XIA XIA

Enjoying the sunset

Beautiful beach views

Xia Xia

Relaxing on the back porch

view from our house

After dinner relaxation

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Friday, I had a nice meeting with the deputy director here. He gave me some good advice about how to get my foot in the door for an international assignment, if I was interested. Of course, I was worried that he would find out that I hadn’t accomplished half of what I needed to yet. (Getting a little worried about this). Friday, is a short work day for us because we work 4 nine hour days Monday-Thursday. So we are done by 1130 on Fridays and the time flew by this past week.

Friday also means another weekend getaway. We planned to hitch a ride up to a beach house in Praia de Xia Xia (pronounced Shy-Shy). My supervisor and her husband rented a house on the beach and graciously offered to take any TDYer that was willing to go. As has been the recent pattern for the last few weekend getaways, we ended up with car trouble. (I am beginning to wonder which one of our group is bad luck). Their car’s shocks literally fell out on Friday morning and their other car is always having trouble. If there is one thing I have learned living here is that this place is so hard on cars. I would not want to own a car here. The roads are so bad that they cause numerous car issues that you would not normally have in the states. Then, you can’t get parts or find someone close by that can fix the car when it breaks down. So the purpose of this part of the story is that we got a little delayed on our departure on Friday afternoon. Luckily, a colleague lent us her car for the weekend. (Now that is a good friend!) We headed out of Maputo around 2:00 pm. Normally wouldn’t be a big deal to leave this late for a less than 200 km drive. However, the roads get very bad the closer you get to Xia Xia and we started to hit darkness outside of Xia Xia. Then we had about 40 km more to go on road that probably hasn’t been paved since the Portuguese left in 1975. There are also no street lights. In fact, the majority of the country doesn’t even have power. One of our colleagues commented on how outside of Maputo, you don’t see power lines. Something I didn’t notice intially, but once he pointed it out, I realized how little of this country actually has power in their homes. (The extreme poverty is one thing that will stick with me long after I leave Mozambique). Finally, we made it to the turn off for the house. Now, it was totally dark and we had about 7 km drive on a narrow sand road. I should also mention that we are not supposed to be driving outside of the city of Maputo after dark for security reasons. I don’t think anyone would have done anything to us, but we did have a couple of close calls with pedestrians. They are so hard to see at night until you are right on top of them. Since they have no where to walk, they walk in the middle of what little road there is available.

We finally made it to the house a little after 6 pm, but because it gets dark so early it felt like 9 pm. The house was really nice. The single girls were delegated to the loft of the house, where there were 4 single beds. We didn’t care, because we got to stay up late laughing and talking. It was probably the most I have laughed since I left home. Only problem with the loft is that is isn't made for people like me. I hit my head off of one of the wooden beams on Saturday and my head is still hurting 4 days later.

Saturday, we got up and went to the deserted beach in front of our house. The water actually wasn’t as cold as I expected. It was definitely warmer than the MD/DE coast in August. The only issue is that the water was a bit rough because it is the Indian Ocean afterall. You had to be careful of the undertow. Jackie and I took a walk along the beach before relaxing and resting on the sand. (Jackie will have to convey the story of the sad dying crab we found along the way). It is so crazy to go to such a beautiful beach and be the only ones for miles. Others in our group went out looking for fish to buy and didn’t see anyone for like 2 hours. Put a beach like that on the eastern shore of Maryland and you probably wouldn’t be able to find a place to put your towel and umbrella on a weekend. Our friends found no fish on their hunt, so we ended up with pasta. We had good conversation and then played a game of trivial pursuit before calling it a night around midnight. And yes, Jackie and I lost, but we staged a pretty decent comeback at the end. Steve has some great pictures of everyone from the weekend. Hopefully, he will post some of them to his blog and/or I get copies of them before I leave Mozambique.
Sunday, the weather was looking like rain and we woke up with no water. Not a big surpise for Mozambique. Power and water go out frequently (even in Maputo). We ended up leaving earlier than we had planned. We wanted to get out before the roads became impassable because of rain/mud. We all did joke that it really wouldn’t have been too upsetting to get stranded there a couple more days, though.

Some interesting sights on our drive home. I saw a man literally walking a vervet monkey on a rope he had made into a leash. Now that isn’t something you see everyday. There were little girls and boys dressed in all white leaving a church in one of the small towns along the way. I didn’t get a close enough look at the church to see what religion they were. How they keep their outfits that white with all of the sand/dust in Mozambique is amazing to me. I always end up wearing my meals, even when I don’t wear white. There was a woman outside of Maputo crossing the road holding a live chicken by its feathers. There was a woman outside of where we stopped for lunch in a wheel chair. We figured she had suffered from major birth defects, as she didn’t have any hands or feets. It is things like this that are hard for me to handle. The sick and the poor. I don’t think I could deal with these things everyday for any long period of time.
This weekend allowed us to see more of the countryside. As my supervisor says, Maputo is not representative of Mozambique. The majority of the country is decades behind its neighboring countries in so many ways. It is good to be able to witness it because it puts things in perspective. You wonder why the CDC and its partners can’t get services to the people that need it and then you realize that there is absolutely no infrastructure to help facilitate any services/programs.

The best part of the weekend is that we got to relax and have fun times with new friends. Here are some pictures from the weekend. (sorry, can't seem to move the pictures from the beginning of this post).