My name is Beatrice, I am a 25-year-old girl with a degree in music education and music therapy. For the past few months, I have been living in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where I am doing 10 months of civil service. When I left, I had a suitcase full of expectations and fears. The reality here immediately proved to be different, more intense, more chaotic, more alive. Here I have learned to let go of expectations and to know how to be.

Civil service abroad is a complex experience, one of continuous adaptation. It is not an “easy” experience, nor is it always exciting. But it is precisely in this complexity that I am finding the greatest value. Here, everything has a different rhythm, slower but at the same time more intense. Every day is full, very full. Sometimes too full. Every day I feel I am growing, learning, discovering something, not only about this country but also about myself.

Maputo is a vibrant city. It has a thousand contradictions, a thousand sounds. It is colorful, chaotic, extremely welcoming but difficult to decipher. It is a city where people greet each other on the street and are genuinely interested in knowing how you are, where every market is a sensory experience and where even chaos has its own internal order. Mozambique is a melodic, rhythmic, deeply musical country. It is not just an artistic matter: it is a way of life, of sharing and community, of expression, of history, of communication.

And even if I don’t always understand everything, even if I don’t always manage to find my place, I feel that here I am learning to listen and resonate in a new way.

I work in the field of music therapy, and here I have had the incredible opportunity to meet Mozambican music therapists: competent, passionate people who are deeply connected to their territory and their musical culture. It is a dialogue between equals, which enriches me every day. We share practices, tools, approaches, and in the middle there is always sound and relationship. Here in Maputo, I work in five different contexts. Five. Just writing it down has a certain effect on me. These include the Mahotas Psychosocial Rehabilitation Center, the juvenile prison in Boane (a town 40 km from Maputo), the Casa Esperança orphanage, and other educational and social institutions that take in women and children with very delicate and diverse backgrounds. In Italy, something like this would be almost unthinkable for a young professional like me, who has just graduated. Here, however, I am trusted. And this trust is a responsibility, a constant call to put myself out there.

Every day I enter contexts that pose new questions, that force me to listen before acting, to observe before proposing. And despite the fatigue, or perhaps because of it, I feel that I am growing a lot. It’s not always easy to keep everything together: changing environment, language, and type of relationship every day. But it is precisely in this variety that I am building a broader and more flexible professionalism.

The project I work on is called Entendarte. It has been around for nine years now and continues to grow with passion, patience, and care. We work with music as a tool for relationship, expression, and shared construction. We create spaces where people can use music to express themselves, tell their stories, and connect with others. Every workshop, every meeting, every shared sound confirms to me how music, a universal language deeply rooted in every culture, can create connections between different experiences and cultures.

Then there are the people. Perhaps it is trivial to say, but it is the truth: this experience is being lived every day by the people I meet. Colleagues, friends, families, women, and children. It all starts with relationships, as in music therapy, where the language of sound and music is used to build a space for sharing, attention, sensitivity, and listening to others.

Beatrice Masi