Thursday, October 12, 2006
The Season of Burning Fields
12 October 2006
Thank you all for your opinions on where I should live. Unfortunately I still don’t have a place. The problem has been time. This last weekend I took a short trip to Chimoio and when I got back it was already time for me to start traveling out to the districts to participate in focus groups. I have been picked up every day this week for a drive to Dondo, as small town that is about an hour outside of Beira. The drive to this town has become very familiar to me now and it is starting to feel less and less new and more and more like home. It is almost mango season. There are mango trees everywhere and the mangos hang off of the bright green trees like little Christmas tree ornaments. The mangos are green too but they are slowly starting to turn ripen and turn red. Soon, I suspect, there will be baskets of mangos for sale everywhere. I love a juicy mango!!! It is also the season of burning fields. On the drive to Dondo there are fields (machambas) on either side that people are starting to turn over for new plantings. This process begins by burning off the bright yellow flowers that are beautiful but are weeds to the farmers. Small square sections of these fields are burned and the air is filled with smoke. The blackened fields are then slowly turned over by women and men with hoes. I haven’t seen any planting yet, just burning and hoeing.
The focus groups that we are running are very interesting. Curandieros (traditional medicine/religious practitioners), pastors, people-living-with-Aids, AIDS activists, church mothers, we spent the week sitting in groups with them and discussing HIV/AIDS, the health system, and the necessity of home-care for the sick. All of these groups want to help, want to stop the death of their community, but they don’t have any good system for finding out who needs help. It’s all haphazard. Hopefully with this work we can figure out a good system for organizing everyone, getting people on treatment, and getting the health system to respond to the communities needs. Next week I’ll be spending the week in Caia…a small town about 6 hours north of Beira…doing the same work. Then I’ll be back for the weekend and then off to Marromeu, an even smaller town a little west of Caia.
The biggest frustration is not speaking Sena. That is the most widely spoken language in the center of Mozambique. There is also about 45 other languages spoken throughout Mozambique but everyone thinks that the best one to learn is Sena. Second best would be Ndao. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn them both. The moment that I return from Caia I’m going to find someone to start to teach me Sena. It’s a beautiful language. There is lots of rolling and fluttering in the language, no clicks though. I’ve learned to say hello and no thank you, that’s all so far. The focus group with the curandeiros was almost entirely in Sena and in many of the other groups there were a considerable number of people who could understand my questions in Portuguese but preferred to answer in Sena.
Hopefully soon I will have a little time in Beira to find a place to live. I have been mostly in the Guest House but different people are always coming through and I don’t feel like I can really unpack. It will be so nice to have a place of my own, be able to unpack my bags, find a decent hammock and a nice pan to fry eggs!! Rebeca, if you are reading this, I want to thank you for convincing me to bring the little stove-top espresso pot. It has been put to much use already. Good coffee is hard to come by and a good coffee maker is even harder. The other wonderful thing has been my little bucky travel pillow. The pillows that I’ve encountered here are all about 6-inches high and hard as rocks…not good. I’ve been using my little bucky and have been so happy with it that I think I might just keep on using it as my pillow when I get back to the states too.
p.s. don’t you just hate it when you’re sitting there working and you feel a strange sensation on your leg where there is a big sore from scratching a mosquito bite, you look down and there is a baby cockroach crawling around on it
Thank you all for your opinions on where I should live. Unfortunately I still don’t have a place. The problem has been time. This last weekend I took a short trip to Chimoio and when I got back it was already time for me to start traveling out to the districts to participate in focus groups. I have been picked up every day this week for a drive to Dondo, as small town that is about an hour outside of Beira. The drive to this town has become very familiar to me now and it is starting to feel less and less new and more and more like home. It is almost mango season. There are mango trees everywhere and the mangos hang off of the bright green trees like little Christmas tree ornaments. The mangos are green too but they are slowly starting to turn ripen and turn red. Soon, I suspect, there will be baskets of mangos for sale everywhere. I love a juicy mango!!! It is also the season of burning fields. On the drive to Dondo there are fields (machambas) on either side that people are starting to turn over for new plantings. This process begins by burning off the bright yellow flowers that are beautiful but are weeds to the farmers. Small square sections of these fields are burned and the air is filled with smoke. The blackened fields are then slowly turned over by women and men with hoes. I haven’t seen any planting yet, just burning and hoeing.
The focus groups that we are running are very interesting. Curandieros (traditional medicine/religious practitioners), pastors, people-living-with-Aids, AIDS activists, church mothers, we spent the week sitting in groups with them and discussing HIV/AIDS, the health system, and the necessity of home-care for the sick. All of these groups want to help, want to stop the death of their community, but they don’t have any good system for finding out who needs help. It’s all haphazard. Hopefully with this work we can figure out a good system for organizing everyone, getting people on treatment, and getting the health system to respond to the communities needs. Next week I’ll be spending the week in Caia…a small town about 6 hours north of Beira…doing the same work. Then I’ll be back for the weekend and then off to Marromeu, an even smaller town a little west of Caia.
The biggest frustration is not speaking Sena. That is the most widely spoken language in the center of Mozambique. There is also about 45 other languages spoken throughout Mozambique but everyone thinks that the best one to learn is Sena. Second best would be Ndao. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn them both. The moment that I return from Caia I’m going to find someone to start to teach me Sena. It’s a beautiful language. There is lots of rolling and fluttering in the language, no clicks though. I’ve learned to say hello and no thank you, that’s all so far. The focus group with the curandeiros was almost entirely in Sena and in many of the other groups there were a considerable number of people who could understand my questions in Portuguese but preferred to answer in Sena.
Hopefully soon I will have a little time in Beira to find a place to live. I have been mostly in the Guest House but different people are always coming through and I don’t feel like I can really unpack. It will be so nice to have a place of my own, be able to unpack my bags, find a decent hammock and a nice pan to fry eggs!! Rebeca, if you are reading this, I want to thank you for convincing me to bring the little stove-top espresso pot. It has been put to much use already. Good coffee is hard to come by and a good coffee maker is even harder. The other wonderful thing has been my little bucky travel pillow. The pillows that I’ve encountered here are all about 6-inches high and hard as rocks…not good. I’ve been using my little bucky and have been so happy with it that I think I might just keep on using it as my pillow when I get back to the states too.
p.s. don’t you just hate it when you’re sitting there working and you feel a strange sensation on your leg where there is a big sore from scratching a mosquito bite, you look down and there is a baby cockroach crawling around on it
# posted by Molly Louise @ 5:40 PM 
