)

On our way to Africa, we paid a visit to some of our dearest Peace Corps friends on the east coast. Anita, Kyle, and Dan led us through New York City debauchery, and then Amelia introduced us to rural Massachusetts, her family, her newly acquired cows, and some of her favorite watering holes and swimming holes.

Then we flew off to spend the next six months (or more?) in a continent fairly new to both of us, and more specifically, a country fairly unknown to anybody: Swaziland.