Feeling so alive

I'm not a big believer in any external locus of control. Fate, destiny and even coincidences were always a bit beyond my grasp.

But lately I haven't been able to ignore the feeling that this is where I'm supposed to be. To be honest, this feeling started long before I could point out Mozambique on a map. Looking back at the spiral of events that led me here, I'm astonished at just how many elements had to position themselves perfectly for this move to work.

I was so content in New York. In love in New York. So ready to carve an X on the ground and claim it as my corner of the world.  I had my perfect life and yet I was restless to move to Africa. This longing inexplicably planted itself in my head and wouldn't leave. Every time I would make a semi-permanant decision, a part of me would squeal, but what about Africa??- At the Ikea checkout line where I bought my first-real-apartment furniture. The day I (very very stupidly) decided to paint our living room wall red. Even as my relationships deepened and developed, I couldn't help but feel that every mark I etched into my life in New York would make it that much harder to leave.

I closed off Saturday at an all-night party in Maputo's crowded train station (where the party never really ends). My head was swimming in the fog of neon lights that would randomly catch the faces of the new friends surrounding me: people who've graciously opened up their lives and their city to me. From these friendships, I have, in just two short months, had crazy, intense conversations. I've learned so much about Mozambican society by watching the enviably close bond that they've all maintained over the past 30 years, in the midst of war, death and suffering.

I can't help but smile at the thought of that crazy intuition telling me to leave my New York world behind. I'm so so glad I did.

This is where I'm meant to be right now.

Small small worlds

We sometimes travel on the assumption that life is the Small World ride at Disney World. Wherever we go, we expect colorful people to smile from ear to ear at our unexpected presence, waving mechanically as we cruise in and out of their scenery.

                                                                                                                                          ( Kristen Howerton) 

But these days, we want more out of our trips than a pleasant smile from the locals. We want to interact, to learn and to live, temporarily, like a native (whatever our idea of that may be).

In New York, I want to eat a messy New York hotdog, from a yellow New York stand, on the corner of a dirty street, served by a Yankee-cap-wearing immigrant with a Brooklyn accent and a bad mood.

Whole economies spring around this search for authentic travel. In the blink of an eye, crappy hot dog stands, poverty-themed restaurants and out of tune musicians await us at ever corner, ready to cater to our demands of “authenticity”. A lion park in South Africa, elephant ride in India and gondola cruise in Venice are a concierge’s desk away.

Never has this been clearer to me than one night in Swaziland, when, after dinner, we were summoned to watch a “traditional” ceremony at our hotel. The guests sat in plastic chairs around an opening in the sand.  One by one the hotel workers came out, wearing skimpy scraps of fur, shuddering in freezing winter air. They clapped and stomped and shouted in unison but the most memorable part of the dance was their matching looks of misery.

It is in moments like these when our desperate search for authenticity is mirrored back to us, a caricature of our expectations.  Authenticity, when mass-produced, becomes its opposite: a distorted, cheap and often, racist, façade.

So can we dig past all that crap and have meaningful interactions with local people we meet during our travels?

At Ilha de Mocambique, I met an intriguing Spanish photographer who has devoted her life to make that kind of travel possible. Cristina is in the process of opening a mud-house hostel, where guests live exactly like the locals: no running water, electricity or gas.

Guests are required to learn how to cook and shower and clean from their neighbors. Instead of paying for their stay, they help the locals with a neighborhood project, donating whatever skills they have. It is an extreme example, but it’s the most honest attempt I’ve seen at responsible, authentic travel.

Traveling to a developing country inherently involves a lopsided power dynamic because of the simple fact that your presence there is voluntary. I’ve landed into someone’s neighborhood and, whether I’d like to admit it or not, I can leave any time I want.

Choice, especially the choice to travel, is privilege the vast majority of the world will never know and, in Mozambique, it plagues my every interaction.

That unequal power dynamic is accentuated by material inequality. As a journalist and a traveler here, much of what I see are the implications of pure and desperate poverty.  For the first time this year, I’ve interviewed people I know are starving as they talk to me. I’ve had the opportunity to stick around long enough to see the effect that my voluntary presence, western clothes and full stomach, have on them. That type of cultural exchange, as selfish an experience as it is for the traveler, has effects that go both ways.

As I learn the implications of my visits, with each trip and interview, it becomes a little harder to parachute in, probe into people’s lives, and return to my air-conditioned safe haven.
 

Time travel in Ilha de Moçambique

Traveling is the only way to go back in time.

This is especially true in Mozambique, a country, in many ways, free from the hallmarks of “modern” society. These days it is almost impossible to find a place in New York with no internet reception. New Yorkers, always connected, tune in to their palm-sized devices to understand what is going on around them.  Hand delivered letters; home radios and printed newspapers are relics of the past.

In Mozambique, they are still vital accessories. As a nostalgic print journalist, I’ve loved living in rhythm with this country.

But last week I had the eerie sensation of traveling forward in time to the post-apocalyptic, dystopia of Ilha de Mocambique.

Ilha de Mocambique was once the capital of Portuguese East Africa and a major Arabic trading post. Mousa-Al-Bic, an Arabic trader, gave the island, and later the country, its name. But the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 carved a direct maritime passage between Europe and Asia. Ships no longer needed Ilha as a refueling base. The island’s days as a cultural hub were numbered. By 1898, Moz’s capital  moved to Lourenco Marques (now Maputo) and all the Portuguese capital that sustained the island drained south. In the 1980's, thousands of Mozambicans sought refuge in the almost deserted island from the country's brutal civil war.

Today, majestic colonial buildings still dot the island. From hospitals to police stations to naval bases, Ilha was equipped to be a capital. But the archways and grand staircases lead nowhere. Almost all of the colonial buildings are in ruins.

Walking on island’s angled dirt roads, I saw children playing hide and seek in crumbled houses and families sleeping inside empty, bleach-white mansions. At night the island is pitch black, save for the small cooking flames that peak through the cracked doors and windows of colonial buildings.

The hospital, once the largest below the Sahara, has now been shut down, except for a couple of backrooms that are still functioning. 

Despite its creepy vibe, Ilha is a happy place. At dusk the island's street children start massive 50-person games of tag and hide and seek that go late into the night. Two days into my trip, they learned my name and for the rest of the week I heard enthusiastic shouts of "MARINA!" everywhere I walked. 

~More to come on Ilha soon~

Swazi Fire

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

- The lovely Jack Kerouac

Last weekend I took a spur of the moment road trip to Swaziland, a landlocked country squished between South Africa and Mozambique.

Swaziland has the misfortune of being one of those countries best known for scaling tragic statistics ranks.

It has the lowest life expectancy of any country in the world (31 years) and the highest HIV/aids rate (25 percent of the population).

Swaziland's landscape is stunning. The bright orange dirt that paves most of the roads sticks to everything that surrounds it, painting whole bushes and trees the same color.

Here is some of what I saw and did along the way:

                                            Horseback ridding through the grasslands

The beehive camps where we slept

A whole city of cliff-side birds nests

Back to Maputo

A rough week in Maputo

Real gunshots don’t sound like they do in the movies, those dull, low beats accompanied by scary music.

A real gunshot is a high-pitched, staccato snap. I was eating dinner with a few expats at a restaurant at a garden in one of the wealthier suburbs of Maputo when I heard this snap for the first time. I looked up and saw two men in a fight ten yards away from me. One was holding an AK-47, the other had his hands up in protest. The man with the AK-47 fired his rifle a second time, and I saw his body sway backwards with the force of the shot. He was shooting one of the restaurant's two security guards. The other had already been shot.

As my friends ducked to the floor, I sat there paralyzed. I felt like I was watching the scene from a safe, far away place.

And then the man turned to us and started shooting.

Finally, feeling the weight of one of my friend’s hands pulling me down, I crouched on the floor. The bullets flew past our table and my mind was completely blank. Some of my friends started to crawl across the park.

Ignoring all the training I had received at Columbia and from my family throughout my life, I decided to crawl, then run, with them.

As I was running, I saw two girls falling to the floor. I was positive they were shot. I ran faster across the park, loosing my shoes along the way. I ran and ran and ran, hearing gun shots in the distance, sure that the men were following me.

Finally, some of my friends who had run in the same direction as me saw a security guard at a building. We filed in through the gate and I begged him to let us stay. I explained that there had been an attempted robbery, a shooting and that we were all in danger. He nodded his head but explained that we couldn’t stay there, we had to go back to the street. We complained that we did not feel safe, that we just wanted to stay there while we called a taxi, but he refused. He pulled out a massive gun and went out to investigate, dragging us with him and closing the gate.

At this point, a pick-up truck with policemen swung past us toward the restaurant, where we heard more shots.

I was shaking uncontrollably. Everyone I called didn’t answer and I realized I had absolutely nowhere to go and nobody to run to. I’ve never felt so alone. Finally, the woman who’s house I’m renting answered the phone. Frantic, I told her what happened and her husband finally came to pick me up 20 minutes later. The ambulance still hadn’t arrived when he got there. The guards lay bleeding on the floor.

We found out that the rest of our group was Ok. The girls I had seen fall twisted their ankles while they tried to run from the scene.

The next day, the full story came out on the news. Four men encircled the restaurant, carrying AK-47s and semiautomatic pistols. After we ran, they robbed the remaining clients. Using someone’s iPhone tracker, the police were able to follow the men to a neighborhood on the outskirts of Maputo. But the men outran them and hid. They’ve still not been found. The two guards are in critical condition at the hospital.

I thought I would feel better in the days following the shooting, but I only felt worse. It was as if my brain had turned on its night vision. Everywhere I looked I saw threats that had previously gone unnoticed: the gate of my house that always remained unlocked, the tjopella drivers, who knew my schedule and where I lived, the beggars on the street, asking for money at night.

My heart would pound and I could feel the adrenaline flood my body with every sharp sound I heard. I would tell myself that it was Ok, that I wasn’t in danger anymore, but my body just wouldn’t cooperate. On Saturday at lunch, the waiter dropped his plate and I couldn’t stop shaking, half an hour later.

The film of what happened played in a loop in my head. Every time a thought would drift from my mind, the film would start playing,

By Sunday, all I wanted was to be back home with the people I loved. I felt completely crippled. It was as if every creative ambition fled my body at once. I didn’t want to be a journalist anymore. I didn’t want to travel or meet people. All I wanted was to be home, where it was safe. I didn’t think it would pass. After all, it had been 3 days, and things had only gotten worse.

Sunday morning, some of the people who had been at the restaurant on Thursday and I decided to cross the border to South Africa and spend the day at Kruger park, a 7,500 sq. mile game reserve.  For twelve hours, we zigzagged through the park, searching the dry bush for leopards, elephants and giraffes. For the first time in days, I felt safe. I found myself able to think about something other than that man shooting his rifle.

Looking out into that endless park, I saw no sign of human existence, save for the occasional car that would pass us by. The beautiful red sun set as we left the park and I remembered why I came here.

My very wise friend Liz reminded me that I came to Maputo to see something different. And that is exactly what has happened. I am seeing good and bad, and the only thing I can be sure of, is that I’ll leave here having seen more of the world.

I’m taking it one week at a time, but, thanks to my supportive family and friends, I’m finally feeling like myself again. 

"Trying to live the image of the life which you have in your head ... it’s really hard not to do that, but I do think maybe it’s cheating.... Cheating life. Cheating yourself out of a real engagement with life, which involves surprise, not just you moving through your environment with this pre-determined idea of what you intend to do with it and how it should react to you. It’s like thinking you’ve been put on this earth to master life and make it submit." 


- Sheila Heti for the Paris Review 

Diving into Rio

"Go to Rio!"

Betraying my Paulista roots, these words would blurt out of my mouth, triggered like a tick onto anyone who expressed an interest in visiting Brazil. I would ramble on and on about the unsurpassed charm and natural beauty of the city I had been pining for since my first visit five years ago.

So when I got a chance to chase a story to the Rio +20 summit, I didn't hesitate. While I spent most of my day interviewing a Mozambican activist, I squeezed in just enough time get some sand in my hair.

Rio did not disappoint. But with those colossal mountains kissing the ocean day after day, how could it?

Next stop: Johannesburg for some training and a safari :)