Tuesday, April 26, 2011

a luncheon and a lesson plan

Some of the people reading this blog may remember how frustrated I was a few months ago when I really wanted to be working, but all I seemed to be doing was becoming a pro at cracking open coconuts and eating mangos without looking like a slob. While I can call those two activities successes, my first few weeks in Manjacaze have been much more productive, if you are measuring productivity based on work tasks. This post is rather lengthy, as I have not had access to a computer/internet. If you are like me and have no patients for long blog posts, I would just skip to the last two paragraphs.

I think it might be helpful to give a bit more detail about what Mozaic does (as I am still learning myself, this will be an ongoing process). Mozaic is a network of South African churches that works in different Mozambican communities building capacity for church leadership as well as in the areas of agriculture and nutrition. It probably does not surprise any of you that my work is mostly focused on the nutrition rather than on building leadership capacity of local pastors (but who knows, maybe my years in USY have prepared me to be a great church teacher. I just don’t know if the Mozambican pastors would have as much fun dancing during the kaddish as I did. Worth looking into…)

Anyway, Mozaic’s nutrition project faces some serious challenges, most of which can be traced back to the weather. Gaza is very hot and dry and the soil is very sandy. No matter how many agriculture seminars you attend, you cannot change the fact that this complicates plant growth. To that end, Gerhard has identified a number of perennial plants and fruit trees that are high in nutrition and miraculously grow year-round in this sandy soil. Chaya, moringa, katuk, cranberry hibiscus, and garlic chives are a few that we are working on getting people to incorporate into their everyday diets. Getting people to try new things (aka behavior change) is definitely not the easiest thing, especially when it comes to a diet that has been almost unchanged for decades. Some of our beneficiaries, however, have seen how well the plants grow and have started to use them, sometimes even when other options are available in the market.

In addition to learning a lot about plants and trying to greenify my thumbs, I have spent the last few weeks talking with Gerhard and various people from the church to try to identify what sorts of things Mozaic might like me to work on. My first week here, Gerhard took me to see a dried up garden at the hospital. The hospital garden had great space, but also was getting way too much sun. Almost everything that we had planted (we being Mozaic, the garden was initially dug last year) had died during the dry, hot months of Febuary, March, and April. As we were looking in at the garden, we met a woman named Felicidade. We explained who I was and I added that I would be very excited to work with the hospital in the future, if she thought there was a place for me. It turns out that Felicidade is the hospital’s nutritionist, and she was fairly excited at the prospect of working with us.

That weekend, Gerhard and I arranged a lunch for Felicidade, Pastor Ricardo and his wife Louisa (the two leaders from the church in Manjacaze who I work most closely with, Louisa is in charge of the nutrition project and will be my counterpart throughout most of my projects), and a man named Sereigo, a local agriculture guru who is wasting away working for Save the Children where he is paid well but not really using his expertise. The six of us sat down to talk about the future of Mozaic in Manjacaze and about how, ideally, Mozaic would start working on more projects in the greater community. We had a nice lunch of m’chaya (so named after matapa, a traditional Mozambican dish, but this one was made with chaya) and a salad made with cranberry hibiscus and moringa. After lunch, we took a tour of the garden, and Felicidade looked genuinely impressed to see that some of the plants had not died and even asked to take some cuttings home. At that point we knew we had sold her and planned to re-work the hospital garden the coming week.

The next week, another group from South Africa came and was able to help us plant the hospital garden. We filled the garden with moringa and chaya and added beds of chives and katuk. Some brilliant person (yours truly) thought it might be a good idea to plant these perennials first and let them grow a bit to provide some shade to the area. Then, once the plants are growing and producing leaves, we can return and plant vegetables (I should give some credit to the permagardening training that I had last fall, but I really feel the genius idea was my own). We plan to continue monitoring the garden and I am hoping to come back and work with the women who cook for the patients to talk with them about how to prepare the plants in a nutritious way.

To keep up our connection with the hospital, I have been going everyday this week to watch palestras that the local activistas put on everyday at 7. Though the palestras are mainly in Changana (which I really need to and intend to learn), I think the opportunity to meet the activistas has been great. Everyday is a different group of six, and each day the group seems excited to be talking with people about HIV prevention and care. A lot of health volunteers are placed with an organization called ICAP (I honestly forget what this stands for but it’s a project out of Columbia’s School of Public Health), and I am pretty sure these activistas are also ICAP funded. I hope to look more into this and maybe work with this group in the future. Yesterday I had a great time with two older ladies who were talking with people waiting to get HIV tests about how to use condoms. Though the women they were talking with blushed at the idea of a female condom, the activistas knew all about it and showed the women how to use them. After their demonstration, I explained how you can use a papaya to do the demonstrations and the ladies were totally impressed.

The other big project I am working on is starting up a “Plant of the Week” class at Mozaic’s training Center. (I actually forgot to mention, Mozaic is just finishing a beautiful training center where people will be able to come and stay for week-long seminars. The first seminar was held two weeks ago, despite little things not being finished. In the next couple months we hope to put some last final touches on the place and make it something like a community center. In my mind it will eventually be like a Visitor’s Center at a National Park, with lots of things to look at and read about and learn from. We have a great garden outside that we are going to make placards for, so people will be able to walk around and learn about the plants that do grow well here in Manjacaze. We are also hoping to get funding for a fooze ball table, but that might be years down the road.) Last Sunday, I met with Mozaic’s beneficiaries and we spoke about the challenges they have in the area of nutrition and agriculture. After our discussion, I suggested that we start up a seminar series about different plants and agriculture techniques that might help address some of their problems. With Louisa’s help, the group agreed on a day for our first class, and I have spent the past few days brainstorming what we can have as our first subject. While we are going to start the seminars for the direct beneficiaries of our project, we hope to eventually expand and invite members of the community. In my head, sometimes the seminars will be technical (like learning how to make a drip irrigation system) and sometimes they will be a bit lighter (like how to make really delicious brownies without an oven). We will see how it all works out.

On a more personal note, I am really growing to like Manjacaze. It is great to be able to walk down the street and recognize the kids or to go to the market and walk right to the lady who gives you the best deal on tomatoes. I am starting to meet people and have become very close with a girl named Celest, who works for Mozaic doing mostly administrative things. She took me to my first ever Mozambican wedding a couple weeks ago, and though all I did was sweat it was a fun ceremony and we had a great time. She told me she wanted also wanted big wedding and I told her she better have it within two years so that I can go!

I have also started playing soccer somewhat regularly. I am pretty decent on defense, and though my team never wins, we always have a great time. Last week we decided to take the whole team out for ice cream afterwards, but the ice cream machine wasn’t turned on. 25 cokes later, everyone was happy and I went home with only a few bruises on my legs. Maybe by the end of the two years my team will eventually win.