Masoko! Ure kukumbira kumwa? Andina kumwa…Hello family and friends! What I just said in Ndau, the local language here in central Mozambique, means “How are you? You are asking for water? I don’t have any water…” which was true two days ago, but after the sudden downpour we had on Wednesday is no longer true so I don’t know why I started my blog post with it. There is a story behind the rain though that I’ll get to later in this post hopefully. But first, I hope that you are all well and enjoying summer back in the states. Now that June has come I’m sure that summer is in full steam with blazing temperatures, slip-n-slides, sprinklers, outdoor tennis, green gardens, long days and dinners on the porch. At least that’s what I like to imagine from over here. In this hemisphere of the world, things are also festive and exciting, and since my last post a lot of cool stuff has happened at school that I want to talk about so I’m going to get right to it.
When I came back from my two week school break in which I explored the beaches of Inhambane I have to admit that it was difficult to readjust to the quiet yet busy life here on the mission. I longed for the company of friends and the care-free sand of the beach. Soon enough, however, I remembered that prior to leaving for the break, I had set a number of goals for myself to accomplish during my second trimester.
The first goal was to re-vamp my ailing garden. When I arrived in January I made a noble but amateur attempt at a garden behind my house. If you remember me mentioning, the few tomato plants that managed to squeeze themselves out of the soils didn’t grow taller than about 6 inches and the zucchini plants that looked lush and prolific at first only managed to push out one zucchini. I was not ready, however to give up on growing. After all, the neighbors all around me had their own plots that seemed to be thriving with corn, squash, and cucumbers. In order to get it right this time, I decided that I would take a more locally integrated approach than before.
In my first attempt, I had marched in confidently with my American seeds and my Peace Corps issued permagarden manual ready to show up my neighbors and teach them how to “increase their yield by 400%” as the manual boasts. I planted tomatoes, peppers and lettuce despite warnings that they wouldn’t survive in the summer heat. I was convinced that my gardening methods would revolutionize hundred of years of learned agricultural techniques here in Mozambique and that the locals simply suffered from a lack of knowledge. Once aware of their flaws, it would start with friends and neighbors, and then word would slowly spread until my burgeoning garden would be a beacon of hope for all struggling subsistence farmers. I would hold information sessions and have a gardening club and they would regale me for the bounty of their newfound harvest.
Well, needless to say, I got a little taste of humble pie as, despite my trenches and berms, double dug soil and water containment strategies, my plants withered and died. Thus, in attempt number two I enlisted the help of a student friend of mine to get my garden on track. He informed me that April was a good month to plant tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage and other leafy vegetables, but we would have to irrigate every day because it won’t rain again until December. I accepted and we set to work expanding our beds. After a day spent with a hoe in one hand and bag of manure in the other we had dug up about 10 beds ready for planting. Too stubborn to totally abandon my permagarden training, I made a bet with Nelito (my helper) that I would double dig my beds (the key to prolific bio-intensive gardening according to the experts) and he would carry on with the traditional surface level hoeing that everyone here does and we would see who’s plants grow higher. We planted tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, corn, sweet potatoes, okra, cabbage, and cilantro throughout the beds and set out watering our creation. We hooked up the hose, set out the sprinkler and two months later we had vegetables! Hmmm, not exactly. Without running water, you have to actually pump and carry the water yourself. Luckily, out nearest water pump is only about 200 yards away, so every afternoon we fill up and lug back the four 20-liter tanks that it takes to water all the beds. I enjoy the walk and chatting at the pump with the neighbors, but it makes you appreciate the ease of a hose and a sprinkler. Now, two months later, our garden looks pretty healthy. The corn is reaching upwards, the lettuce is almost ready to be cut and the tomatoes are filling in. I’m proud of our creation and think that the fruits of our labor will taste extra good when it’s finally time to harvest.
Although the garden is fun, the most fulfilling thing I do here is leading the English Club. This is something that, before arriving at site, I had almost no interest in doing. I wanted to teach science, maybe have a biology club and hold a science fair. Upon arriving at site, however, I was told that the volunteer I was replacing had been the leader of an English Club which put together theater pieces in English and posted a weekly English newspaper. I was never into theater in high school and while at times I entertained a fleeting interest in journalism it certainly was never a passion of mine. Looking for things to do here when I arrived, however, I hesitantly decided to follow in the previous volunteer’s footsteps and pick up the English Club that he had left off. That’s the best decision I’ve made here so far. Our English theater meetings on Thursday nights are the highlight of my week and the friendships I’ve made with my English club students who are trying so hard to learn English and are fascinated by all aspects of American culture have been the most fulfilling part of my Peace Corps experience so far. For a few months now we have been practicing our theater skit, a 15 minute piece that one of my student leaders wrote. It follows a student named Maraba who starts out as a good student but then falls into the wrong crowd and starts hanging out with drug dealers and prostitutes. He stops going to school and eventually gets HIV and transmits it to a young prostitute. The play ends with the prostitute renouncing Maraba’s behavior but seeking treatment and finding comfort in her friends. We presented our skit for the first time in front of the whole school a few weeks ago and it was a huge success. The kids didn’t back down in front of the audience and, despite the fact that no one could understand the dialogue (as it was in English) they acted it up, catered it to the audience and got a lot of laughs. It was a site to see and I was so proud of their effort.
Well, I don’t know how interested you all are in the ennui of my day to day life here – I promise I’ll get to more exciting things, but it’s important to know at least a little of what I’m doing on a day to day basis to get a backdrop for the more colorful stories. Ok. Here’s something. Wednesday was National Children’s Day in Mozambique. The kids had the day off school, and, given this occasion, Tim and I decided to plan a few events to celebrate. At noon the kids all ate a big feast of pork, chicken and rice (a huge occasion for them considering every other meal they are served in the boarding school is beans and xima – a flour-based tasteless porridgy concoction). Among the planned activities was a water balloon toss, a wheel-barrow race, a dizzy-bat relay race, musical chairs and piñatas to knock down for the winners. We had no idea what would be in store for us though.
Everything started off well enough. The night before we had stayed up making the piñatas from balloons, flour-water and strips of newspaper and came out ready to start the festivities with the water-balloon toss. Here’s the thing, have you ever tried organize 100 swarming children into a line while handing out water-balloons to them? It was chaos. First of all, none of them had ever seen water balloons before; they were mystified by these strange flubbery masses. Second of all, very few of them spoke Portuguese, so we needed to enlist older students to translate to Ndau for us and explain the game. Third of all, I don’t know if this pertains to all kids, or just this group of Mangunde kids in particular, but they have NO listening skills whatsoever. I think you could tell them to “TOSS THE BALLOON! WAIT! STEP BACK! WAIT! NOW, TOSS AGAIN!” a thousand times and they wouldn’t follow. Kids are throwing balloons back and forth, handing them off, stepping closer, you name it; they pretty much did everything but what they were supposed to do. Eventually enough people dropped their balloons so that only a few were left and we could select a winner, but it was a mess. By the end of the water balloon toss, we had used up nearly the whole hour that we had allotted for all of our games and it was beginning to rain (What?! I know it hadn’t rained in 3 months, but I guess the rain gods decided to rain on us the one day we had an activity planned). We still had another whole tub of filled water balloons though, so we decided to do the only logical activity left to do with them – break into an all-out every-man-for-himself water balloon war. A hundred kids rushed on the remaining bucket of balloons like it was the last chopper out of Vietnam and the frenzy ensued. What followed was a blur. I was shoving whole gaggles of swarming kids out of the way as I groped for more ammunition. I’ve been here at school coming up on 6 months now, which is long enough to develop a list in your mind of kids that you want to nail with a water balloon. It was a teacher’s dream. No rules, no cameras, just revenge. At some point I grabbed the whole bucket of balloons and put it over my head with kids hanging off me like King Kong stomping through the streets of New York City. Eventually their sheer number brought me down, but not before I was able to dump the whole bucket, which was now filled with just water from popped balloons on a few of my unsuspecting and very deserving students.
In the post-war chaos the rain began to pick up steam. We didn’t realize it because we were all soaked by that point, but the rain was now bucketing down heavily. We decided to skip the other relay races and musical chairs and head directly for the main event – the piñata. Ever since we hung the 4 effigies up on a string between two trees the kids had been eyeing them curiously. We had painted faces on the orbs and everyone seemed completely dumbfounded as to what these crazy American were planning to do – maybe they were religious idols to worship, lamps, giant water balloons, who knows? Well, given our somewhat limited arts and crafts prowess, we didn’t actually succeed in making real piñatas that were filled with candy as planned, so instead we had just hung up these hollow faces and were planning to have some students be blindfolded and try to knock them down with a stick. Simple enough, right? What could go wrong when you have an 8 year old blindly flinging around a giant bat while 100 other kids crowd around to see what is happening? Let me explain something here. Again, I don’t know if this pertains to all kids, just African children, Mozambicans or maybe just Mangunde students, but when it comes to observing anything, they are like little iron fillings around a magnet. You tell them to stay back, but they just keep craning the neck and somehow inch their way closer and closer until they surround you and completely suffocate you. Maybe a better analogy would be that ghost villain in Super Mario World. Do you know that ghost who stays put if Mario is looking at him, but creeps closer and closer as soon you turn around until he is right on you? Well, imagine that, but 100 kids creeping in on you and Mario swinging around a giant stick blindfolded. Concerned by the danger inherent in this activity, and to avert any heads being split open by errant swings, we decided to start off by attempting to demonstrate how one should approach and hit the piñata safely and calmly. We recruited one of our 12th grade helpers to do the demonstration. We blindfolded him, gave him the bat, and told the kids to stay back. He was explaining in Ndau so I could not follow what he was saying, but the instructions seemed simple enough and I was beginning to be reassured that this might turn out alright after all. But then, out of nowhere, he wound up the bat, and I kid you not, took an all out Ken Griffey Jr. homerun cut at the first piñata! He nailed it on the head, the piñata crumpled and went flying and his follow-through came to rest no more that 1 inch away from the head of a little 5 year old girl in the front row. I almost lost it and was ready to sign my Peace Corps resignation for being responsible for the death of a student, but nobody else outside of Tim and I seemed to sense the danger in this activity and everyone was thrilled with the exciting demolition. Reluctant, but anxious to get this over with and get out of the rain, we haphazardly handed to stick to one of the kids to pop the next piñata. The following 5 minutes of kid after kid blindly swinging around sticks with a crowd inching closer and closer were tense to say the least. Somehow, miraculously, no child was knocked unconscious by an errant swing and all the piñatas were destroyed. Phew.
The mayhem was not over yet though. I pose one final question. Have you ever tried to hand out candy in an orderly fashion to a crazed, rain-soaked mob of 100 kids who have absolutely no conception of what a “line” is? I would not recommend it. What ensued was what I would imagine happens when there is a fire in a crowded dance hall and only one exit, or if someone was handing out $100 bills on rush hour in downtown Manhattan. I was engulfed. We screamed, “form a line!” herding them into a line formation to receive candy one-by-one, but after only seconds the line would inevitably break and the people from the back would crowd around the front desperately stretching out their hands to receive a precious piece of candy or a sticker. We tried many different ways of organizing them and explaining to them that we had enough candy for everyone, but no matter how we did it, it would deteriorate into a swarm of desperate hands and bodies on the ground. Kids who received candy would put it in their pockets, cut in front of other and look for more, and kids with enough composure to stay in formation would be trampled. I have to say, I lost a little faith in humanity that day – I know they are just kids, but come on, it can’t be that difficult! The whole candy distribution crisis probably took about 30 minutes and half the kids didn’t get any candy. If they had formed a line, everyone could have had candy and it would have taken no more that 5 minutes tops. I don’t get it.
Again, maybe it’s just that they’re kids, but it seems to touch on a deeper cultural paradigm here – why can’t anyone in Mozambique seem to be able to form a line? You go the bank and people will just walk right in front of you and step up to the ATM without even thinking about it. Forget about it at a bus stop. When the bus comes it doesn’t matter if you’ve been waiting there all day and the person next to you just showed up, it’s every man for himself when that bus pulls up. I’ve been struggling to grasp why this happens. How is it that our culture is usually so orderly and systematic and Africa, or at least Mozambique, is chaotic? I may be opening a bigger can of worms than I have time to get into right now, but if I were to hasten a guess I would say that it comes down to a lack of resources and a confidence in the system. In America, we know that there will be another bus that will come at exactly 3:19, and allowing the person in front of you to get on the first bus is not a huge sacrifice; we also know that, in all likelihood, the bank will not run out of money today, and although we like candy a great deal, if we do empty out the free candy bowl at work we probably have the capability and funding to go down to Kwik Trip and buy a Snicker’s Bar. This is just a thought, but while it is tempting to see not only kids, but self-respecting adults here recklessly cutting people in lines, stealing my flip-flops, and groping for candy and think that there exists some kind of deep lack of integrity, I don’t think we can make that conclusion. I think there is a deeper complexity in the situation than originally meets the eye. People will learn to adapt as well as they can to the system they are placed in. On children’s day the kids that didn’t trample other kids or assert themselves in any way didn’t get any candy. In the same way, if you are waiting for precious food rations that your family needs to survive and you know that the food sacs will run out at some point you learn pretty quickly to cut to the front, shove others out of the way and get what you need. One thing that I have learned here, not just in line at banks and on chapas but in all aspects of life, is that assertiveness is rewarded. Modesty, deference, and passivity, traits that are generally regarded as positive and signs of good character in the States, will not get you anywhere here. You will end up at the back of the food line without any rice to bring home to your family. It is the assertive, even arrogant, self-promotional man who will get what he wants in this country. You cannot sit back looking defeated and hope that others will pick up on social cues and have pity on you like you might be able to get away with in the States – on this continent you will be trampled. Sorry, random thoughts. Anyway, I suppose I should wrap up this post as it is now rivaling the tale of the “Tabishan Peach Pie” in length and pointlessness. For those of you who have made it this far though, I will leave you with a poem that I liked which one of my 9th grade students wrote to be posted in our last edition of the English newspaper. Take care!
I wrote your beautiful name
On the wall of my bedroom,
But the paint with jealousy
Put it out
I wrote your beautiful name
Under my shoes,
But the dirt with jealously
Put it out
I wrote your beautiful name
In the sand,
But the waves with jealously
Put it out
I wrote your beautiful name
On the side of my heart,
And there it stayed
Forever
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