A day in Mozi is not complete until the following things have occurred:
- You wake up all throughout the night hearing the ongoing drum rhythms and chants of the witchdoctor and his disciples just a few “blocks” away
- You wake up at 4 a.m. when the entire village wakes up to begin their day; you hear them singing and playing traditional tribal music as they are sweeping their sand yards, washing their clothes, filling their jerry cans at the water faucet next to your tent, and conversing with their friends and neighbors
- After finally being able to get used to the noise and falling back asleep, you are awoken at 5:30 a.m. when all the neighborhood children come peering into the rainfly and door of your tent, some saying “Cass! Cass! Levante!” (Get up) while the others are saying “No! Shh! Cass! Dormir!” (Sleeping)
- You give up on sleeping and leave your tent to play with the children at 6 a.m.—something you never thought you could do at that hour
- You go inside to the one ten feet by twelve feet room that holds 16 people’s things and squeeze past all the other people in there to get to your bag to get clothes for the day
- You walk 20 minute to the local market to get your food for the day since you don’t have a refrigerator or storage space for more than a day’s worth of food
- You rack your brain trying to come up with meals that you and your team have not been eating for the past week that can be made with the same ingredients as all meals: eggs, vegetables and bread- maybe chicken if you’re lucky! And you have to keep in mind you only have one charcoal burner stove and no oven.
- You try (unsuccessfully) for 20 minutes to light the charcoal stove before a local finally comes to your rescue and lights it in two seconds making you feel slightly ridiculous
- You spend hours cooking a simple meal in one pot over one burner that would take just minutes at home
- You wash your hair in a bucket outside and wash your body with buckets inside a brick room
- You walk 30 minutes to the land where your contact is building an orphanage or to a widow’s house for your afternoon ministry
- You eat random stuff the neighborhood kids bring you to try: homemade bread, crackers, masineka (cherry-sized sour apple, basically) that they shook from the trees, spachupa (suckers), and dulces (candy). But before eating it you pray really hard that God blesses it and you won’t get sick from it.
- You shake hands and hug people on the street whom you’ve never met just because they see a mzungu (white person) and want to say “hello”
- You have more than 50 hands running through your hair, braiding and unbraiding it and brushing it; some hands belonging to children and some belonging to curious women who walk by and see the kids doing it and also want to know what a mzungu’s hair feels like
- You have team time during a break in the day and have to consistently chase the children away so you can have just a few minutes of privacy with your team
- Whenever you leave your campsite, you have a parade of children following you, even though they have no idea where you are going, and all of them fight over who gets to hold your hand
- On those occasions where you are traveling far enough to take a chapa (Mozi’s public transport—think “minibus” with seat for 14 people, but usually crammed with more than 20), the children escort you all the way there, watch you get in, hang on the windows so they can see you still and yell “Ciao, Cass!” until you begin to pull away. Then they run alongside the chapa for as long as their legs will carry them as they smile and wave from the roadside
- You are asked by every person you pass if you want to buy what they’re selling. If you don’t respond, they will walk beside you repeating themselves or stay where they are and yell “MZUNGU!” and then yell what they are selling in broken English
- Any time you retreat to your tent throughout the day, you have children peeking in, offering no privacy. It doesn’t matter if you are napping, reading, journaling, or changing clothes—there they are!
- You buy the same snack (bo– fried dough, basically) from a different person every day because they all make it a little different- either by adding different things in the batter or dipping it in different things after it’s fried and you’re determined to find the best one
- You fix your meals and have a little extra crunch in every dish; you’ve come to terms with the fact that sand might be one of the staples in your diet
- Anytime you sit down, children fight, push each other and hit each other to have the space to sit on your lap and hold your hands
- You step on the brick stepping stones over the faucet run-off to get to the “bathroom” where you knock on a rice sack door and do your best to aim in a concrete awkward-shaped mock toilet that is not at all sanitary enough to even consider sitting on
- You walk in on at least one person a day using the “bathroom” because you really can’t hear a knock on a piece of sack cloth….
- You have fill up the “flushing” water bucket to wash down your —–uh, business in the bathroom because the bowl is so awkward shaped that it doesn’t go by itself
- You fill up your water bottle at least five times and feel like you’re drinking the entire village’s supply of water, but you have to drink that much to stay hydrated during all the walking and working you’re doing
- Children will talk to you in paragraphs for minutes on end before looking at you for an answer and when you remind them “No fala Portugese” they just look confused; like it doesn’t matter that you don’t understand them, they still want an answer from you
- After the sun goes down around 6 p.m., you spend the night swatting away pesky mosquitoes that are buzzing around your face but not biting; basically, they are just annoying you
- During dinner, you watch as lizards and spiders crawl up and down the brick wall across from where you are sitting and no one is alarmed by their presence
- You hold the same eight-year-old boy in your lap and wrapped in your arms from when the sun goes down until it’s time to go to bed because, despite his age and what his peers say, all he wants to do it be loved and you love spending time cuddling with him
- You use your headlamp as everything: a “chopping veggies” light, a “cooking” light, a “dishwashing” light, a “clean up” light, a “travel to the bathroom” light, a “the bathroom is occupied” warning light, a “getting ready for bed” light, a “checking for bugs inside my tent” light, a “Holy Crap! What was that sound?!” light, a “I’m a little freaked out so I’ll keep this on until I’m confident nothing is outside my tent” light, a “Oh, good. That’s just my teammate snoring and my other teammate talking in their sleep” light, and a “There’s my pillow and my sleeping bag is zipped up! Goodnight!” light
- You climb into your tent at night and have to brush all the sand out that somehow accumulated during the day, even if you haven’t opened your tent since that morning
- Even after brushing all the sand out and baby-wiping your body, especially your feet, you climb into your sleeping bag and somehow still are surrounded by sand
- You try desperately for hours to fall asleep, but cannot tune out the sound of the witchdoctor’s drum circle and chants that just started at 9 p.m. and will continue throughout the night and into the morning
Other events that remind you that you are in Mozi, though they don’t happen every day:
- You are asked to preach at a church service that starts in ten minutes
- You are patted on the head and petted like a dog as you sit outside the supermarket
- You go to the clinic because you have all the symptoms of malaria and an increasing infected bump on your arm. Doctor says no malaria but has to drain the Staph infection infested your elbow
- It rains for three days straight and everything floods, including your tent which now has three inches of standing water in it that is dark brown in color and has to be sopped up with the same towel you use to dry off your body after a shower
- A local man climbs a thirty-foot-tall coconut tree to get you a fresh coconut then cracks it open for you to enjoy on the spot
- You compete in a local Mozambique’s Got Talent with about 20 seconds notice
- You are asked to lead worship in front of a church service with a week’s notice! You think, “Wow! What a long notice!” Oh yeah, but the church service will have 6,000 people in attendance and is a deliverance service
- You ask how much something costs at the market and the vendor responds “3” and you say “Okay, I need 40.” and he says, “No! 3!” and you say “Ok. I need 40 of them.” and he thinks you’re an idiot and repeats “3 for 1 of them” and after 5 minutes he finally understands that you’re not an idiot and you do understand and you want 40 of the item after you just hand him 120 mets and say “40!” All of this, by the way, was in the vendors own language (Portuguese) and not broken English, so he could have understood the first time if he just listened
- You cram all 16 of your teammates into an already full chapa with room for even more people; I’m convinced that Chapas are real life clown cars
- The exit security guard at the supermarket invites you and the two other girls with you to come back to his house with him
- If you leave food in your tent, it will be gone when you return; I’m pretty sure the kids smell can smell it from miles away. Anything else in your tent the kids won’t touch, though
- You travel twenty minutes by chapa to the nearest internet café once a week to check your email, post a blog and get overwhelmed by Facebook notifications and messages- even though you love getting them!
So, basically, what we've learned this month is: everything that you face at Training Camp comes true in Mozambique!
