Saturday, August 11, 2012
Officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!!!!!
I am very excited and ready to face what is coming for me. I want to say an enormous thank you to my family and friends who helped and supported me from the application process until after training and now. I will try my best to post as much posts as I can.
Thank you!!!
Friday, August 10, 2012
Last week of training
Here I am completing
my last week of training. I cannot believe 10 weeks has gone by. Next week I
will be heading back to Maputo for our swear-in ceremony and I will officially become
Peace Corps Volunteer. And the 2 years countdown will start on this day. I am
extremely excited to finish training and finally get to my site.
This training was
intense challenging, long very helpful, confusing. It was a very structured and
dense schedule that I had very little time for myself. The huge benefits tha I received
is to be able to communicate in Portuguese. As of now I am able to have a basic
conversation and yet talk about more complicated topics. I also learned a lot
about health and nutrition. I have been well treated by my host family and
learned local cuisines. After that, I am finally ready to step in. Next week I
will move to Chokwe, move into my house and I’ll have to buy all the appliances
since I am opening the site. I am looking forward for this opportunity that is
coming up for me and I am staying positive all the way. J
Amazing day to hopeless day
Part of the training
is to work with an organization based in Namaacha. I was assigned to this organization
called Associacao Tiane. We work with them to understand how an organization
works and to give us a preview on what we will encounter in our site.
Asociacao Tiane is an
organization that supports people living with HIV/AIDS. Although the medication
(TARV) that treats patient with HIV/AIDS is free, people stop taking this
treatment after a month.
The hospital provides to
the patient with medicine worth of 30 days and they have to come back to get
more medicine. Unfortunately, patient don’t come back to get their medicine and
stop the treatment. This is when Associacao Tiane comes in and reaches out to
the community doing home visits in person and looking for the patients directly
to their house to find out why they stopped the treatment and ask them to go
back and get treated.
I had the chance to
participate in a home visit with an activista. We had to look for patient A in
the Barrio Z of Namaacha. This barrio is very much different from where I live.
It is very poor and the house lives next to each other and they are in bad
conditions. There is no system of numbers for each house and they are no street
names as well….it is like a very tiny village where people know where people
lives by names. So we went asking to neighborhoods and kids where Patient A
lives. When we finally found the house, we passed as we were patient A’s friends
paying him a visit to say hello.
It is important that
neighbors and family don’t know about the real reason why we come in person for
confidentiality. Unfortunedlty patient A was not at his home.
Associaciao Tiane pays
a visit 3 times. After 3 unsuccessful visits, the patient is classified as ‘abandon’.
And they won’t follow up on the patient because that person was not reachable,
or did not want to be reached or simply decided to stop taking the medicine.
The activista took me
around the Barrio and we talked to the neighbors. On that day I had my second
lesson of Changana, the local language in Namaacha, so I was able to practice
my language with them and talk to the community. It was amazing. People were so
welcoming and were so happy I was talking to them in their own local language.
It was truly a great experience to be in community. On my way going back home,
I had this long conversation with the activista who is actually living with
HIV/AIDS as well. Being a foreigner and not speaking Portuguese totally
fluently has its advantage and I took the opportunity to ask personal questions.
Questions I think I would never ask to someone with the same situation and who
would speak English. After our long conversation, what I can vividly remember
is the activista saying….all you have to do is forgive and move forward. At
this point I was inspired and amazed by her persona t the point that I teared…
It is truly amazing to
see people like this activista fully grasping the beauty of life despite living
with the disease. I admire her way of thinking and her input in working for Asociacao
Tiane in helping the community. She has the will to give back to the community
and she wants to encourage people who have the same disease as her to continue
living their life fully and inspire them that….simply….life is not finished.
Also, tell others that by taking the medication people can live a normal,
healthy, happy life.
We parted and I walked
home tearing….I was probably a bit too much emotional on that day but I was
amazed by her sense of determination that she had left me inspired and moved….
All these tearing
completely stop as soon as I saw an older woman, albino, beating up this little
girl like no shame. I was standing there….powerless…what should I do?
Intervene? Scream to stop the beatings? Or walk away?
I was shocked….I
walked slowly and then stopped as I was standing in between this woman the
child who had ran passed me and stood behind me. The woman stopped, grabbed her
children walked away…and I continue to walk my way home. I kept thinking…I can’t
believe this woman would dare putting her hand on this child but also I felt so
powerless in this moment. In the states,
people in the street would intervene right away. Although, I have to always
remind myself that I am not home. That I cannot completely act the way I would
do back home and that I have to be careful and discreet in the things I do. I
was by myself surrounded by little kids and this woman…there was no
police….there was absolutely nothing at all around me. This is just sad….to feel
powerful in this situation. That was one crazy first experience of violence
that I have experience and really pray it will be the last one.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
AND THE SITE IS...............
We had our site announcements last Thursday and I will be living in Chokwe in the province of Gaza for the next two years of my life. I will be working for John Hopkins University Communication Program (PACTO). I am so excited!!! In two weeks I finish training and I will officially be a Peace Corps Volunteer. YAYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)
Visit to the Curandeiro
I visited a curandeiro (a healer
who practice traditional medicine) generally; people would reach out to a
curandeiro to get treated. The curandeiro can (supposedly) cure people with
plants but also can see the future.
See, this is how it works. The
curandeiro has a bag filled with shells and coins, he spits in the bag, the
‘patient’ needs to blow on it and the container of the bag is thrown on the
floor. This is how the curandeiro can see what kind of ‘disease’ the patient
has. And offer to get rid of the disease through various practices such as
combining natural plants but it can go to using scalpels and then I don’t know
how it goes. So at the end, how to do in the case of a person who is HIV
positive? How can a curandeiro see if the patient is HIV positive?
How can he/she help cure the
patient with plants if he contracted HIV?
I realize how complicated
cultures/tradition interferes with modern medicine…
Usually, there is a curandeiro in
each town, and as a health volunteer, how can I manage working with a
curandeiro to incite people to go straight to the hospital, get tested and get
medicine. Curandeiros can transmit HIV with their practices in which they use
scalpels and where rituals are asked to pass the blood from one to another as a
ritual path. After several training on traditional medicines and talk. I do
believe that it is important to educate curandeiros first since there are the
first demanded by the community and educate them to practice safe manners when
curing patients and incite patient to see a doctor if the patient does not feel
or look well after being treated with traditional medicine.
Short visit to Mocuba, Zambezia
4 volunteers and I flew to the
province of Zambezia to visit a current volunteer. This visit is called Shadow
Visit. It is way for trainees to see what life like for real! Redeena and I
were sent to visit Tanya Riddle in Mocuba. From Maputo we landed to Quelimane.
We had to stay one night over to another volunteer since it was late at night.
Then early the next day, we hopped in a chapa to Mocuba.
I posted a photo of myself in a
chapa and I did not explain it is. It is a way of transportation here in
Mozambique. It is a minivan. A chapa won’t move anywhere until it is completely
full. So sometimes you get to wait at the chapa station for 2 hours until it’s
full and you go. It is totally uncomfortable, dangerous and long. It’s perfect
for short people but people like me with long legs it is uncomfortable. Also I
would say that you need to have good knees and be flexible. It can be very
frustrating because the conductor would blast his songs, you might sit by the
speaker throughout the whole journey (which can take up hours depending on
where you are), it’s incredibly hot, so of course you will encounter people
with severe BO and you have your bag in your lap. It is a great way to travel
cheap in Mozambique. You can catch them anywhere in the street. There is no bus
station. You just hop in and hop off but you definitely need to be open minded
and ready to go to experience a chapa.
So back my short visit, after two
hours, we arrived in Mocuba. Tanya
leaves in this nice compound with her organization. It is a faith-based organization. Tanya
educates orphans; she runs a theater group that does skits about HIV AIDS and
malaria. We assisted a meeting where professors were recapulating what they
learned about Malaria and how can they reach to the community door to door and
incite people how to put mosquito nets and its importance and the different
practices to avoid getting malaria and so on. It was interesting. Tanya also
showed us her wells projects in which she was able to get funding. So in the
next couple weeks, the community will be able to access water in their
community and not go to further public wells in which generally the water is
dirty and contaminated. I think it was such a great project to see. Two
volunteers are supposed to go to Mocuba because Tanya is finishing her service
in a couple of months. I think that this place is very secure. It is a compound
watched by two guards and there are more than 10 dogs there. (Side note:
Mozambicans are terrified of dogs) I felt very secure there although a part of
me would rather be living within the community and not in a compound close off.
But I enjoyed my visit. I thought Tanya is doing a wonderful work with the
kids. I was very admirative and inspired. So I come back full of excitement
because soon I will be living it somewhere and do my workshops on HIV/AIDS.
From Mocuba, Redeena and I took a
chapa back to Quelimane and the flew to Maputo and stayed there overnight. I
spent a nice full day in Maputo with Lisa. We walked around the city, shopped
then met up with other volunteers to go to the Chinese store. I love my Chinese
people! The only places that look like a wall mart are owned by Chinese people
and you can find ANYTHING you want! It
is heaven there! The funny thing is that literally everything is imported from
China. I know that because I was able to find the exact same shower gel I used
when I was in Xiamen for a month. It was nice little day of shopping and seeing
the capital and the same day came back to Namaacha with 5 kinds of cheese that
I brought in Maputo. I was in Heaven. J
My permagarden
I decided to do a permagarden at
my host family house. I asked permission to my host family to use some space in
her garden and she was glad to let me do it. Sabrian,Colin and Lis helped me to
do it along with the training facilitator Paula and Lucio. In two hours or so,
we made this great machamba and planted tomatoes, onions, sweet potatoes,
pineapples trees, a lychee tree and some
peanuts as well.
I initiated this project because
I want to gain more experience on permagarden because I intend to do my own at
my site. I thought it would be a good idea to re do one while I am in training
and have the facilitator around if I have any questions. So yes! It was a
success. I also taught my host family what was the system of permagardening. Unfortunately
I would be present to see the results of my garden but at least I was able to
practice how to do it again. I think it is so funny that I am doing a
permagarden. I would have never thought I would get interested in gardening to
be honest. Oh well there is a first time for everything J
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