Just Say No

A group of rural health workers showed up at the compound today with the intention of vaccinating everyone in sight, particularly the suspicious white woman holed up in the corner room. I informed them, to the best of my ability considering my discomfort (there were 6 of them with very untrusting faces) that as a government employee, I get all my vaccines from Peace Corps doctors stationed in Nampula and Maputo, both very far from Morrumbala where I live. They said no, these are just pills, apparently with the power to prevent everything from malaria to pregnancy to other things I’ve never heard of. Afraid of being scruffed like a belligerent cat, I declined a little more forcefully and planned my retreat. They think I’m a weirdo, but there’s no way I was ingesting anything that came out of that box.

With the imminent promise of rain, noticeably closer each day as the sky turns gray and the wind picks up, we’ve had to step it up with our farmers and junior farmers. We spent yesterday morning preparing a 7x7 meter peanut plot
with one group of kids, but learned our lesson the hard way, as by 10 o’clock it was too hot to work anymore. So last night I went to bed at 8:30, got up before 5:00 and by 6:00 was out in the fields again, preparing corn plots under a much more friendly sky. By 8:15 we were done; rather, there was more work to be done but we had to give up our measuring tape (essential for a well-planned garden) to the adult group. So we spent the next hour or so talking about manure as fertilizer, the water cycle, and playing duck-duck-goose. Or in Portuguese galinha, galinha, frango. Or in Cena cuco, cuco, sato. Or something like that.

On our way out to the campo this morning, several squealing piglets darted across the road in front of us, which prompted the driver to ask me if I eat ‘leiton’ (the root word of which is ‘leite’, or milk). After a few questions, my suspicions were confirmed. She wasn’t asking if I eat some breed of pig that is smaller than the others even when fully mature. She was asking if I eat piglet, called ‘leiton’ because it’s not even old enough to be weaned yet. I didn’t even know how to go about answering this, and think my only response was hmmm.

Just say no to: suspicious vaccines and baby animal slaughtering.