Christmas in the Save Conservancy

16:36, December 28, 2011. A beautiful house in Borrowdale neighbourhood, Harare, Zimbabwe.

Happy Christmas! After an amazing holiday week, different from any I’ve experienced before, I’m taking a quick moment on my last afternoon in Zimbabwe to write up this post. It’s a cool, rainy day in Harare, and while I’m a bit fatigued from the past weeks of travel, I’m relishing the low temperatures and verdant vistas of this capital city. Also, there are two birds in a cage sitting about ten feet from me, and they keep saying funny things in a variety of men’s and women’s voices, which is pretty distracting and weird. Ha.

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent Christmas this year with some Zimbabwean friends and their extended family, at a hunting camp in a vast nature reserve called the Save Conservancy. My friend Alexandre (JB and Gigi’s son) works as a professional hunter apprentice for a company with a very large land concession, and he got stuck taking care of the property and camp over the Christmas weekend, so he invited his family (and me!) to spend the holiday there with him.

The Save Conservancy is utterly beautiful at the moment, with an explosion of jungle-like foliage accompanying the arrival of the rainy season. The hunting camp is situated in an area rather like my visualization of Eden: a grove of huge trees, a seasonal river teeming with fish, exotic animals freely walking about, a complete absence of other people, and a swimming pool. It’s an amazing place.

I had planned on relaxing at the camp, catching up on sleep and doing some reading (You may remember a goal I made to read a book per week this year; not to spoil the results or anything, but I didn’t come very close to making it. Stay tuned for some reading highlights in a future post, however.), but there ended up being far too much to do for me to sit around. Here’s a breakdown of the first 16 hours’ activities following our arrival, just to give you an idea:

4:30pm – Pull into camp after an 8-hour drive from Tete.

4:34pm – Head into the bush on an impala hunt. (I believe Alexandre’s quote, as we got out of the car, was “Hi. We need to find some braai (BBQ) meat before dinner.”)

5:45pm – Arrive back in camp with a large impala.

5:50pm – Swim in pool, and dry off by a fire pit while looking at the massive trees around camp.

6:15pm – Borrow the camp’s dirt bike to go looking for animals; see baboons, impala, and kudu.

7:00pm – Stand around braai while meat cooks, and pretend to be useful.

7:15pm – Eat a delicious feast.

8:15pm – Sit around the fire, roast marshmallows, listen to a symphony of frogs (we counted six different types) and animals, and get to know the family members I haven’t met before.

10:00pm – Sleep for 7 hours.

5:00am – Drink coffee by the pool.

5:15am – Walk along seasonal river, see waterbuck, catch 15 fish on a fishing rod.

8:20am – Go swimming in the pool.

8:30am – Eat a delicious breakfast.

Pretty idyllic, right? Other highlights of our stay in the Save Conservancy included more fishing and hunting, amazing food, crazy animal encounters during long walks in the bush (it was ridiculous – sort of like walking around a zoo, without any cages), falling asleep at night to the sounds of lions roaring and leopards growling outside, and quality time with some really neat, really hospitable friends. (See a few photos following this paragraph.) I also shot a gun for the first time in my life, and that was an interesting experience. Christmas Day saw a complete absence of carols and lights and things of that sort, which was bizarre, and I missed my family and friends somethin’ fierce, but I couldn’t help enjoying the novelty and adventure of a holiday in the bush. I’m very grateful to have an adopted family on this side of the world, and for their efforts to make me feel welcome… and I’m also very, very excited about the idea of spending next Christmas at home. : )

Edenic.

Baby impala.

Elephants have big feet.

I’m planning to head back to Tete tomorrow, catch up on life, emails, and my housing situation there, and then return to Beira for New Year’s and a staff meeting next week. This should be the final phase of a nearly-nonstop month of travel – I think I’ve slept in eight beds during the past three weeks!

Peace to you all during this inter-holiday time, and I hope you have a wonderful finish to 2011!

Maputo meetings and SwaziMania 2011.

22:06, December 19, 2011. A red-eye flight somewhere between Maputo and Tete, Mozambique.

I’m writing this post from an excessively-spacious exit row seat – a nice bonus to finish up what’s been a really terrific last few days. The small airplanes employed for domestic flights in Mozambique usually leave me with barely enough room to wedge in my computer between my chest and the seat back in front of me, and as any fellow tall folks reading this post will agree, an unplanned exit row seat assignment is a blessing straight from the throne of Heaven. Ha.

The week that’s passed since my last post was filled with a nice mix of chaos and adventure. My MCC and CCM colleagues had planned several days of capacity-building meetings before CCM’s annual national conference on Thursday and Friday, but things went awry soon after our arrival in Maputo. After many months of waiting for news, we learned that the primary anticipated funder for the next several years of our program postponed any decision for at least six months (perhaps indefinitely), and that the planned national expansion of our work is thus without resources to get off the ground (which sounds sort of ironic, as the program’s acronym, ASA, means “wing” in Portuguese).

All plans of capacity building meetings were abandoned, and my colleagues and I instead spent the week in tense strategizing sessions, drafting concept papers and budgets for brand new project proposals. It looks like the next months will likely include very little construction or other activities, which, while certainly a disappointment for everyone involved, will probably actually be a good time of regrouping and planning for me and my colleagues in Tete. We’ve been working at a furious pace during the last six months, wrapping up the food security projects in Tete and Manica, and I’ve got a backlog of side projects awaiting a pause like this one. So, the week in Maputo wasn’t great, but we made real progress in picking up the pieces, and I see some potential silver linings in the midst of bad news. Mm.

As I mentioned in my last post, some of my friends and I took off to visit a new (to me) country this weekend: Swaziland! I knew very little about that country before moving to Southern Africa, so I thought it might be interesting to finish off this post by writing a bit about the 30-ish hours I spent there, and some of the things I saw and learned. Ready?

Swaziland is a very interesting, very beautiful country. Actually, perhaps that’s a good place to start: it’s not really a country at all, but a kingdom. There’s a real-life king, who has something like 50 wives, and he rules a kingdom of a little over a million Swazi people. It’s also known as a nation with one of (if not the) highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the world; if Wikipedia’s correct, over 26% of the population, and more than 50% of folks in their 20s, are infected.

Other than the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS and the current economic difficulties outweighing those of its growing neighbors, I’ve only got positive things to say about Swaziland and the people I met there. It’s a pretty small place; an island of lush, picturesque highlands and drier lowveld, dwarfed by Mozambique to the north and South Africa to the south. In addition to being one of the most beautiful countries I’ve visited thus far, it definitely earned the distinction as the most polite and welcoming – each stranger I met in the street would stop, remove his hat, offer a very warm greeting, and go out of his way to offer assistance for anything my friends and I might need, even to the point of significant personal inconvenience. It was crazy, humbling and rather wonderful, and I quickly found myself adopting the warmth and greeting folks in the same way. Love is pretty catchy, I think.

In addition to exploring two major cities, my friends and I also visited two game reserves, and saw lots of interesting animals and some amazing scenery. If I hadn’t had a flight back to Tete to catch this evening, I would have loved to spend more time in the national parks, which are crazy-cheap (about US$3 for a day pass) and quite striking. We went on a three-hour hike in one park yesterday (you can see a few photos below; others are on Facebook), and saw the tallest waterfall in the country. It was great.

Another thing I really liked about Swaziland was the attention given to anti-corruption and environmental conservation initiatives, all over the kingdom. I love Mozambique, but I think it’s yet to develop to the point where people have the time and resources to worry about those areas, and few things ruin an experience for me like corrupt officials and trashed landscapes. I wasn’t stopped by a single police officer in about 400km of driving in Swaziland, which seemed crazy, and I really appreciated the well-maintained, clean cities and roadways (and flowering trees growing along the sides!).

Despite its level of development, Swaziland still feels like Africa, and that struck me as both important and impressive. I stopped by a modern shopping mall this morning, and between groups of teenage hipsters sporting the latest fashions spotted a shirtless man in traditional Swazi garb: a skirt-like piece of fabric with an animal skin covering, and something like an intricately-tied scarf around his neck. It was a neat picture of colliding worlds, though I can’t imagine what he was buying (or where he kept his money).

So, in conclusion, should you one day find yourself in this part of the world (or if you already live here), I’d highly recommend a visit the Kingdom of Swaziland – it’s a unique, charming little nation, and well worth a few days’ stay.

Well, it looks like this flight is actually making a stop in a city called Quelimane on the way to Tete (this will make seven of the ten Mozambican provinces that I’ve visited in the past two weeks!), and we’re about to land, so I should probably wrap this post up here. I’m not sure when I’ll write next, as I’ll officially start my Christmas break on Wednesday, when I head off for about a week in the Zimbabwean bush. So, with that, I hope you all have a very merry Christmas, wherever you may be, and may the peace of Christ be with you as you connect with family and friends, reflecting on the year and looking forward to the next!

Dive Vilanculos: Check.

20:07, December 11, 2011. An amazing thatched roof house, Vilanculos, Mozambique.

Man, this has been one of the craziest days of my life. Ha.

Before I tell you about it, some background: I’m currently in the town of Vilanculos, located on the east coast of Mozambique, in a province called Inhambane. Several colleagues and I decided to spend a few nights here to break up our long drive to Maputo, and we went in together to rent a Swiss Family Robinson-reminiscent house at an amazing resort located right on the beach.

The beach itself is, I believe, the most beautiful of any I’ve ever been to (other than the Oregon coast, of course). Seriously, though. I’ll put some pictures up on Facebook sometime in the next few days, hopefully, but it’s on par with the best airline ads out there – white sand, groves of tall coconut palms, impossibly-turquoise (and warm) water, and picturesque fishing boats called dhows. I couldn’t really process the view when we first arrived here yesterday, and had to sit down for a while to contemplate how amazing God’s world is.

The other relevant piece of background is that I have a bucket list of things I’d love to do before I die, and one of the things on the list was to go SCUBA diving somewhere warm and clear. I was SCUBA certified in the Puget Sound, off the coast of Seattle, and while that area is amazing and beautiful in its own way, the conditions are quite challenging (incredibly low visibility, cold water, strong currents, etc.).

So, after lots of thought and waiting, I finally had the chance to cross that item off the list, as my colleague Katie and I spent the whole day on and around some islands offshore of Vilanculos, diving, snorkeling and hanging out with a small group of very interesting people. The weather was calm, the sky was clear, and the day included a series of ridiculous experiences that I can’t really imagine repeating. Ha. Here’s a short list of things I did or saw, in order:

1. We started off by setting up a base camp on a desert-looking island (it’s basically a big sand dune in the middle of the ocean), putting up a makeshift shelter there, and did some pre-dive briefings. The snorkelers stayed at the island, and the divers headed out for a nearby reef.
2. On the first of two dives, I swam along with a sea turtle for the first several minutes, and subsequently saw eight devil rays, a white tipped shark, multiple moray eels (including a giant moray swimming along the bottom), and a gazillian other types of fish and corals. The visibility was about 20m, which is almost unbelievable, and I spent most of the 50 or so minutes underwater with very wide eyes. Seeing the rays was probably the highlight for me – I don’t think I’ve ever seen such graceful animals, in any medium, and they reminded me of very beautiful and efficient aircraft.
3. After returning to the island to pick up the snorkelers, we all returned for a snorkeling session at a reef. We came across a school of spinner dolphins on the way out, so we threw on our snorkels and fins and jumped off the boat. The dolphins were a little shy, but we swam around with them for several minutes before they took off (they’re fast!), and it was very cool and surreal to hear their clicks and whistles underwater. The rest of the snorkeling trip was very neat, as well – we saw lots of other amazing fish, including my favorite, a juvenile angelfish (they look more like fancy doodles than fish).
4. We went for a second dive after lunch, to finish off the day. About ten minutes in, my dive buddy and I were cruising along at a depth of about 60ft when we saw some dark shapes in front of us. We inched forward slowly, hugging the bottom, and watched as two gray reef sharks approached us and began circling at a distance of about 30 feet. It was amazing to see them in their own space, and to appreciate how powerful and authoritative sharks are underwater. Shortly after that, I dove down into a little canyon-type coral formation to look at a HUGE potato grouper (which is as ugly as its name), and was surprised to catch some movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked back to see three large batfish crowding me from behind, after apparently having followed my yellow fins for some distance. Ha! They looked really embarrassed to be caught, bumping into each other as they turned around and swam away. It was very goofy and comical, and I wasted some air laughing at them. Other neat sights on the dive included a huge tuna, clown fish in anemones, several iridescent parrotfish and crescent-tail wrasse, and a multitude of other beautiful creatures.

So, in conclusion, it was an amazing, wonderful day, and I feel super blessed to have had the opportunity to see and interact with such a crazy part of God’s world. He’s so good, and such a creative Creator!

Our little Vilanculos interlude will come to an end tomorrow morning, when my colleagues and I will continue on in our drive to Maputo. Hope you all had a great weekend!

Heading to Maputo…

20:40, December 9, 2011. My boss’ apartment, Beira, Mozambique.

Hi guys! Well, after a final, crazy week in Tete, I took off early this morning on the first of several trips planned for this month. The nine-hour, 600km drive to Beira passed pretty quickly, with the accompaniment of some very good podcasts on my iPod, and the rainy season landscapes were truly stunning. The deep jungle greens and blood-red dirt were reminiscent of the Christmas season, and I was once again reminded of just how beautiful this country is.

I’m crashing at the MCC Mozambique national office in Beira tonight, and tomorrow will set out on a three-day drive to Maputo (including a day-and-a-half stop at a beach town along the way) with several colleagues. Next week will be devoted to a multi-day workshop with the water and food security program members and CCM’s national meetings, and hopefully a weekend jaunt to a nearby country that I’ve yet to visit. : )

I’ll try to write another post in the next few days, but hope you all had a great week, and I’d love to hear from you sometime!

Also, if you’re interested in reading more about Mozambique and the mining industry in the area I call home, the following are relevant news articles I’ve come across in the past week:

http://oneworldgroup.org/2011/11/29/mozambique-coalmines-not-reducing-poverty/

http://www.miningweekly.com/article/concern-over-proposed-amendments-to-mozambiques-mining-law-2011-11-24

Rosa’s back…

7:45am, December 1, 2011. My office, Tete, Mozambique.

Man, how is it December already?! Sheesh, time is crazy…almost as crazy as a blazing-hot Christmas season (but not quite). There are a few things about Mozambique that I don’t think I’d ever get used to, were I to stay here indefinitely, and one of those is the season/holiday mix-up. My childhood memories and associations are waaay too strong for me to be okay with sunburns on Christmas Eve and decorated palm trees, and advent candles that melt before you light them. Ha.

Several folks have recently asked me about my housing situation, which had yet to be resolved when I mentioned it early last month. I hoped to wait to give an update until things were finally settled, but that’s yet to happen, and the story has actually taken some funny and ridiculous turns in the past weeks. So, for those of you who’ve asked, here’s the Reader’s Digest version of my personal housing crisis:

When Cheng and I found the new house I mentioned in my post from November 11, we interacted with a guy named Armando, who initially told us that his mother owned the place and that he’d be managing it for her. He had the keys to the house and some authority in speaking to the family that was moving out, so we took his word at face value, and signed a rental contract with him. We also paid the first three months’ rent upfront, which is pretty standard practice here; I had him sign a hand-written receipt for the first month’s rent, but he said that he’d bring me an official, printed receipt for the second and third months’ rent (which was the equivalent of about US$1,000).

To make a long story short, Armando ended up not being the owner of the house, and was actually contracted by the real owner simply to find renters. The contract he signed with us was illegitimate – the real owner never saw it – and after several weeks of broken promises to bring the receipt, Armando disappeared with the second and third months’ rent.

Cheng and I finally figured out what was going on at about the same time as Armando’s disappearance, and Cheng tracked down the real owner of the house at his workplace. Apparently the owner was about to kick us out of the house, as we were living there without having signed any contract that he knew about, and he had only received one month’s rent. Cheng explained the situation to him, and the owner said that because we didn’t have any evidence regarding the missing money, he wouldn’t have anything to do with its recovery. He also said that we’d have to sign a new contract, with him this time, and the document he produced ended up being very different from the one we’d originally signed with Armando. The new contract took away lots of the selling features we had liked, and gave us much more responsibility for the house in the case of emergencies. The owner gave a copy of the contract to Cheng last Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and allowed us the weekend to think it over.

As you can imagine, last weekend was a tricky one, and Cheng and I had lots to figure out. For one, we wanted to try and track down the guy who stole our money, and see what we could do about getting it back. Second, we had strong suspicions that the real owner and the fake landlord were actually working together, as the new contract felt like a bit of a bait-and-switch maneuver, so we decided to look for a quick exit strategy (which would ordinarily be something of a joke; remember that it had taken us more than a month of dedicated looking to find that place, with Tete’s crazy housing market). Also, we had three or four people employed to do carpentry, electrical and plumbing repairs at the time, so we tried to figure out how best to cancel their work and reimburse them fairly for the half-jobs they had completed. Ha. It was a mess, and we prayed a lot.

For those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a long time, you may remember, from way back in the beginning of my term, a very long story about an impromptu road trip that I took with an eccentric Mozambican woman I met in a restaurant. (If you don’t, it’s probably not worth going back to.) In any case, I had also been looking for a house at the time of that trip, and last weekend I remembered that Rosa (that’s the woman’s name) had mentioned something during our drive about some domestic workers’ quarters she was building on her property.

Two years had passed since I’d spoken with Rosa, but I still had her number in my phone (under the name “Rosa Crazy” – oops), and decided to give the idea a shot. I sent her a long text message with obscure details about myself and our short-lived friendship, she remembered me and called back, and we decided to meet that night and talk over the situation. I ended up running errands with her and her Australian husband, David, for well over three hours, and by the end we had struck a deal. They’re really wonderful folks, and, even aside from the housing situation, it was really good to reconnect with them.

So, here’s the current situation, as it stands: The place we’re going to move into is still in construction, and is probably about a month away from completion. Rosa and David spend 95 percent of their time living and working out in the bush, so they’re going to let us live in their own house until the construction is done (which is kind of weird, but extremely generous and trusting of them), and we’ll help oversee the building process. We signed a contract yesterday, and will probably move into their place in the next several days.

Whew.

In reflection, the past month has been hard, and good. It’s amazing to me how God provides for our needs, and how He’s able to set up unlikely and funny ways out of tricky situations. Several of my friends around town have counseled Cheng and me to lie to the fake and real landlords, setting up traps or taking advantage of them to “make things right”, and it’s been cool to refuse those options, trust God to take care of us (don’t get the impression that I’m super-holy or anything, though – there were definitely some pretty anxious moments in there…), and see alternate options unfold in front of us. Man, He’s so good.

It’s also been hard to feel like my time is being wasted, and that I’m unable to engage fully with my work because I have so many other things to take care of. That’s certainly a cultural issue on my part – the idea of fixing a value to one’s time is something I brought with me to Mozambique – but it’s a difficult one to release. I’m definitely ready to get settled down, get our stuff out of storage (Cheng and I have been sharing a single spoon and mug for the past month and a half. Ha!), and return to a semi-normal lifestyle for the last months of my contract. I’ll keep you posted.

Hey, before I wrap this up, I just want to say thanks to the folks here in Tete and in other parts of the world for all of your prayers, care, and for taking the time to read these posts. I really appreciate you people, and the role you’ve played in my time here. So, thank you!