Privilege and Motives

Peace Corps volunteers are conditioned to do whatever we can to fit in. To spend 2 years (or more) trying to “integrate”, living on 200-300 dollars a month, having authentic experiences. And it’s an important learning process. But somewhere along the way, about 2 ½ years down the road maybe, you realize you can’t fit in. Not really. That you never will. I never will. And that’s because anyone I work with, given the opportunity, would swap lives with me. Not that they want to leave Mozambique, or be American, but they would take the privileges I grew up with in a heartbeat. Sometimes I worry that that means that the integration I’ve tried to achieve is a mockery of their lives, of a situation that they never chose. At the very least, it’s self-serving, perhaps ironically, perhaps not.

When this is over, I know that I will make a smooth transition back to life in America. Maybe I’ll go to grad school in a big city. I’ll eat junk food for a while, but then I’ll set rules for myself. Maybe I won’t remember all the details of the DR and Mozambique. But I’ll never lose all the things I’ve learned simply by being here.

And not all of those things are beautiful.

Many white South African business owners in Mozambique harbor post-colonial hatred for dark-skinned Mozambicans while simultaneously profiting from the country’s natural resources. They work in the tourism industry, building beautiful hunting and fishing lodges that are meant for foreigners and priced thusly. When Mozambican NGO workers stay at these lodges while traveling for work, the tension becomes palpable. After visiting one such lodge yesterday afternoon, and having a beer with the deceivingly pleasant South African owners, one of our colleagues who had 2 extra beds in her room invited us to come back and sleep at the lodge. But upon our return around 8pm, with another friend in tow who planned to camp on the beach, the owners threw a race-based hissy-fit of historic proportions. To tell us that camping on the beach isn’t allowed is one thing – to storm into our colleague’s room looking for stowaways; to cut my friend off while he’s trying to apologize for assuming camping was allowed by proclaiming ‘I didn’t expect this from a white person’; to demand that we vacate the premises immediately because ‘this is not a South African squatter camp’ – all of that is a whole different story.

I left feeling shocked by some of the blatantly racist comments that these proprietors made, and glad to be on the other side of a war that clearly never ended. Now my Mozambican colleague’s discomfort around the South Africans living and prospering financially in Moz makes more sense; they’ve clearly seen this before.