noise.

I have this random memory of me as a fifteen year old. I was walking through Westroads Mall with my mom. I was wearing my Central Cheerleading uniform and an awesome pair of yellow Adidas sneakers. It was a phase. I eventually grew out of it. Anyway, I was walking, annoyed about something. Part of that phase. I was dragging my feet as evidence as to how little I cared about whatever it was I was doing. My mom kept asking me to stop dragging my feet. I think I probably continued to roll my eyes, stop for a few minutes, and then go right back on with dragging my feet. It was all part of the phase.

I never realized how annoying that dragging the feet sound really is.

It really is like just saying “whatever” to the whole world around you. I care so little about today, I am not even going to pick up my feet all the way when I walk. I can do whatever I want and how it affects you does not bother me.

People in Mozambique drag their feet. A lot. It drives me crazy.

People drag their feet while they walk to the market. How you drag your feet while balancing a huge pile of wood on your head is a mystery to me.

People drag their feet when they go to fetch water. Sometimes its the dragging feet that wakes me up in the morning. That scratch scratch scratch on the sand.

Kids drag their feet when they run with me. It drives me crazy. I run to escape from the world a bit, to control everything around me. I wear an ipod. But I can hear those dragging flip flops or mis-matched, four sizes too big high heals. It can drown out my American pop and remind me that I am indeed being followed by a small heard of children. I am the pied piper.

But I think the dragging feet is just the start of the unexpected noises in Mozambique.

You think about Mozambique, a “developing country” in Southern Africa, as a place where people are spending the whole day getting water, caring for their cute little babies, and living in nice straw or mud huts. It is all of that. But there is energy here. There are cell phones. There are kids who are being called from the neighbors house.

I think it might be the novelty of energy that makes people put their radios on so loud. They are proud that they have that unnecessarily big amplifier, and they are going to use it. My neighbor has one CD. He plays one song from that song on repeat most of the day. Then I get a little Avril and some Bieber before he goes back to the thumping house music.

I love it when the energy goes out.

When you walk down the street, you get to walk through a variety of music. Some people playing Changana church music, others the latest Rihanna song. When you are near the school, students play Chris Brown from their phone. They think that since they want to listen to that Westlife song, you will to. More and more I am impressed with the invention of the ipod and convinced that since the walkman never made its way here, this new form of the Will Smith boom box on your shoulder is about the best thing since the cell phone itself.

But in addition to these new sounds, there are the noises you would expect in Mozambique. There is a chorus of dogs at night and a different chorus of roosters to wake you up in the morning. Every once in a while you get to hear a pig being slaughtered. Who knew that sound would be so terrifying?

As a kid, my mom used to ask us to go call everyone down for dinner. We would just stand at the bottom of the stairs and scream as loud as possible. Mozambicans are not so different from Americans. When it is dinner time you will hear the same name being screamed, seemingly to no one in particular, until Angelina (GEL-TAH-NA!) returns from whomever's house she has been playing at.

The noise in Mozambique is unexpected. I never thought of Mozambique as a loud place. Its not the noise that comes to mind first. And, to be fair, I am sure it is not the noise I will remember. My neighbor who plays the one song over and over has the cutest baby who greets me every morning when I leave for my run, “titia!” The singing cell phones can be the best part of a too long chapa ride and often ask as an ice breaker between me and the people waiting in line at the bank.

The noise is here. It rarely goes away. But there are moments of quiet. Moments when I cannot hear anyone's footsteps. Moments that I hear crickets and am glad to just sit and be.

Usually, shortly thereafter, the energy comes back on.

TOT

Last month, REDES hosted its first annual TOTs, Training of Trainers. While it was a whole lot of work, it was also a whole lot of fun. By the end of the five three day trainings held throughout Mozambique, about one hundred REDES facilitators left motivated and excited to go back to facilitate their REDES groups.

The facilitators were a mix of seasoned veterans, who have been with REDES since it started in 2005, and new facilitators who are just now starting to think about starting groups.

Our TOT in Homoine was a small group, there were only thirteen facilitators, and it was an even split between women who were familiar with REDES and women who were just starting to get involved.

In between all of the singing and dancing that we did during the training, we also managed to be quite productive. We talked about different ways to present information to girls. We talked about the biology and transmission of HIV. We talked about decision making and goal setting. We voted for leaders among the group and we established our group's goals for the year.

While the whole training was memorable, I think what to me was the most impressive was how we were able to create a space safe for these women to discuss so many issues that are often not discussed.

We created a detailed diagram of a woman's reproductive system and the women were able to point to different parts of our bodies and talk about their form and function. We were able to answer questions about why certain things make us feel pleasure and how so many men don't understand those certain things.

We did a condom demonstration, complete with a step by step explanation about how important condoms are but also how tricky they can be. We talked about tips for the women to take home to try during condom negotiation in their own lives and we talked about how to talk about condoms with young girls who are not yet sexually active.

I think these two examples are particularly telling because even in the states we cannot talk about many of these things. We often find that talking about sex with young people is difficult, and it is. But without explaining how to be safe, young people cannot protect themselves against the reality of HIV in their communities. We talked about how in Mozambique one in five or six people is infected with HIV and almost all of us are affected by the virus. We talked about the importance of making people more aware about the ways to protect themselves from HIV and the ways that girls' empowerment is integral to handling the epidemic in Mozambique.

We also set goals. I have done goal setting exercises with my REDES group in Manjacaze, and I always love it. So seldom in Mozambique are girls asked what their goals are, where they see themselves in ten, twenty, thirty years. Even these women, who are leaders in their communities, seemed genuinely excited to share with a group what their goals were. Their faces lit up when they talked about how they wanted to go on to have a family, to become college professors, or continue working with girls in their communities.

I love I working with girls and women and encouraging them to think about their futures and the potential in their lives. But at the TOT, I got to see some of these goals being put into action. Because of the variety of participants, we also had a variety in the facilitators of the sessions. Some of the sesssions were facilitated by Peace Corps Volunteers, but the majority were facilitated by group leaders from different places. Marisa, Vilma, and Celest each did an amazing job.

Marisa has been involved with REDES for years. She knows lots of ice-breakers, she can get people talking, and has a great presence in front of a group. Vilma and Celest, new facilitators were incredible to watch.

Celest, my counterpart and close friend in Manjacaze, did an amazing job. She was really nervous the day before the training, and came in to go over her session plan with me. While I had worked with her on a few trainings in Manjacaze, she was much more excited about this material and she wanted to give it justice. Though she was younger than many of the other facilitators, she did a great job getting the women talking and was able to facilitate two wonderful sessions.

When I met Vilma I knew she was going to be amazing. She is a counterpart for a group in Inhambane, and has a lot of experience facilitating for groups as she is running a small course with another volunteer in Inhambane. She stood in the front of the room and the volunteers just looked at each other wondering who this girl was.

Vilma is the kind of woman you hope to work with as a Peace Corps volunteer. Like Celest, she is young and has lots of great ideas. She is always willing to try something new and she has this ability to gain the respect and interest of a group. She is an amazing facilitator, and REDES is lucky to have her.

As we were going around discussing goals, all three of these facilitators explained how they hoped to continue working with girls and women and continue facilitating REDES groups. It could not have been more inspiring had it been scripted. Talk about thinking toward sustainability-without being prompted these women were thinking about it on their own, and it was something they wanted. Their goals would become our motivators.

diarrhea.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer I have become pretty open talking about my bodily functions. Although, those of you who know me, I actually have never been particularly sensitive to talking about things others would consider taboo. Maybe its because “snot” was a regular topic of conversation at the dinner table when I was a kid. Its easy to blame things like this on my parents.

Either way, Peace Corps volunteers share their poop stories pretty regularly. Last week, a group of us was together and an American expat joined our table. At first I was a little embarassed for him. He had to just sit there and listen to class young women like myself talk about that time they had to run off the chapa for the bushes with the who chapa watching them suffer. We each have stories like this, and we each try to outdo each other. I say with some confidence, that I am not the star of the best poop story I have heard among volunteers, and since it isn't my story, it remains untold until she, the guilty pooper, is ready to share such a story.

We joke about pooping. We joke about it because to us its this pretty obnoxious bodily function that comes and goes. To us, its not something that we are concerned about. Its not something that can take our lives.

But to Mozambicans, it is.

Last week, two of my babies from the nutrition center passed away after a week of bad diarrhea.

Vaselina was on her way out of the center. The doctors had finally said she had reached a healthy enough weight to go home. She had been with us at the center for four months and I had watched as her cheeks got plumper and plumper and the concern on her mom's face went away.

Rosa had only arrived at the center two weeks before. She was the smallest 20 month old baby I have ever seen. Her mother spoke no Portuguese and we worked hard with her about her personal hygiene and the basic nutrition for a baby living with HIV. She was not gaining weight as she was not eating and her mother wasn't insistent. Feeding a baby who throws a fit each time you get a spoon near her mouth is pretty discouraging, especially for a young, sick mother who lacks energy otherwise.

Since all of the kids in the nutrition center stay with their moms, hygiene is both extremely important and extremely difficult. Once we had a little girl with scabies who had we had to really watch to make sure her mother was washing her and her clothes regularly and not sharing with the other kids in the center.

As far as we can tell, Rosa came down with diarrhea first, and it quickly spread to the other kids in the center. The moms all cook together and the kids all play together, so you can imagine diarrheal disease has the potential to spread quickly. Despite the fact that we had explained the importance of hand washing and bathing to the moms, these kids got sick. And it didn't help that both Vaselina and Rosa were so small and struggling to begin with.

But that is usually how it is with diarrheal disease. Its a nasty, sad way to die, but it targets sick people whose immune systems are not as strong as ours. It, bacteria that causes diarrhea, looks for people within whom it can thrive because otherwise we pass it after a couple of days.

After Vaselina and Rosa passed away, we decided to make hygiene a weekly theme at the nutrition center. This week I played the part of a fly in a role-play. I explained how much I loved sitting on poop and then sitting on food and on people's skin. It made people laugh-talking about poop usually does. But I think they also got the point. I saw one of the moms wave off the flies that afternoon. Its small actions like this that have the potential to prevent deaths from diarrheal disease. More than waving off flies though, we did a hand washing demonstration and showed how to set up a “tippy tap,” a hands-free hand washing station made using local materials. I am not sure if the mothers will go home and continue these types of hygiene practices, but I can hope they will.

In the meantime, I am pretty sure I will continue to talk about poop. We all do it. But we all should be able to do it without it causing our mothers to really worry.