Dreams of joy

Last week we began taking our malaria prophylaxis. We've heard so many awful stories about taking it that the least we could expected was to wake up and not want to get up from bed. Depression, psychosis, nightmares, all this is what we expected to face.

But so far nothing, not even a dull gray light has shined on our lives. I am even beginning to think that my reaction is the opposite. Today, I've had a few hilarious moments laughing for no reason for 5-10 minutes. Kajsa told me something must be wrong with me and sent me home. Now when I think about it, it might have been the beginning of a cold. I hope not. I mean, I don't really have time to have the flu now, it's just boring and time consuming lying in bed feeling sorry for myself.

And my dreams, so far they have been of giraffes, cats, squids and horses. Nothing too scary if you ask me.

Did I tell you about the French couple we are going to stay at when we get to Maputo? If not, we found a nice couple on couch surfing offering us to rent a room for three weeks! Bingo!

Now, time to get some sleep. I'm hoping for hippos tonight.

Fake husbands

One of all our prejudices of what will happen when we arrive in Mozambique is that men will be very straight forward and confront us and ask us to marry them. Or at least be their girlfriends. This is of course not necessarily true, and I will try to remember to tell you what it's like when we get there. Either way, someone told us that, to avoid unnecessarily awkward moments and the need to explain ourselves every second time someone confronts us, we could wear a ring to look "less single". Good plan.

Only problem is that Kajsa really hates to lie. So, she said she would feel better if she had more info to back her up. And, why not? We simply let our imagination free to make the perfect fake husband. Kajsa picked a good friend of hers, (whom we happened to meet in Uppsala and happens to work as a police). And yes, she asked his wife for permission. All is good. Me, I think I will make a man up. Would be better to be able to switch once in a while. He can be a business man who makes big money on the stock market one week

and a kind farmer who has cattle the next.

Straight from Farmer wants a wife - Swedish version

Or that French man who owns three chateaus that I never found last semester. Anything is possible. Who is your favourite husband? Feel free to come up with suggestions.

Apart from these (very important) issues, we've been working on our field trip methodology, and be safe, we are going to accomplish something down there. Not sure what yet, but we're getting there.

How we think about things, and get to learn things more than once

One more week passed by, and we are like bees working from early morning to late afternoon.

We spent two days in Uppsala last week on a preparatory course on how to succeed on a field trip. Uppsala is one of the oldest student towns in Sweden, a bit like Grenoble, with people going by bike everywhere.

The days were packed with lectures on how to not get ill (don't swim in lakes where the water is not moving was the main message), how to keep your money safe (don't make arrangements to get 10 000 euro in cash and always keep two credit cards on separate places), how to approach people (kind of to remind ourselves that we go there and expect people to be willing to answer all our questions even though it might not be interesting for them at all) and all sorts of useful things.We also got to know some facts about a mermaid sect and that local beer is to be avoided since it includes a shot of the local bacteria culture.

After talking to a bunch of people about these things, and having done some travelling by myself, I start getting the feeling that I've heard most things more than once. It's a good feeling. I feel prepared. And I also know that most things will be new to us however we plan it beforehand.

After all the lectures, we got some time to talk to a Mozambican man, Sergio. A nice man in his forties, working as a  photographer, telling us about his country. He told us about Niassa Province where we're planning to go and said that it resembles to Norrland (north north of Sweden), where people live far away from each other, well not exactly like Norrland, but by African standards. He sounded excited by the fact that we were going there and told us about people he knew there. He also gave us the number to his wife if we wanted to ask about malaria medicine, kind of sweet.

Today has been a day of planning and contacting people. And I had a good time trying to express the aim of our project in more specific terms. Arriving at questions regarding the river and the head of the river (=fallhöjden), and not being a native English speaker all my questions got very amusing. Maybe i didn't use the word in a correct way, but I mean, questions like "What is the distribution of heads in Mozambique? " and "What is the most suitable head from a cost-efficient perspective?" was enough for me to laugh until i cried. Ok, so I was a bit tired at the moment.

To finish off, some photos from Uppsala. After all it was my first visit there.

This is a bridge over Fyrisån. And me.

We made some sight-seeing.

The beautiful church, Domkyrkan, dominating the town centre

Kajsa and her mother's weekend bag (the small yellow one)

We found the university park which was a bit of a disappointment, but at least there was rune stones. And snow. It will be nice to look at the snow when we are in Moz and dream about the coldness of it.

Kajsa and the rune stone

Finally, some photos from the coffee place we found.

One last thing. If anyone ever have a question about how lajv (live role playing games in English?) works, just ask me. Kajsa and her friends were so kind to tell me all about it.

My next post will be a presentation of our fake men. Oh yes.

Snakes and monkeys

First week of the project completed and the feeling that lasts is "How are we supposed to set limitations to not let it expand out of our reach?" Once we've started we've realised how much there is that could be done.

When you have a project like this planned, most of your conversations will sooner or later end up discussing the subject. This has resultet in a lot of useful information about Africa and its animals. First, do not trust monkeys. They will steal your food. They can open car doors. They will most likely get in to your unattended tent if they think you store food in it. Second, do not walk into even the smallest forest without company. There are cobras. Cobras are not very nice and can rise up to a height of 2 meters. And, if you can't find any company and you still have to enter the forest the best thing to bring is a slingshot.

A Post-It dream

I give you The wall of planning and organisation:

 

All with a color scheme for every kind of event.

 

And this my friends is the meta post-it (saying "buy more post-its").

With this taken care of it is time for us to start produce some results. Which in this case mean digging deep down into literature research. Oh, how lucky we are to get to go through tons of scientific reports.

Ladies and gentlemen; we have a departure date

Voilà!

This is the proof that our trip is for real! In five weeks we'll be sitting on a plane to Maputo, capital of Mozambique. Woho! We decided to postpone our departure one week to get some extra time for preparations so the D-day will be March 13.

Before buying the tickets we had an interesting conversation with the Mozambican embassy in Sweden. We'd heard from previous students going to Moz that it can be difficult to renew the visa after 60 days. You have to do this every 30 days and the second time is for some reason harder. Kajsa called and told the embassy man about our worries and he answered that it shouldn't be a problem to stay 70 days, no no. As long as we went to the embassy there to renew it every 30 days. However, when Kajsa mentioned this friend and his problems, the embassy man thought for a wihile and said "Yes, well it's not the first time I hear about this. No, not at all in fact." Oh, thanks for that information. You planned on saving that for someone else, did you? So, now we're thinking a multiple entry visa and a trip to South Africa every 30 day could solve this problem. I mean, if in Africa, we might as well see some more of it than just Mozambique, right?

Apart from the visa/flight business today has mostly been spent taking care of administrative stuff like chasing our examinor for signatures (he never seems to be in his office when we need him) and getting a room. Getting a room means we can realise Kajsa's post-it-wall tomorrow = Happiness!

Word of the day (Today in Swahili which is spoken in the north of Moz): Hippo - kiboko

A start

C'est parti! This is the start of my blog about my ten weeks stay in Mozambique. My plan was to start this blog the day we bought out flight tickets, but since I couldn't keep myself waiting - here it is!

So, why Mozambique? I will start by giving you a short answer. Me and my friend Kajsa have manage to get through four and a half years of engineering school and have reached the point where it is time to do our Master's Thesis. After several hours of crazy brainstorming, wine drinking and waffle eating we've come up with the idea to go to Mozambique. Not completely out of the blue of course. Our project is a smaller part of a larger project called STEEP-RES which is looking in to the question on how to increase access to electricity in Tanzania and Mozambique. And also to do it in a sustainable way. Our part in this is to investigate the potential of using small scale hydro power to increase the electricity access in rural areas in Mozambique. An aim we hope to fulfill by doing interviews with concerned parties in Mozambique and visit suitable sites for hydro power plants in the countryside. This is all the details I will give you for now but more details to come when we've started working for real (so far we've only had a meeting where our supervisors told us how much we have to work before we leave - oh my).

The idea of this blog is to tell you all about our adventures during ten weeks in Mozambique. Before we leave, you will get a glimpse of the preparations for the trip, hear about Kajsa's obsession to organise everything with post-its and some everyday happenings in Göteborg.

And yes, one more explanation. So, why a sentence in French? For those of you who don't already know it, have just returned to Sweden after living five months in Grenoble, France. This sudden change of culture shows off in the funniest ways. An example is that it has left me with random French phrases swirling around in my head on a daily basis and since I have no one to say them to (my mum gives me rather poor response when I talk to her in French) I guess I just have to write them down when I get the chance. Anyways, the phrase simply means that we've started. Mozambique here we come!