"Why is my hair falling out? Why am I sick all the time?"
Abia is a fifteen year old girl in a rural community in Mozambique. Although Mozambique has a long coastline, she has only seen the ocean once as her community is located inland in the northwestern province of Niassa on the border with Zimbabwe. Abia has three sisters and one brother, all short in height with a slender bone structure. One of her sisters is so small that she is considered a dwarf.
Abia's education went up to middle school where she learned how to read and write, an achievement in Mozambique where the literacy rate for women is around 34%. However, she never attended high school because her family could not afford the school fees. Abia was also embarrassed that patches of hair is falling out, which made her self-conscious in school because she wondered if people sitting behind her would notice. Like her siblings, she frequently is sick, and when she had an infection, it seems to keep coming back.
Abia's parents have a machamba, or small plot of farmland that they work to grow their own food. They mainly grow and eat cassava, a root crop similar to the potato, some beans, onions and tomatoes. Like other subsistence farmers in the community, they do not grow enough food where they have extra to sell. Thus, they have little income to buy foods that they do not grow, such as meat and milk. Abia's father grew up on the coast of Mozambique eating a lot of shrimp, but moved inland with his family during the brutal civil war. He misses eating shrimp, so Abia's mother buys it for special occasions. Abia's brother does not understand what the fuss is about getting shrimp; he says he cannot taste the difference between shrimp and cassava. Abia and family do snack on peanuts and mangoes, which are relatively inexpensive to find.