You Not My Mama

Gosh.. I hope Elio doesn't turn into another African dictator.  I've been following what's been happening with Laurent Gbagbo in Cote d'Ivoire and I've read a fair amount of African history, and well, Elio's behavior is starting to resemble that of an African dictator.  Or maybe it's just that some African dictators behave like three year olds.

Today Laurent Gbagbo was captured at his hotel in Abidjan after refusing to give up the presidency to its rightful owner, Alassane Outtara.  The BBC characterized Gbagbo as short tempered, closed to new ideas and outsiders.  Sounds kind of like Elio.  Elio's patience lasts as long as it took your to read this last sentence, and when we go to someplace new, his first question is usually "When are we going home?"

We went to a beautiful eco-lodge nestled in the mountains in Swaziland over the weekend.  It was a kid's dream. They could run and play everywhere.  There were all these streams to splash in, rocks to climb, cable TV in the TV room.  Elio did all the playing and having fun, but the first night, as we were about to go to bed, Elio said, "I want to go to my house.  When we go to my house?" 

He's also been learning new expressions and figures of speech from who knows where.  We're trying to get him off his bottle, which we are not really winning.  Usually, when he asks me for his bottle, he starts out very nice.  "I want my tee-tee please."  Tee-tee is milk.  I respond (very nicely too).
 "No, we aren't having tee tee, but we can read a book and I'll lie down with you." 
Then, it starts to escalate to "I want my tee tee." Then, "I want my tee tee now."  When I finally refuse to give in, he has been known to scream, "I'm not your mama anymore."  Nalia then jumps in and corrects him, reminding him that he was never my mama in the first place.  I try not to laugh. 
He is getting more sophisticated though, because tonight, at the end of the battle (which I lost, for the record), he screeched, "And mommy, YOU not my mama."  
Any suggestions on bottle weaning of 3 year old are appreciated!

Finding the Target in Brooklyn

Yesterday, Ometepe comes to an end and I am translado almost instantly from the sun kissed dust and smiles of Nicaragua to cold gray granite JFK airport.  Our flight arrives at 3am, but I am awakened before that because my seatmate has a problem.  My seatmates always seem to have problems on the night flights, and they are invariably large strong men.  This one has the build of Mike Tyson, but can’t take the air bumps, starts sweating profusely and having shortness of breath when we are 1 hr. outside NYC.  They decide to administer oxygen so move me to first class to get me out of the way.  Sounds great, but I didn’t sleep at all because of the whole drama.

The most important thing about my 8 hour layover at JFK was a trip I’d plotted and planned for months.  It was my second place aspiration for 2011. 

This year, on my self-evaluation at work, there was a section for career aspirations.  I left it blank.  After years of working and responsibilities, my real aspiration is to take four months off, stay with my parents on Bainbridge, and be a stay at home mom.  After that, or my aspiration for March 2011, was to go to Target and go shopping (by myself…mom readers can fully relate!).  When you live in Mozambique and haven’t been able to leave much for the last 8 months, going shopping in the US can easily become an aspiration… and an obsession.

 I had a running shopping list over the last 6 months.  All the things that are impossible to get in Moz (gummy vitamins, Ranch dressing packets, my annual dose of Peeps!, make-up that doesn’t make me look like a drag queen, TORTILLAS) or the things that are ridiculously expensive in Moz (dog leash, $40 in Moz), (ibuprofen, only $6.09 at Target for 250 pills!), (Ben Ten action figure, $8.44 at Target and $45 in Moz).   All these made the list.

But the trip was going to be tricky because I got into JFK at 3am and my flight left at 11am, and as hard as I tried cruising the net, I couldn’t find the closest Target to JFK that opened at a reasonable hour.  When I arrived at 3am, I asked the Arabic speaking information desk person… he had no idea, but still made something up.  And the Jamaican policeman standing next to him told me all the Targets were too far, didn’t open until 10 AND I would miss my flight.  ‘Forget it.  Twill not work.’ So I asked the Trinidadian lady who came through the door primped up for her flight to Port of Spain.  And then I asked the Dominican cleaning lady.  And then I asked the lady at the baggage storage.  To each of them I had to explain why I ASPIRED, dreamed of going to Target on a cold NY morning.  They all gave me different answers on where I might find this Target, and so, resigned, I tried to sleep. 

But if any of you know JFK terminal 4, there is NO place to sleep.  There are only the phone booths.  So I tried that, but kept getting interrupted by the homeless man snoring in the booth on the other side.  I was still determined though—to prove the Arab information guy and the Jamaican policeman wrong. 

Finally, I bought 4 minutes of internet and Googled:  Target Brooklyn Hours.  Yes!  There was a Target near the airport that opened at 8… and this matched the Trinidad lady’s instructions.  Finally, with two sets of instructions that matched, I decided to wait in the phone booth until 7:30, then get the Yellow Cab and go for it.  I told the cab driver the address and he nodded.  That’s supposed to mean he knows where he’s going, but not 2 minutes later, he is parked on the shoulder of the Belt Parkway, yelling at some guy named Hamid on the phone in Arabic, trying to figure out where the Target is.  I don’t speak Arabic, but didn’t need to.

‘It not come up on GPS. Hamid don’t know and Hamid know Brooklyn.’ 

So we just sit there.  Then he starts driving again, and I ask in an unconcealable worried tone, ‘But if you don’t know where the Target is, where are you taking me?’ 

‘I take you anywhere you want to go. Customer first.  I know Queens, no Brooklyn.’

I was worried.

‘But I’m not from here … never been here, so I really don’t know where anything is, but I really need to go to Target.’

‘Why you need Target?’ 

‘Because I live in Mozambique and need to buy shoes and shorts and other things for my kids because these things are really expensive in Mozambique.’

He smiles very big and I can tell we now have a bond. 

‘You live in Africa!?  I am from Egypt, so I understand!  Africa is mess.  It  poor.’

He pulls over again on the Belt Parkway and starts re-entering the address in his GPS.  I hover over him to make sure he gets the spelling correct. 

In five minutes, we are there.  It’s Target, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Home Depot…spread before me, all rolled into one strip mall in Brooklyn, a mirage for an American from Mozambique, but it’s real.   

The Egyptian dumps me off.  I ask if I can call his cab company for a ride back.  He laughs, explaining that people in NY don’t do that.  ‘Good luck getting your flight…no cab come here.’ And off he goes. 

Target has just opened and I am privileged to be their first customer.  I take a moment to let the cold air enter my lungs and watch my breath exit on the way out.  Sigh.  It’s been over a year since I felt cold and it’s revitalizing, with the Gateway Target in Brooklyn awaiting me. 

The first thing I do is go talk to Bianca in customer service… initially, she looks at me like a have 3 heads.  ‘You need a cab to JFK airport in an hour?  From here?’

Yes, and then I explain the whole story again.  She thinks it’s funny and agrees to call a cab for me because I don’t have a cell phone.  I whip out my tattered 6 month old list and am exhilarated about experiencing Target for 1 hour, only a blip on the screen of time.  It is empty and all mine… and everything is familiar, for the Gateway Brooklyn Target has the same layout and feeling as the PG Plaza Target or the Eden Prairie Target or the Academy Blvd. Target. I have grown up on Target and there is always comfort in the familiar, even with its loud red bull’s eye and glaring fluorescent lights. 

I love Mozambique, but I will always be a foreigner there…I didn’t grow up there, so though I am used to it and like it , it can never be my true home.  I will never know Mozambican culture in the sense that I know all the minutiae and idiosyncrasies of American culture.  In Portuguese and Spanish, there are two words for know—saber, which means to know facts and where things are, what time it is, and conocer, which is to know people, what a place is like, to be familiar with something all the way down to your bones.  Conocer is  that part of knowing that can’t be clearly articulated, but is simply felt.  Familiar is the closest word to conocer in English, like family, but the way we use familiar doesn’t express the depth of conocer, because while I can say that I don’t know where the Brooklyn Target is located, I know the Brooklyn Target.  I truly know… conocer…my country and how it operates.  I understand the details because I am American.  That is why I can pull off an early morning trip to Brooklyn, stock up on everything I need for the next 4 months, fit is all into my bag and make it back to JFK in time, all in 1.5 hours. It’s because I know how all the gears fit together and how to make them move.  I know how to talk to Bianca so she will call me a cab.  I know the dog collars are next to the aisle with the Ziploc bags.  I know how to deal with the cashier so she will be expeditious and help me.  There are some very comforting things about being in one’s own country.

When I get to the cashier, I pull out my pink duffel bag, smile, and tell her no plastic bags are needed because all this stuff is going on the plane at JFK.  She looks at me like I’m just another weirdo, so I feel the need to justify, explain again. 

‘I know you might think I’m just another weirdo, but I Iive in Africa, and these  things are expensive there and they don’t have some things my kids really like and….’

She smiles a nice soft sympathetic smile- whoever said that people from Brooklyn were harsh and abrupt.  These people are my red target angels. 

‘You mean, they don’t have a Target in Africa?’

‘No, and in Mozambique, no MacDonald’s.’

‘Oh man, that must be really hard for your kids…. Coming from the US.’

‘They’re happy, but they miss some things..’

I rip all the boxes off the Wheat Thins, gummy vitamins, Ibuprofen, Oil of Olay moisturizer, throw the Converse shoe box in the trash to save space, and cram, mold and coax it all into the pink duffel.  Only the castle jigsaw puzzle doesn’t fit.  2 minutes after I get outside, my cab pulls up to take me back to JFK.  I have proven the Jamaican policeman wrong.

Target booty

Ometepe, Lake Nicaragua

It was my first girl weekend since Nalia was born… nearly 8 years...my first time on a trip, just me and a girlfriend.  Majella flew from San Salvador and met me in Managua.  After meeting her at the airport, we took a long taxi ride to San Jorge, and then boarded the ferry to Ometepe (Majella and I both agreed on the luxury of the taxi… we are over and done doing the Central American bus ride, which takes place in a used (though highly adorned and decorated) USA school bus, covers long distances with LOTS of stops and LOTS of dust, all in temperatures that rival a summer kitchen in New Orleans.

 Ometepe is in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, which is so large it looks like an ocean rather than a lake.  But it’s better than an ocean because it’s agua dulce (sweet water, as they say in Spanish)… during the dry season, the Island looks like a cross between the muted, earthy tones of Western Colorado and at higher elevations,  Hawaii.  The Island is dominated by two volcanoes, one active (Concepción), and the other inactive (Madera).  Ometepe is also Bainbridge Island’s sister island. 

On Ometepe, we were cared for by Marvin at Finca San Juan de la Isla, and if there is ever a moment for a blogger to indulge in some shameless publicity, this is the time!  San Juan is one of the most relaxing places I’ve stayed for a vacation. It’s a restored 100 year old Spanish hacienda on the shores of the lake, and doesn’t have many amenities, but the hammocks and the wholesome food (prepared by Marvin) were enough for weary burnt out NGO workers like Majella and me.  I say that Marvin took care of us because he really did.  He got to know us and suggested what we might like to eat based on who we are and where we’d been.  And then he went to his kitchen and in a whirlwind of vegetables and pasta, enhanced by some flourishes of secret spices, he’d pull off a work of art that tasted close to ecstasy.  That, with one of his famous Ometepe margaritas… put both Majella and me to sleep by 9:30.  He let Majella and I take a sneak peak at his kitchen after the storm, and it looked right out of Like Water for Chocolate….  Pieces of ayote on the table, open bottles of capers, eggplant stems, bits of carrots strewn everywhere. Majella asked if he’d clean it up that night and he only said one word, manaña.

On the ferry to Ometepe

Bainbridge Sister Island office in Altagracia

Nicaraguan transport

Finca San Juan de la Isla

Beautiful spring on Ometepe

Ferry Che Guevara

In Nicaragua...

Our, my, life has been full this month.  Full, but not in the busy sense that we usually equate full with in our American culture, but full as in good solid living.  Content.  For now, I am back in Central America, in Nicaragua.  We, 4 Mozambicans and me, came on a trip here for work, to learn from a similar program that has been going on for awhile and is more established and experienced than ours in Mozambique. 

For me, it's been like coming home... Costa Rica was the first place I went abroad, in 1995.  And then, I spent a year in Honduras.  When I was in Costa Rica, I spent two months living with a family in the mountains, 3 hours from the nearest town on a mule.  The family farmed beans and corn.  My job while I lived with them was to learn Spanish and collect plant samples in recently deforested areas, to learn what species were colonizing these areas. 

The health 'strategy' I work on now targets families a lot like the one I lived with in Costa Rica....those at the farthest ends of the earth who have little to no access to health care.  We train people in these communities to treat children for the diseases that most commonly kill children in places like Nicaragua and Mozambique: diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria.   In Mozambique, we call it a project, but here they call it a strategy... which is more accurate.  The whole idea is that the strategy lives on after the project dies. 

So we have been visiting communities, the Mozambicans and me, accompanied by Nicaraguans.  The Nicaraguans I've met on this trip are some of the most dedicated, dynamic people I've seen in my work.  Never have I seen a whole country so collectively driven to improving the health of the poorest children.  They feel an obligation to change lives and they are proud of what they are doing.  They exemplify what it means to be human.
 
In Mozambique, poor women in remote villages are usually shy and apprehensive about speaking with people they don't know.  And most don't speak Portuguese, which doesn't help.  But here, it was a different story.  Not only did the women voluntarily share a lot about themselves, but they had a lot of questions for me too.  Our conversations went something like this:
'So are you from Mozambique too (in reference to my 4 colleagues)?...  You don't seem like you'd be from Mozambique.'
'No, I'm from the U.S. but live in Mozambique.'
'How far is Mozambique from here?'
'About 30 hours flying.'
'That's farther than Managua.'
'Do you get to Managua much?'
'No, we really don't leave here.... have you heard about this earthquake, the one in that country in the Carribean?'
'Yes, but that was last year.  There have also been other earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, and many people have died and suffered.  Have you seen the pictures?'
'No.  We don't have TV or newspapers, but I heard about it on the radio. Pobrecitos... como sufren' 
These women are hungry... for information.
Then one of the women asked me, 'How old are you?' I told her 36.  She said she was 38, but looked 48.  She saw the difference too.  She paused, and then stated matter of factly, 'But it's all because you don't work.  Not like us.'  And that's completely true.  These women work cutting coffee by hand 3 months of the year.  During the other months, they are growing corn and beans on their own little plots, for survival.  You see, the coffee is not theirs.  They just cut it.

Yaro, La Dalia, Matagalpa

Some very talkative mamas, San Pedro, El Jicaral, Leon

Tough guys.  El Jicaral, Leon

A health brigadista assessing a child's respiratory rate.  Rapid breathing is one of the symptoms of pneumonia. 
La Flor, El Cuá, La Dalia, Jinotega

More dynamic mamas, La Flor, El Cuá, La Dalia, Jinotega

Church with mountains.  Yaro, Waslala, Matagalpa



Mozambican doctor and a Nicaraguan doctor sharing stories...

 On the way to these villages, we sliced through coffee plantation upon coffee plantation, hanging precariously on the steep hillsides, protected by big tropical shade and fruit trees.  Sometimes the hillsides are so steep, you can't see the bottom when look out the car window.  It's beautiful.  Green jungles with tropical flowers growing naturally on the banks of streams with the coffee bushes right next door.  But the reality isn't as idyllic.  Most of the haciendas are owned by big land owners, not the people who cut the coffee.  They just cut it for a few cordobas for their work. 

Mozambican Martha

Nalia goes to horseback riding every Friday, and while she's riding, I usually talk with my friend Kevin.  Kevin went to Tulane with me, and I didn't know him well then, but through Friday afternoon horseback riding, I've gotten to know him a little better.  He and his wife have been in Mozambique for 10 years--first, we was the director of Habitat for Humanity, but then decided he wanted to do something else and opened up a coffee shop called Cafe Sol.  They bring coffee from Malawi and roast it in Mozambique.  It's good coffee. 
A couple of weeks ago, Kevin told me that they're ready to leave Mozambique and do something else...  'You know, mid-life stuff,' he explained. 'You get to a point in your life and realize you're not going to do all the important things you thougth you would, and you won't advance in your career like you thought you might... and you realize you're just an ordinary person.  But it's good.  It's ok.'  So, in the next chapter of their lives, Kevin and his wife want to work on an organic farm in Yolo County, California. 

I think I've been going full speed for say.. the last 15 years, and I hadn't really even stopped to breathe and think about any of this.  After Kevin said this, my fist thought was, 'Well, maybe he's middle aged, but not me...wait, oh shit.  He's right.  I'm 36 and that means that statistically, my life is about half over!'  That's me, the positive one.  But really, I have half my life left.  However, given who I am and how my life has been over so long, I hadn't even reduced the momentum long enough to consider any of this.  Living in the U.S., working full-time with two little kids, I couldn't reduce the momentum. 

That's why we came here, to slow the pace and do more of the things I longed for but could never do in the U.S. Sure, we did bike rides and went to the park and pool, but I was always rushing.  I was always exhausted.  There was a lot of stress.

Here, I've had a lot more time to consider this short beautiful life.  Part of the reason we came here was because I wanted to have more time with the kids-- to cook, swim, do art projects.  Last week, we picked lemons from the tree outside our house and made lemonade.  The same day, our chicken started laying eggs...last weekend, we made a parking garage for Elio's Matchbox cars out of a cereal box... it was great.  Since I've had a chance to consider more what I want for my family and for myself, I feel myself being pulled more and more towards domesticity.  Just call me Mozambican Martha.  I've been planting herbs and flowers.  I've spent a lot of time on allrecipes.com, printing out recipes for Oatmeal Carrot Muffins and Chinese Chicken Fried Rice.  And I actually make them.  Sometimes they're even good (according to Matias).

Zinnias in our garden

The words from Kevin made me think about how much time I've spent in my life apologizing for who I am... true, I'm impatient, I do things too fast, sometimes I'm defensive and don't listen, I can be cynical.  I feel guilty about too many things, and then feel guilty about feeling guilty.  But doesn't it really take your whole life to get to know yourself, work on the things you're not so good at, and figure out how to use the things you are good at to make the world a better place?  Also, another thing I'm finding out, as a mom, is that I need to take time to do the things I love!  And, for me, that's what I've missed... so, in the next postings, I'll start sharing my recipes, craft projects, recommendations for good books. 

Mozambican mailbox, aka Blackhole

Photos of Kruger Park

Below are some recent pictures of our trip to Kruger last weekend.  I showed Elio the picture of his passport and he told me, "Elio was sad that day.  He didn't like people taking his picture."  Poor Elio... he does look pretty glum. 

King of the Savanna after the kill

The hippos are the same color as the rocks!

At our hotel in Nelspruit



Fist time swimming with Floaties... all by himself!

 It's still hotter than Hades here, but I'm getting used to dripping in sweat by 7AM.  Funny how adaptable we are as human beings... today a pick-up truck full of policemen toting AK47s passed me on my way to work.  Here, there are two types of policeman.  Fat ones in white uniforms called Policia Transito-- Traffic Police.  They are fat because they take bribes from all the chapas (minibuses).  Then, there are what Mozambicans call Cinzentinhos, or little gray guys.  They are all skinny young guys and they are the ones who get to hold the AK47s.  Twenty years ago, I would have beem scared by all these machine guns, but now I hardly notice.  Yes, we are adapable...

At the Mall

Finally, we got out of Mozambique.  The kids received their Mozambican passports on January 31, and I told Matias that we HAD to get out that weekend.  I just needed a break from the heat, grime, dirt, people asking me for every favor under the sun.  So Saturday morning, we left at 6AM for South Africa and drove through Kruger Park on our way to Nelspruit.  Nelspruit was one of the host cities for the 2010 World Cup, but more important than this, it has a MALL… and a McDonalds. 

We didn’t see as many animals in Kruger as we did the first time we went—during the dry season, it’s much easy to see the animals because there’s not as much bush and the animals tends to aggregate around the water holes.  However, we were treated to seeing a male lion that had just killed a huge buffalo.  We got within about 20ft of him… he was satiated into total apathy, tummy full of the buffalo, and probably wouldn’t have touched us if we’d walked up to him.  We were also fortunate to see a very large male elephant up close, and even more exciting for the kids, we got to see him pee.  Nalia was trying to make comparisons on how much pee he’d made… bathtub full?  No, more than that.  20 buckets full… yes, maybe that.

We spent the night at a beautiful lodge near Nelspruit that had live animals roaming around the grounds- we opened the door to find an ostrich next to the car.  The next day, we went to McDonalds for breakfast… and that sausage McMuffin was so tasty.  Then, we fulfilled Nalia’s dream and hit the mall!  There’s a Chuck e Cheese type play area there, and Elio was so excited that he forgot about the bathroom and went right there next to the Skee Ball machine.  After 4 hours of mall roaming, we hit the Pick n’ Pay, or the South African equivalent of Safeway.  This was the exciting part for me… because you can save so much money by buying groceries in S.A.  Almost all packaged food in Mozambique comes from there, so the prices are a lot higher.

On the way out we stopped at Claire’s boutique so Nalia could get her ears re-pierced… amidst all the mayhem of moving, I forgot to put earrings in and her ears closed up.  She was so determined to do it—she didn’t shed one tear the whole time.  The ladies at Claire’s said they had never seen a child not cry, so they gave her a certificate. 

 After all the shopping and piercing was done, we hit the road for the border.  I asked Nalia what her impression of the trip was, and she sighed and said, “It was FANTASTIC.  It was the best day of my life.  My favorite part was the mall.”

Below... a couple of pictures from January.  Pictures of Kruger Park tomorrow!

Museum of Natural History, Maputo

Our new kitten, Little

Nalia's fist day of 2nd grade!

Mr. Elio... hair keeps getting straighter!



Museum of Natural History, Maputo