The five films I'm most looking forward to

There's not much in the cinemas at this time of year that interests me a lot, maybe because I'm becoming a bit of a snob. The Oscar cycle means that most studio features by big name directors are held back until the end of the calendar year, which leaves a bit of a drought of great studio films mid-year, with some notable exceptions (foreign and indie films included).

But here are the five films I'm most highly anticipating:

5. The Ides of March - directed by and starring George Clooney, who showed he is a very capable director with Good Night, and Good Luck, as an aspiring Democratic presidential candidate - sounds a bit West Wingish. Coming late 2011.

4. J.Edgar - this biopic is in the very capable hands of the legendary Clint Eastwood, and will star DiCaprio outside of his familiar Scorcese territory. Late 2011.

3. Moneyball - a comedy-drama about a baseball miracle story, written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing and Social Network fame, and starring Brad Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jonah Hill. Late 2011.

2. The Dark Knight Rises - Christopher Nolan's last Batman film had a terrific ending that has set up what is sure to excite film buffs and blockbuster buffs alike. Still shrouded in mystery. July 2012.

1. Django Unchained - only Quentin Tarantino could promise a film more exciting than Nolan's next offering - a revenge tale set in America's Deep South starring Jamie Foxx as a vengeful slave. Possibly also starring DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson and sure to be amazing in every way possible. Late 2012.

I didn't include the Coen brothers' next film because its name and core details haven't been announced yet, but it would probably slot in at #4 otherwise.

Now to wait!

Ben Folds live in Canberra - review

I've been a big Ben Folds fan for a couple of years now - I've got pretty much everything he's recorded, even the obscure stuff. Which is why last night's concert at Canberra's Royal Theatre was so satisfying: Folds doesn't build his set around his big radio hits - in fact, Brick and Rockin' the Suburbs, perhaps his two most mainstream hits, were nowhere to be heard, not even in the encore. It was a night for the fans, who know and appreciate his clever and cheeky while poetic lyrics and his powerful piano solos. He paused before Effington to explain the Lydian mode; he reminded us that he was about to play a song in F -"that's one flat, everyone." His unique nerdy style went down great with his audience, young nerdy guys and their young nerdy girlfriends, and young nerdier guys who are so nerdy they don't even have girlfriends (like yours truly).

It was an intimate concert - he got up and took requests, sending his band offstage to revert back to the solo-piano style which no one in the world does better. He even played Emaline, an obscure song from an obscure album, and he was genuinely pleased when someone requested it. He got Kate Miller-Heidke, the support act, up for three songs- she marched in during Songs of Love at just the right moment, bringing her bizarre pop-opera voice seamlessly into the Folds universe, with its French horn player, dishevelled multi-percussionist, and piano stool which was hardly sat on.

Of course he played Rock this Bitch, a song that changes every show, and whose lyrics and chords are made up on the fly. He played the rare "fake" version of The Bitch Went Nuts (which I think is better than the "real" version), which retains only the hook line, half-rapping to a funk groove. And a Kesha cover made up the trifecta of brand new tunes that even die-hard fans like me hadn't heard.

He'll never fill stadiums, because his music is too creative, unconventional and dorky for them. And he's actually such an accomplished pianist that it would be great just to see him play if he had a sore throat and couldn't sing. But lucky he could last night, because it was by far the best concert I've ever been to.

Ode to the Brazilian mumbler

It's Christmas day in Ouro Prêto, Brazil, a peaceful colonial town set amongst lush green hills. I've been fortunate to have met heaps of English speaking (and some Portuguese-speaking) travellers here to spend Christmas with; I'd been experiencing my fair share of solitude, so it has been good to re-establish human contact.

I have met a few people here and there - a very eccentric Frenchman (whose name I forgot, so I decided to call him Jean-Claude) who travels with only a tiny daypack, alternating between two very smelly T-shirts, and has no greater plan other than to go fishing at every opportunity possible, fighting the fierce and relentless world with his extremely laid back attitude. He and Guillermo, a Spaniard (also not his real name) provided some welcome company for me in Posadas, Argentina, although they snored in symphony in the dorm room, while Jean-Claude complemented the melody line with some incoherent French mumbling as he slept.

Crossing into Brazil, a few things changed. Softer toilet paper, higher prices, fruitier breakfasts and of course a different language. I hoped I'd be able to pick up Portuguese where I left off in Mozambique a year ago, but the accent is very different here and I've struggled to understand people, although I'm slowly gaining ground. One problem is that young shop assistants in particular seem to mumble an awful lot, even when I ask them to repeat themselves. Then they laugh at me. The one positive thing I get from this is that I realise now that this happened very rarely in my final weeks in Argentina - while my Portuguese is still getting there, my Spanish reached a reasonably comfortable level without me fully realising it. Having said that, I have had a few substantial conversations with Brazilians in their language, once they could see that they needed to speak slowly for my benefit. And it's a beautiful language.

Crossed the border at the grand Iguazu Falls - a great sight, particularly on the Brazilian side as a platform took me out into the middle of the falls, with water everywhere (sorry, my description isn't very vivid. Let me assure you it was cool). São Paolo is a city almost as big as all of Australia - helicopters ferry rich executives between meetings as the traffic is terrible, skyscrapers stretch on forever, there is a mall dedicated entirely to hip-hop garb - hats, shoes, CDs, just a one-stop shop for all your gangster needs. They also have half-Asians there, so I blended in quite well.

I've got less than a week to go now, as I've brought my flights forward to be home earlier to prepare for my interstate move. I go to Rio de Janeiro tonight, for the big finale, and I have been constantly re-gluing my sandals back together, and hoping they will last me the last five days. Steep cobblestone streets really give ageing footwear a good workout.

Solitude and the River Plate

Since returning from Patagonia, I've been exploring Buenos Aires, as well as nearby Uruguay, before heading northwards towards Brazil. I'm currently in Resistencia, an obscure city that doesn't offer much except for a good place to break up the journey.

Perhaps I've configured my itinerary badly, as I find myself too often sitting around waiting a full day in a dead-end town for a bus. I don't like the idea of super-long bus journeys as I have real trouble sleeping, but is the answer to travel this slowly? I was telling some Resistencia locals on a long distance bus that the reason I was going to visit their town was to break up my journey; they then told me they were on day three of a 60 hour bus trip from the far south to the far north of Argentina. I can't fathom that. Seasoned travellers (you know the type: smelly, shirtless, bearded) will tell you 60 hours is easy. I don't really care though - I prefer to sleep in a bed when I'm on holiday.

I haven't had a meaningful conversation in English for a week. I've spoken lots of Spanish, but it's not the same. Try going a week without being able to really express yourself to another person whom you know fully understands what you are saying. The solitude can be great, but sometimes it does my head in. I always made a big deal about being an introvert, but I think that I really desire human contact, and in a mutually fluent language, too.

I have met people though - a number of Spanish-speaking travellers, as well as being stuck seated in the middle of a big family with lots of young kids on yesterday's 12-hour bus. I didn't really speak to them until I saw the little boy trying to open a packet of mayonnaise - I said to the girl next to me, "I don't think that's such a good idea," as I was closest to the kid. She took it off him, and he burst into tears, and stayed that way for fifteen minutes. But I knew I had done the right thing. I got to talk to the family after that, and they were fascinated to hear where I was from.

The obsession in this part of Argentina and Uruguay is a green tea called mate. Locals drink it from a gourd of mashed up leaves through a straw, and refill water from a thermos. You see them carrying thermoses under their arms everywhere - seems like a bit of a burden just for a drink, to lug this thing around all day. But it's huge here, and a guy offered me some, and it was nothing special, but there's obviously something I'm missing, because they love it.

Montevideo, Uruguay's capital, was cool. It was like Havana in Cuba - crumbling facades, Art Deco buildings and a long sea wall. And a big peach fair. Just heaps and heaps of peaches, plus peach jam, peach juice, displays on peaches and their relevance to the Uruguayan economy, etc.

Buenos Aires is a big city, and hard to get one's head around. There are superrich neighbourhoods (I visited a luxury homewares mall where they sell designer toilet seats) but the poverty is so visible, even without straying into the poor neighbourhoods. Mothers and children hunt through garbage bags on major pedestrian streets as the rich walk by; little girls are selling stickers and tissues on the metro to anyone who will have pity.

At the same time, some sights are marvellous. The city has a big obelisk in the middle of a 8-lane-each-way road, and to just watch the city buzzing here at dusk is unbelievable. So many people, cars, billboards, everything. No one bothers you because everyone is too busy getting on with their own life. In contrast, the tourist-oriented Caminito section of the Boca neighbourhood is a nightmare. It's over-exploited by people out to make money out of tourists (and who can blame them?) but it feels so tacky, so manufactured, and the tourist is the centre of attention there, and can't escape the constant hassling.

I didn't really get to meet any local people unfortunately, but I got a mixed view. The bus terminal is full of people unwilling to help you navigate its terrible design, while in the rain you can expect to be dodging umbrella prongs and to be forced to step into puddles to make way for everyone. But at the same time I saw generosity - amidst the bustle of the metro, a young man intercepted a blind man from walking into a wall, put his arm around him, and asked him where he wanted to go, ready to guide him in any direction.

That's enough for now, I think.

The wind

OK, so I'm travelling again. And I feel mixed about it, because I think I've travelled too much. I feel really privileged to be in a position to go on this trip, but I've already been so privileged to go on so many trips in the last few years that I don't really deserve to go overseas again so soon, and to such an extravagant destination as South America for the second time, especially given that most people in the world will never have the opportunity to visit perhaps even one foreign country, and here I am travelling in every spare moment.

So it's hard justifying the extravagance of this trip just by saying "I've got a job next year so I can afford it." I just feel that I'm going over the top now. In my last spare summer before my move to Canberra I've chosen to leave for overseas yet again, for the second Christmas in a row, this time not even for development internships but just for fun. So that's what I've been grappling with.

Asides from that, it's been pretty good.

Started in Buenos Aires, which is one big, loud, polluted, busy city. More on it later, as I'm going back there after I finish Patagonia. I travelled with my friend Amy from uni and her partner Al for the first week, and now they have gone further south to Tierra del Fuego, while I'll return to the north.

I met up with an old friend, Wladimir from SKIP Peru, who now lives in BA, and I reckon I spoke a year's worth of Spanish in a day, which left me exhausted, but I was pleased that I could keep talking. Whether what I said made sense or not, I don't know! Speaking Spanish again has been fun, but I am constantly embarrassing myself in public by using words wrongly, not understanding basic questions, and so on. It'll be worse when I hit Brazil later this month and try my basic Mozambican Portuguese on the Brazilians...

I've been in Patagonia, in the far south of the continent, for the past week or so, and it's been fantastic. This whole region has a mystical feel to it, with endless landscapes, sheep grazing peacefully in windswept meadows in front of snow-capped mountains, where the trees are on 45 degree angles permanently due to the fierce, super fierce, winds. The sun sets at about 10pm, which is a bit hard to grasp; stray dogs wander the streets and bark at passing cars; the locals eat lots of ice cream, in the coldest place I've ever been. The wind is the most noticeable thing here, though. That and the mind boggling scenery. I've gotten to the point where I'm even a bit over snow capped peaks, I've seen so many. Oh, and the parking inspectors. They seem to be on every street corner here in Punta Arenas, Chile. It's insane.

Was originally going to hike for five days in the famous Torres del Paine National Park, then changed it to one day when I decided I wasn't fit enough, it would cost too much, I hurt my knee, and I was generally too lazy. But the one day turned into two hours, when the wind was so fierce that everyone going up the cliff turned back, except for a few brave souls (nutters) who crawled up, despite the gravel being blown in their faces and the risk of being blown right off the cliff.

So, essentially, wind. It's all about wind.

How to make a film in a language you don't speak

I thought I should write one last blog, mainly because the previous one isn't a nice place to end, with its description of the shooting I witnessed.

No need for an update on that business - I'm fine and feel really comfortable, and I visited the site of the incident a few times before I left South Africa, and had no odd feelings.

I'll finish my 2009-10 trip blogs with a brief account of the film I made with Justice and Women in the final week of my internship in Kwa-Zulu Natal. You can see it here or at the bottom of the entry.

Yanguye High School is plagued by violence, and it has become a pretty bad environment for learning and feeling safe. So JAW's plan was to allow youth to speak on film about their thoughts about what is happening at the school, and what they see as the sources of the violence, and what can be done about it.

We wanted a fair representation of different types of students, not just the types who would normally volunteer to come to a workshop about violence at school, so we set up a little role play where our youth team acted out a scenario. A boy and a girl are attacked by another guy who throws a rock at the boy. What does the boy do? Students were asked to write their name and put it in box A, B or C based on their likely response: fighting, walking away or reporting it to a teacher. Then we selected an equal number of students randomly from each of the three boxes to be part of our workshop, the final stage of which was interviews with some students one on one.

One of the students randomly selected was a student who, days before, had been expelled by a traditional council for threatening to shoot the principal. He was allowed back to school, and features at the end of the film.

The workshop was run entirely in Zulu, and I technically was the lead facilitator without knowing what was being said. But it worked, somehow, and we got footage out of it, which I then got translation help with. And some lovely songs as well. It was then a case of quickly editing it together before the internship was over.

One issue was that I wanted to get kids to speak outdoors, in front of the hills and houses of Yanguye, but I didn't realise the camera microphone couldn't handle the wind. As a result, some interviews can't be heard but they have been 'double-subtitled' in both English and Zulu.

As for some concluding remarks about the 3.5 month trip, I learned an awful lot, and I was challenged an awful lot, with all sorts of things I've gone into in earlier entries. I went into the internships sure that I wanted a career in aid and development work. Now I'm not so sure, having learned about how it actually works and the realities of the industry. Coupled with a renewed passion in filmmaking, I doubt that I will be following the aid career path in 2011, and I may well decide to study film.

The journey of working out what I actually like and what I want to do isn't finished (and it never will, I'm guessing), but I think I took a few big steps over the summer, and will look back on the trip as a difficult one but a profoundly important one in my self-formation.

Here's the film:

Why I needed to see a psychologist in South Africa

Since my last blog, a few things have happened, mostly building up to making the documentary about youth and violence that we hope to complete by next week. I’m only here for a week and a half more, so we have to move quickly to get it done, but I’m confident we will.

There was one incident, though, which deserves a blog entry of its own, and I’d like to share it with you, but at the same time let you know that I’m feeling totally fine and there is no need to be concerned about me.

Last Friday, I witnessed a fatal shooting in a supermarket carpark.

There are some areas in South Africa where you can sense the dodginess - there’s something about the way people are dressed, about the loitering young men, the rubbish around the place, and general disorder. Such areas are the kind of places I’ve learned to spot since being mugged in one back on Christmas Eve, and the places that I stay clear of generally when I can help it.

Melmoth is a small town where the organisation I am working with bases its community office. It’s not the kind of place a tourist would come to - there’s not much there to see, and a lot of the town has that dodgy feel to it. The supermarket has that feel, and with my fellow interns we joked about its seediness and the fact that we felt our car would be broken into, or that we would be mugged.

On Friday afternoon, after work, Jenny, the manager of JAW, and I were at the supermarket, and just about to drive out of the carpark when we heard a single gunshot. I wouldn’t have realised it was a gunshot if it weren’t for the scattering, panicking crowd, and for the black man who fell to the ground in the carpark driveway.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; it was exactly like a scene in a movie. We all know what a murder looks like from seeing them over and over on TV, but no one ever thinks they will see it happen in real life. We didn’t see the killer, and he must have disappeared fairly quickly, as most of the people around didn’t take long before they went to take a closer look at the victim.

Before the crowd formed, I saw the man’s face, as he writhed in pain. I didn’t see his wound- just the look on his face. A woman came up beside him and started crying uncontrollably - the look on her face was unforgettable. It reminded me of a photo I’ve seen of when a schoolboy called Hector Pieterson was shot in Soweto in the 1970s during apartheid - his sister‘s face is almost hauntingly similar. Words can’t describe the grief and sorrow on her face - a loved one whose life has been taken away in a flash. I didn’t know any more about the victim, the woman or the killer. But they were all human.

I only worried about my own life for a split second - perhaps it was because there was only one gunshot, and perhaps because the crowd formed quite soon, which suggested the locals were confident the gunman was both gone and not after anyone except the one he had hit. I was worried about my general safety though, and stayed in the car while Jenny called the police. I didn’t think of doing so - I guess nothing like that crossed my mind, except for shock to see that a man had been shot down in front of me.

The formation of the huge, equally shocked crowd proved that while South Africa is violent, it’s not so violent that people have become completely desensitised to murder. People are still human enough to see the loss of life as a big thing, even a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world. At the same time, there are some people whose lack of love or moral sense disgusts me - a minibus taxi driver viciously honked at the crowd to get out of his way, so that he could exit the carpark. It didn’t seem to matter to him, or another driver who followed, nearly hitting a woman on the way out, that a man had just been shot dead - there were simply more important things going on in their lives.

Jenny got out of the car to see if there was any way she could help. Helping the man was the last thing on my mind - perhaps because of my fear that I would be next if I got too close, and also because in a moment of shock and fear, I think such feelings slip away unless you are somewhat prepared. That’s perhaps why most people stood around doing nothing, rather than calling the police or seeing what they could do to help. We’re simply not built to respond to that kind of thing, and I don’t blame people for standing by doing nothing, or running away. Jenny returned to the car quickly, resigned. She didn’t have to even say the words - the look on her face told me the poor man was dead.

We left the scene, as the crowd grew bigger and the police arrived. As we drove back to our B&B I was in shock, and couldn’t say a word for quite some time. It took me a few hours just to think it over, but I was surprised when I was able to engage in normal conversation by dinner time.

I’m surprised, a few days on, looking back and saying that while seeing the shooting was one of the most shocking moments of my life, I think I’ve dealt with it quite well. I haven’t broken down about it or exhibited any of the symptoms the psychologist told me were common as a result of trauma. I’m aware that something might come later on, and that these things can be triggered by something. Both Monash and Oxfam have been quick to support me and offer counselling and even an early flight home. I declined the earlier flight. I didn’t think I needed the counselling, but Oxfam booked it for me as something they do for any volunteer who witnesses something like that. And I think it was good, because it enabled me to explore how I have responded to the incident, and it’s prepared me for what may come later on.

The psychologist said I had done pretty well in coping with it, perhaps due to the way I think things through and also because I see myself as detached from the kind of environment where it happened. If it happened at home, it might have been a totally different story, but the fact that I already saw this supermarket carpark as a dodgy area perhaps mentally prepared me to be able to deal with things that may have happened. It’s also perhaps the fact that I’ve been mugged at knifepoint in this country and that I’ve read and heard so much about crime here, that have prepared me for such an incident. I don’t think anything can prepare you for the shock of seeing a man get shot about 15-20m from you, but I think my reaction would have been more emotional if it had happened in an area where I feel safe, like back home.

I’m going back to Melmoth tomorrow. I don’t feel scared about it, or any more scared than I do about going anywhere in this country. When I walk in the streets now, I am wary about being mugged, as I’ve always been, but I don’t fear that I’ll see another shooting. To me I see it as an isolated incident - there was surely a background to the shooting which I don’t know or understand - perhaps linked into some bigger crime. The supermarket wasn’t one of the areas that white people and foreigners should never go to - sure it was dodgier than some areas, but not so dodgy that people should avoid it. I think it was more a case of an incident that could have happened anywhere happening there, and in front of me.

Maybe something will trigger me in a month’s time when I’m back home, and I’ll get flashbacks. But I don’t think it will, and neither did my psychologist, not because I’m strong, or that I’m too macho to cry or to get shaken up, but maybe just because of the way my thought processes work and the way I rationalise things. I hardly thought about the shooting over the weekend or afterwards, except when people asked me about it. I haven’t played any violent computer games since it happened, and I don’t know if something might happen to me when I do. But I don’t think so.

I also have to admit that the victim and the poor girl haven’t crossed my mind much since Friday. Maybe because of my detachment from the situation. I think that if I had had any emotional connections to them it would be a completely different story. But it was like I just got a little window into a distant, foreign world that I don’t understand and never will, and saw into the lives of people I will never know, just for the brief moment where I saw the agony on the man’s face and the distress on the woman’s. I don’t even know if she was his sister, or his partner, or friend. I just know that to feel pain like what she felt would arguably be as awful as being the one who was shot.

Please don’t worry about me - I have had a good session with a psychologist and we are both confident that I am doing fine.

KwaZulubalooza

I’m now three weeks into the Monash-Oxfam internship program in the South African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, with another three weeks to go. I’m based in the city of Pietermaritzburg, and working with Oxfam’s partner organisation Justice and Women (JAW), a small NGO that works to transform power relations and gender injustice in rural and urban settings here, through HIV/AIDS support groups, an Access to Justice program, particularly for victims of abuse, and a youth program.

I’ve been assigned to the youth team, who work in local schools in the rural community of Yanguye to try and encourage dialogue about gender, power and HIV/AIDS. I’ll be training the team in basic filmmaking skills and making a short movie with them and the youth of the high school to encourage debate about schoolyard violence (which is quite severe at this school) and its sources. That’s exciting for me, because the more I think about it, the more I want to shift from my pursuit of a career in straight aid work, to a career in film. So I think this might be right up my alley.

A big part of JAW’s work is raising up leaders from the community – most of its staff are from the Yanguye community and JAW invests a lot in their development. Many of them don’t speak fantastic English yet, and of course I don’t speak Zulu, so it’s sometimes a challenge to convey meaning. Last week we helped to facilitate a three-day workshop for staff to reflect on their own growth over the last two years – there was also a considerable amount of tai chi, which was something I wouldn’t have expected in most larger NGOs.

In Pietermaritzburg I live in a nice guesthouse with four Monash girls, all older, also doing the internship – I got the single room being the only guy, but they use it as the communal pantry as well. We cook in turns, but I don’t really cook, I just help, because I don’t really know how to cook creatively. But I’m learning. It’s a pleasant life, and nice to be able to share our intern experiences with each other – so different from doing it alone in much rougher conditions back in Mozambique. Working hours have been short, so it’s almost like a holiday sometimes – good food, a nice house, nice housemates and a film project.

I’ll talk now about some of the issues going on here that make it hard to have a positive outlook when I stop thinking about my own life and start thinking of the community we work with. First there’s a thing called lobola – it is a payment from a man to his bride’s family, to marry her. If a man is too poor to afford it, he can’t get married, and is seen by the community as a child, no matter how old he is. If a wife is beaten and abused by her husband, her parents often won’t let her divorce him because they don’t want to have to pay back the lobola. Men often feel they own women because they’ve paid for them – this seems to be a likely contributing factor to the high amount of abuse within marriage. Children not born under the lobola agreement are cast out, but women are forced to have children before the lobola is paid to prove their fertility.

There are many outcast children, and so many AIDS orphans. And even worse, children who can’t show their parents’ ID cards to the Department of Home Affairs can’t get an ID card of their own, and can’t access any government support. These kids are stuck in limbo, and many kill themselves because of the injustice of the system.

Next let’s talk about teachers – they are often drunk, often they don’t rock up to class, often they beat students or sleep with them. Add to this the fact that schools pay parents blackmail money to keep quiet about teachers’ crimes against students; this gives parents an incentive to get their kids beaten up by their teachers.

The issue of violence is seen as a wider, endemic problem here in South Africa so closely tied to poverty. In the school, and in the community more generally, people get jealous if someone has something better – better clothes, or they can speak English better, or those who got to participate as ‘change agents’ in last year’s JAW youth program. And when something has something good – better than everyone else – it must be destroyed. There’s awful violence in this community – stabbing, stoning, rape - the kids have guns. I haven’t seen any of this – I’ve just been told by community members and JAW staff, but it makes me feel like the problem is too big and too tied into culture and circumstances for anything to ever change.

Hanging over this all is HIV/AIDS. And I’m not even going to go into it in any detail, because I fear I’ll get too depressed talking about all this mess at once.

In summary, I’m doing great, but this community isn’t.

Between the internships

I finished at CARE Mozambique just before Christmas, and I’m starting with Oxfam in South Africa on the 11th of January. I’ve travelled a bit in between, but rather than listing exactly where I went and what I did I’ll just mention a few things of note.

The first event of note was being mugged at knifepoint in the mid sized South African city of Nelspruit (no, Microsoft Word, Nelspruit, not Newsprint). After walking around carefree around even dodgy-looking places in Mozambique, I guess I was a bit more confident about safety, and on my first day back in SA (Christmas Eve) I was walking down a busy street at 9am when three guys surrounded me, held the knife to my throat (didn’t hurt me luckily), emptied my pockets and told me menacingly never to come to that part of town again. White South Africans later confirmed to me that that area of the town is not for white people, ever. What a country.

I was treated with a bundle of Christmas kindness, though, when a man called Jono who worked in a phone shop I visited to buy a new phone helped me to sort out everything, drove me around to fix things up, then took me to the town I was planning to go to the next day, as he was heading that way to visit family for Christmas.

I ended up spending way too much money on activities, tours and criminals in South Africa and had to cut my spending, eating nothing but peanut butter and bread for breakfast and lunch for four days straight while in pretty, mountainous Swaziland.

Unable to justify the ridiculous price of a tour in Johannesburg, I went to the shopping mall to see the film Invictus about Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) and the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and how Mandela used it politically to work towards bringing South Africa together after apartheid. It was a great film, and afterwards, while I know very well that South Africa is a long way away from racial harmony, it was so magical to walk out into that mall and see white, black, coloured and Asian shoppers everywhere - a place where no racial group would feel out of place (although the divide between rich and poor in SA is another story).

I flew to Livingstone, Zambia to visit Victoria Falls - they are really spectacular as you would expect. I was hassled by a few Zimbabwean souvenir sellers who had climbed over the park fence and accosted me while I was alone - I was quite scared I would get mugged again the way they were talking to me, so I paid $10 for a copper bracelet I wasn’t interested in at all. The Zambian curio sellers outside the park gate try a different method - a friendlier but deeply manipulative strategy I’m surprised I haven’t seen elsewhere in the world. These guys flatter you with their knowledge of your country, rattling off Prime Ministers’ names way back to Malcolm Fraser; they try to establish a rapport with you before even talking about their stalls; they ask you to sit down, and when you refuse they insist, saying it’s part of their culture for guests to sit down (very clever ploy); and when the deal is done they hand the souvenir to another nearby seller to wrap it for you, and while he wraps it extremely slowly, he invites you to look at his own store.

I saw the obligatory wildlife in Botswana, being charged at by a couple of hippos which was nice (once we knew we were safe). I did the tour with two obnoxious Danish couples who kept asking questions like how much elephants’ tusks weighed, and denying they were an endangered species because they wanted to hunt them.

Trying not to spend much more, I am spending my final days in the backpackers in Zambia not doing activities but trying to do some reading and writing (a new short film concept…) before meeting Monash Uni people on Sunday for the next internship.

Bob Dylan sometimes says it all for me.

And when it's time for leaving Mozambique,
To say goodbye to sand and sea,
You turn around to take a final peek
And you see why it's so unique to be
Among the lovely people living free
Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.

-Bob Dylan, 1975

Things to smile about in Mozambique

I'm sorry that my blogs here have so far been a bit depressing. Either I've been complaining about comfort, or bureaucracy, or lamenting the poverty and social problems here. I feel it's time to devote an entire entry to the things that make me smile in Mozambique. My work is largely complete and I have my passport back safely. While I've enjoyed my time here all along, I suppose that various high-stress events (and if you know me, you'll know that most events are high-stress events) have made it onto paper ahead of the small, nicer things. So here we go.

1. I saw a wedding party go past this morning. It was three Hilux-style pickup trucks. The first was full of women in the back singing beautifully. In the second, the bride and groom stood, and the third had some other people, also singing, but a different song to the first car as they were far enough behind for them not to be synchronised.

2. You see a lot of locals on the street wearing Australian clothes. I've seen Kmart staff T-shirts, AFL team tops (a few years out of date), a Melbourne Uni rugby top, and various other things. I think the story is that they're donated second hand clothes, but they end up in the markets. I tell them where their clothes are from, but they don't seem that interested.

3. I got Rickrolled in my second week in Vilankulos, but I don't think the people who Rickrolled me knew they did. Out of all the wonderful English-language music that exists, the genre Mozambicans seem to have taken to the most is 80s synth pop, and Rick was a feature on one illegal mix CD one of the drivers had picked up.

4. I haven't seen a lot of TV here, but at a CARE camp one evening we were watching TV, and it seemed like the sound was muted, so about four guys each took their turn to bang the TV on the side a few times, then gave up. I then had a go, fiddling with the mute buttons on both remotes, then gave up. So they called the resident technology expert of the camp, who proceeded to bang the TV a few more times. I think he got it working.

5. One of the projects CARE has been working on has been to set up an intermediary in one of the towns who buys goats from villages then sells them to buyers who come from the cities. A sale was set up one afternoon, and we drove over with the buyers in the back of the pick-up, and this guy was nowhere to be found. We waited two hours, then gave up, then encountered him on the road back. He had the cheesiest of grins on his face, which prevented me from being annoyed at him for standing us up, because the look on his face basically said, "I have absolutely no idea what's going on or supposed to be happening, but it's really nice to see you!"

6. At the cattle fairs, there are inevitably cattle breaking free of the flimsy wooden pens, and galloping off into the bush, followed by a trail of young boys brandishing sticks and yelling after it.

7. I have a knack for being stuck next to fat ladies in small vehicles for long journeys. One of them, who was drunk, asked me to marry her in slurring Portuguese, then spilt beer on my foot. The driver gave me his crusty handkerchief to wipe it clean.

8. There's a town called Mabote, where CARE bases a lot of its rural work. I like to call it The End of the World As We Know It- it has electricity from 6.30pm to 9.30pm only, it has no running water as far as I know, no sealed roads, and the street is lined with peculiar Wild-West style buildings painted bright yellow by the major telco, Mcel, who sponsors buildings in the same way a company sponsors a soccer team- it just paints its logo all over the outside walls. It's such an unappealing place that it's funny.

9. One thing Mabote can pride itself on is the fact that it has the most stunning view of the stars after dark. With no electric light at all in town, the night sky is clear and beautiful.

10. There's an old lady beggar who comes by the place I stay some mornings. She stands outside, and the staff bring her a bread roll. She doesn't say anything when she receives it; she just holds up her fist, clenched, somehow expressing thanks and solidarity in a more powerful and warm way than words could.

Stuck inside of chapa with the passport blues again

Informal public transport in Mozambique is an experience. I’m sure if you’ve travelled in other ‘developing countries’ you already get the idea. Minibuses don’t leave on schedule; they don’t even leave when full, they leave when they’re above capacity. They are the arteries and veins of the bloodstream of the informal economy – traders pack in their wares, including the obligatory live chickens. The buses – chapas, they’re called here – occasionally race one another at full speed on long stretches of highway, that is, when there aren’t potholes. When there are, chapas tend to prefer to drive on the dirt path next to the road instead. At crossroads towns, dozens of desperate vendors rush up to each new vehicle and wave their goods into the windows to the passengers. I saw one old lady attack a boy who I think was on her ‘turf’, selling stuff in her area.

The most tragic thing is perhaps this huge number of young kids working on the streets selling little things for little income. These kids should be in school, but I suppose that either with parents who need them to work for extra household income, or with no parents at all, they are forced to work. To put it into perspective, imagine sad-faced Australian primary-aged kids lingering on the streets of your home suburb trying to sell you phone credit, or soft drinks, or bread, especially during school hours. Very few Mozambicans finish high school, and of those that do, many do so much later in life, in their 30s. School fees are expensive relative to income, and there is a nationwide textbook shortage. For me, poverty is most simply defined as lacking the chance to achieve your full potential.

When my colleagues at CARE, or the staff at my guesthouse, or my Portuguese teacher question me about how things are in Australia in comparison to here, I almost feel guilty for living in a comparatively perfect state, where the government provides a safety net for the needy, where education is free, accessible and universal, where children play and read instead of working on the streets. Sure, Australia is not perfect, but compared to Mozambique, it is, in terms of government-provided services.

Speaking of government, my sole personal concern right now is my passport, which remains in the provincial capital and has been there for a week, waiting for a signature from some director which will formalise my visa renewal – why can’t the lady behind the desk just sign it – what’s the difference? The inefficient bureaucratic practices are pushing me to my limits, and it worries me especially as my flight out of Mozambique is just over a week away. We can say “this is Africa” with a chuckle all we like, but not when it concerns the single most valuable document we possess.

This, like most of the others, has been a bleak entry, and I’m sorry to those who are reading and want to read something nice. I have been enjoying my time here overall, excited by what I am learning, and interested in the sporadic work I am getting done with CARE. And when I sit at a seaside restaurant at dusk, to see the sun gently set as I gaze over the Indian Ocean, I’m reminded that there are beautiful things about this place.

Being worthwhile

My greatest challenge here now is not the climate, or the power outages or the language. It’s the constant niggling that makes me need to feel that this whole thing has been worthwhile: that I’ve achieved something, or I’ve contributed, or it’s been worth my time, money and energy to be here and volunteer for six weeks.

Early on I declared to myself that it was wholly unrealistic to expect that I would achieve something every day here; I decided that this would be a success if I did something of value every week. So far, so good. Now, in week four, I find myself struggling to know what I will be doing this week, if anything at all. And this makes part of me shudder, and feel really miserable.

But I need to look at the bigger picture. Six weeks on a development internship is a ridiculously short time. Volunteers come here for two years and say that the first year is for working out what’s going on and the second year for actually doing work. And working in a new environment in a culture so different from my own, it is unreasonable to think that I can be anywhere near as productive as I want to be in this tiny timeframe.

I knew before I came that I wouldn’t make a real difference to this organisation – no unskilled, inexperienced university student could expect to in just six weeks. But I hoped I’d be learning things constantly about development, and NGOs, and Mozambique, all the time, and that I’d be busy, working on all sorts of little things. But even when I do have worthwhile work to do, it runs out quickly, and I ask around for what to do next, and there’s nothing.

I realise that I need to look at it from the managers’ points of view. When I was working with the Global Poverty Project campaign back home I sometimes had two or three interns assigned to help me out. Sometimes I could give them jobs that didn’t really need to be done; sometimes I could give them the most painful menial tasks imaginable, and a lot of the time I was clueless as to what to do with them. And we were working in English, and they were more skilled than me in many ways. So what can I expect, working in an unfamiliar country with an unfamiliar language on a project totally unlike anything I’ve really experienced?

Realistically, given that I’ve already worked on three livestock data analyses and identified a number of inefficiencies in the way the system works, I’ve already contributed to a very reasonable level given my position. And I think I should understand that even if I go through entire weeks where I do nothing of value, I’m still learning just by being here, and I’m learning that to be valuable in this kind of work you need to stick around a lot longer.

To finish on a more positive note, I won a bottle of wine in a raffle at a primary children’s musical at the local centre for rich white expatriate children, which I found myself at thanks to the guesthouse owner inviting me. I don’t really drink wine, and I would hardly drink it alone anyway, so it’ll make a nice gift for someone when I leave. It’s already got a nice little bow on it, so I can just leave that on and make it look like I made an effort.

A seaside pace

I’ve been in Mozambique for three weeks, and I leave Mozambique in three weeks. But things are not awful, as my earliest blog reported. Sure, it’s sometimes not as comfortable as I want it to be, but overall, things are good. And I could probably stay here a lot longer if I had a longer time frame to work with.

Vilankulos is honestly a great place to be based for an African internship. It’s by the sea – that alluring Indian Ocean, central to romantic ideals about Mozambique with its fishermen, its beaches and exotic bird and marine life – I went snorkelling on Sunday for the first time- it was pretty cool. There are allegedly lots of dugongs here. I haven’t seen (or heard) any, though. I look out the office window from my Excel spreadsheet, and see palm trees gently blowing in the wind. I eat a banana at 6:30am as I walk to the ATM – on the way, the city streets are already lively and busy with the stereotypical “African” suspects – women carrying stuff on their heads etc. When it rains, it rains for four days; in the afternoon, the fishermen tout freshly-caught metre-long fish at the major intersections; there are rusted shipwrecks beached down by the jetty, and when the tide goes out, the locals walk out on the sand around the temporarily-beached dhow boats.

I’ve been able to get a much better idea of what I’m doing here. The end aim is to help rural criadores (herders and farmers of livestock) to earn a good and stable income. To ensure they can, they need buyers from urban areas to regularly buy the animals. My job is to look at the situation from the buyers’ perspective and see if it is financially viable, and sustainable. Because if it isn’t working for buyers, it leaves the criadores stuck with no income source.

My role involves data collection in the field about prices and logistics, then doing a study back at the office to crunch the numbers. When I collect data, I ask the questions in bad Portuguese, and a field agent translates it into the local language. That’s right; I speak much better Portuguese than a lot of rural Mozambicans (I’m taking lessons now, as well, and growing in confidence). One problem, however, was conveying the idea of opportunity cost in Portuguese, and then getting it translated to the local language. Opportunity cost is a concept difficult to grasp even as a first-year economics student – to get accurate figures on the income sacrificed by doing another activity is hard with rural Mozambicans, but central to finding out whether their activities are ultimately profitable.

My main concern over the past couple of weeks has been worrying I will not have enough work to do, and that I will run out of things to keep me occupied. Right now I’ve got work to do, and I don’t know how long it will last, but I feel I don’t need to work at a frenetic pace with German efficiency – on the field trips, there’s so much time allocated for relaxing, and people seem to be much more casual about work here – so I think I’ll try to work at a seaside pace- a tropical pace. I’ll get work done, but I don’t need to rush it. I’m in Mozambique, after all.

Development is a 4WD with a motorbike, a goat and firewood in the back.

First off, things are getting better here. I’m getting used to the climate here, and I’ve realised that the hot days alternate with cool, wet days that are quite pleasant for me (but a bit cold for the locals). Power cuts have happened less often than I thought they would, my panic surrounding mosquitoes has subsided to a healthy level and I’m waking up at a more regular hour. In all, things are going OK, although there is still an animal in my ceiling.

This week I went on my first NGO-funded overnight field trip to do a bit of field research about the logistics of buying and selling goats and cattle in rural Mozambique. Pretty obscure stuff. I know very little about livestock, or Mozambique, or anything for that matter, but I’ve been assigned to the task of doing an economic analysis of prices, buying and selling, the impacts of diseases like bovine tuberculosis and other factors affecting the livestock game here, so that CARE can hopefully improve the way it approaches livestock assistance projects on the ground.

My Portuguese is really awful, and the short stay I have here means that even if I take lessons I will still need English translation for nearly everything in the field, which makes me feel pretty useless at times. I know the feeling of being in a meeting, or sitting at dinner, with people in full flight in German or Spanish while I would struggle to capture the meaning of anything even with a few years training in the language. With Portuguese I have no formal training- it’s similar to Spanish so I have worked out the patterns in many ways, but still my ability to converse in this language is ridiculously basic. I wish I could speak a language fluently- maybe if I had stuck to just one language rather than switching between them I would be able to by now.

In the field, in a little known district of a little known province of a little known country of (dare I say) a little known continent, I started to collect info on prices and livestock health, mostly through a translator, except on the occasions that I was impressed by English-speaking locals, of which there are surprisingly many. At the office now, I have put it all together into a neat spreadsheet, but there’s lots more to do, and I expect it will take time to reach any conclusions here, and by the time I do it will be about time to leave. Such is the nature of a short term stay of an Australian uni student who only speaks poor-tuguese and knows nothing about agriculture. I don’t know what will happen next week – I need a lot of guidance with this stuff, as you’d imagine, but I hope I’ll continue to be able to contribute in small ways.

The trip into the bush was really nice. At one point a small-scale farmer was showing us his herd of goats by the roadside. (He also has a pet monkey tied up by rope. Local kids pull the rope and laugh at it.) The sun was setting, and the grassland countryside was so charming with its baobab trees mingling with coconut palms. The 4WD was sitting up by the side of the road, against a grand backdrop of endless sky, the music of Queen from the car’s speakers adding in a peculiar way to the scene’s grandeur. The light was fading and the breeze calm; it was beautiful.

On the way back from Nova Mambone, the town where we spent the night, we accumulated in the back of the vehicle a motorbike, two women who wanted a lift, a goat (alive, bound and yelping) and some firewood from a roadside stall. When we stopped there, the children stood dumbfounded as they stared at me for the entire ten minute period we were there. It was if they were staring at a ghost; in a way, I guess they were.

Mozambique - first impressions

Most of the following blog entry was written while in a state of discomfort a few nights ago when the power was out, I was under the mosquito net and sweating like a pig. There are many great things about Mozambique, and there is so much charm to the place. I’m still going to publish this because it captures part of my mindset here, while by no means all of it. Stay tuned to hear stories on the brighter side.

I have now been in the small Mozambican town of Vilankulo for just three and a half days. And so far I have faced challenges to my comfort that have really pushed me to my own limits.

1. The climate here is devastatingly hot, with a harsh sun and drenching humidity. It’s really bad, all day long, but particularly around lunchtime. The worst bit is that apparently it gets much worse in the next two months.
2. The constant high risk of malaria makes the night times even more stressful than the daytimes. While it is much cooler outdoors than indoors at night, staying in the open is so dangerous given this is a high risk zone. I am on malaria tablets, I use repellent, and I sleep under a net, and I can’t think of anything except mosquitos.
3. That’s not true: I also think of the other things we lack. Like regular electricity. The whole town suffers power outages regularly- so far in three nights here, two nights have been majorly interrupted by power cuts. This is OK during the day, but at night with no light and no fan, I can neither sit around nor go to sleep. Mosquitoes + climate + no power = challenging evenings.
4. I have more to complain about. Because of the time zones here, Mozambique gets bright at 4.30am and dark by 6.30pm. The whole country is in the wrong time zone, and this means I have been waking three hours before breakfast is served, and going to sleep immediately after dinner as the combination of 1, 2,3 and 4 means that there is little else to do once night falls.
5. Water is also scarce here. Running water is elusive, unless a building has its own supply, but even this is a problem sometimes eg the first place I stayed had a full tank on the roof but none of the water was flowing into taps. This is a problem in a country where the climate and the dusty roads (the whole city is just sand roads) mean that I’m filthy all day and need a good wash, and all that’s available sometimes is a bucket.
6. There’s no public transport in this town and it is really spread out, so it takes a long time to walk around, plus you shouldn’t really be out after dark for long, for safety and malarial reasons.
7. There’s some kind of animal living in my roof, burrowing through. It sounds like at any point the whole roof will cave in and some kind of exotic Mozambican squirrel will fall onto my bed.
8. Of course the water is not drinkable, but I’m used to that one.
9. I just heard the animal in my ceiling again. I’m told the power will come back on soon, and I hope so because being the comfort freak I am, I don’t think I can sleep until my fan is back on.

All this paints a bleak picture of this place. It’s all tied to the fact that Mozambique is really poor. The strong infrastructure that we have in Australia we really take for granted and assume that that is the norm. It’s not. In the real world, people can’t afford to provide reliable water and electricity; diseases that don’t exist in our country are serious fatal risks. It makes me feel so privileged to live where I live. And I hope that all people fortunate to have been born into the wonderful country that is Australia consider it an amazing privilege.

Things will pick up here, I’m sure. Once I get used to these things, it should be OK. My internship is still a bit sketchy but it looks like the organisation has a project for me that I can hopefully contribute to meaningfully.

To be fair, Mozambique is going OK. This was written in a state of extreme stress. I'm actually doing fine.