The Kujilana Production Blog

live at five

For anyone loyal enough to return after a week of silence, we made it back in eight pieces. Four of those- ourselves- have fully recovered from jetlag at home. The other four- our luggage- has just been delivered to Mari’s house exactly one week late. Given that one of the bags contained all 120 hours of footage from this summer, it’s safe to we finally feel like we’ve pulled it off.

In other news, the news. Huntsville’s WAAY is making the trek to Florence to film a mock-editing session on Wednesday. We’ve been a buried headline before, but a 5 o’clock news clip is a different story.

The Yao filmmakers (Lucia, Lucia, Tayo and Victor) were the last people to point their lenses at us before we left. Questions ranged from “If you repeated the project, what would you do differently?” to “Who’s hooking up with who?.” I suspect this interview will have an entirely different feel. We’ll now be asked to speak for a culture we’ve known for only a month and to summarize a summer in a soundbyte or two. Word choice is so crucial in real-time and when someone else is editing your answers.

the right exposure

During our last two weeks in Nomba the cameras changed hands so quickly we had very little time to get our palms on a keyboard. With the advent of a first generation of filmmakers, the sights and sounds in Nomba became much more alluring than a night with qwerty. So here’s the belated climax of the summer that you’ve all been waiting for, replete with an epic battle over western technology gone awry.

After the weeks of film school with our shadows always by the filmmakers sides, with the finale it was hands-off for the Americans while Lucia, Lucia, Taio, and Victor each completed his or her own project. The projects they turned in ranged from how-to pieces on knitting and rocket stove-building to comedies with a moral twist like a Judd Apatow. All these flicks deserved their rightful debuts. It was time for movie night in Nomba.

The house was sold out the night of the premier. Friends, family, and neighborhood rubberneckers all gathered to see what was number one at the box office in Nomba that weekend, but unfortunately our hard drive failure and the loss of two of the pieces meant we didn’t have the quadruple feature we had planned.

It felt like failure. But after the showing, and gift-giving of personal cameras to each of the filmmakers that felt a little more glum than it should have, we got to work recovering Lucia’s and Victor’s projects from the faulty hard drive by applying what seemed to be a witch doctor’s remedy of freezer time and ice cubes. And the next night we had part two of a two-part series featuring the recovered stories, which played to a packed house for the second time. That felt like Africa.

That night the white sheet provided a clean start, a clean place for the Yao to project their own stories, in Yao, by Yao and for Yao. This new campfire that cast a bluish glow had lit up faces that were pleased, proud, and definitely amused. Here was a front stoop with room for more than hand gestures.

In the words of Victor, “the power is in the seeing.”

intact

“I will break rocks until I die.”

At the rock yard in Lichinga there is no retirement. There is only an eternal showdown between mountains of granite and women made of steel.

When Mari and I visited it was hard to tell the difference between rock-hard human and mountain. In spite of more than their fair share of hard knocks, neither has lost its voice. The stone sang along in an accompaniment of clanks while the women lifted their voices as well as their buckets.

The singing belies the scene, however. The women who work the rock yard make almost no money, not nearly enough to support a family. Several have absent husbands, drunks who deposit their wives’ income in more Travel Gin. Many women feel like they have no choice but to work there, and it is backbreaking work, work we Americans assume you must wear plaid and a beard to perform.

But these women are stronger than their rocks. Even if in her lifetime a woman has received a beating, her face is somehow less weathered than the mountain’s. Her spirit is still intact. But for many women, their prospects are in pieces beside their rock piles: on the one hand there’s Maria, a child worker who wants to be a nurse someday, and on the other hand is Luisa, a middle-aged woman who told us, “I will break rocks until I die.”

It’s resilience in the face of an erosive wind: poverty, sexism, and pain.

No retirement, but eyes that look unflinchingly into whatever future will be.

——

I came to the rock yard hoping to photograph a raw aspect of life here in Lichinga. The women and children of the rock yard work from sun-up to sundown carrying and breaking rocks that will be sold by the pile for pennies.

The women were not impressed with my equipment and were quick to drag my face out from behind a now dusty lens and send me to the mountain, bucket in hand. My frustrated attempts at explaining that we weren’t here to carry rocks were simply lost in translation.

With my camera gone I was forced to stop looking and capturing, and to start seeing and living. With new eyes a yard became a community.

A project became a narrative.

A subject became a woman named Maria.

If I learned anything, I learned that it takes more than a morning and a few dozen frames to capture an image or gather the words to write its story. It even takes more than feeling its weight run through your shoulders.

Like my feeble attempt at breaking rocks, these pictures only scratch the surface.

stimulus outsources stimulation

During a recent visit to Estamos, a Lichinga non-profit working in community health, I was offered a box of mints which, flavored or not, turned out to be condoms. The laugh needed no translation. Knowing they were from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), I took one as a gift from my parents’ tax dollars.

You get your Alabama pride where you can. And today, it was in exported condoms. Alatech Healthcare has been the country’s exclusive condom supplier for USAID and operates a state-of-the-art facility in Eufaula with the capacity to produce one billion a year.

Recently, however, it’s been Alatech’s own employees who have needed protection.

Senators Shelby and Sessions are fighting to keep “buy American” language in spending bills, but now 300 workers are facing layoffs as the factory’s future is in jeopardy.

Last March, The Kansas City Star broke news of overseas competition threatening Alatech.

“At a time when the federal government is spending billions of stimulus dollars to stem the tide of U.S. layoffs,” said columnist Mike McGraw, “should that same government put even more Americans out of work by buying cheaper foreign products?”

USAID will begin purchasing condoms from China and South Korea, costing 3 cents less than those made in Alabama. Those pennies mean lower overseas standards and a time where the U.S. outsources its own aid. 

For USAID, the road to development forks again over “saving jobs at home or lives abroad” (Dugger, New York Times). 

For Alabama, it may mean the rubbers are finally hitting the road.

Malo Ga Kujilana

The smell of the composting toilet is enough to confirm to us that until now, we’ve been living in a vacuum. The dust in Nomba doesn’t cloud our senses, either; in fact, here at MGK we’re being reconciled to the dirt.

At Malo Ga Kujilana we’ve learned that it is good to know where your food comes from and where it goes. MGK is made up of gardens full of medicinal plants, pens of chickens and goats for food and for micro-loans, and homes that house solar panels and babies in cloth diapers. On the shelves books on permaculture and humanure perch alongside Bob Dylan’s Chronicles while Eucharistic Theology bristles its spine at the whole lot. Down the road are coops where locals learn to manage projects and micro-loans as a community. And past the moringa and artemisia rows is the compost pile where we dump our waste before the bucket gets too full.

With our guesthouse only a few steps from the compost pile, for the first time we’re living right next to the consequences of us. For the first time we’re aware of our empty bellies, our dirty fingernails, our feeble Chiyao, our dilemma of whether to wear dirty underwear just one more day.

Since old habits die hard, we aren’t flushing anytime soon. Previous notions just become fertilizer for new ways of thinking. On some fronts, such as Zaxby’s Chicken, we may be incorrigible. But once we get back to America, we’ll be looking for spaces to grow something good. Caring for our neighbors and for the earth is the responsible way to live, and if we’ve learned anything at MGK, it is that we’ve got this earth on one heck of a macro-loan.

But it’s not enough for MGK to be an oasis. Development is sometimes slow to catch on: at this point, rocket stoves are not the rage in Nomba. Whether it’s attributable to a universal disdain for change or to the slow steady crawl of time in Africa, development will not become a fad and it doesn’t happen overnight (and “overnight” means months, even several years in Africa). We still count on our fingers here.

And for now, our fingers are dirty but our consciences are clean.

The Lord's Army

Books as vehicles sometimes take you places you’d rather not go. In our reading up on Mozambique’s civil war we recently came across strange intersections of conservative American culture and Mozambique’s devastating civil war. What should have been a no-passing zone became a chance for misguided heroics on the part of American Christians via their subscription to conscription and a paper trail that leaves us ashamed.

Some background:

Threatened by the success of Mozambique’s fight for independence from its colonial oppressors, 1980’s apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia began to look for a way to undermine Mo’s fledgling black government.

They found constituents in the political prisons of Frelimo, the current Marxist-Leninist-leaning government. The savory characters they drew from the prisons were groomed for what became Renamo, the rebel group whose “pro-democracy” front was mostly an excuse for Western aid.

Ninety percent of Renamo’s volunteers were actually kidnapped Mozambican youths with little interest in any political ideology. In the rebel raids, “Renamo attacks closed or destroyed 822 of the 1373 existing health units in the country,” as well as leaving “32% of primary schools destroyed by rebel forces” (Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story, 1997).

It was while perusing Carolyn Nordstrom’s A Different Kind of War Story that we discovered the role the End-Time Handmaidens of Jasper, Arkansas played in the war. Upon further research, we came across this NY Times piece.

Because of Renamo’s supposed anti-communist politics, right-wing Americans tagged the insurgents as “freedom fighters.”Advocates’ misguided faith in these so-called freedom fighters meant the demolition of Mozambican health care and schooling, instead of the sun-drenched suburbia supporters hoped for.

Groups like the End-Time Handmaidens of Jasper were busy providing war lords with more than doilies to wipe their faces. It must have looked like Renamo forces had ordered the full armory of God when the flow of field radios and Bibles started pouring in from the West. Though much of the religious fervor may be attributed to deception and misinformation, “patriotic duty” does not justify any person’s responsibility to march in line to the tune of an ideology that leaves orphans in its wake.

Not even sweet old ladies in Jasper, Arkansas can dodge the blame.

To put it nicely, Christians aided in the destruction of this country. This is why the idea of a “good missionary” feels like mission impossible to many in Mozambique. Since we’ve been here we have seen a country whose infrastructure has recovered appreciably in less than two decades from thirty years of war. And it’s tragic that some Christians, whether actively or unwittingly, rooted for ruins.

Reconciliation takes even longer than rebuilding cities. This is why Malo Ga Kujilana stands as a resource center and as a bridge between past and present, the Christian West and the Islamic Mozambican.

Because there are unintended consequences when we are handmaidens to an ideology instead of our fellow human beings.

what you hear is what you get

Not only do the Yao speak a different language, they think one too. Moving a question from the interview list to the interviewee’s mind takes two translations: one from English to Yao, and one from the abstract to the concrete. “Why is storytelling important to culture?” becomes “Why do you tell your children Yao stories?” and “Do you feel globalization’s import of image-saturation is eroding the Yao’s orality?” becomes “Can we go now?”

Our fourth day of film school took the form of a field trip to the feet of a respected story-teller and local imam, Proverbio Abu Bakar. Stories were told; lesson plans were shredded; categories were dissolved. Batri, one of our filmmakers, more or less turned the pages of Proverbio’s story by firing off “What happened nexts?” We’re now positive we’re learning as much as our students.

Oral cultures like the Yao’s haven’t peeled themselves off the page of reality yet. Literate cultures paved the way for abstraction by externalized detail to the written page. Hence, oral cultures have an incredible mind for detail but don’t know it, and literate culture have split-level brains but need sticky notes to remind themselves to use it.

Thus far, Yao stories have been heard but not seen, and that jump from the campfire to the screen requires just enough abstraction to keep us humble. Until we master the magic of hiding hypotheticals up our sleeves, interviews will continue like bad sleight of hand.

“Is this your answer?”

“Okay, is this your answer?”

open hands

On Friday we were contracted by the Minister of Education to film the opening ceremonies of the high school sporting championships… we think.

Negotiations began the day before in the Holton’s backyard, sitting on the ground where, Feliciano Dos Santos informed us, all deals are made in Mozambique. Laid out on the grass was the chance to document history—Niassa’s first hosting of the national games. President Guebuza was headlining along with Feliciano’s Massukos, who conveniently needed a new music video. We jumped in the truck to check out the venue and found it undergoing some 11th hour construction. Apparently we weren’t the only crew playing catch-up.

We met the day with our translator Lucky and twice as much tape as battery life. On-field access is no problem when having white skin automatically makes you an insider. Maybe some day we’ll know what the Governor and President said in their speeches, but until then, our memory comes through the viewfinder: sun reflecting off open hands, dust beneath an athlete’s march, and fireworks.

A week late, but lots of fireworks.