It’s two in the morning and I wake up suddenly to the cacophony of a
rooster humping a chicken outside my window.
This has happened every night for the past two weeks and unfortunately
for me this particularly horny rooster tends to cluck wildly we he is on the prowl
for vulnerable hens. Why he’s not
sleeping like the rest of the world is trying haplessly to do at two in the
morning, I don’t know. I look out my window
and perhaps emboldened by the anonymity of darkness the rooster has let the
victimized hen out of his clutches and sets his target on my garden. First he pokes around the seedling basil,
then tears clean a few leaves of nascent green bean plants and then rests his
icy and sinister gaze on the lettuce I just transplanted yesterday. I will not stand by and watch all of my work
be destroyed by the malignant whims of a rooster. Can I run outside at two in the morning with
my boxers on and catch this pest? The
answer is no. I go back to bed and toss
and turn restlessly with the knowledge that my already feeble garden is being
killed a little more every night by a pea-brained rooster.
I have tried to catch this rooster before. I would recommend this activity to anyone
marooned at a mission school with few other sources of stimulation. I have to confess that it’s not as easy to
catch a rooster as one might imagine.
They are as wily as they are annoying when you are trying to corner them
and actually get them in your grips. If
you, dear reader, are ever unlucky enough to be faced with a pernicious rooster
problem and need to go about capturing said rooster, here are some recommended supplies
you may need to carry out this task: sturdy shoes, long sleeves because you
maybe be chasing the rooster into thorny bushes, a few stones to throw and, most
importantly, a band of anywhere from 2 to 10 children who have nothing better
to do than chase a rooster around for 2 hours.
Step one is to try to surprise the rooster, if you can catch it off
guard, maybe, just maybe, you can nab it before the chase ever begins. This, however, is unlikely. What will probably happen is that during the stealthy
approach one of the kids will get over-anxious and rush too early. The rooster will get spooked and run for dear
life. Then, the chase is on. Roosters, unbeknownst to me before engaging
in this hobby, are quick little suckers.
They only have two legs, but they start pumping that head back and forth
and the momentum drives them forward. You
will not outrun a rooster in a foot-race, you must use your guile to catch
them. Set up a perimeter of equidistant children
around the rooster, and begin moving uniformly inward to trap him inside the
circle. Once you get within 10 feet of
the rooster, it will sense danger and starting freaking out. This is when you must act. Close then circle rapidly and hope that
someone is able to dive on and nab the rooster.
Another wild card, however, that I didn’t know about roosters comes into
play during this step. You may think
that they can’t fly. You would be
mistaken. While I’ve never seen a
rooster flying up in the clouds, they will start flapping those stubby wings of
theirs and get high enough to fly right over your head when you close the
circle. The dust will settle and you and
your child helpers will all be clutching air, piled on top of each other like
policemen trying to catch the savvy bank robber in a cartoon. Once you pull your wits together and start
looking around for the elusive rooster, you will realize that it has
disappeared. In addition to being quick
and flighty, a well-adapted rooster will also be an accomplished hider. They duck into thickets of grass and bushes
and remain there, absolutely still until you have stepped right over them and
not noticed. The chase is over and you
have lost, again. This has happened to
me countless times and I still don’t have the evil rooster in my grasp.
It’s actually become a running joke here in Mangunde. Our house is literally a stone’s throw away
from the school and at times feels a lot like a fish bowl. Students and teachers are walking by,
relaxing in front of our house, playing on the field and always watching what’s
going on in “Teacher’s” house. Thus,
they see me maniacally chasing a rooster in my pajamas five days a week and
have probably already begun to question my sanity. People will ask me on my way to school how
the chase is going and I tell them “bit by bit, I’ll kill that rooster if I
ever catch it.”
Chasing roosters, however, is not the only thing that I’ve been up to
here in Mangunde over the past couple of months. It has been a busy and very enjoyable last
couple of months filled with classes, theater presentations and even a few school
trips. I have been happy to settle into
the day to day flow of simply being here at site throughout May and June. Often, between trips to the provincial
capital, Peace Corps parties and other non-curricular events it can feel a bit
like I am a visitor even at my own home here in Mangunde, always coming and
going, and never staying long enough to simply exist and adjust to the rhythm
of day to day life. The past two months,
however, have offered me that chance.
For the most part, over the past two months, I have been exactly where I
want to be, here. I’ve had the chance to
focus on my teaching during the days at school, spend time with my students in
my various extra-curricular clubs in the evenings and enjoy time tending the
garden, cooking, and relaxing at home.
Here at the house we’ve had a few new developments that have
significantly altered and improved our quality of life. As you may remember from an earlier post of
mine, we had a situation here where our modestly sized house and meager incomes
were supporting a family of four, our housekeeper Gracinda, her now two
year-old son Jacinto, and her two teenage nephews. The situation was taxing our patience and
also taking a chuck out of our living stipends.
Thus, we decided to make a change.
As of the beginning of May, Mike and I decided that we would begin
cooking all of our meals for ourselves and have our housekeeper begin providing
food for herself and her family from the wages she already receives. This may not seem like a large alteration,
but when you’re talking about the livelihood of a family you care dearly about,
it is a serious conversation. The plan
worked though, and for almost two months now, Mike and I have been expanding
our recipe books and enjoying the fruits of our own cooking. There still is very little fresh food to be
found in Mangunde, which diminishes the size of one’s cookbook drastically to essentially
variations on beans, lentils, and pasta, but, to us, it still feels like
culinary freedom, and it feels great.
At school, it is mid-June and we are nearly finished with the second
trimester. Meaning, wow, I only have one
trimester left in my Peace Corps service.
I am still teaching 10th grade English, 8th grade
biology and 12th grade computers and I am enjoying myself in the
classroom. Despite the fact that I do enjoy
my time in the classroom, I can say, without a doubt that I have now officially
lost hope in education, period. This is what
two years in the Mozambican education system will do to even the most optimistic
PCVs out there. Is lose faith in the
future of humanity too strong of a statement?
I’m not sure. I remember when I
first started teaching here how surprised I was by how slowly students learned,
and then realized, no, it wasn’t slow learning, at times it was no learning. These days I shouldn’t be surprised anymore,
but I still find myself scratching my head at times saying, “How? How can you NOT get this? I literally can’t
spell it out for you any clearer…” Yet
there are students who, after a year and a half with me as their English
teacher, don’t know more than a dozen disparate words of English. I don’t understand. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some
students, a select few, who are so refreshingly smart that they momentarily
restore your once lost faith in humanity.
You can ask them about things learned in previous classes and they just
might show some indication that they were on this planet during the class and
maybe, just maybe, learned something.
There are those, however, who clearly were not even in the same
galaxy.
Let me give you an example. I’m
giving a biology test about the digestive system and am giving them instruction
for the test. Just so that everything is
clear I tell them “Let’s do number one together. What is the first part of the digestive
system? Look at the picture on the
blackboard and write down the name of the first part of the digestive
system. Anyone? Anyone?
Bueller? The answer is boca.
That’s B-O-C-A. Boca. There were it says ‘number one’ on your
test, everyone, right now, write B-O-C-A.”
One would think that surely everyone would at least get number one, boca, correct. Well, I was wrong. Somehow, somewhere in that series of words a
neuron misfired for about 25 percent of the class because about a quarter of
the class got number one, boca,
incorrect. Again, sometimes I just don’t
know.
At one point during an English class in which I was teaching the present
perfect tense (i.e. I have written, she has arrived) I had a
revelation. The present perfect tense
isn’t an overly complicated tense to comprehend, but I knew that it was
probably going to be a stretch for many of my students. The task of stringing together three words
and conjugating both the verb “to have” and the correct form of the past participle (i.e. written, arrived)
would outwit the vast majority of my 10th graders. One would think, however, that given a set
formula to follow, and me being there to guide them through it, they would
eventually at least grasp some kind of understanding of this tense. This, I found out, was very optimistic. As I was up there carefully explaining the
steps “begin with the subject, I, then,
what’s the next word on the board?
Anyone? Bueller? Right there after I what is written on the board, look at the board, after I, anyone? Have. I have”
I realized that I was talking to these 16 year-olds as if they were in second
grade. This is how I would address a
second grader if I was teaching in the States.
I’ve found myself doing this because I ‘ve found that many of their
abilities to follow simple logical steps is, I’m not kidding, at the level of
what I would expect an eight year-old to have.
The ability to learn a form or a process, whether it is a grammar rule
in English, a mathematical principal or a chemical equation, and apply it to
new situations is a jump in logical thinking that, I would imagine, happens for
most students somewhere between second grade and high school. It’s very important, but, and I say this with
the utmost consideration of all of my students, it is something that I’ve found
to be quite scarce here and it often leaves me at a loss for what to
teach. Do I try haplessly to teach them
all of the advanced grammatical concepts that the nationally published
curriculum requires that they know, or do I approach it like an elementary
school ESL class and try to get them thinking, even if just a little, about some
basic concepts in English. It seems to
me that there’s no right answer to that question so I keep chugging along with
my vocabulary and grammar rules and hope that, somewhere along the way, someone
gets something useful out of it.
Outside of classes, my projects, JUNTOS theater, English journalism and
English theater, have been very active in the last couple of months and I have
a lot of fun activities to talk about.
That, however, will have to wait until next time because it is midnight
here in Mozambique which is far past my bed time, and the rooster is going to
start clucking any minute now as it gulps down more of my lettuce. Thus, I’m going to wrap up in my blanket and
my long underwear (yes, it’s that cold here now) and go to bed. By the way, anyone who tells you that Africa
is all hot all the time is a liar. As I
write on the computer in my room with the window open, I can see my breath in
front of me. I don’t know what that
means temperature-wise, but it has to be cold.
Google only tells me that seeing your breath means that the temperature
is below the dew point, and unfortunately the local Mangunde meteorologist doesn’t
broadcast the local temperature or the dew point, but I think it must be in the
40s here. Anyway, I’m cold and tired, so
thanks for reading this far and I hope to hear from you all soon!
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