I still consider my reasons for coming, every day, and I ask myself at every juncture in my decision-making, what is the best decision in terms of my motivations for coming to Mozambique? So if I choose to teach a lesson a certain way, deny water to someone, use a little more water doing my laundry, I'm thinking about how it could eventually help people here.
And with every passing day, it gets harder to justify my actions, and it may happen that I can't justify my actions. That scares me, because then I will have lost my purpose for being here.
I had a conversation earlier tonight about vegetarianism. I confirmed that I was veggie to another professor at my school who ate dinner with us tonight, and he asked me if it was due to religious reasons. I said it was just because of the way animals are treated in the US, and that I had no church, no religion. This surprised him greatly, but didn't change his respect for me.
It's interesting to me, the phenomenon that someone needs to have a bigger thing than themselves to justify their principles and beliefs - that it's not sufficient to have principles and beliefs for the sake of having them.
And it's also intriguing as to why people always ask if I've taken a girlfriend here yet. Taken day after day, it feels like a matter of willpower, even though I'm not interested in anyone here and I want to concentrate on doing my job. When I take a step back, though, I realize that I'm in complete control and the power of suggestion (by others) is merely playing on things the "victim" wants to do anyway. The same thing with being drunk - you won't do drunk, anything you really didn't want to do sober, but when you're not true to yourself, you're different drunk. So when you don't really mean something you say, and people try to "change" you - you'll change, but only in what you're saying.
So what I'm afraid of, in general, is people changing me, is this country changing me, but I'll only change in the ways that I wasn't sure of inside myself before, and ways I won't necessarily notice or mind.
And if I dwell on this too much, is it just as time-consuming as taking a girlfriend? Yeah, I gotta move on.
So I had an interesting discussion with another teacher at the school tonight about the origin - the true nationality - of people and the things they produce. He is from Zimbabwe, and sees blues music as being African in nature because African-Americans started it, essentially. But Phillip (another volunteer visiting) and I argued essentially that they are Americans when they are born in America.
Kingston, the man from Zimbabwe, is a Shona. He is essentially from the highest "caste" in Zimbabwe, though it would be a disservice to separate the three major tribes like that. So I asked him where he's from, if he knows that, and he is from the Great Zimbabwe.
But what I was really after was that it all depends on where you draw lines. You can draw a line between the Great Zimbabwe and where he was born, and where he lives. And it's just as arbitrary as drawing a line between Zimbabwe and Mozambique, between Africa and Asia, between Asia and North America.
So essentially, I was arguing that African-Americans are just as much African as they are American, and I am just as much Lithuanian as I am American. You can say that blues is African music, because people can trace their ancestry to Africa, but it is still American because of the cultural influence. America changed because of blues, and vice versa. Blues would not be what it is were it not exactly the same - with the influence of cultures.
So we were basically arguing the same thing, that we all come from different places, but our culture defines us ultimately. We were just coming from different places to talk about it. Place about 10,000 miles apart.
Peace
John
