Campokids and Citygirls

Also, although I formed very dear friendships with many individuals in my campo in the DR, it was obvious that we had little in common. My closest friends were evangelical Christian girls in their teens, and I’m, well, a pants-wearing, alone-living, female world traveler. We often just talked about the weather. But here, I’m working with a city-based NGO and associating with Mozambicans whose life experiences have, in many ways, reflected my own; college, traveling, privileges that most Africans cannot imagine. For instance, several nights ago, I was invited, along with the other American World Vision volunteers who happened to be in Quelimane at the same time, to a dinner party at the house of a young Mozambican World Vision employee. We arrived to find a buffet of food she had prepared, bottles of wine, and candles on the floor for mood as opposed to necessity, all to a backdrop of trendy music. When I left for my hotel, she and her friends went out dancing. It was about midnight. In other words, it was just like being at a small party at home. I felt immediately comfortable with her friends, and realized even further that this experience is shaping up to be very different from my first 2 years in the Peace Corps.

I’m simultaneously disappointed and excited that the relationships I shape here, even with people in my site should I ever arrive, will be fundamentally different from those I had in the Dominican Republic: instead of forming very close bonds with the same small group of people over a two year period, it seems I will have more occasional contact with a wider group. This week, for instance, I am visiting 3 separate groups of children to talk to them about agriculture and starting a youth group. I won’t be able to follow up with them as I did with my youth group in the DR, but after meeting the men and women in charge of the two groups I spent a collective 3 hours with today, I feel that they’ll be able to get along in their new gardens just fine without me. Their lives are so difficult. Most of them showed up to the meetings barefoot and filthy, flies swarming on their smiling faces, and even though I now realize how unrealistic it is for me to ever expect them to act naturally around me (we’re just too different; I’m too healthy, too white, too accented, too educated, too unable to speak African dialects), I hope they at least enjoyed the time that we spent together today. I imagine I’ll have the chance to form closer bonds with small groups of people once I settle in and stick to one place for a while, and a good place to start will probably be learning basic phrases in the local language: Sena.