The Kujilana Production Blog

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.

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.

120/80

Washing their hands of doom-and-gloom approaches to rural African life, the people of Lichinga and its surrounding areas drank a toast to their health last Saturday at the Feira de Saude, or Festival of Health.

The events proved the Niassan pulse is throbbing at a lively pace.

It looks like the African renaissance is real and it is sweeping. In fact, in the words of Lucia, one of the local filmmakers, “something like this has never happened before.” Nomba has never been so hopping like it was the day it showed off its good reflexes.

In spite of a sky that looked ready to spit fire and clouds that carried water on their heads, the daily forecast included only the near-2000 people who kicked up their heels and the music in the dust of Nomba’s soccer field.

The A-list included the mayor of Lichinga, multiple NGOs, dance and drama groups, and the main act, Massukos. Even diffusion of innovation showed up when some Americans started a mosh pit in the midst of the crowd. And bobbing in that crowd were four red cameras, each in the hand of one of the Yao filmmakers, who quickly took to filming the constant parade with little hesitation.

While costumes were flashing and hips were gyrating, development organizations draped in UNICEF tents tested 800 people for malaria, who could then sample artemisia lemonade (to prevent malaria) and try out an ecosan toilet. It was a day that took no lip from what prevents good health here and countered by turning out educational skits and good music.

The Festival of Health was one day where the African audience could stand at the feet of its own, those who celebrate where they came from, and give itself a hand. It may be just one day, but no one can discount the value of a healthy sense of pride.

five w’s

Yesterday we arrived in Nomba to stay, not-so-fresh from Mandimba, a midsize town near the Malawi border.  This city is a frequent stop for truckers whose calling cards often spell HIV/AIDS, as well as creative comebacks like the play we filmed whose theme was HIV prevention.

In Mandimba we met Legion, a local who is the director, writer, and actor for his theater troupe. Legion’s homecoming in the village of Luelele was also the debut of his play production, an act that received rave reviews from the crowd of men, women, and children who attended. Featuring music and dancing, Legion’s drama brought forward the dangers of HIV, minus “La Vie Boheme.” Creative development has a ready audience.

On the way back to Lichinga, however, what started as a blown tire off our “taxi” turned into a three-hour-long pit stop and gave us plenty of time to reflect on the Africa that’s challenged positive thinking in some ways.

To fill in the blanks, by the time we got to Mandimba, the romance was fading and the soundtrack had started skipping. Mandimba was a staring contest with Africa. Both the literal and figurative tire has blown on the way from Mandimba to where we are now. In that city we started asking “why?,” and we won’t be publishing answers anytime soon, because here in Lichinga we have been confronted with similar question marks.

For now, we’ll focus on the immediate: rice, or beans?

bumps in the road

The African stereotype may be easily confirmed when you’re jolting past it, viewing the passing scenes from the lofty heights of your personal metal elephant.

All sorts of ironies reside in Pemba, including but not limited to ponytailed Russian game hunters and metal elephants and African children in Lakers jerseys and a guard with a bow and arrow, and then, of course, the Kujilana team.

We don’t belong in a beach house that rents out to Russian elephant hunters. This place is a hideaway for the wealthy who needed an escape plan. For those Mozambicans who lack frequent flyer miles, however, it’s not an umbrella crowning a pina colada but the thatched roof of a mud hut that’s a dependable sight in Pemba.

But the view from the door of a hut is much better anyhow. This may be the clearest view of the universe from earth, with the Milky Way looking deliciously close, like it might leave some starry residue on the roofs overnight.

Anyhow, from our truck-turned-elephant, images of Africa are blurry. And the story is only ours from that vantage point. It takes something like a visit to the bush with an ex-civil war captain to give us back our clear vision.

no static

Billboards across Johannesburg proclaim the 2010 World Cup and this city as its perfect host. While driving through the city today I heard (over the rain’s drip-drop) a poster that read, “Africa makes a lot of noise.”

Cup your ears for now, everyone on the other side, because her voice sounds like Zse-Zse’s who dances so that her feet strike the match that lights up her face when she moves. And Peggy’s soft voice that names colors and numbers for the children at her free daycare. And all this noise, boisterous or steady, is accompanied by South Africa stomping her gumboot-clad foot.

And then of course our own perfect hosts’ “African animal droppings” cookies speak for themselves.

All that to say strap yourself to our boom pole.