Work and tigers.

19:14, February 27, 2012. My house, Tete, Mozambique.

Hi everyone! I’m sorry for what’s been a rather low-density blogging month; I’ve spent most of my waking hours these past weeks behind a computer, and while it’s been good to have some time in the office to catch up on projects long set aside, I’ve tried to be intentional about staying away from screens during the evening hours. : )

I recently realized just how little time I have left in Mozambique, and it’s begun to feel like each new day whizzes by faster than the last. The laundry list of work ideas sitting on my desktop, also known as my MCC Annual Plan, was already fairly ambitious in its inception, and I think that the inverse relationship between days left in my contract and the addition of new projects to the list has become very nearly linear. For you non-math folks out there, that essentially means that I love my job, and just don’t have enough time left to do it.  

In addition to work, I’ve been trying to wring every ounce of joy and adventure out of life in Africa; in the past month that’s looked like homemade chicken enchiladas, games of tag with a friend’s pet vervet monkey, cliff diving into a seasonal river, cooking lessons with Cheng, afternoon runs in the bush, and my newfound (or rediscovered) passion for fishing.

As some of you may remember, I live just a few kilometers away from the widest river in Africa, and, according to a professional fisherman friend, it’s home to over 1,000 different species of fish (along with the crocs and hippos). Can you believe that? The list is as diverse as it is long, too, and includes electric catfish, giant bream, freshwater eels, and man-eating bull sharks (known as Zambezi sharks in this part of the world). It also features what may be the most sought-after gamefish in Africa, and something that I’ve wanted to catch ever since seeing a photo during my first few weeks in Tete: the tigerfish.

Tigerfish are epic. As best as I can describe, they’re somewhat like a cross between a salmon (in size and fight) and a piranha (in ferocity and teeth). You can read more about them here, on Wikipedia, but suffice it to say that they’re killing machines, and big ones in the Zambezi, which can grow to well over 30lbs, are quite a handful both in and out of the water.

Two of my Zimbabwean friends, Patrick and Diddy, invited me to go bank fishing with them yesterday, and we spent a beautiful morning hanging out and getting our lines wet. The river is quite muddy from the recent rains, so we used bait, and about an hour into the excursion I hooked into my first tiger! It was only a baby, about the size of an average trout back home, but I was so pumped (or “chuffed”, as the Zimbabweans would say) to have finally caught one. Here are a few pictures, so you can get an idea of how hardcore even the little guys are:

 

I drove over the river twice today, and each time felt a very strong urge to go home and grab my rod. Ha. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work out, but I think I’m going to start fishing for an hour or so before work, a few days each week, to see if I can catch another tiger in the few months I have left here (or one of the other 999 species). I’ll keep you posted.

Hope you all have a great week!

It’s still raining.

8:37am, February 17, 2012. My house, Tete, Mozambique.

Well, it’s official: for the first time in my life, as best as I can remember, I am staying home from work because of the rain. Ha.

As a Portlander, I’m no stranger to precipitation, but the past 12 hours of steady downpour have dropped more water on this city than Portland probably receives in any given winter month. Even aside from getting soaked on my ride to the office, I seriously doubt that I could physically get my motorcycle from here to there; the roads will be rivers right now, and I’ve got about a 3-foot depth limit with my bike.

I love the rainy season in Mozambique, just because it’s so different from the rainy season(s) back home. In Oregon, stormy weather is characterized by gray, low-hanging clouds that blanket the landscape with notable steadfastness; here, the weather is more like a bipolar friend. A particularly hot and cloudless February morning in Tete is actually a pretty good sign that the afternoon or evening will bring torrential rain; it’s pretty common for me to get sunburned and drenched within a few hours’ time.

One of the very few downsides to the rainy season in Tete is that I ride a motorcycle, and one of the few downsides to riding a motorcycle in Tete is that there’s a rainy season. Tropical rainstorms and motorbikes just don’t go well together, I’ve learned. The following is an illustrative example from Monday, when the beautiful morning transformed into a monster of an afternoon thunderstorm, and I decided to knock off at around 3:30pm to avoid getting stuck at my office:

The trip started off okay, aside from the tricky visibility (no windshield wiper on my helmet, unfortunately), but within a few minutes things grew complicated. The chain on my motorcycle (which looks and functions much like that of a bicycle) fell off as I drove through a section of flooded road, and I ended up standing in two feet of swirling, muddy water in my nice pants, trying to balance the running motorcycle with one hand while blindly fiddling with the submerged chain. I finally ended up getting it put back together, made it another 5 miles or so, and then entered the network of dirt roads that comprises my neighborhood.

As background, the dirt roads near my house aren’t anything like the bermed, graveled, well-maintained byways of rural America. While some of the bigger ones are graded once a year, I think most were probably created informally by their users, and the combination of clayey soils, heavy traffic and standing water creates a yearly labyrinth of vehicle-trashing mayhem. The potholes have grown to the point where they cover the majority of the road space, so I suppose one might actually consider sections of the original road level to be “bumps”, rather than calling the eroded areas “holes”. In any case, heavy rains quickly cover the entire road surface with water, and those holes become invisible death traps lying in wait for unsuspecting or forgetful drivers. The deepest pits are  transfored into swimming holes for neighborhood children, who seem to especially enjoy sneakily grabbing on to vehicles and being dragged through the water. It’s something like a mother’s worse nightmare, and looks like quite a bit of fun.

So, anyway, I entered my neighborhood to find the roads covered with rushing water, and effectively doubled the distance of my trip as I wound an erratic path through back alleys and people’s yards, trying to find passable routes. I had a few close calls, as I plowed through areas of dangerously deep water and slipped around in the mud, but I finally arrived at home covered in clay and feeling rather proud of my ability to keep the bike upright. I left the motorcycle in front of my house with the kickstand resting on a large rock, but the rock sunk into the mud a few hours later, and the bike fell over. Ha.

Here’s a picture of the main road near my house, taken this morning with my camera inside of a Ziploc bag:

Pick your path...

Okay, I should wrap this up, but a quick update before I do so: Cheng just walked into the room and told me that he’s never seen this much rain, in such a short period of time, during his seven years in Tete. Apparently students can’t get to their schools this morning, so it’ll be a public holiday for them. Kind of fun.

For those of you who pray, I’d ask that you continue to remember Moz in your conversations with God. Here in Tete, there’s real danger of collapsed houses and dams (I’m personally quite nervous about the latter), but things are apparently much worse along the coast. As of yesterday, another cyclone was making its way across the channel between Madagascar and Mozambique, and the death toll from the last two hurricanes was still rising as officials continued to assess the damage. I usually think about rain as a life-giving and precious gift in this semi-arid region, but it’s good to remember its power and danger, too. Mm. There’s probably an analogy for God in there, somewhere.

Hope you’ve all had a great week!