Category: Africa 2012
Dinosaur
Filming in Changara
Three months later, I’m back in the little district of Changara in Tete province.
This time, I am accompanying a UNICEF Finland National Committee, a national celebrity and UNICEF goodwill ambassador and a film crew to collect some material for Finnish TV. My role here is to take care of everything, translate, solve, inform, fix, accomodate and – apparently – walk, talk, and pretend like I am not seeing the cameras in front of me.
Unprepared and surprised, I was thrown into the show because I could do the translation between Portuguese and English. I also got to coordinate the team and give instructions to people we met on what to do and how to act on request of the director and TV crew. Totally new thing for me and great amounts of fun.
The team has chosen to focus on health, so today we visited the Changara health centre where we met with the only medical doctor in a district of almost 200.000 people. When I asked him how many hours he usually works a day he answered 24 and that he basically lives at the health centre. Committed people really do inspire.
We attended a demonstration where mothers were taught how to prepare nutritious food for their children using locally grown ingredients. Later we went with a local community health worker to visit a family where we got information about the distribution of mosquito nets and malaria and in the evening we attended a big outdoor movie screening for the community where mobile multimedia units were showing video clips with discussions in between and where the focus was malaria, malnutrition and tubercolosis.
And those wonderful baobab trees? You knew I wouldn’t write a blog from Tete without mentioning them but this time I will give you a photo of me hugging one instead. That’s how much I like them.
Tomorrow the filming continues. And then we leave this difficult but very real place that should not be forgotten. I would wish for more people to get out of Maputo every once in a while to also see and understand the problems in the rest of the country. This is Mozambique, as real as it gets.
Open
Another Friday.
The ladybug and the letter
Once again trying to squeeze everything I own back into my backpack. Despite my little helper it actually won’t work this time, impossible.
The happiness I felt when moving in here and the amounts of love I have felt for this family and little Ava since, have now been replaced by a profound sadness. Having a new family in Mozambique has been of huge value and I have been inspired and learnt things that I will never allow myself to forget. I will miss this home a lot.
Two evenings ago, when putting Ava to bed, she asked me to tell her a story.
So I started by saying “Once upon a time there was a little ladybug sitting on a flower” immediately thinking to myself that this was the most boring intro to a story ever.. so the ladybug was sitting on the flower, which was her entire world, and her friends and family would come visit her sometimes to hang out.
One day, a little girl came and took the flower, taking it to her house far, far away. The ladybug didn’t know what was going on and she was both afraid and curious. But when the girl saw the ladybug, she took her out to the garden and put her on a big blue flower. The garden was huge and interesting, and a lot of different insects and animals approached the ladybug, one of them a scary looking blue headed lizard that proved to be a very good friend. So the ladybug had fun in her new world and she loved her new friends, but she was always missing her old garden, her family and the little boy who lived in that house, Gabriel.
“-But wait, I know Gabriel! So.. the little girl must be me!?”
The other ladybugs said that Ava and Gabriel actually go to school together and that it would be a chance for the ladybug to get back home.. so she jumped into Ava’s backpack, and after a long and dangerous adventure, jumping between the backpacks of 6 year olds, the ladybug finally made ir back to her old garden and her family. However, knowing now how to go beyond her life on the flower, the ladybug would now sometimes jump into Gabriels backpack to go back to Ava’s garden to meet her sweet ladybug friends, and the blue headed lizard she always misses so much.
It wasn’t supposed to be this cheesy, it just happened. Most important is that Ava liked it, and I noticed only afterwards what I had actually told her, realizing that improvising stories brings out a lot of subconcious feelings.
I got this letter today:
“Caroline I love you greetings Ava kiss and hug”
So I’m not leaving Maputo yet, but I’m already somehow on my way. There have been no indications convincing enough for me to know that I will be staying, not yet, and my mind is starting to adjust to the thought of going back to the cold. Maybe even accepting it as an inevitable fact. Let’s see.
Injustice and fog
.
Is it Thursday already? I obviously didn’t dance enough last weekend.
Tomorrow I’m moving to a new place. Leaving the kids that have become my siblings and their parents to live in a shared flat with a friend during my last two months here. It will be a good place to stay, but leaving the kids and the closest I have had to family life makes me very sad.
Work is exciting. Receiving a National Committee in the weekend and taking them on a field mission to Tete province on Monday. Everything is planned for, except the weather, there’s nothing we can do about the temperature that supposedly will be going up to 50 degrees Celsius. What does one even wear in weather like that?
Been thinking a lot about children lately, children and their options. Yesterday I thought about when we as 10 year olds would jump on our bikes and go far away to explore. Look at grasshoppers, buy fresh bread and a little plastic container of Nutella spread from the bakery, bike to the big water tower that looks like a UFO, find new playgrounds and little secret parks we didn’t know existed. The value of being able to be free, letting curiosity and fantasy show us new worlds and teach us things about ourselves we didn’t know, and about friendship.
There’s a 7 year old that spends a lot of time at a friend’s place here in Maputo. He watches TV for hours because it’s too dangerous for him to be outside playing after a certain hour. It’s not a safe neighbourhood and many of the kids could have a very bad influence on him. I frankly don’t know of any neighbourhood here in Maputo that actually could be considered safe for a 7 year old. But anyway, the boy sits there, and you can almost see him slowly melting away into that couch, bored but indifferent. I see a lot of children here that are just like that – indifferent and tired. Many of them hungry. Some smile while playing, and they are obviously having fun, but when they reach the limit of what is safe and possible, they have no further options. There are no places for them to run all that excessive energy off, no possibility to go beyond, strech realities, explore and let playfulness take over. All of this provided that they would have enough food in their bellies and energy in their bodies to do any of that. There are definitely no little secret parks anywhere nearby. Just a lot of indifference.
How many times have we not heard that children are sincere and happy with what they get, that children in poor countries have a better life because they can entertain themselves with a stick and a plastic bag instead of Playstation consoles? And sure, you do force innovation when there are no pre-fabricated toys available. But what is available? I can tell you what I’ve seen so far. Empty Coca Cola cans, broken bottles, car tires, garbage, pieces of wire. Stuff you can use to build a cool toy car and then burn to get a good fire and highly toxic fumes. I had a rat run over my feet the other day.
This is injustice in its simplest form. When there simply aren’t any options to sign your kid up for saxophone lessons, horseback riding or badminton if you’re not very rich, even if that might be the biggest dream and maybe hidden talent of the child. Right now in Sweden the kids are off from school for a week, we call it the autumn holiday and in sports and cultural centres all over my city there are free activities for children who would like to try out different things. I used to love that week. We would run around from place to place, meet new friends, sing karaoke, play badminton, talk about love in the girl-talk room, try out indoor climbing.. and one year I accidently found myself in a small dark room where some older kids from the card club taught me how to play the highly addictive cardgame bridge, luckily I forgot it after a week so it has had no further implications on my adult life.
So there’s all of that, and a thick, white fog in front of me that keeps me from seeing beyond 2 months from now. But it’s okay.
All I want for Christmas
– So when are you coming?
– I will probably be home on.. I mean, in Malmö on the 24th..
And the feeling that immediately strikes you afterwards, about definitely not identifying with that city as your home.
Should I stay or should I go, now?
I need my palm trees. I just wish I could bring all my close one’s here and show them the beaches, the sea food, the long nights full of dancing, the people and the wonderful sun. Might change my mind next week though. Going to Tete province and I have been told I will most probably melt.
UNICEF Mozambique – the page
This week, the focus on the UNICEF Mozambique Facebook page will be the Child-Friendly Schools initiative, presented through my stories and photographs from the field. Do you recognize the photo in the header? They are the two lovely girls Winet and Stefi who I met in Changara, Tete, when I was there in August.
The page is very popular, closing in to 6,000 likes and sharing information and stories about the situation of children in Mozambique both in Portuguese and English. Only 12 of my friends are currently liking the page so I would be very happy if more of you clicked the photo below, liked, and followed my stories. :)
Green stuff
– So what do you eat over there?
– Different things. A lot of sea food, European food, sometimes sushi, and a lot of Mozambican dishes, of course.
– What’s the Mozambican food like?
– It’s nice! It doesn’t necessarily look great, but it mostly is.
– Ooh, I want to see – blog a photo!
– Haha, really? Do you really think it would be interesting?
– Ah come on, I’m curious. Do it!
So on request, I give you today’s very Mozambican dinner: Matapá de Abóbora com xima.
Translating it, it’s basically cooked pumpkin leaves with a lot of coconut milk and some shrimps, accompanied by a kind of corn mash that keeps you full for two days. Very tasty stuff, if you ask me.