Walking the line.

The big-a** white 4x4 rumbled up to my hut, rolling over the miniature sand dunes and dwarfing my pathetically dead garden beds, the weeds shyly, curiously reaching out to tickle the massive treads. I had my capulana’ed butt up in the air like a typical Mozambican woman, bent over a bucket of soapy water. “We caught you missy, we caught you right in the act!” I whipped around with a priceless look of surprise, which upon seeing Christine’s grin morphed into its happy twin. We caught you being Mozambican!” Christine re-emphasized, it seemed a bit sympathetically. “What are you guys doing here?” I demanded, delightedly, yet hesitatingly, in English as my brain switched language gears. “We were on our way home and decided to swing by and see if you wanted to come stay the night on the farm with us!” Christine said, putting her hands on her hips and examining my dirt smudged face and frizzy, sweaty hair as her fiancé Cristo and his farm buddies hopped out of the covered truck bed. It’s exactly for this reason of my complete and utter homeliness that I’ve refused to buy a mirror for my hut so far. I have a general idea of how ragged and rough around the edges I may come across. And I sometimes try to do some triage work with my appearance. Yet, thankfully, not having the mirror allots me some grace. Some things you just… you just don’t wanna know. If you don’t know, there’s no problem. Remembering my manners, I quickly wiped my hands “clean” on my capulana, tucked my loose hair behind my ears and began hastily throwing some overnighter things in my trusty little backpack. I then threw it over my shoulder and pulled myself up into the left-side passenger seat of the off-roading monster. Christine threw a reverse, spun the wheel, and we roared back over the retreating weeds. A row of crianças had lined up along the fence and five pairs eyes turned to watch Teacher Karina and her Mulungo friends get whisked away in a white chariot.

And so, I got to spend the weekend at Christine and Cristo’s cattle ranch near the little village of Muabsa, about 30 minutes north-west from Mapinhane. I got a tour of the farm, walked through and examined their herd, helped feed the orphan calf living in their kitchen (ADORABLE), and enjoyed delicious fresh veggies from their garden along with the freshest beef I’ve ever eaten. We spent the evening with some of their neighboring ranchers and I was steeped in an evening of Afrikaaner-South African farming culture. And I got to be the token American with the funny accent. I am overwhelmingly a curiosity to white Africans. They simply cannot or will not understand why a blonde American girl with a good education came to live with nothing. And, I believe that despite my explanations of why what I’m doing is important, none of my white ex-pat friends actually, truly understand.

Overall, I really enjoy my ex-pat friendships and I love learning yet another narrative in the salad bowl of identities and histories that make up Mozambique. I am burning with curiosities myself! What is it like to be a cattle farmer here? What is it like to run a resort or tourism based business? How do foreigners make a living here? How do they impact local Mozambicans? Are they contributing to Mozambique’s development? Why did they come to Mozambique? When? Where are their families? The white ex-pat community is small and incestuous like any clan. But it is fascinating.

Yet, largely because of their views and misconceptions of local Mozambicans, I feel somewhat confused, frustrated, and guilty about my friendships with them too!

I tried explaining my mixed feelings to my parents like this: Here I am, a white American woman who is accepted in both the black Mozambican world (because of my commitment to language and Integration) and the white Mozambican world (because even though I’m “poor,” I’m white, so I’m automatically in). I have a rare ability to walk the racial “line” and pass through both worlds equally well; yet I know too that never will my friends on either side of the “line” ever meet each other in the middle (I feel I must even put “line” in quotations because race as a socially constructed phenomenon primarily implements social power structures AND moreover doesn’t allow for any nuance between extremes). This ability to “pass” in both worlds troubles me because in some ways it almost feels like a betrayal to the black Mozambicans I’m serving.  Mobility is the epitome of white privilege – and despite my desire to rid myself of all my racial baggage and extra privileges through making Integration my mantra – privilege inevitably rears its ugly head and comes rushing back in. The wealth. The mobility. My sheer ability to escape the hard days. The white chariot. The rumble of a 4x4 engine.

And it feels reaaaallyyy awkward, like a nauseating sinking feeling in my stomach coupled with the twinge of embarrassment – when I drive off happily, thinking of the hot shower and evening of conversational English awaiting me, waving to Prof. Angelica and Junior as they watch unsmilingly, waving slowly from their doorway.  

And that’s the worst part: My whiteness will always somehow separate me from the friends, neighbors, students and colleagues I have come to love here.  Ultimately, I haven’t been able to stop worrying: Is walking both worlds jeopardizing my Peace Corps experience? Is it possible for it to not?

Sophomore year at Willamette, we played this “game” in my American Ethnic Studies Intro course called the “Line game” in order to demonstrate how privilege affects our perceptions of race. My professor, Dr. Drew, took us outside one beautiful spring afternoon and lined us up on the concrete walkway on the backside of Eaton Hall. The lush green grass and the Oregon capital building lay before us, the Golden Man gleamed down at as. “Now, before we begin,” she said calmly, “here are the rules: I will ask you quite a few Yes/No questions about your life. Take one step forward to answer “yes,” and one step backwards for “no.” If you don’t want to respond or don’t know, stay where you are.” I glanced over at my bestie Heidi, and she shrugged her shoulders in her usual “let’s-just-wait-and-see” way. But we were curious now. We all began sizing each other up on the line. We all assumed that to “win” the game, you had to finish in front of everyone else. That was the point of pretty much every game, right?

Well, we were all in for a surprise.

With her series of simple “Yes or No” questions, Dr. Drew showed us just how much or how little privilege each of us had experienced in life.  “Do you parents work?” Did your parents graduate high school?” “Were you expected to go to college?” One by one, as the white students in the class took steps forward happily, our excitement turned to chagrin as we turned and looked behind us, slowly realizing the horrible reality. Each one of our non-white classmates had not only NOT moved beyond the starting line, but rather had dropped dramatically further and further behind. Moreover, even us white females couldn’t keep up with the “progress” our white male colleagues. By the end, the gap between everyone had widened so greatly that Dr. Drew had to raise her voice for all of us to hear her questions.

It was perhaps my first REAL understanding of privilege and how racism, classism, and sexism work to systematically disenfranchise and hurt EVERYONE. The class of “–isms” are part of a self-perpetuating machine that divides and conquers, pitting good people against each other. From that point on, I began looking at the world through lenses conscious to the forces of privilege and power that shape our status quos and our constructed ideas of “common sense.”

So, where does this consciousness fit in a Mozambican context? How does it fit into my Peace Corps service? Honestly, I’m frankly hoping to offset my privilege with my sheer dedication to serving growth and capacity building initiatives within my community. Peace Corps is about exchanging skills and knowledge to help someone else help themselves. And the process goes both ways.

And so, this last week when Prof. Gloria told me that I’m “a mulungo, but not an estrangiero [because]… Estrangeiros are peoples that have colonized, mulungos are just whiteys in general,” what she was insinuating is that although I’m white, I’m not as disenfranchising as “other whites.” My Americanness and my work here lends me some forgiveness I suppose, whereas if I was white South African, Afrikaaner, Zimbabwean, or Portuguese my integration would have to reckon with a long history of conflict, oppression, and exploitation here. Moreover, my attempt to achieve integration makes me fundamentally different than the “estrangeiros” who live and work in Mozambique and have not only self-segregated themselves but bring the racial paradigms of their home countries to Mozambique. Interestingly, many of my South African friends have fled to Mozambique because the “reverse racism” of South Africa – where now whites are experiencing economic discrimination in attempt to even the playing field – has not yet taken hold in Mozambique. Indeed, southern Mozambique is called the “terra dela boa gente” – “Land of the Good People” – because of the degree of compliance locals had to the Portuguese occupation.

This brings me to back to the main problem I’ve been wrestling with the last few weeks about how my mulungo privilege is impacting my effectiveness as a Peace Corps volunteer. Giving some of my time every month to hanging out and living the lives of my ex-pat friends feels at first somewhat wrong-minded and in contradiction to Peace Corps service. Yet, I cannot help but feel that there’s just as much importance in understanding the world of estrangeiros in Mozambique. Whether we like it or not, in our globalized world they also have a part to play in development work in Mozambique. And it has the potential to work out in a fair manner that can actually break the cycle of poverty that is crippling the majority of Mozambicans. For example, when Christine and Cristo started their farm in Muabsa five months ago, they employed 200+ local villagers, gave them technical training, give them sick days and health care, and pay them above minimum wage. Moreover, they don’t hire outside labor, only people in Muabsa. Thus, they essentially are jumpstarting a local economy.  They also built the village a school, and numerous community water tanks that keep the women and children from having to walk hours each way to the nearest well. Christine and Cristo are actually doing really important, effective, direct development work! It just has a different face to it than the one typically lent by international NGOs, government organizations, and other aid work.  And frankly, I kind of prefer the freedom from the red-tape that plagues any bureaucratic operation.

I believe skepticism is good. It keeps us evaluating and re-evaluating ourselves as anti-racist, social-justice oriented development workers. But it’s also important to be pragmatic and creative in looking at the problems of poverty and privilege and how the two are interconnected. Yes, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I am walking the colorlines in Mozambique. But, it is indeed a blurrier line than before.