The question was posed perhaps most poignantly inside the Museum of National History in New York City. Beyond the gems and the meteorites and the massive cases of butterflies, there were cultural displays, one of which included a Tibetan wedding cart. The cart was constructed to be hoisted onto the shoulders of four men and carry an ornately decorated bride to her waiting groom, who would then become her life partner. “I think,” I said to my museum companion, “that humans are naturally monogamous.”
“No,” he replied, “humans are naturally polygamous.”
Humans are, unarguably, nutrient-consumers, sleep-needers, air-breathers. My mothers college friend who tried for a time to live on a only-water diet did not succeed. It is not possible to violate basic truths about human nature and live healthily and happily. The secret, then, the health and happiness could be coming to the correct conclusions about human nature and obeying those inherent laws.
Perhaps having a variety of subsequent partners is like having a variety of favorite-things-to-wear phase. For two years it was jeans and flip-flops: comfort is king. For the following year it was only basic colors: white, black, blue, beige and grey. You cant go wrong with classic. Two years later it was all the colors in the rainbow…what’s the harm of matching red shoes to a red shirt? Why where white when you could wear orange? What are eyes for but to appreciate the light spectrum? Now its all about quality…fit, fabric, tailoring. A few good things are worth so much more than a closet full of $10 pieces. As people evolve, so do their personalities and their tastes. The desires of a 20-year old are not the desires of a 40-year old, and changes must be made to reflect that.
Or perhaps people are born with all the core aspects of who they are, only to let some thrive at different times and with different people. You are my fun side. You are my intellectual side. You are my wild side. You are my lie in bed for hours side. You are my climb very high mountains side. You are my write love letters side. You are my try every food we can imagine side. How can one person bring out every possible positive dimension of another?
On the contrary, a person must have anchors in order to have a sense of security and place. Blood ties are valuable simply because they will always be there, through fights and disagreements and distance, a sister is a sister; a mother a mother. A lover who promises forever is all the more a lover because of the commitment. Something you can hang on to is the only thing you can really have.
Love is not meant to be created only to be broken. Who would plant a garden only to destroy it when the stems began to hold flower buds? Who would begin construction of his house on a plot of land the government has designated to be cleared the next week for a highway expansion? Futile investment should be avoided.
These are all the things I think as I call my sister on her first wedding anniversary and stop at the street vendors in Maputo to buy two pairs of men’s socks.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
20 something year old
On Thursday, Celso the art teacher and I were arguing about the size of bears.
Celso: “Are bears as big as cows?”
Anna : “Yes, sometimes bigger.”
“They are not. They don’t reach it.”
“They do.”
“don’t”
“do.”
“don’t”
Anna: “How do you know?! You’ve never seen a bear! Bears are on the flags of my state, California! In California, we have bears.”
I had made a true point, except for the more relevant information was that I also had never seen a bear. Not a real one, not close enough to judge its size. So really we were arguing about something that was not applicable nor within the domain of knowledge of either of us, which meant it was just arguing for the sake of…entertainment.
Arguably, there are differences between Americans and Mozambicans. My experiences with cuisine include more than fourteen dishes (counting bread as a dish), my battles against disease include nothing more serious than the common cold, and the number of books I have read before I was twenty years old exceeds what the vast majority of (educated) people here ever read in their lives. And while I, the American, am contemplating the possible careers available to me beyond teaching, any Mozambican teacher knows that they have likely reached the pinnacle of status and pay of anyone in their community.
Even more so, however, there exists differences between people in their 20’s and people in their 40’s. Men in their 40’s begin to notice how their once svelte wives have acquired a certain weight in their thighs and stomachs and women in their 40’s wonder how they can skip breakfast and still have weight in their thighs and stomachs. In Mozambique, the once-African ideal of well-fed and curvy is being challenged by life-size posters of Janet Jackson and Brazilian soap opera stars and these past-their-prime women attempt to make themselves feel better by taking jabs at me.
“Anita!” They’ll say. “You’re getting fat!”
“I’m not,” I’ll respond placidly, because it’s the truth.
A bulge below my hip will be pointed out and I’ll lift up the hem of my shirt to reveal it’s only a pants pocket that has come untucked.
I don’t fret over my body or my fading looks or to what extent my children have failed my hopes of beauty and intelligence, nor how many younger women my husband may be sleeping with. I don’t criticize myself for opportunities past, since few have, and I don’t wish I had married a different man, for whatever man I could dream of may still be out there. I cook for myself and I clean up after myself, which is hardly any cleaning at all, and I am never woken up in the night by children crying.
In the peaceful little sphere of my house and in all the undecided things of my future, I often have little to identify with my Mozambican neighbors over, as I am the youngest teacher in the school, the most single, and absolutely childless.
After more than a year of being all sorts of an anomaly, it makes sense then, that I should like Celso so quickly. I don’t know why he came, exactly, to be a third art teacher in a school that had previously done fine with two, but there he was, all of 23 years old, and saddled with the title “Senhor Professor.” He had grown up without parents but had still managed to precociously finish an art certificate program that qualified him to instruct adults his own age, as all of our students are. The girls, who weren’t really girls but 23-year olds themselves, asked him very interested giggly questions about his girlfriend after classes, but he didn’t play that game. He stood out from the male students in the way that he can wear a pink button-down shirt to school instead of the white button-down uniform shirt, but if you are not paying close attention to color, he could easily pass as a student himself. There was my experience of the past year exactly summarized in another person: refusing to date students, being mistaken as a student, having almost no experience and being thrown in deep, and being oddly younger than all of our colleagues.
Celso became a frequent dinner guest. In fact, any time I cooked at all, Celso was invited. The use of a chopping board and frying pan was almost always, now, associated with his presence.
My adoption of Celso was quickly followed by my adoption of another kindred spirit.
Maria Luisa, the new African Languages teacher is quite and a little fierce looking, always in glasses, a suit jacket and tailored trousers. But I greeted her at the break time one day and discovered that all she was is a 25 year old brand new teacher, missing her family several hundred miles away in Quilimane. She likes to make sound effects when she talks like “che, che, che” which serves to describe almost any type of movement. When she is relaxed, she laughs a lot, and will be on my side when Im arguing with Celso.
The topic was whether pregnancy affects women mentally and if the mentality of pregnancy affects women physically.
I say that pregnant women have the same mental capacities of non pregnant women. Celso says no.
“There are so many things that the mind can affect about the body,” goes on Celso. “Like if you say youre sick when youre not really sick, then soon you will start feeling sick. I don’t think women who are pregnant can study because their mind is elsewhere”
“That can apply for many things, except not pregnancy,” concluded Maria Luisa. “ Pregnant women can still study.”
“You cant say, you’ve never had children,” argued Celso.
“Well, neither have you,” I came in laughing. “You can argue with us about pregnancy once you’ve tried it!”
And then we all laugh, like a bunch of young twenty something olds who are having a good time being our age and who have the liberty to talk about things that don’t really matter to us at all.
Celso: “Are bears as big as cows?”
Anna : “Yes, sometimes bigger.”
“They are not. They don’t reach it.”
“They do.”
“don’t”
“do.”
“don’t”
Anna: “How do you know?! You’ve never seen a bear! Bears are on the flags of my state, California! In California, we have bears.”
I had made a true point, except for the more relevant information was that I also had never seen a bear. Not a real one, not close enough to judge its size. So really we were arguing about something that was not applicable nor within the domain of knowledge of either of us, which meant it was just arguing for the sake of…entertainment.
Arguably, there are differences between Americans and Mozambicans. My experiences with cuisine include more than fourteen dishes (counting bread as a dish), my battles against disease include nothing more serious than the common cold, and the number of books I have read before I was twenty years old exceeds what the vast majority of (educated) people here ever read in their lives. And while I, the American, am contemplating the possible careers available to me beyond teaching, any Mozambican teacher knows that they have likely reached the pinnacle of status and pay of anyone in their community.
Even more so, however, there exists differences between people in their 20’s and people in their 40’s. Men in their 40’s begin to notice how their once svelte wives have acquired a certain weight in their thighs and stomachs and women in their 40’s wonder how they can skip breakfast and still have weight in their thighs and stomachs. In Mozambique, the once-African ideal of well-fed and curvy is being challenged by life-size posters of Janet Jackson and Brazilian soap opera stars and these past-their-prime women attempt to make themselves feel better by taking jabs at me.
“Anita!” They’ll say. “You’re getting fat!”
“I’m not,” I’ll respond placidly, because it’s the truth.
A bulge below my hip will be pointed out and I’ll lift up the hem of my shirt to reveal it’s only a pants pocket that has come untucked.
I don’t fret over my body or my fading looks or to what extent my children have failed my hopes of beauty and intelligence, nor how many younger women my husband may be sleeping with. I don’t criticize myself for opportunities past, since few have, and I don’t wish I had married a different man, for whatever man I could dream of may still be out there. I cook for myself and I clean up after myself, which is hardly any cleaning at all, and I am never woken up in the night by children crying.
In the peaceful little sphere of my house and in all the undecided things of my future, I often have little to identify with my Mozambican neighbors over, as I am the youngest teacher in the school, the most single, and absolutely childless.
After more than a year of being all sorts of an anomaly, it makes sense then, that I should like Celso so quickly. I don’t know why he came, exactly, to be a third art teacher in a school that had previously done fine with two, but there he was, all of 23 years old, and saddled with the title “Senhor Professor.” He had grown up without parents but had still managed to precociously finish an art certificate program that qualified him to instruct adults his own age, as all of our students are. The girls, who weren’t really girls but 23-year olds themselves, asked him very interested giggly questions about his girlfriend after classes, but he didn’t play that game. He stood out from the male students in the way that he can wear a pink button-down shirt to school instead of the white button-down uniform shirt, but if you are not paying close attention to color, he could easily pass as a student himself. There was my experience of the past year exactly summarized in another person: refusing to date students, being mistaken as a student, having almost no experience and being thrown in deep, and being oddly younger than all of our colleagues.
Celso became a frequent dinner guest. In fact, any time I cooked at all, Celso was invited. The use of a chopping board and frying pan was almost always, now, associated with his presence.
My adoption of Celso was quickly followed by my adoption of another kindred spirit.
Maria Luisa, the new African Languages teacher is quite and a little fierce looking, always in glasses, a suit jacket and tailored trousers. But I greeted her at the break time one day and discovered that all she was is a 25 year old brand new teacher, missing her family several hundred miles away in Quilimane. She likes to make sound effects when she talks like “che, che, che” which serves to describe almost any type of movement. When she is relaxed, she laughs a lot, and will be on my side when Im arguing with Celso.
The topic was whether pregnancy affects women mentally and if the mentality of pregnancy affects women physically.
I say that pregnant women have the same mental capacities of non pregnant women. Celso says no.
“There are so many things that the mind can affect about the body,” goes on Celso. “Like if you say youre sick when youre not really sick, then soon you will start feeling sick. I don’t think women who are pregnant can study because their mind is elsewhere”
“That can apply for many things, except not pregnancy,” concluded Maria Luisa. “ Pregnant women can still study.”
“You cant say, you’ve never had children,” argued Celso.
“Well, neither have you,” I came in laughing. “You can argue with us about pregnancy once you’ve tried it!”
And then we all laugh, like a bunch of young twenty something olds who are having a good time being our age and who have the liberty to talk about things that don’t really matter to us at all.
Friday, March 19, 2010
The Setting fo my life
At the very tip of Africa is the Mediterranean climate of the city of Cape Town, South Africa, famous for its grapes and wineries. Several hundred kilometers northeast, a very well maintained highway transverses the South African boarder into Mozambique, a country whose population is quite naïve as to their near irrelevance to more developed countries of the world. They imagine that their celebrities: politicians, musicians, and one Olympian, are world celebrities, not realizing that the United States, for example, has had hundreds, maybe thousands, of its own Olympians, many of its own which it also has by now forgotten. The climate of Mozambique is tropical and neither grapes nor apples grow there, so these fruits are packed into truck beds and imported from Cape Town, where they are sold for inflated prices on the sides of the roads in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. The fruit boxes are labeled in English, “Fresh from the Cape!” which Mozambicans understand since it sounds like the Portuguese word “Fresco.” All Mozambicans want to learn English but few are willing to put in the effort to actually do it. Some don’t even speak Portuguese, the national language, and converse nearly exclusively in African dialects.
One day I will travel the three or so hours (even though it should be one) in a very tightly packed mini-bus (four to a row) to Maputo to mail letters, use the internet and buy a kilo and half of grapes. I live directly north of the capital in a village close enough to the city that all of my neighbors have a second house there. My home and place of work are the same, residing inside the walls of a Japanese-built school compound where I teach English for nine hours a week. My house is made of cement blocks since that is the only available building material in this country, besides straw and tin. I have managed to pound one whole into the wall with my bare hands to place a nail and hang a mirror, but real you need a power drill to do that well. The windows are all barred. Thanks to the Japanese, we have a false ceiling which insulates from heat and the sound of rain. There is a clothesline outside which is used every Tuesday by a sweet lady named Alzera who I pay $8.00 a month to wash our clothes. I live with a 24-year old blue-eyed private-school graduate from Kentucky who is everything you would imagine a very energetic, very idealistic Peace Corps volunteer to be. She usually is not in the house and I am usually am.
From my bedroom I can see the front yard of Lavinho and Akeisha, my very adorable 3 and 6 year old neighbors. When they are playing outside, I can lean back in my desk chair and yell at them to stop sucking on their grimy fingers, which is sort of like the chastising voice of an invisible god, since they can’t see me through the window screen. Lavinho and Akeisha’s father is Daniel, a fellow English teacher who works for the school five hours a week. Daniel’s wife had a baby two weeks ago, contributing to the never-ending supply of newborns I seem to be holding and taking pictures of and buying presents for.
I grow Marigolds in hanging pots beside our front door, which is how you can recognize our house in a long block of connected teacher’s houses that all share walls with their neighbors.
I will leave Mozambique in December, probably forever. I don’t know how many Peace Corps volunteers succeed to go to back to visit their countries of service or be recognized by the people they used to work with. I think I will cry. I think Lavinho and Akeisha might cry too, but my Mother, who calls every week from California, says that children get over things quickly.
I finally bought a very cheap gold-colored ring to bolster my claim that I am married. I feel I could never marry a Mozambican and the only way I have succeed to say this not cruelly and effectively is to convince them I already have a husband. I wear the ring, which has a pretty little stone, even inside the house.
The main reason I consider no Mozambican men eligible is because I do not live in Mozambique. In less than a year’s time, my visa will expire and my house will be turned over to someone else and I will be living in a country where grapes can be eaten in the same region where they are grown. The fact that all this will happen is not probable, it is definite. I will leave Mozambique and I will go to America. And when I go to America I will face the significant stress of finding a new house, a new job, new friends, and do not think I could imagine succeeding to handle the additional stress of helping a Mozambican husband adapt to the craziness that is the developed world with its thousands of Olympians.
Every detail here is the setting of my life, but it is not actually my life and it is not actually me. It is a postcard of the things I experience but not sincerely what I live. In a way, it feels like a charade of non-reality, where I am accepted and even loved as though I am not transient, when I mostly certainly am. I cannot expect that the relationships I have now will still exist five years from now and I cannot expect that any of the connections with colleagues will lead to any sort of future opportunities. These years in Mozambique feel to me like an isolated cell of my life and not merely more time in a harmonious flow.
The Peace Corps catchword is “integration” which despite being in many ways an undefined cliché, I feel I have achieved. I know everyone inside the wall and several outside, I have friends through random encounters in Maputo, and I know everyone I buy anything from, including photos and vegetables. All of these moments of connection, however, feel like making love to someone you know you will leave. It’s not fair to let them get attached so you hold back the most genuine part of yourself.
One day I will travel the three or so hours (even though it should be one) in a very tightly packed mini-bus (four to a row) to Maputo to mail letters, use the internet and buy a kilo and half of grapes. I live directly north of the capital in a village close enough to the city that all of my neighbors have a second house there. My home and place of work are the same, residing inside the walls of a Japanese-built school compound where I teach English for nine hours a week. My house is made of cement blocks since that is the only available building material in this country, besides straw and tin. I have managed to pound one whole into the wall with my bare hands to place a nail and hang a mirror, but real you need a power drill to do that well. The windows are all barred. Thanks to the Japanese, we have a false ceiling which insulates from heat and the sound of rain. There is a clothesline outside which is used every Tuesday by a sweet lady named Alzera who I pay $8.00 a month to wash our clothes. I live with a 24-year old blue-eyed private-school graduate from Kentucky who is everything you would imagine a very energetic, very idealistic Peace Corps volunteer to be. She usually is not in the house and I am usually am.
From my bedroom I can see the front yard of Lavinho and Akeisha, my very adorable 3 and 6 year old neighbors. When they are playing outside, I can lean back in my desk chair and yell at them to stop sucking on their grimy fingers, which is sort of like the chastising voice of an invisible god, since they can’t see me through the window screen. Lavinho and Akeisha’s father is Daniel, a fellow English teacher who works for the school five hours a week. Daniel’s wife had a baby two weeks ago, contributing to the never-ending supply of newborns I seem to be holding and taking pictures of and buying presents for.
I grow Marigolds in hanging pots beside our front door, which is how you can recognize our house in a long block of connected teacher’s houses that all share walls with their neighbors.
I will leave Mozambique in December, probably forever. I don’t know how many Peace Corps volunteers succeed to go to back to visit their countries of service or be recognized by the people they used to work with. I think I will cry. I think Lavinho and Akeisha might cry too, but my Mother, who calls every week from California, says that children get over things quickly.
I finally bought a very cheap gold-colored ring to bolster my claim that I am married. I feel I could never marry a Mozambican and the only way I have succeed to say this not cruelly and effectively is to convince them I already have a husband. I wear the ring, which has a pretty little stone, even inside the house.
The main reason I consider no Mozambican men eligible is because I do not live in Mozambique. In less than a year’s time, my visa will expire and my house will be turned over to someone else and I will be living in a country where grapes can be eaten in the same region where they are grown. The fact that all this will happen is not probable, it is definite. I will leave Mozambique and I will go to America. And when I go to America I will face the significant stress of finding a new house, a new job, new friends, and do not think I could imagine succeeding to handle the additional stress of helping a Mozambican husband adapt to the craziness that is the developed world with its thousands of Olympians.
Every detail here is the setting of my life, but it is not actually my life and it is not actually me. It is a postcard of the things I experience but not sincerely what I live. In a way, it feels like a charade of non-reality, where I am accepted and even loved as though I am not transient, when I mostly certainly am. I cannot expect that the relationships I have now will still exist five years from now and I cannot expect that any of the connections with colleagues will lead to any sort of future opportunities. These years in Mozambique feel to me like an isolated cell of my life and not merely more time in a harmonious flow.
The Peace Corps catchword is “integration” which despite being in many ways an undefined cliché, I feel I have achieved. I know everyone inside the wall and several outside, I have friends through random encounters in Maputo, and I know everyone I buy anything from, including photos and vegetables. All of these moments of connection, however, feel like making love to someone you know you will leave. It’s not fair to let them get attached so you hold back the most genuine part of yourself.
Cows blood vs. Corn Flakes
Seemingly every semester my housemate, Katie, delivers the bad news: she has to save money to travel and therefore cannot buy food anymore. Regardless, this does not stop the flow through our cement block African house of watermelon and grapes, chicken and ground beef, olive oil and jam, corn flakes and granola, nor her requests for shrimp and brown rice. We still have Parmesan cheese and milk, we still make naan bread and tortillas, and when I have a can of evaporated milk from the States, I will stir up an Alfredo sauce. I freeze sausage to save for pizza when I have a chance to go to the city again to buy cheese, which will be combined with a yeast crust and very thinly sliced tomatoes. I will trek fifty miles with bread from the capital, since it’s whole wheat or really soft or particularly fresh. Katie will become so enamored with the bread as to do the same, although it faces the significant risk of getting smashed on the long bus ride home. We gave up margarine a long time for real butter and dip our carrots into creamy Caesar dressing from South Africa. I have developed a particular affinity for ketchup, which I eat with potatoes fried until they are crispy.
Since we are foreigners in a land that is not our own, we do what other foreigners in strange places do: Food is one possible means by which to preserve a satisfying part of your own culture. This why the Indians in California bring spices packed into their suitcases, why the Chinese flock to specialty stores for fish-flavored rice crackers. When no one is like you nor understands exactly what you are, you can still be yourself when you face your dinner plate.
Mozambicans do not drink cow’s blood, one of the horrors I was spared from facing when coming to Africa. Overall, food is not horribly painful, only a little. I am still uncertain if they eat cow’s brain, which I know is removed from the cow’s head, perhaps to be thrown out, perhaps to be cooked separately. The cow’s head is by all means, eaten. I have both tried it and helped prepare it. A cow’s head lying the market place is in fact a very common site. One day I discovered cow testicles draped over a severed cow’s neck, which I imagined implies that testicles are eaten as well. Mozambicans suck the ligaments off chicken’s feet in wedding soup and sometimes they clean the yellow muck from inside the chicken’s intestines and make soup out of them, too. All butchers sell hooves and livers and other organs I cannot identify, sitting in little open-air, fly-covered piles. Fish heads are consumed, little white fish eyeballs and all, but usually the tiny fish is cut in half and shared between two people so I request the tail. Meat is almost never served in terms of steak and fish fillets and boneless chicken breast.
Vegetarians can opt for white corn meal porridge, or rice, which is the cheap, sticky, fat-grained kind, or a variety of green curries made with ordinary leaves. Leaf consumption in the United States is usually limited to flavorful herbs, cabbage, and crisp lettuces, but in Mozambique, anything that is not poisonous or too tough or extremely bitter will be pounded up, mixed with salt and coconut milk, and eaten. Some if it is still fairly bitter. They call these dishes “yangana” and “matapa” and “couve,” and “aboubora” but they all more or less taste the same with only some variance between mildly sweet and painfully bitter. The typical diet is rounded out with white bread, watery bean dishes, and tea with brown sugar.
I have, for many years, eaten nearly everything that can be chewed and swallowed. I marvel at the oddity of adults who refuse to eat harmless things like tomatoes and myself keep a very short list of things I will chose to pass up, like Brussel sprouts and beets. In this way, Africa suits me well, and with the assistance of only a mild dose of hunger, I can almost always clean my plate, no matter what it contains. I do, however, draw a distinct line between consumable (nearly everything) and enjoyable (desserts with nuanced sweetness, meat marinated into spicy savoriness, warm, dry rice…)
In my generally very ascetic life, food is my primary source of fleshly pleasure, and I can fantasize about life where restaurants of every type line the streets and brownies are a mere instant grocery store mix away!
Since we are foreigners in a land that is not our own, we do what other foreigners in strange places do: Food is one possible means by which to preserve a satisfying part of your own culture. This why the Indians in California bring spices packed into their suitcases, why the Chinese flock to specialty stores for fish-flavored rice crackers. When no one is like you nor understands exactly what you are, you can still be yourself when you face your dinner plate.
Mozambicans do not drink cow’s blood, one of the horrors I was spared from facing when coming to Africa. Overall, food is not horribly painful, only a little. I am still uncertain if they eat cow’s brain, which I know is removed from the cow’s head, perhaps to be thrown out, perhaps to be cooked separately. The cow’s head is by all means, eaten. I have both tried it and helped prepare it. A cow’s head lying the market place is in fact a very common site. One day I discovered cow testicles draped over a severed cow’s neck, which I imagined implies that testicles are eaten as well. Mozambicans suck the ligaments off chicken’s feet in wedding soup and sometimes they clean the yellow muck from inside the chicken’s intestines and make soup out of them, too. All butchers sell hooves and livers and other organs I cannot identify, sitting in little open-air, fly-covered piles. Fish heads are consumed, little white fish eyeballs and all, but usually the tiny fish is cut in half and shared between two people so I request the tail. Meat is almost never served in terms of steak and fish fillets and boneless chicken breast.
Vegetarians can opt for white corn meal porridge, or rice, which is the cheap, sticky, fat-grained kind, or a variety of green curries made with ordinary leaves. Leaf consumption in the United States is usually limited to flavorful herbs, cabbage, and crisp lettuces, but in Mozambique, anything that is not poisonous or too tough or extremely bitter will be pounded up, mixed with salt and coconut milk, and eaten. Some if it is still fairly bitter. They call these dishes “yangana” and “matapa” and “couve,” and “aboubora” but they all more or less taste the same with only some variance between mildly sweet and painfully bitter. The typical diet is rounded out with white bread, watery bean dishes, and tea with brown sugar.
I have, for many years, eaten nearly everything that can be chewed and swallowed. I marvel at the oddity of adults who refuse to eat harmless things like tomatoes and myself keep a very short list of things I will chose to pass up, like Brussel sprouts and beets. In this way, Africa suits me well, and with the assistance of only a mild dose of hunger, I can almost always clean my plate, no matter what it contains. I do, however, draw a distinct line between consumable (nearly everything) and enjoyable (desserts with nuanced sweetness, meat marinated into spicy savoriness, warm, dry rice…)
In my generally very ascetic life, food is my primary source of fleshly pleasure, and I can fantasize about life where restaurants of every type line the streets and brownies are a mere instant grocery store mix away!
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Failing, repeating, and the future
During one episode of my De Anza college automotive technology class, the instructor passed around, for the sake of demonstration, a piece of an engine. A “piece of an engine” is still the best I can identify the object as. When the piece was passed to me, I touched something I should not have touched, for when it made it back to the instructor, it was broken. Well not broken, exactly, but stuck. The instructor, who had no qualms at all, systematically went through the rows of students asking who had done it until a gentleman in the row ahead of mine falsely admitted to it. The class however, did not doubt the abilities of this aspiring mechanic. They may have wondered, rather, what this 18-year old woman with a horrified look on her face was doing in a night class for people whose profession would be fixing cars.
When I inevitably failed the class with a “No Pass,” I went to the instructor and asked if he could change it to a “Withdrawl.”
He didn’t grant my request, but he gave me some advice. “You know,” he told me, “sometimes you just have to learn when to quit.”
While I do not disagree with this advice, I do not often follow it. I don’t usually quit. And I also almost never repeat. Sometimes this means suffering through something to the end and then forever turning my back on it. Or sometimes it means enjoying something through the end and then decisively moving on from it. I never repeated the same activities during any of the summers of my five-year college career. No one who ever sent brochures to recruit me back for a second year of camp counseling or program assisting succeeded.
In the end, I feel that this means that nothing but a disaster could make me leave Peace Corps early, and Mozambique certainly doesn’t seem like a country prone to disaster. Yet as the end of my contract nears, I will become restless and not at all interested in the suggestion of a colleague that he could help me find a paid position teaching here a third year. “Why would I do again what I have already done?” I would reason, and would therefore also never apply to Berkeley for a graduate program after having done undergrad there. I am not excited about moving back to San Jose, after having grown up there. Nor do I feel right trying to reinsert myself into the same group of friends after having left them. The preservation of individual relationships, of course, is different.
I am very torn, however, between resisting stagnancy (coming to land in a comfortable place and being afraid to ever move out if it) and avoiding rootlessness (never being content or fully satisfied by anything, not buying into it, investing in it, and letting it become part of your identity and sense of place.) In one moment I criticized the boringness of people who thought they would never move on and in the next envied them for the amount of happiness they must be experiencing to arrive at that kind of certainty.
“If there is one thing I’ve learned from flying across the Atlantic,” I wrote to a friend in a letter, “it’s that I want roots.” And what I want about roots is the absolutely most mundane things, like knowing how to take public transportation around the city and where to find everything in the grocery store, having a friend to spend the night with when it’s too far to make it back home and knowing you won’t ever celebrate your birthday alone. And what I want about the ability to fly is simply the capacity to not be forced to disappointment by reliving something that’s not as good as the first time, nor being stuck in something that wasn’t even good the first time.
My Italian neighbors have given me the idea to teach English in Italy. My friend Sara thinks I should move close to her in Sacramento. I’ve talked with my friend Jen about living with her in Cambridge. The only “rooty” thing I have considered is moving close to my parents to help my mother take car of my immobile grandparents. “Maybe I could help you drive Grandpa to the hospital,” I told her. But on second thought I considered the time to dedicate my life to supporting my family will be when I must take care of my own ailing parents, not when I’m 23. Only such a heroic thing could attract me to home and even that likely will not. I may go back to community college to take math or business courses, but not definitely not my first community college, simply because it was my first my community college. I adore my successful friends but fear being the least accomplished of all of them. I am motivated to the new and the different out fear as much as curiosity.
When I inevitably failed the class with a “No Pass,” I went to the instructor and asked if he could change it to a “Withdrawl.”
He didn’t grant my request, but he gave me some advice. “You know,” he told me, “sometimes you just have to learn when to quit.”
While I do not disagree with this advice, I do not often follow it. I don’t usually quit. And I also almost never repeat. Sometimes this means suffering through something to the end and then forever turning my back on it. Or sometimes it means enjoying something through the end and then decisively moving on from it. I never repeated the same activities during any of the summers of my five-year college career. No one who ever sent brochures to recruit me back for a second year of camp counseling or program assisting succeeded.
In the end, I feel that this means that nothing but a disaster could make me leave Peace Corps early, and Mozambique certainly doesn’t seem like a country prone to disaster. Yet as the end of my contract nears, I will become restless and not at all interested in the suggestion of a colleague that he could help me find a paid position teaching here a third year. “Why would I do again what I have already done?” I would reason, and would therefore also never apply to Berkeley for a graduate program after having done undergrad there. I am not excited about moving back to San Jose, after having grown up there. Nor do I feel right trying to reinsert myself into the same group of friends after having left them. The preservation of individual relationships, of course, is different.
I am very torn, however, between resisting stagnancy (coming to land in a comfortable place and being afraid to ever move out if it) and avoiding rootlessness (never being content or fully satisfied by anything, not buying into it, investing in it, and letting it become part of your identity and sense of place.) In one moment I criticized the boringness of people who thought they would never move on and in the next envied them for the amount of happiness they must be experiencing to arrive at that kind of certainty.
“If there is one thing I’ve learned from flying across the Atlantic,” I wrote to a friend in a letter, “it’s that I want roots.” And what I want about roots is the absolutely most mundane things, like knowing how to take public transportation around the city and where to find everything in the grocery store, having a friend to spend the night with when it’s too far to make it back home and knowing you won’t ever celebrate your birthday alone. And what I want about the ability to fly is simply the capacity to not be forced to disappointment by reliving something that’s not as good as the first time, nor being stuck in something that wasn’t even good the first time.
My Italian neighbors have given me the idea to teach English in Italy. My friend Sara thinks I should move close to her in Sacramento. I’ve talked with my friend Jen about living with her in Cambridge. The only “rooty” thing I have considered is moving close to my parents to help my mother take car of my immobile grandparents. “Maybe I could help you drive Grandpa to the hospital,” I told her. But on second thought I considered the time to dedicate my life to supporting my family will be when I must take care of my own ailing parents, not when I’m 23. Only such a heroic thing could attract me to home and even that likely will not. I may go back to community college to take math or business courses, but not definitely not my first community college, simply because it was my first my community college. I adore my successful friends but fear being the least accomplished of all of them. I am motivated to the new and the different out fear as much as curiosity.
Sand
When you lie down in water and get up, the place closes over as it if never was. But if you lie down in sand, your indentation will still be there when you leave, for sand remembers. This comparison came to me in the last few moments of a dream, and when I woke I didn’t know what it meant, except that I would prefer to lie down in sand.
When I left for Africa I was far more attached to things in the United States than anyone leaving for a far place for a long time should ever be. The things I had there were very pleasant and very satisfying, and it’s very difficult to abandon such things without knowledge of what their replacements may be. It was a trade of known good for unknown good, and the unknown good may in fact involve a lot of bad.
The bad may be the superfluous bad, like the passing sickness and unusual accidents that in the end are worth it for the spellbinding stories they result in, or the bad may be the sort of more integral displacement and doubt that makes you wonder who you are and how good this person may be. It was in this sentiment of dissatisfaction, then that I missed my old life with all my heart, hoping that much of it would still be there when I returned, and feeling crushed when parts of it broke apart. When what I thought was sand turned out to be water, I felt betrayed. Many melancholy months passed.
But I discovered, eventually, (for everything always happens eventually), that my destiny in life is to be happy. It’s a childish sort of happiness, promoted by commonplace things like black and white butterflies that somehow seem like flying zebras or my full moons that look like they were plucked from movie sets. When I buy sausage, I am not only buying sausage, but tapping into world full of wonderful things to eat. And when I sit in church wearing a new dress, I remain giddy over this fact all throughout a two and a half hour service. Sending international letters is not only sending international letters, but proving that oceans can be crossed and distances can be surmounted, and kissing black-eyed children is realizing all the joy that human beings can bring each other.
I am relatively unaccomplished and untalented and have no certainty for the future nor reason to believe that it will be shiny and smooth. I wish I have done things I haven’t and sometimes wish I were someone I’m not. I admire and sometimes resent the souls that never have believed anything other than that they are wonderful human beings destined for adoration and success, and with this belief, follow through to be exactly what they think they are. I don’t face difficulties with the certainty that everything will work out, sometimes I worry that they won’t.
“How long have you been in Africa? How much longer will you stay?” I’m questioned almost weekly by a new acquaintance. “It’s been about a year and a half,” I respond. “I finish my contract in December.” And in December I will either return to my roots and all of the things I prayed would remember me for these years, or myself turn into water and fall into something new.
White High Heels
Mozambique, is, for many days of the year, hot. Hot is where people say “37 today” as they open their windows for a breeze and refuse to touch you when they great you because they are sweating. Hot is rolling out of bed and onto the floor to sleep because the tile is a cooler than a mattress. Hot is sweat droplets appearing above your lips as you sit quietly in church and salt stains appearing on your clothing. Hot is taking a shower immediately after waking up after having soaked the sheets in the night and noticing that your hair is always wet, even on days when you don’t wash it. Hot is garlic growing white mold and pineapples quickly fermenting despite their hard skin. In the summer, every day is what people in the States would call 90, 100, or 105. But if it’s not 105, it’s hardly worth the trouble to say it’s hot, since it’s just another day.
Mozambique is, in many places, dirty. Dirty because dirt is the natural state of the earth and if you want something other than dirt, you have to pave. Paving costs money and who has many to pave? Except for the national highway, the major roads in the capital city, and the corridors of our Japanese designed school, almost everywhere I walk is through dirt. The dirt is deeper when tractors go through it, stickier during mango season, worse after it rains. Drainage systems don’t always exist, so sometimes dirty water sits on the road until a car passes and launches the water into the air.
Mozambique is, in many aspects, poor. The limited economy provides very few jobs in even fewer sectors, so except the lucky few who have foreign roots, capital, or education, most people don’t have money to buy things. When people don’t have money to buy things, the low demand results in high prices. New clothes can only be afforded at the cost of good food.
All of these factors seem to point to one conclusion: Africa is not the place for fashion. Even if you can afford it, it is too hot to wear it, and even if you wear it, it will quickly become dirty in a place where it cannot be dry cleaned. Peace Corps Volunteers, therefore, arrive in the country with shaved heads, water proof pants, and one all-purpose pair of quality sandals. The leave behind nonsense like perfume and jewelry, dress shoes and button-down shirts.
Mozambicans, however, see it differently. The woman augment their hair with heavy extensions despite the heat. They would not wear flats if they had heels, would not wear plain things if they had colorful things, would not go without jewelry if you could perhaps match your green blouse with green earrings. The men only wear well-ironed dress pants and meticulously scrubbed cleaned shoes.
It took me a great many months to fully adopt what I saw as a sign of self-esteem. Looking nice is not a result of an environment, it is a result of an attitude, a personal standard. It is always something you can control to some extent. I have never been the type of volunteer to consider going to Africa a chance to climb Kilaminjaro, so from the beginning, I left behind the mountaineer’s gear (or rather never had) in favor of two pairs of high heel shoes. When told to pack “business casual,” I never envisioned this as pants that did not reach the ankles with shoes that can double to exercise in. It took me a while, however, to actually wear the heels enough to buy a third pair. (White, when my black or brown wouldn’t do.)
Eventually I added daily eyeliner to the mix, decided I could arrange my own eyebrows with a good pair of teasers, but stopped cutting my own hair, which was never good news. I still didn’t feel I have money to go to a white person salon in the capital, however, which are designed for wealthy ex-pats, so I trusted my head once to an outdoor barber beneath a tin roof at the bus terminal. I had confidence in him since he could actually see what he was doing. The huge man was so nervous, however, that he cut off almost nothing with the gigantic shears that are probably meant for flowers and not hair.
I hunted through used clothes piles for pencil skirts and bargained on the street over the price of belts. Seventy Metecais ($2.30) was so expensive! How about 60? ($2.00). I gave in, at least partially, to the idea of monochromatic. I would wear a purple skirt with a purple t-shirt but stop at adding purple earrings or purple shoes. Or I put on purple earrings along with a purple tank-top, but that was the end of the purple. I was sold nearly completely on culture of color, however, and began to fill my closet with $1 finds in blight blues, all shades of green, and splashes of orange. I began to wonder how a perfectly happy person could wear all black, and even hesitated to buy one black shirt even though it fit perfectly. I realized most of my pants were too loose so I took them to the tailor.
Dressing in the morning became fun. I began to find approval in the all-seeing and all-saying eyes of Mozambicans. They liked my eyebrows. They asked for my makeup. They thought I was" chic." They still thought my jeans needed a belt. And so I did what Mozambicans do, which is to combat the circumstances and end out on top.
Anna Loves Africa
If I were asked to define love as a single emotion or force of motivation, I could not do it. I could nothing more than to list a general set of correlating characteristics, supporting the definition only in a vague and insuccinct manner. It was with this same level of understanding that in the Summer of 2008, I put the word “love” as the center of my e-mail address, my own name as the subject, and “Africa” as the object. “Anna loves Africa.” A few months later I left everything and boarded a South African Airways flight departing from the JFK airport in New York City to take me 10,000 miles away to the African country of Mozambique. I was not going for a safari, for study abroad semester, or for a brief internship. I would be staying for over two years, rebuilding my life there and sacrificing any certainty of what would be left for me in the United States when I returned.
My friend Eliza looks a little bit like the Grinch, but only in the very cutest way. She has very long eyelashes and very wide eyebrows and little nose that makes her eyes look bigger and her eyelashes longer. On one extremely hot day in Southern-Hemisphere February I noticed her mother. Eliza’s mother cannot walk so she crawls, her knees wrapped it fabric, one foot falling behind her, the other bent towards the left. This makes her arms and shoulders disproportionately muscled, and her hands exceptionally calloused. Her back is severely arched and her full stature is only two feet. Eliza’s mother was sitting near the gutter as I passed, on my way to the village market to buy potatoes and carrots, and I did not consider it appropriate to stare at a crippled woman. I wouldn’t have stopped if it weren’t for Eliza, standing nearby in a sun hat and a flowered skirt. I smiled at her because she was too cute not to smile at. I bent down and greeted her. “It’s a very sad story,” said the man standing near us, to me in English which no one else understands. “Her mother was sexually harassed.”
The next week at the market I saw a woman give Eliza one Metecal to buy a Popsicle. A passing man thrust 20 Metecais at her mother. I picked up Eliza, calling her “my little sweetheart” in Portuguese, and helped her open her Popsicle. When I put her down, she held on to my legs, so picked her up again, orange Popsicle juice dripping onto us. I was so busy helping my little friend enjoy her treat that I didn’t notice a fifteen or twenty person crowd had gathered to gawk at the interesting trio: a disabled mother, a little girl, and a young white woman. I put Eliza down. Her sucking was becoming less fruitful as she has reached the very frozen center of the Popsicle. Some people walked away. I bent down, patted her sun hat covered head, and told Eliza that I will visit her next week.
And that is how I love Africa. Not by writing policy, developing programs or by donating funds. I teach English. And I feed Popsicles to a little girl whose father is a rapist and whose mother can’t pick her up. It’s so simple, it’s almost trivial. No one could call it “saving the world” and no one will give me any sort of prize for doing what I mostly do, which is talk to people, visit their houses, and adore their children.
If love is defined as ongoing dedication, a sustained commitment, than I do not love Africa. My time here will be enough to show me that development work is not for me; it is not for most people. It is filled with infinite frustrations and roadblocks that make work difficult and disappointing. I have neither the spirit of Pollyanna nor the single-minded drive of Attila the Hun that could make survive in this kind of work forever. Love for me at the moment is passing moments of warmth, small encounters, fleeting and sweet connections.
Only the Good Things
The instant a moment passes, it becomes only two things: a force for the future and a memory. Some moments are too inconsequential for long time memory, and only are useful for the short-term future. Washing clothes on Friday gives you clean underwear on Saturday. Eating lunch at noon prevents you from feeling uncomfortably hungry at 3:00 PM. Other events are both memorable and consequential. Asking for the phone number of that attractive stranger could result in the meeting of your spouse. The day at the doctor where you discover you have colon cancer could also be the day that saves your life.
Yet in the convoluted set of circumstances that determine decisions, preferences, and life outcomes, many days could not be considered particularly significant, leading to no specific end. They serve, therefore, primarily as memories. There is the girl you dated that you didn’t marry. She did not scar you against women nor did she lead to your life partner. There was that summer job that didn’t end up being your calling in life, nor did it lead to the contacts that would fulfill your calling in life. There was that conversation with a friend, or maybe a stranger, that only the two of you witnessed. A broken arm that healed with no permanent damage. The summer you tried mango sorbet. The view of a valley from the edge of a cliff.
So many things are only memories.
Memories remain in the control of the mind, for that is the world in which they exist. This is a manageable world, where things can be preserved or thrown out, according to choice. On the same day it took four hours to get home a stranger chased after you with your purse, which you had left behind. So was that the day of terrible transport or of the kind stranger? On the hike to cliff with the beautiful view, you encountered biting ants that crawled up your legs. So was that the day of the picturesque valley or of the horrible insects? An hour before you dropped your cellphone in the toilet, an old friend called to remind you of how much you mean to her. Was that the day of the lost cellphone or the sweet call? Whatever you remember becomes the record for what happened. A string of bad memories is a series of bad days, a collection of good memories is a life prone to luck.
A mind full of bad memories is nearly the same as having nothing good happen at all. A mind full of good ones negates the importance of any unfortunate occurrences.
“You only remember the good things,” my student Elisa told me once, as if this were a general truth for human kind. For me, I decided it would be.
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