TravelStream™ news feed for member shelagh.baird on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/shelagh.baird en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:19:12 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188937080/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188937080/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188937080/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:19:12 -0400 What transpires when gringas wander (somewhat) aimlessly in Colombia

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Barranquilla, Colombia

Ah, yes, travel tales. I always forget how absurdly ridiculous traveling can be when I'm home writing papers and dodging puddles in Seattle. I start imagining warm beaches, exotic fruits, and swarthy men, and then I start salivating and my eyes glaze over and my bike wanders perilously close to some asshole frat boy driving a gigantic SUV before I snap out of it.

The reality... yes, gorgeous white sandy beaches, delicious fruits with bizarre and complex names, and swarthy men. But the sand is too hot to stand on, the fruits are liable to give you dysentery, and the swarthy men are invariable oiled up and clad in a repulsive little banana.-smuggler.

Nah, that's not totally true, either. Thing is, it seems that Colombians like the idea of pretty, unspoiled places but they hate the reality of them. Last weekend, I kind of went to Tayrona, which is arguably one of the most gorgeous places I've seen in Colombia. The beaches were perfect, long sandy affairs lined with palm trees and all the other appropriate tropical accoutrements. The water was that brilliant Caribbean blue and a fantastic refreshing temperature only bordering on tepid (okay, so the waves were a bit daunting in some places but those reminded me of home). And there were great piles of boulders (perfect for climbing) that divided the succession of incredible beaches. I was in awe. I LOVED it! But we only spent two hours there. I was PISSED!

So, here's the saga: Unfortunately, I had made the mistake of announcing my intention to travel to Tayrona that weekend to the woman I live with, who is incredibly well-meaning and overall, an awesome person, but at heart is a Colombian with Colombian driving habits and the Colombian sense of the aesthetic. And I have yet to meet a Colombian who understands my affinity for peace and quiet. (I almost used the word "tranquillity" but as you all know, that particular term has sadly taken on a negative connotation.) She decided she would go with me. Cool. Then she invited her sister-in-law and her kid. Okay. Then her sister-in-law invited her sister and her kid. A little less cool, bordering on not okay. I saw where this was going and I didn't like it.

So, we didn't leave like I had originally planned on Friday afternoon. And we didn't leave early Saturday morning, as I was assured we would. And when we arrived to pick up the sister-in-law at noon, she wasn't at her house. We waited until 2:30. Then her sister didn't show up until after 3:00. And of course we spend a lot of time clucking, because that's what is done here. And then we piled six people into a car that kind of fits four somewhat comfortably. And promptly got lost, less than two blocks from where three of the women in the car had lived for more than 30 years. Doing anything here is an exercise in patience that I suspect even a saint would have a hard time enduring.

Can I reiterate: I just don't fucking get it!

First, the Colombian sense of direction borders on the mentally retarded. People here are simply amazed that I can remember that Calle Simon Bolivar, the largest street in Barranquilla, leads directly to the airport and bisects the city (after two months... I fucking hope I remember!). I, in turn, am simply amazed that after 45 years or more of navigating these same city streets, they can't remember that Calle Simon Bolivar runs directly through the whole city and leads to the airport. It's not fucking brain surgery.

Second, the driving... I almost prefer being lost because though we're driving around in weird little circles and stopping randomly in the middle of busy city streets without any respect for self-preservation, at least we're not barrelling down the road at mach speeds employing terrifyingly erratic driving skills. Though I remain a steadfast Agnostic, a part of me has to make an exception when it comes to understanding how Colombians survive into adulthood. There is no other explanation other than one god or another has chosen this country to work miracles of survival...

Take, for instance, the road signs advertising speed bumps (aptly called "dead policemen" here): you can see these goddamn signs from fucking Mars but somehow drivers manage to ignore them and hit these freaking speed bumps-and these are speed bumps! I'm sure not a few cars have been destroyed by these things-at full speed, then they slam on their brakes (yes, after the bump), swerve, careen a little, curse and get pissed off at... oh, jeez, I don't know who they're pissed at but there's always a lot of offended yelling and gesticulating after a speed bump disaster... and then they speed up again, swerve again into the oncoming lane, forcing the oncoming car to squeeze off the road, causing more swearing and gesticulating, and then finally things calm down.

So, while they manage to miss-almost without fail-these freaking GIGANTIC road signs, they'll see a car parked half a mile up the road and about 25 feet off the side of the road, and they will slam on their brakes without warning, setting off a cacophony of blaring horns, screeching tires, swerving, gesticulating, swearing, and finally, nervous laughter. My nerves were a little raw after the second hour of this shit.

It could be easy to blame it on the roads, though. The speed bumps are, admittedly, placed without regard to reason or safety. They are very rarely located near schools or within towns. And if a large and inconvenient item, like, say, a log (seriously... we almost lost our lives to that fiasco, too), falls in the road, rather than move the fucking thing off the road, road crews simply cement it into the fabric of the motorway. I can't see the logic but somewhere there's gotta be some rational.

So, after much fanfare, we get to Rodadero, just south of Santa Marta, which by all rights should be an hour, maybe two hour affair, but we have managed to stretch it into an odyssey of more than three hours. Rodadero is a beach resort town and it's disgusting. I tried to imagine it without the high-rises and the garbage and I could imagine that it might have once been almost pleasant. The beach seriously feels like a mosh pit and there was garbage everywhere, including in the water, where several thousand people where splashing around. I wanted to cry. This wasn't fucking Tayrona!

Four words: thank god for kids! The two boys, wiry, energetic little guys, were kicking around a soccer ball with kind of hyperactive mania that I totally understood. I promised to make sure neither would drown and off we went!

The next morning, we all get up hella early, repeat all the bizarre time-consuming, death-defying shenanigans, and drive the 20 miles or so up the coast to Parque Tayrona, one of Colombia's fine nature reserves. The entrance fees are hefty by Colombian standards-even I was a bit grumpy at having to pay the 7,400 pesos (a little less than $3! So worth it.)-and after much grumbling and bargaining (which, incidentally, didn't work), we park. From my admittedly limited observations, it seems that many Colombians like to drive up to beaches, park on the sand a few feet behind the awful tent-like structures that consume roughly 90 percent of the beach space, and then hang out and pretend like they're at a night club. At Tayrona, you have to walk for about 10 minutes (or more) to get to a completely deserted beach. There is a very stark difference between these two notions of paradise...

While I was in my own little tourist heaven, loving the absence of hawkers and garbage and crowds and loud, blaring music, my friends looked like they were being tortured. I almost felt bad but then remembered that I had meant to spend the whole weekend here and, as much as I adored all of them, they had literally hijacked my mini-vacation. Still, they managed to keep me laughing... in spite of having what I consider to be a perverted sense of beauty, they are lively, energetic, and freaking hilarious. I felt like we were trapped in this crazy little bubble of pure chaos but removed from the confines of the car and the unsettling effect of being truly and constantly being worried for my life, I kind of enjoyed the entertainment.

Anyway, Tayrona was gorgeous and in a pair of seconds, my clothes were shucked and I went scampering off into the rock piles, frolicked in the waves, and checked out some deserted beaches. Unfortunately, while the park afforded me everything I could have asked for, it was simply derelict of the kind of stimulation my friends needed (I'm still working on trying to define what that may be...). Two hours later, we were back in the car, getting lost, swerving, swearing, gesticulating, and finally returning to Rodedero, where all of our moods took a 180. I became annoyed and sulky-seriously, who the hell prefers loud, polluted, dirty, crowded Rodadero over Tayrona??!!!-and everyone else became chipper again. Whoa! HUGE discrepancies in our notions of beauty, relaxation, and enjoyment...

Then we went home, and the return journey was much the same fiasco as the day before. So, my mini-vacation left me feeling like I had endured two straight days of high-voltage shock therapy. Maybe next weekend I'll sneak away...


]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936960/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936960/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936960/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:18:01 -0400 What transpires when gringas wander (somewhat) aimlessly in Colombia

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Barranquilla, Colombia

The ill winds have swept by and I think I am still standing. I survived a bureaucratic tangle with a passel of inept... well, bureaucrats; a bout of bronchitis and an ensuing regiment of self-injections (thank god for the sterile needle kit, eh?); an alcohol-free birthday party (damn codeine and needles and steroids and antibiotics...) with enough food to render comatose a herd of foraging wildebeest; and... shit, there must be some other woeful tribulation I've sailed gamely through. Eh, I can't think of any other ones, and beside, the odds are certainly against me keeping a stiff upper lip about anything; I am far too fond of whining and bitching when things don't go my way. They have a word for people like me here: "cambambera." Don't ask me to translate but roughly, the idea is "spoiled little shit." To me it sounds like some kind of highly edible cheese.

Anyway, the point is I´m starting to feel a little repentant about my former snarkiness. I´m not saying that that it has disappeared-snarkiness is as much a part of me as my ovaries-but more that I realize that sometimes I should temper my rants with some positive observations. And the past few days have been almost pleasant, if I forget about all the wasted time and the stifling heat.

Walking home the other day, marvelling at the suicidal nature of Colombian drivers (it still boggles me that almost without fail, every Colombian I have met here moves like they've been shot at close range with a full dose of elephant tranquilizer but you put them behind the wheel and they transform into this deranged beast that would put the most irate, psychotic New Yorker to shame), I was suddenly struck by something completely unexpected: the beautiful and enticing fragrance of something tropical and... okay, something tropical. The adjectives will stop there. What made it such a pleasant experience was that for just a quick second, I smelled something other than black diesel exhaust, rotting garbage, and piss. I exalted! I almost expected something weird and romantic to happen and I looked around for some swarthy man but all I saw was a wave of lunatic drivers bearing down on me and an old man trotting along serenely with his donkey (yep, seriously).

But still. It was beauty in the midst of a decidedly unbeautiful city and I was thankful for it. (The trees are in full bloom and they add a gorgeous touch to the cement and smog.)

And for the first time in a while, I was deadly horny last night. I got my game back! Well, that's not true at all... I think I got asked out on a date yesterday (nothing to do with the horniness) and because A) I'm a chicken shit, and B) I'm not really interested in men right now (yes, I am aware that this statement is distinctly at odds with my claims of horniness), I did what I always do here when I don't want to deal with something: I started speaking in English and refused to admit that I spoke more than a word of Spanish. Why I couldn't just say no gracefully is still beyond me but as I suspected, the ploy worked and the guy got frustrated and gave up.

But I do get out, mostly on eating adventures with the women I work with. While there's no sex and most of the time, I eat until I want to vomit, then I eat some more, they are a great group of people (though one of them was somewhat responsible for my earlier church debacle) and we can gripe together about working with an ineffective stress monkey (no names...).

So. The other day, I was walking home, lost in thought-maybe I was calculating the weight of a Colombian hummingbird with a guayaba tied to its leg, it kilograms-when this mime came up from behind me and barked at me! Mimes aren't supposed to make noise, goddamnit! And this fucker scared the shit out of me-a few inches to the left and I might have leaped into the advancing horde of enraged drivers. I made a weird chicken squawking noise back at him-out of pure terror, I assure you-which seemed to surprise him as much as it surprised me. We stared at each other in pure confusion for a few seconds, and then I told him that mimes should be silent, and that was the end of our interaction. It was really strange, though...

On a happier note, I had a small and admittedly one-sided interaction with one of the geckos that hangs out in my house. I know it's probably not a mark of mental stability to converse with small, oddly-colored reptiles but they're so freaking cute that I can't help it. And I think they're supposed to be good luck or some shit like that, and I'm always in need of some luck. (Heh. Wink wink...)

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936900/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936900/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936900/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:16:26 -0400 What transpires when gringas wander (somewhat) aimlessly in Colombia

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Barranquilla, Colombia

Oof. Rage. Crazy savage rage... I've never been good at waiting (for anything) and maturity's not helping!

I know I've given you all my thoughts on that cursed word "tranquilo" but there is another word/concept peculiar to Latin America that inspires the same sense of futile rage: "ahorrita." Ahorrita means, quite literally, "right now," but like anything Colombian that pertains to time or a sense of punctuality, this concept is nuanced and can be so loosely interpreted as to contain the entire timeline of future human activity. In essence, it is a shameless ploy to assign some sense of reliability to sheer ambiguity. I have been ahorrita'd and tranquilo'd to near insanity here; I am still waiting for a project to start that was funded to begin July 1, and I am still waiting for a signature (it's just a goddamn scribble on a line, for fuck's sake!) from June 20th... I've read lots of cookie-cutter Peace Corps testimonials exalting their religious acceptance of tranquilo and ahorrita but you will never see me make that same senseless, idiotic personal journey. I am simply too high-strung and neurotic (and productive) to accept that the concept of time can be completely irrelevant.

Breath. I can't even write about it without feeling like fighting cock hopped up on PCP (and if you've never been in the headspace of a drugged-up, enraged rooster, I'm not going to recommend it as good heart-body-mind therapy; it's a miracle I haven't yet done something stupid and Irish).

That said, there is still much to occupy the foreign mind in Colombia that leave a small smile on the face rather than a pile of mutilated corpses. First of all, dogs. Dogs rock my universe. I think they're all little Buddha reincarnates, running around with happy thoughts of carnage and stinky things to roll in and humping. The dogs here are scrawny, diminutive muppet-like creatures and a lot of them, through some freak accident of cross-breeding, inbreeding, and... humping, have great mohawks that run the length of their patchy, flea-ridden bodies. And they run in packs, attacking car tires with a single-minded gleeful ferocity that fascinates me and makes me giggle. (Yes, I am aware that my opinion on such behavior has undergone a radical transformation from my bicycle days, when such mob activity made me wish for violent endings to these canine pastimes.)

Between all the bureaucratic wrestling matches (I won't go into it but Colombian immigrations now ranks among my least favorite things on the planet), I managed to slip away for a long weekend to Cartagena, pirate town of yore, home to fantastic food and colonial charm (strange that what is widely perceived as the most beautiful town in Colombia, and maybe South America, is nothing more than a living monument to colonialism... I don't think I'm going to go into that, either.). Anyway, I mow-hounded my way through town and found a new love: Argentine meat (and by that, I am honestly referring to culinary excellence and not... well, you know.) Cuban meat was a close second.

The old town center is a gorgeous work of narrow streets and old, balconied buildings. There wasn't even that much garbage on the streets, which is nothing short of a miracle for a Colombian town of any significance. The bay was a different story and should be classified as a toxic hazard but I think that's probably low on Colombia's list of priority problems. At night, the plazas would erupt into tourist meccas, which normally annoys the shit out of me but was strangely pleasant. Kids would dance their crazy asses off and there were people singing and selling kitsch and always the ubiquitous men with guns-this is Colombia, after all. My favorite was a man dressed as a mime with this wretched, skanky puppet of a sloth or a monkey. It looked like grotesque road-kill hanging on a string, and I gave him a couple pesos just for the sheer bizarreness of it. I think I scared him, though, because most people rightfully steered clear of the nasty little hunk of rag.

The only thing that made me uneasy about Cartagena (aside from the outrageous abundance of military, police, and other men with guns-the president was sworn in for his second term on Monday and this past weekend, the entire country fortified itself against a potential full-scale attack) was that I was almost overwhelmed by voyeuristic desire. I know what I am about to tell you is not going to inspire calm but I have this bizarre thing about looking inside houses and buildings; I walk by a house and all I can think about is how I'd like to break in and check it out, just to walk around and see how other people are living. Well, houses in Cartagena are elaborate affairs that unfortunately take place behind a walled façade. I just knew that there were mansions and gardens just inches from me and I couldn't explore them. I wished I had some good B + E skills to fall back on but alas, I am not a criminal mastermind.

Otherwise, I managed to burn the shit out of my entire body at the beach-there goes another bright red gringa!-and made it back to Barranquilla in time to witness some fine female pirate action. I met Luz Helena, the woman I live with, at her sister's house, where she and six of her sisters, her mother, and a sister-in-law were doing some serious damage to their second bottle of whiskey. (I was later informed that they only turned to whiskey because they had killed all the beer and wine.) They plied me with it but I took one look around and realized that was a can of worms I did not want to open (whiskey and I have a sick kind of love-hate relationship). I stuck with the kid shit-some weird flavor of soda-knowing that when the dancing was done and the whiskey gone, these insane, wild, pirate women were going to need to get home... and I've been in Colombia long enough to know that drunk driving isn't particularly frowned upon. I must admit, though, I was seriously impressed!

There. I know there's a lot I'm probably leaving out but I don't want to seem to negative and I've since discovered that me, PMS, and Colombia aren't the best combination. Screw that, Colombia has nothing to do with it; I'm just a cranky bitch when I'm PMSing and I'm liable to say things that I will seriously regret when I have my sanity back about me. For those of you who don't yet know, I lost the visa wars (they had the definite upper hand and I don't know enough Spanish insults and swear words yet, though I employed every one I knew, and threw in a couple I've picked up from other languages, too), and will be home at the end of August. Do what you will with that information.




]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936120/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936120/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/colombia/1188936120/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:15:02 -0400 What transpires when gringas wander (somewhat) aimlessly in Colombia

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Barranquilla, Colombia

The good news here is that I have not yet managed to get kidnapped, mugged, or diseased. No, I lie; I did manage to fall prey to a quick but vicious bout of Traveller's gut last weekend up in Taganga, a cute but dirty little fishing village about two hours north of Barranquilla. So, instead of lounging all weekend on the beach, I spent the better part of a day and night bruising my forehead on the rim of a toilet bowl.

But the trip was interesting. It was good to get out of Barranquilla, which, despite its underlying charm, is still a gritty, loud, and polluted city. I arrived in Santa Marta on a Saturday evening of a holiday weekend (the second of three in a row since I've been here - I am beginning to think that Colombians like working even less than I), and was witness to madness. I am tempted to add "senseless," too, but I still don't know the purpose behind most of the many holidays here. That said, I can't fathom any sane purpose behind a parade of ambulances and fire trucks and cop cars-basically anything with a siren-and a bunch of cowboys on completely freaked out horses. There was no order and any time a horse started to calm down, someone with a fog horn would come up and blow it in the poor animal's ear. Still, it was surprisingly entertaining... for a few hours (then it just got annoying).

Santa Marta is a nice town on a relatively clean stretch of beach and the kind of narrow streets and nostalgic colonial architecture that just knots our panties as tourists. The beaches to the north are your typical Caribbean fare: crystal clear, warm water, palm trees, that kind of thing. Lots of freakin' Israelis... guess they're not put off Colombiaby threats of violence. But my room on the beach, with a balcony overlooking the ocean, only cost $7 so even though I spent a majority of my time losing weight in the Spartan bathroom, it was a good weekend.

And though the "conflict" here remains mostly an abstract to me, aside from the endless and seemingly excessive security measures, my bus back from Taganga (shhh... I signed a piece of paper saying I wouldn't travel by bus, so technically what I'm about to tell you never happened) was stopped and boarded by soldiers. I don't know what denomination they were - either paramilitary or Colombian government - but everyone on the bus got real quiet and wouldn't look at the soldiers. The soldiers didn't do anything but were on the bus for about 10 minutes and made a big show of looking at everyone and checking all the storage spaces. And, man, they had some weapons.

I am constantly told my Colombians to be very careful here. I am, as someone recently told me, simply "merchandise" here, and if not for ransom money, then as a strategic ploy. See, while the US government refuses to "negotiate with terrorists," the Colombian government takes the kidnapping of foreigners very seriously and diverts massive resources to the locating and recovery of captives. It costs a lot of money and resources and distracts the government from actively focusing on... well, name it-drugs, violence, education, healthcare, et cetera. So, I try not to be piqued when I'm told that "people like you" - what, people who hate losing? People who like calamari but hate shrimp? People who have no hang-ups with modesty? People who love travelling but hate not being able to communicate? People who play kickball? People who...? People like me? - are inherently unsafe here. (They mean obvious foreigners from developed countries.) The hardest part about it for me is that I know it's true and I respect their concerns but at the same time, I am frustrated by being limited in my freedom of movement and choice. And while I don't like anything that impedes on my individual freedoms, I am beginning to understand the reality of a country in active internal conflict.

Of course, my understanding is still very superficial but the ongoing conflict here has certainly taken its toll on the social and economic stability of the country. Though narcotrafficking is a lucrative business, it does nothing for economic growth; rather, it impedes it by ensuring that large amounts of illegitimate wealth are consolidated, while a large percentage of the rest of the country is very poor. And because government resources have been consistently distracted by the conflict, these resources are not used for development purposes. Unemployment rates here hover around 20 percent nationally (with some areas much higher and others lower) and the guerrilla and paramilitary groups continue to easily recruit new members because they pay more than most young people could hope to earn in a legitimate profession.

Anyway, I'll spare you the socio-political lecture. It's interesting and not a little disheartening. But I'm grateful for the experience to be here and learn how to work and try to affect change in a system where doing such often feels futile. And I don't harbour any illusions about changing Colombian health in three months, I did just get a multimillion dollar USAID grant application dumped in my lap, which is exciting and intimidating and, truthfully, distressing. So, for the next ten days, I'm going to be scrambling to translate vast amounts of materials into English and draft a grant, which I've never done before.

I feel so naïve.

PART TWO: Let's see... Colombia. Yes, it's hot (and yes, in the Land-of-the-Panting-Chicken kind of way that Amelia so aptly described) and yes, even the locals think it's hot, though I'm confused by their constant griping about the heat. They act surprised and offended by it but when I ask if it's unusually hot or if it ever cools off, they look at me like I'm crazy and say no. You'd think they'd have developed an understanding of the temperature patterns by now...

Barranquilla remains a sprawling, chaotic city but now that it's starting to make more sense, I'm seeing the charm. It's something intangible, just a kind of wild, fun feeling in the air. It jives well with my personality. The traffic is, of course, sheer madness, though it is slightly more logical than China or Vietnam. Still, crossing the street is an act of pure faith, and for someone who doesn't believe in God, it's a risky business. I stick to the locals like sweaty underwear (sorry, I couldn't help myself), and trust that they're not suicidal. Or, if they are, at least there will be a little padding between me and the vehicle?

Strangely, vehicle safety is a big thing here. There are seatbelt laws that for the most part people obey, and helmet laws that are... well, more loosely interpreted. Everyone has a helmet but it seems that only about half the motorcyclists wear them and the other half loop them over their arm... I guess they'll have one pretty elbow in the coffin. And it's not unusual to see a donkey cart trotting down the middle of the road with crazed drivers zooming past it at Mach 10. The disparities here are glaringly apparent and I find myself placed squarely on the uphill side of the steep SES line. We have a maid. It makes me very uncomfortable but everyone else takes it in stride. And by maid, I mean someone who does all the cooking and cleaning and waits on us at meals, while we talk about income disparities and how they contribute to poor health. Yes, I am aware of the inherent hypocrisy.

The other day I went to a nearby fishing community with the research team to do a focus group on common childhood illnesses-acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, and skin infections (Hallelujah! My forte!). The town was almost comically stereotypical in its poverty. But there was nothing funny about it; the streets were a muddy disaster and the kids were dirty (and not in the charming, been-out-playing kind of way) and too skinny. Most of them rely on the local church to provide all of their meals. We went there at lunch time. The kids were cute, a little snotty for my taste, but lots of smiles. I was talking with a couple of nurses who seemed a bit depressed about the whole situation. Apparently, the pollution in the nearby swamp has caused a whole host of nasty health problems that only compound the lack of a good, balanced diet and access to medical care.

I wanted to take some photos but I've been strangely reluctant to pull out my camera and start documenting my experience. I did take one picture of the "World Trade Center" because I have an inappropriate sense of humor and I thought it was funny in an ironic, not-funny kind of way. I also took some pictures last night when a fantastic tropical storm swept through and turned all the streets into these incredible torrential rivers ("arroyos" in local parlance though they seemed a bit more aggressive than any arroyo I've ever seen). I ended up standing under an awning drinking beer with a crowd of Colombians, waiting for the water to subside just enough for me to be able to cross the street and walk the 100 feet back to my apartment. I waited for over an hour. It was really cool and for just a few minutes, the temperature was pleasant.

That's it. If you've made it this far in this email, you're a saint. I'm sorry I'm so prolific... it's because I've been so stymied in my conversations because of language limitations. I'm just letting it all out!

PART THREE (?)

I'm not even going to begin apologizing for writing a mass email to y'all. I am a lazy creature and this astounding Caribbean heat does nothing for my motivation. Besides, I only feel marginally bad about it -- I have no desire to write over 100 personal emails and neither would any of you.

Barranquilla is... well, hot and wet. And like Robin Williams so wisely said, "that's okay if you're in bed with the ladies..." Otherwise, it´s just hot and sticky (okay, I know what you´re thinking). The amount of sweat I've produced in the last few days is mindblowing; it runs off me in rivers, in arroyos. My clothes are wet and clinging to my body in grossness within minutes. The heat makes it hard to breathe at night.

But I kind of like it.

Ha. My spanish is kind of a disaster but I don't really have any choice but to learn damn fast, so I am. It's frustrating because I like to talk (a lot) and I constantly find myself limited by my fat American tongue. I feel like... well, I won't even go into what I feel like; it's not polite.

The city itself is sprawling and dirty and loud and kind of crazy. I'm still trying to orient myself but I know I'm north of Bogota and just a few minutes south of the beach. I guess that's all I need for now...

The security here would make me laugh anywhere else. There are some serious guns strolling about these parts but I don't get the sense that there´s a lot of violence here, though I have been warned numerous times to steer clear of certain areas and not to walk about at night or alone. Common sense, I suppose.

Still, the day I got here, Mario, the guy I will be working with once I can manage to say my own name in another language (ha ha... if I can't do it in English, Spanish surely won't do the trick!), took me to a little town just southwest of here. I asked a relatively innocent question about the "situation" here and was assured that guerrillas weren't a problem in these parts. Then he casually added that paramilitaries held control of this area. Eh? Yep, the town we were walking around in was a paramilitary stronghold. I couldn't quite look at people the same afterward. It's easy to think about conflict, etc in the abstract but a little more difficult to assimilate the reality of it. That said, I still feel pretty safe. The Colombians are incredibly friendly.

Okay, this is turning into something long and probably not that interesting. I'll have more to say in a few days because I made some friends today (drink a beer in celebration!) and am going out with them tonight, and tomorrow, I am going to a small town somewhere in this region for some training, so that should be interesting, too. Ciao, bellas!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188924240/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188924240/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188924240/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:19:43 -0400 On getting nearly arrested, naming my heat rashes, and falling in love with Winston and the wonder children of Moz

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Beira, Mozambique

This is long. The unabridged version is verbose and full of invectives and other colorful and probably completely culturally insensitive and inaccurate interpretations of my perceptions of Mozambique (after two days, mind). In the interest of my more productive friends (if I have any) or those friends who, like me, have the attention span of a drug-addled flea, I've created an abstract:

Long plane ride. Old German men are stupid, fat, and childish. Mozambique is green, tropical, humid. Roads are shite but the geckos are cute. Lots of poverty but very nice people. 25+ % HIV-positive in Beira (HOLY SHIT!) The Indian Ocean! The Southern Cross! Aid workers and their stupid white Land Cruisers (present company included)... Hot, sticky, sweltering heat (Kevin has made vague threats if I complain about the heat but complaining is what I'm best at and besides, I have to make him feel bad about being stuck out in the middle of the ice floes in the Bering Sea. Sucker!) Have come to no life-altering epiphanies regarding...anything.

Now for the real thing:

Holy crap, Mozambique is HOT. I have a salty river of perspiration running down my cleavage like a fluvial flood. My curly hair has kinked up like a wild pubic sprawl on my head. My eyes sting from the drops of sun block-sweat mixture that keeps dripping down off my forehead. And suffice to say, I have swamp ass again. (I only share this with you all because I have to keep Chad and Dan abreast of all butt-related goings-on.) My feet feel nice, though.

I went to a party last night, the 30th birthday party of an HAI clinical advisor from Colombia. She's a fire cracker and looks like one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's cat-eyed nubile convocations. During the talking and eating and drinking, I had a moment, albeit a sleepy, somewhat dazed one, where I thought, "hell, I could do this..." I guess that sums up Mozambique so far. But man, what a fucking journey to get here. 41 hours...it just doesn't go over well with someone like me who has a rough time of an hour-long class. And upon arrival... well, let's just say I'm not always 100 percent in possession of my common sense.

You'd think that I'd have learned by now that trying to enter a country without a visa is never a good way to go about things... But at the core of my neurotic, overachieving façade is a lazy, lazy person, one who despises bureaucracy and paperwork and paying petty fees. (Find me someone who relishes that kind of thing and I might rethink my very liberal stance on the death penalty...) So, the inner-me won the debate over whether or not I should get a visa for Mozambique before I left. You see where this is going...

I step off the plane in Beira in much the same manner that most tourists step off planes into developing countries in hot climates: a vacant look on my face and even more vacancy in my mind. The heat is shocking, and almost offensive in the way it wraps around you in that invasive, unshakeable way. I wander into some vague semblance of a line and am promptly redirected to a dodgy office with high ceilings, cracked windows, and sparsely furnished with a battered desk that's probably been there since the Portuguese first colonized some 500 years ago.

My passport has been taken away, my luggage is pulled off of me and disappears three different ways, and I am told (I think?) to go talk to the baggage inspectors, which makes no sense to me for what I consider pretty obvious reasons-my bags are no longer in my possession and while I can still see one (I made a half-way futile effort to follow the most important one, the one with my wallet, computer, and camera), I'm still not sure what the point is.

That problem is eventually solved because apparently, they've already gone through my bags and come retrieve me, demanding I pay a 50 percent "duty" on the two wireless routers I brought from the US for the offices here. (Wireless routers here are upwards of $200, so I think they're excited about a pretty big pay-off.)

I'm confused. Well, I'm even more confused than I already was. Where's my passport? I don't have any cash. I have a credit card, will that work? No, no, cash only. What they're looking for is a bribe, and in the best of situations, when my mental faculties are strongest, I am not one to tune into subtleties of any kind (this is why I think no one ever hits on me, a notion Justin assures me is bullshit). I miss the hint and continue to act confused. The entire Beira customs office probably thinks all Americans are retarded now.

Luckily, Molly has seen me wandering around like a stunned cow and comes to my rescue. After some rapid haggling and the exchange of what amounts to about $10, we are free to leave. Oh, and I've gotten a visa, too! (So, my laziness was rewarded, and much like a Pavlonian dog, I will learn the wrong lesson and miss the valuable one that was offered here: prepare thyself, oh, innocent lass abroad!)

Outside, the heat is even more aggressive and I am reminded of Barranquilla, except here, things are greener and the countryside is divided into small rice paddies that have water lilies growing in them and corn patches. It's green, super, brilliant green. The colors are kind of unreal but it's gorgeous. We drive away from the airport along a narrow, pot-hole filled road lined with palm trees and Mozambican women walking slowly with huge bundles of grass balanced on their heads. It's fantastic but I always get annoyed with people when they try to describe the landscape of places they're visiting, so I won't try too much.

Well, that's kind of a lie. We get into the city, which is a weird jumble of decrepit colonial buildings-you could tell that once they were beautiful but now they're kind of creepy-and wide dirt streets full of kids and dogs and whatever else you wouldn't expect. The town wraps around the north end of a bay, so the beach is always right there.

The Indian Ocean! I've never been on the Indian Ocean! This is fantastic. But the water is muddy brown from the river (I don't know the name... the Pemba, maybe?) emptying into the ocean there. Still, there are dozens of kids and families playing on the beach, fishing, etc. We get beer at a little shack and sit there until the sun goes down. There's a full moon that obstructs my first view (non-view, as it were) of the Southern Cross, which is one of the things I am most excited to see. (This is my first trip south of the equator.)

The streets of the city are primitive affairs; in fact, Beira doesn't seem so cosmopolitan so much as a village that's exploded without much strategic planning involved (take that, management class!). The poverty is right there, everywhere. Women pound rice and other pale grains (??) in big wooden...shit, the word is eluding me. Does mortar and pestle make any sense? Anyway, it looks like a lot of work, especially in this heat, and once again, I'm reminded what a spoiled, lazy fucker I am. There are a lot of kids everywhere, running around barefoot. They're pretty freaking cute and it's sad to realize that here in Beira, upwards of 27 percent of the population is HIV-positive, which means that a lot of those kids are already or will be soon(ish) AIDS orphans. If they weren't already born with HIV themselves...

The language-Portuguese-is beautiful, and it's enough like Spanish that I can understand about 70 percent of what is said. I can't begin to answer, though, which is a huge pain in the ass. I feel inept and mentally inadequate-the only other time I feel like this is when I am grappling with biostatistics-but I am determined if nothing else, and just speak Spanish, letting them correct me ever other second (it IS a different language, after all...). On the good side, one Mozambican told me that if I stayed here for a while, I'd become his Mean Machine, which was his way of saying that I'm quick, as in quick-witted, sharp, and sassy. Sweet. I've always wanted to be a mean machine.

My long nap in Johannesburg during my 14 hour layover there actually got me into the right time zone, so I avoided the jet lag plague and went to sleep under a mosquito net watching the geckos crawl around on the walls. I slept like a rock, face down, drooling all over the pillow and awoke refreshed to the sound of roosters crowing, dogs barking, and people yelling. (I have two sleep modes: drug-induced coma sleep, which doesn't really involve drugs but you probably couldn't wake me up by dousing me in ice water; and not-sleep, which is basically a torturous insomniac delirium. I cycle through these two modes pretty regularly, so really, jet lag wouldn't have bothered me too much.)

And here I am, at the OR (Operations Research) Center, trying to finish all my bullshit course work and figure out how much time I'll spend traveling around to the villages and treatment facilities over the next two weeks with the World Food Program dude. That's the drill for the first couple days of my stay here, anyway.


]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/bering_sea/1188925740/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/bering_sea/1188925740/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/bering_sea/1188925740/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:11:58 -0400 Oh, Dutch Harbor...

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Dutch Harbor, Alaska, United States

We come here so you don't have to; dwarfed by majestic splendor, it's a horrible, empty place, a dying town peopled by desperate souls. And there's the shanty-eyed procession of nomads: the brawny fishermen, mostly young white men; the steady trickle of Asian immigrants lured by the promises of America and a job at one of the local canneries; and the scientists, a misunderstood lot, even by those who work closely with them. I fall loosely into the latter, but only by the association of being part of the crew on one of the NOAA research vessels they frequent.
Dutch Harbor, Unalaska is the convergence point, the place where we let all the boredom, all the insanity, all the anxiety from our days at sea pour out like hot oil, a liberated crowd, giddy with freedom. Our energy is chaotic, shiftless, all encompassing. It overflows our bodies, fills up a room, and punctuates the fresh Alaskan air like the double exclamation point at the end of a roar. But our exuberance is ephemeral, a sweet bit of bliss ravaged by dog-killing hangovers, work, and the dread of an imminent departure.
Dutch Harbor, to us, is a Heaven-Hell, a place we hate because of its isolation and grimy post-industrial feel, and a place we adore because, simply, it's land and there are bars and stores, little ho-dunk establishments where we can act like rabid hell-hounds, horny, vicious, and a little crazy. Well, I suppose I use the word "can" loosely; behavior smacking, however remotely, of hedonism is severely looked down upon in Dutch Harbor, and the full fury of the Dutch Harbor Public Safety (no, not police - they don't rank) is unleashed upon violators of the rather strict social regulations and expectations.
The problem is, of course, that for many years Dutch Harbor suffered under the odious (depends on who you talk to) notoriety of being an old-fashioned fishing port, drowning in the debaucheries of rowdy fishermen and crabbers, flush with cash from a booming industry. But when the industry died in the late Eighties, the vibrancy perished with it. Now the town is suffocating under a lugubrious gloom of desolation and desperation, and trying to shrug its bawdy image, trying to reinvent itself as a growing family town, a final bastion of wholesome American values.
Take, for instance, the transformation of a notorious Dutch Harbor institution - the Elbow Room. Once a Petri dish of profligacy, this bar reminded one scientist of "the bar in Star Wars" (the original), while Playboy magazine scorned it as "the most despicable bar in America." The windows were boarded over. Rumor has it, lines of coke were cut on the bar. Scuffles were vicious; people died there. Today, there is little remaining of that scene; the Elbow Room of the present is an unassuming lavender building crouched on a non-descript Unalaskan corner. Inside, a large window overlooks Unalaska Bay, and while it's still a little dingy, it's certainly not a dangerous place.
It used to be difficult to get booted; even when the knives were pulled and the plywood splintered, so long as whatever rowdy heathen was still pushing money across the bar, he stayed. Today, my name graces a short list of previous patrons who are now 86ed for life - for throwing a glass. Hardly a lethal weapon, at least in my very inebriated hands, but the Dutch Harbor mod squad swooped down on me with vengeance, leaving me forever banned from that shit hole.
We have since abandoned Dutch Harbor in favor of more agreeable climes and environs. (While it's no tropical paradise, Kodiak Island, Alaska's "Emerald Isle" gem, boasts a booming metropolis - for Alaska - and exquisite landscape.) However, instead of the exhilaration I was sure I would feel as I watched Dutch Harbor recede into an indistinguishable smudge on the horizon for the last time, I was surprised to feel a twinge of regret, a stab of sorrow. I had plowed and seeded that barren wasteland with a cacophony of memories, unequalled incidents of hilarity, shame, and joy.
Of course, there was the aforementioned episode that earned me an unsavory reputation throughout the NOAA fleet, from Alaska to Seattle to Pascagoula to Woodshole and beyond. And there was the time Joel and I opted out of a night of drunken revelry and instead climbed Ballyhoo, the mountain that looms above both Captain's Bay and Unalaska Bay, offering a breathtaking vista of an otherwise dreary town. That night, we paused half way up and laid down on the steep incline. I showed him the "Egg of Life" and we both lay there, feet pointing to the summit, necks arched backward, contemplating the tranquility of Dutch Harbor, from there only a smattering of lights peppering a mighty uproar of bleak mountains.
That was the same mountain Chad and I so gleefully trudged up several months earlier, when the land was still suffocating under a heavy blanket of snow, sleds dragging behind us, aided by a dwindling 18-pack of Ranier, Alaska's version of Budweiser. We flew down that mountain, face-first, bellies to the ground. We tore through the snow, screamed over the mounds and humps, whooping and hollering the whole way. After our second run, we were frozen through, wet, faces frosted pink from the cold and the alcohol. We were drunk and invigorated.
And the Fourth of July, our last collective hoorah, was perhaps our most memorable night, if not entirely remembered by its participants. The day began innocently enough - as innocently as an import day in Dutch Harbor can - with the crew gradually dragging themselves out of horrific hangovers. Today was a holiday - the excitement this afforded had an insidious effect on the normally glum post-hoopla funk.
Carl's, another intriguing local business - pizza parlor, bar, hardware store (with a male's and female's porn section), and the island's only dance floor - hosted a miniature golf tournament, in which our captain and three other crew participated. It was, from the start, a debacle, rife with shady judging and blatant cheating. As the afternoon wore on, the playing became progressively sloppier, the laughter louder, the conversations less focused. We were, true to our nature, proudly evolving into a lusty mob of dirty ole sots, lushes. Full-bore bacchanalia descended, gurgled out from the taps, and settled warmly in our bellies.
Later that night, cluttering the lounge of the Grand Aleutian Hotel, our boisterous posse waited, with yellow beach pails of rum, for midnight to draw near. And, in an ill-advised act of commemorating the remarkable evolution of more than two centuries of idiocy, Mackie bought a full round of Kamikazes, dangerously elevating all our blood alcohol contents. I, suffering from a ban on all hard liquor (see Elbow Room incident), was left gagging and dry-heaving over the balcony, unable to see or enjoy the brief splatter of fireworks over Unalaska Bay.
In retrospect, however, I am fortunate; my blindness was fleeting. Others claim to recollect nothing beyond this point, though whether in truth or a vain attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility for embarrassing drunken antics ("If you can't remember it, it didn't happen."), I am unsure. Chad was transformed into a salacious pervert, raging with lust, fingers twisting into groping claws, while the rest of us melted into a mess of giggling and a tangle of limbs.
We carried on in the proper celebratory fashion, turning our bodies into distilleries. Given to moments of profound epiphanies and intimate sharing, as drunks are wont to do, three of us finally found ourselves on our backs in the bushes, comparing anterior scars - abdominal mostly, though I should mention I sport a two-inch colloidal slash across my pubis - much to the amusement of one Officer Lowell, who discovered us, quite literally, with our pants down.
My disrobing tendencies, unfortunately, did not end there that night; sprinting down Unalaska's main street, my shoes flew off, and, me not being the conservative type, I tore my shirt off in a wild bid to prove - what? Something, surely, though maybe I just did it for the pure joy of it, to feel the brisk air lick my belly.
That's how the cop, same Officer Lowell, found us: four running heathens, one barefoot and in a navy blue bra (Yes, I managed to maintain some semblance of modesty.). It was time, he declared, trying to suppress a smile, for us to get home. He packed us into a taxi and the next day, on a desperate quest for my lost wallet, we embarked upon a treasure hunt, culminating in the hysterical discovery of my forgotten red tank-top.
It's been months since any of us have seen Dutch Harbor, months even since any of us have gotten in trouble, been a little crazy. But in Dutch Harbor we discovered forgotten primordial instincts, expressed in savage bouts of lunacy. It was liberating, exhilarating, to be so removed from the confines of stodgy societal expectations; here I was, wasting a hard-earned degree, running through an uptight and conservative fishing village in the far North half-naked, half out of my mind, and fully shit-housed.
We're in port for the winter, and with the same reckless enthusiasm we showed the bars and mountains of Alaska, so too do we revel in the options a city like Seattle offers. But even now, with the promise of a rowdy New Year's celebration looming, we're already contemplating the sobering reality of another Dutch Harbor-bound departure. If I've got to go back, I declare, secretly excited and anxious, I'm going to hike up to the top of Ballyhoo one final time and snowboard down - a fitting farewell to a strange and dislocated chapter of my life.
But maybe it's not all that strange and dislocated; handed down through generations from my mother's side of the family is a love of the sea, a dependency on the oceans for livelihood, adventure, and spiritual fulfillment. And like my grandfathers before me, I feel the pull of lunar tides and tempestuous waters. If my behavior is a little feral, edging on psychotic, then look to the similar daredevil glints animating eyes throughout the family albums, understand that I needed to set my course on hold, come out here to find myself, to understand a part of the world no amount of postulating could define.
I had to come, and I'm glad I did but now I'm ready for it to be over. As the Romans learned from the Irish, "I came, I saw, I drank."
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188925440/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188925440/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188925440/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:05:08 -0400 On getting nearly arrested, naming my heat rashes, and falling in love with Winston and the wonder children of Moz

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Caia, Mozambique

Chickens spend a lot of time upside down in Mozambique. They hang in bunches from the handle bars of bicycles, dangle from little boys' arms at the spontaneous "markets" that line the road sides, and are stuffed into weird arrangements on tops of buses and in the backs of trucks. I kind of feel sorry for them, especially since most of them are panting-really! It's like Amelia's Land of the Panting Chicken all over again (when it's so sweltering the chickens flop over in the dirt and pant. I understand how they feel, all jumbled up and confused and HOT.) I pass a lot of time with my mouth slightly agape, confused to shit myself, and wondering why there's a mob of kids around me pointing and laughing (body check! Do I have any inappropriate body parts hanging out? Did I shit, piss, or otherwise stain myself unknowingly?). I also shvitz (ask a Jew-it's a word worth knowing) a lot here and lactate awesome quantities of bodily fluids (sweat mostly) from weird places (including, but not limited to, my boobs).

I just returned from Caia, where the temperature rarely drops below 40 degrees Centigrade (104 F), and this week was, by all accounts, a hot one. It felt like my own little piece of hell and it sure was for all the Mozambicans living in makeshift refugee encampments (an advertising circle jerk for the heavy weights of international aid-UNICEF, FAO, Red Cross, World Food Program, Medecins Sans Frontiers, Oxfam, etc, etc), displaced by the recent floods along the Zambezi River and left with fields upon fields of drowned corn and sorghum and other myriad staples that keep them alive from one season to the next. The town was swarming with aid workers and their ubiquitous white Land Cruisers, each one costing more than the average Mozambican will make in a decade. Helicopters made endless sorties, loaded full of the white 50-pound sacks of corn and rice-"from the American people" and other subsidized Big Agriculture outputs that are denied farmers in the developing world (another big round of applause to economic interests and regulations!).

Work this week was standard fare-lots of driving out into the villages to interview patients about their food intakes and nutritional status. Oh, wait, that's not entirely true. I got hoodwinked-tricked, as it were, through some blatant manipulation-to participate in a PTV (again, HIV-positive Vertical Transmission Program) discussion. And by "participate," I mean that I stood up in front of about 60 women, all cradling squalling and/or escaping babies, and presented-in Portuguese! This was embarrassing and awful and stressful because if ever there were a language I'm not meant to speak, it's Portuguese, with all its soft j's and "sh" sounds. (Of all life's cruel ironies, that my name is one I am almost physically unable to pronounce strikes me as one of the cruelest I can imagine... I get around this by looking at people who can't understand me as if they're a retarded flea and I guess I am very, very good at making people feel like they are being judged inadequate because they normally go red-redder than me, even!-and mumble something about having an ear infection and bad hearing.) Anyway, this whole process is made worse because the one question that I keep getting thrown at me is "Why isn't there a cure yet?" This question makes me cock my head sideways and look at the interrogator askew: Do I really look like a biochemist? (Are biochemists even the people who do this kind of research? I don't know.) In the end, I feel more bewildered, sad, and awful than when I started but then again, as aforementioned, I spend a lot of time in a state of complete and extreme bafflement, so it's no real change.

Aid work drivers tend to barrel down the pot-holed roads like possessed and deranged psychopaths but our driver is a genius behind the wheel and navigates our-yes, you guessed-white aid truck along the narrowest of paths, between chickens and corn patches, up hills, around trees. I am impressed and think that my father missed his calling as an international aid driver. If ever there was a man meant to take cars where they don't belong, it was my dad. (His list of bizarre vehicular conquests includes driving a match-box car to an Alaskan island, up the side of a Costa Rican volcano, down a steep and narrow dirt trail on a motorcycle with four kids piled on, and so on...)

In any case, traveling around the country was awesome, in spite of the heat. We were up in the mountains, which rolled out into the distance, a fading series of forested bumps rising up from the narrow red dirt track we were bumping along on. If I squinted a little and blurred out the distinctive feathery flat lines of the Acacia trees and ignored the occasional fatness of the incredible Baobab tree, I could almost imagine I was in the Smokey mountains, or the Bershires in mid-summer. What the hell am I talking about? That's a crock of bullshit-you're never going to see grass-thatched round mud huts in the bed-and-breakfast-canned-jam middle-aged yuppiness of the Bershires. This is Africa, my loves, and it's hot, and the toilets are nasty, waterless affairs. Well, the "nice ones," that is; for some reason, I am not allowed to use the pit latrines (why, please?!) and am redirected to the porcelain relics of colonization. These are unsanitary and mystifying affairs (more on the ensuing constipation later...) and I would prefer-and anyone who knows me well will know that this statement does not come easily out of my mouth-the hygienic disaster of a port-a-potty to a seatless flush toilet full of poo and no water.

The most memorable event, in a very traumatic sort of way, of the week-aside from seeing monkeys scurrying across the road near the tiny village of Mongolai (I've almost made it to Mongolia!) and the ensuing discussion about the choicest cuts of monkey meat-was stepping on (in?) a dead puppy in Caia. Winston (give it a number; they're all the same dog here) is even more adorable as a puppy but I'm drawing the line at a freshly-deaded puppy with its guts spilling out in a mess of twists and other disgusting sliminess, especially as it's squishing up around my sandaled foot. At first I think it's a giant pile of shit and I'm annoyed but then I look down and realize what's going on... it takes all I have in me not to screech and start crying.

But still, I was traveling with Obede and he cracks himself up, and people who crack themselves up are among my favorite things in life (coming in after dogs and kids but before geckos and river otters). Molly and I crack ourselves-and each other-up, too, which makes traveling her another Highly Enjoyable Endeavor (acronym: HEE). Last weekend, before my decent (ascent?) into aid work hell, Molly, Bruno, and I headed up the coast to a little island barely separated from the mainland by a tangle of mangroves and a probably crocodile-free river (we don't know for sure but I am typing this with all limbs intact, so I'm making assumptions here). This brings me around to my next point: St. Patrick's Day in Mozambique!

I'm going to have a hard time doing it justice but suffice to say, I passed this most holy of days in my usual style: naked, naming inanimate objects (Montgomery the Coconut, Tallulah the Pineapple, Michael the Massive Slab of Steak-more on that later), dancing the jig (poorly and somewhat clumsily, with Molly and I both listening to my iPod, our heads knocking together, as Bruno watched, bemused and somewhat concerned by our maniacal antics), losing my clothes (through no fault of my own, thank you), and swimming! I guess that last bit's a small lie because I normally don't get to go swimming in mid-March in the Pacific North West... even I, of the hard nipples, have some difficulty being impervious to the cold waters of the Puget Sound that early in the year. And as it is, no one can ever be persuaded to join me in my aquatic adventures, so frolicking in the gentle warm waters of the Indian Ocean for St. Patrick's Day this year made for a fantastic departure from my usual course of debauchery.

I want to rant here about constipation (not too much, I promise!) because more than anything, my St. Paddy's Day was characterized by the consumption of a giant chunk of meat that proceeded, post-mastication, to wedge itself sideways in my colon, bringing back painful memories of the time I ate a pound of Swedish Fish (gummy candies, for those of you not in the know) and then devoured a pound of rib eye in an indecent amount of time. I couldn't shit for three days, and no amount of coffee, laxatives, or prune juice could persuade the gelatinous lump of meat candy to hurry it up. In between broadcasting all the unpleasant details of the goings-on in my guts, I was begging for someone to massage my belly (á la Tim Marshall!). Justin finally acquiesced and massaged the shit-quite literally-out of me. Justin's a pal like that; he even burps Shiv like a baby when he eats too much and starts whining like a Frenchman. (Shiv, who is French and will thus not take offense to the previous statement, and I are not good eating companions; we get excited by vast quantities of food, eat excessively, and turn into grumpy fuckers, wallowing in our indigestive misery.) In any case, I was feeling ferocious that night and made a good showing of my animalistic nature, resulting in a "Sector Four Meat Explosion" that had me groaning the next morning.

We were meant to have a real mick along for the ride but in the vein of poo-related issues (it's standard conversation fare here), he was floored by a case of diarrhea-we don't use euphemisms here like "traveler's gut," IDIs (Interesting Digestive Issues, per Jessica's childhood in Tanzania), "not feeling well," etc-and we were thus deprived of Mícheál (no relation to Michael the Massive Slab of Steak) and his Pot of Gold. (Being the only Irish person present with a funny accent, he was decreed our official leprechaun, meaning that he would pee in a jar and we would place it in a central location for the duration of our worshipping celebrations. I did have my green undies on, though, so the night wasn't entirely without patriotic spirit.)

On the subject of pee, I would like to make a very quick detour to detail Molly's strange obsession with urinary enterprises. Molly is of the mind that any frustrating, annoying, or perplexing situation can be solved-or at least the associated emotional taxation ameliorated-by squatting down and pissing somewhere unusual. These locations include on the airport floor, on your supervisor's head, on pumpkins, out the window, et cetera, et cetera. "Just piss on it" has become a stock phrase of ours and never fails to set us off into worrisome screeches of laughter, and has recently culminated in the development of a brilliant business plan to bottle our leakages to use for random cases of sheer bureaucratic madness (tranquilizers!) and the occasional jellyfish sting (cheaper and less greasy than your standard anti-itch crème).

And since we're talking about skin ailments (bet you didn't realize that we actually were talking about skin ailments... ha ha, tricked you!), I can officially add excessive heat to the short list of things my body can't deal with (peanuts, cats, Melfoquine, latex, and pollens, though I'm not sure what kinds). I was blessed with a magnificent eruption of rashes up and down each arm, and at first I thought I was dieing but Mícheál assured me I was just allergic to the sun, and pulls up his sleeves to display a suspiciously similar blooming of redness. Ew. We make a joke about our respective odds of getting laid (I'm not really that worried; I'm not that interested in getting laid here, and besides, I once puked in a garbage can and still managed to hook up) and then, realizing that my rashes are kind of pet-like, I promptly name them-Sylvester on the left arm, Penelope on the right-and distract myself by stroking their bumpy itchiness. (They have since been shamed into hiding, so I don't look so leprous anymore. Sweet.)

Savane, the mini-island, is wonderful. We sleep in a primitive hut on the beach, under an incredible arrangement of stars, some of which are constellations familiar to the Northern Hemisphere star gazer (Pleiades, Orion, the Swan and Eagle, etc) but in the wrong place in the night sky, and others weird configurations I don't begin to recognize. I imagine I'm seeing distillations of great Greek myths-skeletal imaginings of bestiality, massacres, and vomitoriums (wait, no, that was the Romans, wasn't it? Eh, well, I'm pretty sure I picked out the distinct shape of a vomit receptacle in the stars here.)

Later, skinny dipping under this spectacular palette, I am mystified by an echoed sparkling in the water until I realize that my movements through the warm water were agitating the bioluminescence, so all around me there were pointillist splashes of light. I ducked my head under water and swam with my eyes open, watching trails of silver follow my arm strokes through the clear waters. And later, I peed in the ocean, an explosion of light between my legs (if that isn't a metaphor for an orgasm, I don't know what is) and laughed aloud with joy. This was fantastic! (Less fantastic was staggering back to the beach, thoroughly waterlogged and salt stinging my eyes, to discover that my clothes had been stolen... WTF?! Oh, well, this is the first time I've ever been robbed while traveling and in the end, it was pretty funny.)

And fireflies! Oh, yeah, how can I forget about these other sparkly things in the night? I love them, which is weird because I am not a great lover of anything insect, but much like a crow, I am attracted to bright shiny things. (I do, however, manage to refrain from picking at the innards of dead things on the road.) I am far less taken with the armies of mosquitoes that do their very best to give me malaria. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out where the heat rash ends and the mosquito bites start but in the end, it's all just a mass of itchy red bumps. More than once, Bruno jokes that he should share some of his melatonin with us and I wish he could because black skin just makes so much more sense.

And finally, "a scholarly and systematic exposition of a topic"-that topic being geckos and the noises they make, with a short non-sequitur homily on the dead animals one stumbles across in strange locations. Maybe this paragraph could more accurately be entitled "My Theory on Lizards in Toilets," though, as Molly wisely pointed out, that's really not a topic that lends itself to the development of theories but in any case, I went into the bathroom in Savane-a real one, with water!-and discovered, to my great dismay and sadness, a gecko floating serenely in the toilet bowl. At first I thought that maybe he was just taking a cooling dip and I didn't want to traumatize him with a torrent of hot urine, so I did a quick test squirt, which catapulted the poor little guy upside down. He was totally dead, so I peed on him (and felt terrible about it) and then flushed him down the toilet. But I stood there for a few minutes wondering how he ended up in the toilet (developing my theory, as it were, so scoff at that Molly!), which was happy luck, because I was distracted out of my deep brain concentration by a rapid dry scuttling sound. I looked up and saw two geckos chasing each other madly across the ceiling and made two rapid-fire discoveries: 1) I love the sound running geckos make; and 2) the little dude in the toilet was playing just a bit too hard (don't worry, gecko spirit, I know what that's like!).

Either way, if I ever do write a book or dissertation, it will be called "A Theoretical Dissemination on Lizards in Toilets" and it will explore the nuances of buffalo hunting in Montana and maybe something about Irish beer. My experience with dead animals here has mainly centered on constipation and eating with my hands (an activity I adore) but waiting for the dhao (crude wood boat-craft) to Savane, I wandered over to a dirt mound. The top had been dug out to create a shallow crater of sorts. Inside were three dead mice winsomely and peacefully arranged. They must have been put there by someone because it didn't make sense that all three would spontaneously die sleeping like that but I suppose weirder things have happened. I took a couple pictures and showed them to Molly. We stood there considering Three Dead Mice and then, almost simultaneously, we sang "Three Dead Mice..." to the tune of "Three Blind Mice," before realizing that we don't actually know any of the words to this song. The experience fulfilled a tiny bit of my Bill Bryson-induced obsession with finding animal carcasses (goat preferably) laid to rest in unexpected locales.

That's it. I'm coming home soon and already dreading the airplane ride. Who sits still for that long?!!! (The American Heritage Dictionary has no fewer than 26 vomit-related entries! What joys one finds hidden inside dictionaries!)




]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188925080/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188925080/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188925080/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:03:00 -0400 On getting nearly arrested, naming my heat rashes, and falling in love with Winston and the wonder children of Moz

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Nampula, Mozambique

Oh, man, where to start... Mozambique is fantastic and chaotic and tragic and...well, I suppose I could get carried away in a frenzy of adjectives. Africa lends itself to that, apparently. In any case, it's been quite a week: north to Napula, Nacala (third deepest natural port in the world!), Ilha de Moçambique for holiday-type friskiness; then east to Machanga, Muxungue, Guara Guara, and Búzi for somewhat depressing, sweltering work. I have seen no wild African beasts (aside from Molly) but I have almost been arrested, been bitten by every mosquito in Africa, seen too many very nearly dead people, almost stepped on a cockroach the size of my arm, met some great people, learned a (very) little Portuguese, finally seen the Southern Cross, and went swimming in the Indian Ocean (!!!) That's just a synopsis (you're not that lucky; I'm going to ramble).

Policemen... jeez. In the best of situations, policemen are a dodgy specimen best left to the lions. I've never had one get me out of trouble, only into it. Still, you'd think that after 27 years at it, I'd have figured out certain things... Not so if it involves storming the realm of Not Very Good Ideas. Mostly I just get cut up and banged up but sometimes I manage to do something so stupendously ill-advised that I nearly land my ass in jail (a place I've miraculously never actually been, despite my valiant efforts to the contrary). I'm enough of a radical to believe that it's imperative to toe the proverbial line whenever possible and have a healthy disregard for rules and regulations (so, I've a bit of the anarchist in me, too... whoopee! And I'm loose in Africa!)

Eh, maybe not entirely true; cops the world over scare the piss out of me because they tend to be of dubious intelligence and given disproportionate amounts of power to wield somewhat indiscriminately over their compatriots. And it's precisely this power imbalance that makes Johnny Law so jumpy, especially when it comes to photographing them when they are involved in dodgy and immoral endeavors (ipso facto, it is never a good idea to photograph cops). But I've never been put off by that and usually I'm slick enough to pull off a couple good shots before they even know I'm there. But I have a new camera with an indecipherable instruction manual and an erratic and unpredictable flash, so when I saw three spiffy Mozambican policemen surrounding a cowering woman out in the slums, I instinctively shot a couple pictures-with the goddamned flash!

I immediately recognized the folly of this act, especially as they peeled themselves away from that poor woman (who, at this point, is probably Number One Fan of dumb Americans) and proceeded to surround me. Oops. And they're pissed. Really pissed. They're yelling at me to give them my camera, which I really have no choice but to do. While I can be borderline slow when attempting normal, everyday activities (mentally, I mean. Otherwise, I'm like a hummingbird on crack.), when it comes to being in deep shit, I am an ace with the old brain. I give them my best innocent and confused face and stall while I frantically delete the incriminating photos.

Bruno takes over from here-thank god, because my Portuguese extends to some butchered Spanish approximations, though I did look up the translation of "pernickety" (pedante...not the most inspired of translations) and know that puta is the same in both languages but that's certainly not going to help me in this situation. The police are convinced I've done something underhanded and sneaky (they're right but they can't prove it and luckily, none of them were a crack with digital technology). But then they continue to yell and gesticulate and generally froth in my face, at which point, I start getting a little more nervous. A growing crowd of Mozambicans jostle around us, eager for some Mazunga (whitey) entertainment. Finally, the clink reluctantly bade us (me) free to go, and everyone was left with the somewhat accurate impression that Americans are stupid motherfuckers (this one, at least). I probably didn't learn any good lessons from this experience, either, except to reiterate what my parents taught me years ago: just don't get caught.

This isn't the only time that weekend that I managed to make myself even more conspicuous in Africa. In the market in Nampula, a wild and fantastically chaotic affair that involves multiple mobbings (not muggings), my shirt strap comes untied, and my boob flops out. I am grateful that I don't have a firm enough grasp on Portuguese to understand "Look! The white woman has her boob hanging out!" Ha Ha. It reminds me of the time I accidentally flashed my entire family reunion (I must have been smoking pot with my Uncle Trevor because I could have sworn I still had my bikini top on) and turned at least one male cousin off women forever.

Anyway, Molly, Bruno (said Mozzie), and I were in Nampula in northern Mozambique, doing a little touristy action and checking out the incredible beaches. These were the stuff tropical paradise clichés are made of-long stretches of sandy white beaches, clear turquoise waters, coral reefs, funny looking colorful fish... The journey there was comical; our plane (and another plane) was stranded on the tarmac without fuel for several hours because no one had thought to arrange it-just a slight oversight, given it's an airport and all... When we do finally start taxiing down the runway to take-off, the cabin starts filling with smoke. Molly and I laugh nervously and I write in my Bruce Willis notebook, "Smoke in aircraft. Sweet. May be about to die," just in case the black box got lost in the wreckage but apparently, it's no big deal, because in a matter of seconds, we're in the air, smoke still leaking into the cabin. Hmmm....

Nampula is gorgeous, surrounded by the same kind of sudden jutting rock mountains that I saw in southern China and Halong Bay in Vietnam. Our company-some acquaintances of Bruno's-left something to be desired but Molly and I kept ourselves well entertained with mildly perverted conversations. Let me give you an idea of how our mind-singular unit, at this point-works. Back in Beira, Bruno asks us if we know what a McGregor is (it's a kind of Scotch, apparently). We are confused. We think it should be a euphemism for a sexual act or toy, kind of like a Dirty Sanchez, so we decide that a McGregor is a woman wearing a strap-on. Just as we're deciding this, we careen past three highly-evolved Winston mutts (see Moz Installation #2), involved in an oddly nonchalant doggie threesome. "They're making Winstons!" Molly cries, and now we have a verb (another euphemism, this time for doggie-style sex-making) to go with our new noun... (Used in a sentence: Want me to be a McGregor tonight and make Winstons with you?) I'm still giggling typing this.

In a manner of forced segues, our linguistic adventures don't end there. Rather, Nampula saw the advent of a short love affair with word plays. We can blame Bruno, since it was his somewhat non-sequitur observation that started the whole thing. Passing the main round-about in Nampula, he casually mentions that he once saw a plane in the middle of the plaza there. I consider this for a minute, deciding that any pilot who accomplished such a feat of aeronautical mastery was both a genius and a fucking lunatic (I know a few of these kind of people, including both my parents, so I'm not that surprised...) and say so. No, no, he corrects me. It fell. The plane fell? This is even more impressive to me, and I try out the Spanish past preterit: se calló. Molly corrects me to adjust for the Portuguese: caiu, pronounced "kai-you." I get excited because of the six or seven French words I know, this is one of them, meaning Polar Bear. (I don't really know this and am probably wrong.) I point this out-kaiyu caiu, polar bear fell-and we're all silent for a few minutes, imagining a polar bear falling out of the scorching African sky, twisting madly, like a doomed cat. And then we laugh hysterically because the image, so improbable, is hilarious, and because linguistic gymnastics is among the most entertaining pastimes on the planet.

This initiates a weekend-long frenzy of not-so-subtle word games. Oddly enough, the Mozambicans we're traveling with see the humor in the subtle twists and double-entendres but we completely lost them with the more obvious word plays. Fresh off the caiu-caiu kick, we pass a truck (we're pushing 180 km-yikes!) that has another truck parked on top of it-"truck on truck!" we holler-and then a few miles down the road, we pass a man riding a bicycle with a bicycle balanced on his head, and we're overcome with glee, yelling "bike on bike!" (or, bike-on-man-on-bike), which brings me around to another African miracle (to rob-and butcher-a fine turn of phrase by Tim O'Brien): the things they carry.

People here carry everything on their heads, and in massive loads. To me, who can barely balance a wet towel draped over my head, this is sheer magic. The man had a bicycle (a bicycle, for fuck's sake!) balanced on his head. And he was riding a bicycle at the same time! Women stroll along imperturbably, carrying gallons of water, large sacks of food, pumpkins, tables, wood, grass, truck tires, pretty much anything you can imagine, balanced serenely on their noggins. I saw a man walking down the street balancing a wheelbarrow on his head. Let's take a minute to consider this... a freakin' wheelbarrow! I'm in awe. I get really excited about it and jump around, twisting back to watch them. It's incredible, especially for me, because I am definitely NOT a graceful creature, despite having the kind of freaky long toes and boney feet that make ballerinas sigh with unrequited passion. If I tried to carry a wheelbarrow on my head, I'd probably manage to break both my legs and kill a small child in the process.

Out in the country, where I traveled for the week with the guy who coordinates the food supplementation program for HIV-positive people on antiretroviral drugs, you see people, even little kids, walking along the side of a single dirt track, miles and miles from any village, with those gigantic loads on their heads, and you know they're going to be carrying that shit for hours, out in that freaking oppressive tropical sun. But the kids smile huge smiles and give us big thumbs up and I can't help but smile hugely back and wave like an idiot. I'm not doing any favors for the "cool American" image here (it's a big lie, anyway).

The country side is incredible. I'm no good at nature writing-I leave that to the Annie Dillards and Stephen Goulds of the world-but I'll take a quick crack at it: very green, passed through forests, savannahs (authentic African savannahs! How awesome!), across crocodile-infested rivers (I'm not allowed to go swimming...), palm trees, rice paddies, corn fields, and everywhere, women walking along in colorful capalanas with babies tied to their backs and little kids scampering along. Well, that was a pretty sucky visual image... sorry, I'm much better at describing the bizarre, depraved, and disgusting stuff.

But Mozambique smells good, fresh and raw. It has a visceral quality to it, like all the smells are real (oof. Could I get any more cheesy and unimaginative there?), the same smells you would have smelled 100, 500, 5000 years ago. True, the bathrooms are hardly a party in your olfactory glands but they also don't take on the epic proportions of stench that characterize (for example) a Chinese public bathroom (though that loo in that Moroccan bus station, the one that left me in a state of sheer panic and terror, still tops my list of Bad Bathroom Experiences). Even the overcrowded district hospital in Búzi, which was stifling hot, with heavy, unmoving air, and smelled of sickness and a little like dying, was easy to breath in (though it left me sad and uneasy with the state of the world).

Traveling around to the rural villages was a trip (quite literally, I guess... let's all take a moment to collectively groan at my lack of wit). We worked like possessed meth heads-awake at 7 am and working until 7 pm or later, then dinner, then exhausted sleep. My brain hurt at the end of the day from all the struggle of communicating in a language I don't really speak. We'd go out into the villages, tramp along the narrow dirt paths that wove through a maze of little grass thatched-roofed, stick and mud huts. Corn grew in weird, indiscriminate bursts, and every so often, we'd pass one of the community wells, where a group of kids would be madly priming the pump. (That has to be one of the most inappropriate metaphors in the universe for Africa... apparently, Adam Smith didn't have the Third World on his mind when he was working out his economic theories that would eventually drive the industrial world forward and bury the rest of it in a stinking pit of poverty and asinine economic regulations.)

Anyway, amateur economics aside (man, one could go on for days ranting about what a mess economic theory and interests have made of Africa!), it was pretty cool, and I managed to get in a shit ton of interviews that I need to somehow figure out how to use for my thesis, despite not having been cleared to conduct these through any of the human subjects review boards...fucking bureaucratic nightmare, there, my friends. Best avoided all together; do now, make amends later, right? (I am apparently not cut out for the academic life.)

It was sad, though. It's easy, I think, to feel disconnected from the reality of this disease (HIV/AIDS, if I didn't allude to that earlier) when I'm back in the States, researching food aid policy and crafting clever logistic models with neat little inputs and outputs and outcomes. USAID would be proud of me but it doesn't do shit to reflect the messiness and complexity of trying to help the woman laying on the ground in front of me, almost too weak to clutch her severely malnourished baby, who's probably the saddest thing I've ever seen in my life. Her arms were tiny little sticks, improbably small and her head was disproportionately large, with the veins sticking out. Her ribs stuck out, too, and she was covered in open sores. I remember seeing a Pulitzer Prize photo taken of a little girl starving to death in the Horn of Africa (the photographer later committed suicide) and she looked too much like the unresponsive infant in front of me.

Oosh. What a problem. I was taking part in a nutrition meeting with the mothers in the Vertical Transmission Prevention program (HIV-positive moms, hopefully HIV-negative babes) and one of the women, breastfeeding a really cute baby, asked me (rhetorically?) "AIDS doesn't go away. We're not going to get better. When will they have a cure?" I didn't know how to answer. I'm really not good at being serious and the last couple days stretched the limit of my capacity for not making an inappropriate joke out of everything.

But it's not all terrible. The antiretroviral drugs work small miracles and people come off their death beds (so to speak) and are able to participate in life again. One little girl, born HIV-positive, was a firecracker. She ruled over a gang of boys with a ferocity and confidence that was hilarious and made my heart go "La La La..." (in the same warble of Bert and Ernie's "La La La, Linoleum!" song). Her mom laughed a lot and told me how she couldn't keep up with her daughter's energy or her appetite.

And it was so cool to be out in the country. There are all these impromptu markets in the most unexpected places, and like most non-American places I've been, the things you can buy off the street here crack me up. We interrupted one of our interviews to conduct what appeared to be a covert drug deal but was really just a transaction involving weird bits of cow. The next day, as we're packing to leave, I find a bloody cow head in the back of the truck. I'm a little perturbed-the fucker was bleeding all over the place-but more confused. What part, exactly, do you eat, I ask somewhat naively. Obede, the HAI-WFP food coordinator, laughs at my ignorance, and says, the whole thing, chopped up. The brain, too, I query, somewhat slyly. Yes, definitely the brain, it's the best part, he assures me. That's when I know he's a liar, and I know this because I've eaten brains (pig) before and they were quite possibly the most repulsive thing I've ever had the misfortune of ingesting, and that includes the time I ate my own poo when I was a baby (though not before finger painting all over the walls with the contents of my diaper). But the food here is actually pretty standard, non-mysterious fare, if a bit monotonous.

Since, we're on the topic of food (it's all I think about anymore... one way or another-either I'm hungry and want to eat, or I'm doing research on food), I'll end it with a happy discovery: Mozambicans love mayonnaise! One restaurant had "Mayonnaise" as an entrée (you could order it with a side of crab or lobster). And the grocery store in Nampula had an amazing, almost religious, display of mayonnaise! I was so excited I picked up the biggest jar there (huge!) and hugged it.

I'm kind of in love with my Portuguese dictionary, too. It has words like "dirigible" in it.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188924600/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188924600/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/shelagh.baird/mozambique_2007/1188924600/tpod.html Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:51:57 -0400 On getting nearly arrested, naming my heat rashes, and falling in love with Winston and the wonder children of Moz

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Beira, Mozambique

Oh, man... dogs and kids. I don't think anything makes me happier than those two things, African anythings included. Like in Colombia, here in Mozambique we have our neighborhood mutts (and sometimes little hierarchies of mutts). I have a theory about the evolution of mutts that comes from observing how similar street mutts are in developing countries around the world. It goes something like this (note the very unscientific tone of my evolutionary theory; that is a direct reaction to writing a research proposal on bionutrients and HIV/AIDS... I am fed up with science and biostats): if dogs are left to themselves to breed wantonly and without regard to fidelity, aesthetics, or disease, they will eventually all evolve through breeding to look like the same dog (medium-small, tan, usually short-haired, kind of pointy nose, and skinny, though that may just be environmental). It's the pinnacle of mutt evolution! These are advanced canines! This is the future of dog.

So, our neighborhood scavenger is a fine specimen. He trots around happily and lies at the top of our street garbage pile (which is somewhat smaller than those of other streets in the vicinity, probably because this little dude is efficient) and regards passerby with an affable dog smile (when he's not gnawing on something unspeakably disgusting). He reminds me of a Buddha, and I have christened him Winston, after Amelia's and Alex's maybe-dog (because it is a fine name and it cracks me up that they would end up with a dog named Winston... such divinity!). He may be a she; when (s)he trots along, (s)he has little nipples but they're not the calloused and droopy affairs of your Vietnamese or Thai street dog, so I don't know. Besides, I'm not one to make assumptions about gender.

Kids... well, I guess English kids all look the same but I wasn't really trying to draw a parallel between dogs, kids, and inbreeding (or make sweeping and vaguely racist generalizations), except that both canines and little people of stunted/undeveloped maturity make me happy. I was walking home from work today after a fierce tropical storm that flooded the streets (an earlier one last night apparently drowned a cat, which I saw laying dead on the drying sidewalk looking waterlogged and pathetic on my way to work). Though the rain had stopped, the air was wet, hot, and heavy (mind out of the gutter, ladies), and the streets were standing lakes of mud, garbage, and probably every kind of worm I could imagine. Schistosomiasis, anyone? I learned my lesson in Vietnam and now try to keep my feet pure of disease and weird third world creepy-crawlies, so I ended up walking along a narrow cement wall in front of an elementary school that had just let out. There were dozens of screaming kids jumping around (also all on this same narrow cement wall, with the lakes of disease below us, like something out of a bad Jim Henson acid trip) and every few seconds, I'd have to kind of hop/dance over the top of one. They were all giggling and crawling between my legs as I teetered there nervously. Luckily, they're nicer than I would have been and didn't push me off.

I'm sitting here typing this and Winston is down in the street freaking out at an interloper... happens to be a person encroaching on his pile. It would almost be funny if it weren't so fucking sad. Sometimes-not often-I'm genuinely surprised at something I'll see, just because it is so wholly unexpected. This short(ish) list includes barking mimes (they're not supposed to make any noise, let along bark), Pentecostal mass (disturbing and terrifying), and Moroccan henna assaults. Yesterday, I added another one to the list. I was walking along, inspecting a garbage pile I was passing (I always peer at them closely because Bill Bryson has me convinced that one day I will find a goat carcass somewhere completely bizarre, and I figure here is as good a chance as anywhere to see that.). This garbage pile had something I wouldn't have begun to fathom: a large bird's nest (think eagle-large) with a neat pile of human shit inside, like chocolate eggs. I had left my camera at home or I would have taken a picture of it to blow up and put in my office back in Seattle.

I did a lot of walking yesterday (and earned my very first Indian Ocean sunburn-Hallelujah!) through Beira and the slummy areas around it, down to the docks (yes, I always somehow end up at the docks... good thing I'm not a prostitute, eh?) and then back up along the beach, where there were men feverishly salvaging an old shipwrecked barge or something very large, metal, and skeletal out of the low-tide sand. I wondered whether they did this everyday, redigging it all out over and over again, like an exercise in Sisyphean futility. The white sand that I've fallen in love with is a bit farther up the shore and here, it's a sticky, slippery black mud. I pause briefly and realize that this might not be the best place for a white girl (quickly reddening, mind) in a dress and without much of a clue. I keep walking.

(Whoa! I just re-read that and have shocked myself with all the racial alliterations I managed to make... It's weird, you don't want to talk about race but it's hard to avoid the fact that my whiteness here is even more glaring than ever. I feel awkward and strangely apologetic for European colonialism-though the Irish never made it much further than bombs in baby carriages in Northern Ireland, which is, by all rights, their land, so.... Is it my fault, somehow, that I'm white and not poor, at least not by these standards? It feels like it but rationally, I know I'm reacting to an ingrained guilt over colonialism, neo-liberalism, and the persistent racial disparities that pick away at the social fabric of my own country, let alone Africa, which seems to me like one big, messy tragedy.)

Racial confusion aside, the shore is pretty cool. I walk though some slums, stick and wattle houses built on a swamp of standing water. I shudder to think about the hygienic nightmare that's occurring and rapidly calculate how many hours it's been since I took my last malaria pill. I feel a twinge of guilt (again! It must be my Catholic roots!) for being so... what? American? Truth is, I've been sick. I get sick, probably more than you're average hippie-dippy white kid, so I have no desire to return there. Besides, I ostensibly work in public health, and our hearts are supposed to bleed at such ostentatious displays of poverty.

Anyway, I keep meandering, pass through a market, smile at some kids who pause to say "Hola!" (kids! They're so fantastic!!) and then I'm back on that beach again. It stretches for what seems like miles, white sand and then the Indian Ocean, almost blue in the bright sunlight (remember, we're at the mouth of a delta here). There are fishermen out in wooden canoes that are made of hollowed-out tree trunks. Not the most sea-worthy of vessels but they're able to pull in piles of small fish that they lay out on the beach to dry. The stench is amazing. I wasn't born with a gag reflex but something happened and I think I puked a little in my mouth.

Right. Well, miraculously, I've so far managed to avoid anything more violently vomitous that a little hiccup of bile and I've totally escaped the plague of travelers navigating the alien foods of developing countries-explosive diarrhea-though I still laugh about Sarah's and my hellacious episodes in Northern Vietnam. Ha ha. (As you can tell, I am over being reflective and serious... anytime I act remotely more mature than a 14-year old boy, you can rest assured that it's a temporary and fleeting affliction. My boobs are there just to distract people and trick them into thinking I can act like an adult. On that note, I just had to add "vomitous" to my computer's dictionary... stupid thing tried to insist it wasn't a word.)

Sheesh. I'm prolific in my opinions and have barely been here four days, so I'll just send this totally offensive email off. (Sorry, I really don't like cats. Or standing water. Or worms because they make your butt itch. I think poverty is tragic and a form of violence in its own right but I still make weird comments about it. Race relations confuse me. I don't think I'm properly equipped to handle them, and that both frustrates and confuses me. I do like fish, especially dead fish that I can eat, but I have a hound dog nose and a delicate stomach-not the best combination. And I recognize that it's never appropriate to make jokes about bombs in baby carriages. I don't know what to say about the English...)
]]>