Thursday, October 12, 2006
A Sense of Space
08 October 2006
I finally got out of the city on Thursday morning. It was great for my loneliness and even more wonderful to finally get a sense of where I was in the world. I left the city last minute with Pablo who was traveling to Chimoio (Chee-moy-oh), a small city in the mountains toward Zimbabwe. He was planning on staying there Thursday night and then returning on Friday. We had to stop by another even smaller town called Gondola first because he has to check out the new construction going on at the hospital there. The ride was wonderful. We passed out of the city and then through an area of machambas.
Machambas are small plots of land that people in the city use to grow rice, vegetables etc. It is a lot of work but absolutely necessary for life! The main preoccupation of people who are HIV+ is the inability to work in their Machambas. It becomes an awful spiral. A person is too sick to work in their machamba, they don’t produce enough food, they don’t have the energy to get better and their side effects from the drugs get worse. The World Food Program only gives out food for the first three months of HIV drugs. After that everyone is on their own unless they can hook up with another association that provides food. To make matters worse, the drugs themselves make people very hungry. It’s a vicious cycle.
The area of machambas, however, is beautiful and seems very fertile. After you pass through the machambas you get into the countryside. The road is variable. At times it is a nice paved road and at times it is a dusty dirt track with giant potholes you have to swerve to avoid. It is so bad in some places that there is a prohibition of people driving HAI cars after 6pm. The little towns that you pass are often a mishmash of different house styles. Toward the front of the road are often little stores and markets that have whitewashed walls and doors that lock. Then there are houses made in the same style that was common in Brazil. You build the walls from straight branches interwoven, then you fill in the weave with mud. The big difference is that, in Brazil, the roofs are completed with terra cotta tiles or corrugated tin, here they are often completed with thatch. The other houses that are the most common are called rondavals and are made also of stick walls filled in with mud but topped by round thatched roofs. Occasionally they are decorated with paint and sometimes they have small windows cut out of the mud walls. They are organized in big compounds that are near machambas.
The landscape is always hard to describe but it is very open from Beira to Chimoio, there are large vistas with acacia trees and other trees that I don’t know the name of. It is flat as a pancake for much of the drive and then you begin to see mountains in the distance and the elevation climbs. The mountains also look sparse, in comparison to Seattle where at least one thing is growing in every free inch of dirt. But it is beautiful in its openness. There are little markets in the small towns that sell used clothing (I think all from American used-clothing companies), tomatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, okra and peppers presented in lovely colorful stacks. The road is shared by many trucks making their way to and from Zimbabwe and many people walking along the road (mostly kids back from school and women carrying water). The women almost always wear colorful wrap skirts that most of you who have seen pictures of Africa can imagine. There are also many men on bicycles laden down with either sacks of charcoal (giant sacks—6ft tall) or bundled thatch.
I’ll stop with my description there because I’m sure that I’ll have much more to say later. I arrived in Chimoio and met the staff of HAI-Chimoio and worked in their office for a few hours before Pablo and I went out and had dinner. If you have the money for it, there is a surprising diversity of food here. We had really nice burritos!!! Burritos I repeat!!! And, of course, some grilled squid. For those of you who know me well…you know I have a little obsession with squid. I LOVE SQUID. How perfect, then, that you can get squid all over the place here. Really good, giant, tasty squid. Anyway, I’m off on a tangent again. Before we left for dinner Wendy, an ex-pat that works at HAI-Chimoio (a different Wendy from the one mentioned above) said that Pablo had told her that I was joining her for a HIV counselor retreat the next day. Surprise!!! I didn’t know that was in my plans but it did sound interesting. So the next day (after spending a beautiful night in the very comfortable HAI Guest House in Chimoio) I was picked up by Wendy and driven to a big resort in a little town called Inchope. Counselors from all over two provinces came to learn a little and discuss their experiences. It was really interesting to hear what they had to say and to meet the people who I’ll be working with in the small towns in these provinces. We danced at night, had some more meeting items in the morning and then all got ready to go. The car situation was a fiasco and a small group of us were waiting for a few hours. Normally this would be no big deal but it takes about 3 hours to get back to Beira, it was 3pm, and all of us knew that cars could not be on the road after 6pm. Ahhh…we all thought we would have to spend the night in one of these small little towns. But Antonio, our driver, pulled through for us and got us into the city limits (you can drive within the city limits after dark) with 10 minutes to spare.
Ok…I think that is probably enough reading for now. I was going to tell you the story of the baboon who was trying to make love to a chicken but I’ll save that for tomorrow. Cheers!!!
I finally got out of the city on Thursday morning. It was great for my loneliness and even more wonderful to finally get a sense of where I was in the world. I left the city last minute with Pablo who was traveling to Chimoio (Chee-moy-oh), a small city in the mountains toward Zimbabwe. He was planning on staying there Thursday night and then returning on Friday. We had to stop by another even smaller town called Gondola first because he has to check out the new construction going on at the hospital there. The ride was wonderful. We passed out of the city and then through an area of machambas.
Machambas are small plots of land that people in the city use to grow rice, vegetables etc. It is a lot of work but absolutely necessary for life! The main preoccupation of people who are HIV+ is the inability to work in their Machambas. It becomes an awful spiral. A person is too sick to work in their machamba, they don’t produce enough food, they don’t have the energy to get better and their side effects from the drugs get worse. The World Food Program only gives out food for the first three months of HIV drugs. After that everyone is on their own unless they can hook up with another association that provides food. To make matters worse, the drugs themselves make people very hungry. It’s a vicious cycle.
The area of machambas, however, is beautiful and seems very fertile. After you pass through the machambas you get into the countryside. The road is variable. At times it is a nice paved road and at times it is a dusty dirt track with giant potholes you have to swerve to avoid. It is so bad in some places that there is a prohibition of people driving HAI cars after 6pm. The little towns that you pass are often a mishmash of different house styles. Toward the front of the road are often little stores and markets that have whitewashed walls and doors that lock. Then there are houses made in the same style that was common in Brazil. You build the walls from straight branches interwoven, then you fill in the weave with mud. The big difference is that, in Brazil, the roofs are completed with terra cotta tiles or corrugated tin, here they are often completed with thatch. The other houses that are the most common are called rondavals and are made also of stick walls filled in with mud but topped by round thatched roofs. Occasionally they are decorated with paint and sometimes they have small windows cut out of the mud walls. They are organized in big compounds that are near machambas.
The landscape is always hard to describe but it is very open from Beira to Chimoio, there are large vistas with acacia trees and other trees that I don’t know the name of. It is flat as a pancake for much of the drive and then you begin to see mountains in the distance and the elevation climbs. The mountains also look sparse, in comparison to Seattle where at least one thing is growing in every free inch of dirt. But it is beautiful in its openness. There are little markets in the small towns that sell used clothing (I think all from American used-clothing companies), tomatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, okra and peppers presented in lovely colorful stacks. The road is shared by many trucks making their way to and from Zimbabwe and many people walking along the road (mostly kids back from school and women carrying water). The women almost always wear colorful wrap skirts that most of you who have seen pictures of Africa can imagine. There are also many men on bicycles laden down with either sacks of charcoal (giant sacks—6ft tall) or bundled thatch.
I’ll stop with my description there because I’m sure that I’ll have much more to say later. I arrived in Chimoio and met the staff of HAI-Chimoio and worked in their office for a few hours before Pablo and I went out and had dinner. If you have the money for it, there is a surprising diversity of food here. We had really nice burritos!!! Burritos I repeat!!! And, of course, some grilled squid. For those of you who know me well…you know I have a little obsession with squid. I LOVE SQUID. How perfect, then, that you can get squid all over the place here. Really good, giant, tasty squid. Anyway, I’m off on a tangent again. Before we left for dinner Wendy, an ex-pat that works at HAI-Chimoio (a different Wendy from the one mentioned above) said that Pablo had told her that I was joining her for a HIV counselor retreat the next day. Surprise!!! I didn’t know that was in my plans but it did sound interesting. So the next day (after spending a beautiful night in the very comfortable HAI Guest House in Chimoio) I was picked up by Wendy and driven to a big resort in a little town called Inchope. Counselors from all over two provinces came to learn a little and discuss their experiences. It was really interesting to hear what they had to say and to meet the people who I’ll be working with in the small towns in these provinces. We danced at night, had some more meeting items in the morning and then all got ready to go. The car situation was a fiasco and a small group of us were waiting for a few hours. Normally this would be no big deal but it takes about 3 hours to get back to Beira, it was 3pm, and all of us knew that cars could not be on the road after 6pm. Ahhh…we all thought we would have to spend the night in one of these small little towns. But Antonio, our driver, pulled through for us and got us into the city limits (you can drive within the city limits after dark) with 10 minutes to spare.
Ok…I think that is probably enough reading for now. I was going to tell you the story of the baboon who was trying to make love to a chicken but I’ll save that for tomorrow. Cheers!!!
# posted by Molly Louise @ 5:39 PM 
