#matulife

Teenage girls splitting firewood for their families. Kitchens so smoky from cookfires that my eyes tear up instantly and I have to wait outside. Waking up to the sound of grinding corn, or drums from the neighborhood witch doctor. Shepherd boys with herds of long-horned cattle blocking the road. The cheers of the night school students when the power goes out. Chickens everywhere. Goats…

Reginaldo and his son Ambrosio

At various points he’s worked as an English teacher or a translator, but now he has an association that works to get grants for his community. He’s been a longtime friend of peace corps volunteers, along with everyone else he meets. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more friendly, genuine, or humble person. He knows so many people and works with so many projects, but always takes care to stress how much he is learning at any given moment. How much he is benefiting.

Reginaldo lives in Chokwe with his wife and two children, but his family lives in a small village called Mbalavala. It’s a tiny community of 1000 people, about an hours ride down a dirt road in Guija district. Reginaldo and I have been trying to arrange for me to visit there for a few months now, but, as is common in Mozambique, something always came up.

Until this week, when Reginaldo’s father became sick. They took him to the hospital in Chokwe and then Xai Xai, but he passed away on Friday. He was 85, which is astonishingly old in Mozambique. Reginaldo says he was a hard worker until the last. He produced charcoal to sell, farmed their land, herded cattle, and took care of his wife and six grandchildren whose father passed away. He was also an active community and church leader, and his friends told me he regularly visited the surrounding communities on his bicycle.

Reginaldo’s father, Papa Suto

So on Saturday, my sitemates Kayln, Laurel, and I decided to forgo Halloween and go to his funeral instead. And I’ll admit, it was partly a selfish decision, because I’ve been waiting for a while to visit Mbalavala.

We left Guija at 6am on a private chapa (the mozambican bus system; just wait until I write a post about the horror that is the chapa system) along with Reginaldo’s other friends and colleagues from Chokwe.

We arrived in Mbalavala around 7 and were introduced to the family and shown around, and then had tea while the other guests arrived and people prayed over Papa Suto’s body. We went to Papa Suto’s church, and the service was led by one of his good friends, a Mexican priest living in Chinhacanini. They asked me to stand up and say a few words along with the other important community members, and I spoke about what an amazing person Reginaldo is, and how welcoming his family has been to pcvs, and how sorry I was that I didn’t get the chance to meet his father before he passed away. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to being an honored guest at every ceremony, simply for the fact of being a foreigner.

After the service we went to the cemetery where they buried the body, and this part was actually very familiar. They lowered the casket into the ground and everyone threw some dirt on top, and then the men in the family took turns shoveling the rest of the dirt.

For the record, they asked me to take these pictures so I could share it with them later.

And afterwards we returned to Papa Suto’s house, where they killed one of his cows, and everyone feasted and drank all afternoon. It was an excellent celebration.

Xima and beef, classic Mozambican celebration food!

Cutting up the meat.

The guests at the funeral.

Cooking massive quantities of xima.

Reginaldo’s wife Olga with their son.

My sitemate Kayln

Pounding garlic.

Frying onions.

The cookfires in the shade of a tree. It was still incredibly hot.

***

One of the reasons I’ve been especially curious to visit Mbalavala is because Reginaldo has been working for months to build wells in his town. This town suffers intensely from a lack of water. In Guija, many houses now have working water spigots outside, which were installed three years ago. But if you don’t, there’s always wells, both the hand pump and the bucket variety. Mbalavala, however, does not have any wells. Instead, they walk a half an hour to a watering hole well outside the village.

The watering hole.

Reginaldo and I with the community leaders.

If they have cattle, they take their cattle and a sleigh and fill up many buckets at a time. But if they don’t have cattle, they carry the water buckets by hand. Because the whole town uses the same water source and because they go at the same hours (early morning or late afternoon), it’s often a very lengthy process, easily over an hour.

Think of how much water your family uses every day. At minimum you need the water you drink, but you also need water to cook with, to take a bath, to wash dishes, and to wash clothes. The Mozambicans are experts at using far less water than any American would believe possible, but even so, there’s a certain amount that is simply necessary for life. When the energy and water goes out in my town, my neighbors have to make several trips back and forth to the well to stock up on water for their family just for one day.  And our well isn’t even a block away from my house; imagine how much more time it takes when the only water source is half an hour away.  Is it any wonder rural Mozambique has a hard time developing when so much time is taken up by basic daily tasks?

And even after all this effort, the water these families are working so hard to bring back to their homes isn’t even remotely clean. They are drinking from the same watering hole as their animals: their cattle and goats and dogs. In addition, the hole simply isn’t that big. Standing water in a small area will never be clean, and the village suffers horribly because of it.

During particularly dry seasons, the watering hole simply dries up, and at this point the villagers take their cattle and their sleighs and their buckets to the neighboring town of Chinhacanini, which is on the banks of the Limpopo River. Now, this trip isn’t long at all in a car, but at the slow, plodding pace of cattle, it will take the better part of the day. So the villagers spend the night in Chinhacanini and return the next day, hopefully laden down with enough water to last several days. But it will run out soon enough, and they will make the trip again, and again, and again, until rainy season returns and the watering hole fills up again.

They dig a separate smaller hole in the hopes that the sand will filter out some of the impurities, but the water quality is still very low.

***

Reginaldo describes Mbalavala as the town where life began, meaning that they have been living the same way for hundreds of years. They do not have energy. They clearly do not have running water, or even wells. They have a primary school, but it only goes until 6th grade. They have a small dry goods store, but I’m pretty sure it’s a recent development. They do not have a vegetable market, or any other market. What people eat comes from their own fields and gardens. In dry years when they aren’t able to grow enough food, they know how to gather food from the bush, but there’s not a lot of options. Life isn’t easy in the deserts of Gaza. It is hot and dry and dusty, and all the plants have thorns. But these people are farmers and herders, and they know how to live off of their land.

This is the town where life began, and I can’t wait to go back.

The bush outside of town, on the way to the cemetery. It’s dry, dusty, and everything has spines.

Walking to get water.

The village:

The village.

The village

Solar panel to charge their phones.

The guests at the funeral.

A nicer section of the road to Mbalavala.

Their animals:

The kraal they use to keep their cattle.

The kraal they use to keep their cattle.

The kraal they use to keep their cattle.

Baby goat! It’s just 2 days old!