Walking around town

We've moved into our new place which is a bit closer to downtown. I'm still within a 10 min walk from the VSO office and about a 10 min walk from the Ministry of Education (MINED). It's a great place and like with many places that you move into it needs a bit of attention before it becomes "home". Either, it needs replacing or repair … hopefully it'll be done before too long, or I fear we'll have some flooding on our hands.

View from our bedroom towards Maputo Bay	View from Balcony towards downtown and the port
French Cultural Centre	Cathedral near City Hall

It looks like there is going to be a delay of about 3 - 4 weeks till we actually start our placement as we brush up and improve our Portuguese. So far I've been getting by with portuñol! But I'm not sitting idle till things get sorted out - I got involved with another related project setting up a computer resource centre for Mozarte (Mozambique centro de arte).

I worked with Enosse from CJE Maputo who was great. We walked quite a bit through Maputo: one day to plan the layout of the room, another to obtain quotes for hardware, yet another to get the cash to purchase, and one more to actually make the purchases. Sometimes it took us quite a bit (like an hour) to actually pay … they love stamping paper! Nothing is official without it. But last Friday we finished the installation, this week I need to update software and install other stuff. However, it was a valuable experience in terms of understanding how things work here, the culture, and importantly, practicing/learning portuguese. Without him, I would have definitely shied away from taking the chapas - a bus, either mini or small bus. The saying goes that there's always room on a chapa! And indeed that is the case. On one trip I was standing in a minibus between two bank of seats, braced against the ceiling while trying to avoid falling onto the lap of an older lady. These rides get even better when the music is blaring ;)

View of the courtyard at the MOZART Centre 

Umm ... that's a lot of cable!

Plugging away ...

Wires are installed ... let the unpacking begin.

Plug in what? Where?

Computers installed, yea!

You can walk a lot around Maputo, there are of course some areas you have to be aware of - either for security reasons or olfactory. And while the sidewalks are quite wide, it is more of a hike than walking in the city. There's always some construction to deal with water main repairs, telecom installations, or its broken up because the tree roots didn't like the pavement.

Have I mentioned that they love music here? Well, I'll say it again. They love music here - anytime, anywhere, and any reason to get up and dance. OK, not everyone. But many places love to share their music with the local neighbourhood by cranking the volume as loud as it can get.

It's definitely interesting … we found a fruit/vegetable street vendor lady on our home over the weekend. Very lovely lady with decent prices and a good seller too.

However, we did run into someone pretending to be "the guy" who admitted us into the country at the airport. He said that he remembered us, but we probably don't remember him because he's out of uniform. Asked us how we were getting along and so forth. The only problem with that story was "the guy" at the immigration desk was a lady! Yup, he wanted something: some gas money. Though it would be very unfair to say that no one is nice here. On the contrary, it's been easy to say hello to people, be they be guards, street vendors, or storekeepers. After a few times they recognize you and you get some great tips on where to go to get decent stuff. Most of the time they are very patient with me in explaining how things work.

But yes, I am enjoying it here and looking forward to meeting my colleagues at MINED.

Até logo!

Arrived!

It has only been 3 days ... Maputo is like any major bustling city in the world: noisy, eventful, and challenging sidewalks. Although it is walkable, which is great for us to explore and get to know the place.

Early morning view out of our apartment over looking
Av. 24 de Julho.

Our travels were long, also 3 days, but was fairly smooth. We were met by Katia, a member of the VSO Mozambique office staff who was great in helping us get oriented, even though we were quite disoriented ourselves. The guest house is nicely situated: it's about 6 blocks from the VSO office and conveniently for me, next door to the Ministry of Education! Next week we'll start our in-country training and get as much stuff sorted out, primarily our living and work arrangements. But as the city goes, its ok. The sidew

Other volunteers had heard of our arrival, but did not know the details. Although we happened to meet one of the volunteers when we stopped by "Livro abierto" (open book), an NGO working to improve literacy amongst primary school children. As it turns out there was a get together of volunteers in Maputo to celebrate a birthday and the departure. There are about 15 or so volunteers in Maputo out of 35 in Mozambique. All working in rural livelihoods, education, or health. A new volunteer from the UK arrived a day after us, will be stationed in Manica working on assessing micro-dams for generating electricity.

Saturday we went walking around the south end of our corner of Maputo, stopping by the Casa do Ferro (Iron House). Yes, it's a house made out of iron plates, designed by the guy who did the Tour d'Eiffel, Gustav Eiffel. And yes, it is quite inhabitable without a crazy amount of air conditioning in this part of the planet. From there we made our way to handicraft market and stopping by the Brazilian Embassy that was hosting a "Portuguese Day" event, got treated to quite a bit of poetry and music. We then made our way home to then head out to the volunteer's party, which was a great party and included a lively bunch of drummers, thanks so much!

Hmmmm ... foood!

Hello :) Drummming!

I've recorded a bit of the Portuguese Day event, the capoeira, and the drum circle, and compiled it into a podcast. For sure, there's lots of room for improvement so any suggestions are welcome :)

Company BBQ

A big thank you to everyone that came out to the company BBQ last wednesday. You help me raise a further $350 towards my goal!

Again thank you!

The company is E-One Moli Energy (Canada) Ltd. Their work: high end rechargeable lithium ion batteries. I had the pleasure of working with a wonderful and knowledgable team within the research and development (R&D) department at the Maple Ridge offices, and with the development team at the Tainan, Taiwan offices.

Moli – short for the company name – has had quite an influence on the lithium ion battery field. They have produced a number of "firsts" ahead of their larger competitors, and in doing so, setting the standards for such technology. If you're involved in original equipment manufacture (OEM) then you may come across their products ranging from small products such as cell-phones and professional cordless power tools, to bigger stuff such as hybrid electric vehicles (HEV).

Below is the presentation I had running while talking discussing my assignment in Mozambique. Perhaps this will help improve the "Moza what?" polls ;)



Cuso International presentation by Fadi Asfour

Delays, and more delays

We've been waiting for a while now for our paperwork to come in. These are needed to obtain our entry visas into Mozambique. Now before you jump to conclusions, it is not a beaurocratic issue ... in fact it is not clear what happened. The papers were sent, but they were not received. But it doesn't matter, there are other things that require our attention such that we won't be leaving prior to the end of April.

One thing though, it allows us to celebrate some very important events in the lives of some dear friends!

So always look at the positive side of things. We now have had the wonderful opportunity to celebrate some important events in the lives of some dear friends. One had succesfully defended her Ph.D., and the others have just become new Canadian Citizens! I'm so glad we were here to celebrate these events. It also gives me the opportunity to spend more time with friends, cycle around town, and enjoy our awesome library. In between I've started on my Portuguese lessons - similar, but not so similar, to Spanish. It's weird: with languages I need to hear to learn, with other topics, I need to read. Probably has something to do with the way brains, or my brain, is wired.

But check out the following language learning links:

• http://www.easyportuguese.com/ 
• http://www.livemocha.com/ - You can also learn other languages here.
• http://www.sonia-portugueseforkids.com/
• http://www.bookbox.com/ - Basically lots of videos in various languages. Each as subtitles that change colour, very similar to karaoke.

If you know of others, please add to the list in the comments below.

Quantum physics

By now you most likely have come across the video about Joseph Kony produced by KONY2012. The narration is quite moving, the movie well produced, the story ... yes, very sad and troublesome. And yes, I am totally ignorant about this story.

One of the topics we tackled at our SKWID training was that of "the single story" - keeping to one perspective of our world, rather than searching and understanding other alternatives of the story. Chimamanda Adichie has an excellent TED talk describing what this is and its impact.

Chemistry, like the real world, has a lot of unknowns. A professor once told me that we probably know at best, about 10% of what's to know about chemistry. Of that there's like 1% of the reactions that are so well known that you can effectively predict the outcome of the reaction, and more importantly, repeat the experiment reliably. Discovering new reactions, creating new compounds and materials requires lots of resources and time to properly investigate. Why? Because we cannot rely on one source of information. We have to constantly test our hypothesis, always asking "are these results real? or are they a phantom of our imagination?"

Look at the hot discussion in physics today: 1) The mounting evidence supporting the observation of the Higgs-Boson particle, and 2) The hint that the speed of light is not the absolute - it could be broken.

These are quite important experiments as they have great ramifications on our understanding of this universe as well as our technologies. How so? The discovery and verification of the former - also referred to in the media as the "God particle" (physicist really dislike this term) - would complete an important physics model called the Standard Model. By doing so, we begin to understand how particles get their mass. Implications? We have particles for light called photons. We are taught that atoms are composed of electrons, neutrons and photons. However, there is one observation of our physical world that we have yet to verify the particle responsible for it: gravity. According to theory, there should be a particle - a graviton. Its validation would in turn help in our understanding of String Theory - perhaps you've seen What the bleep do we know

While the latter, if found true would have meant the dismantling our understanding of physics - particularly quantum physics. As it turns out, by looking at multiple aspects, and "checking in" with other scientists you'll be happy to know that the speed of light remains absolute!

So, back to Kony. There's got to be more to this story than just the Jedi vs. the Sith, or good vs. bad. Where did he come from? Why is he doing this? What are his motivations? Why hasn't the Ugandan army been able to do something about it? Why hasn't the UN done something about it long time ago? Wait, the war ended like six years ago? Well what about the reports of the behaviour of the Ugandan army?

While all are valid questions, I do not understand the issue enough to discuss it here. All I can do is look deeper into this topic with an open mind ... avoid a single story. I encourage you to do the same.

To get started here is the TED talk I mentioned earlier:

And here are some links that I just came across:

1. Grant Oyston's post on his Visible Children blog
2. The Telegraph - outrage over KONY2012 movie