Subway, Seminars and the Smoke that Thunders

So, where I left of in my last blog post I was slowly catching up to the present day.  We had just celebrated Women’s Day on April 7^th and I was getting ready for exams and the end of the first trimester.  Exam time went by rather seamlessly here in Mangunde, but PCVs in other parts of the country did not have it so easy.  Word spread quickly (well, as quickly as word spreads here in Mozambique) that this year the Ministry of Education would begin provincially standardized final exams, what we call “ACPs” here.  Sounds like a decent idea, right?  That’s probably what the Ministry of Education thought when they implemented them too.  Well, it was a disaster.  Luckily Mangunde, being a privately funded mission enjoys a certain degree of autonomy from the Ministry and we were not submitted to such ridiculous and whimsical testing methods.  We’ve heard, however, that we will begin the provincial testing this trimester.  From what I’ve heard the provincial-wide tests were distributed in some cases only days before the tests were to be given.  The content of the tests was, at best, a random assemblage of questions loosely related to the discipline being tested.  This gave the teachers no time to prepare their students for the final exam and, in many cases, ended up submitting the students to testing on material they had not yet learned.  Am I surprised that they wouldn’t tell teachers this until a few days before the test?  No.  I’ve come to expect a certain level of neglect when it comes to organization in the central government and a barefaced inattention to advanced planning.  They seem to just expect that teachers and students will adjust to this minor change.  Does nobody plan ahead in this country?  I’ve learned, now almost 19 months into my stay in Mozambique, that the answer is no – we  have a teacher’s meeting in 10 minutes; cancel your classes this afternoon; there’s no school today because the administrator is visiting tomorrow and all the students have to spend the afternoon cleaning the classrooms; the dates of the holiday break have been moved up two weeks, cancel your trip.  Such is life in Mozambique.  Those that plan ahead are punished. 

No matter, I got all 492 of my tests graded (I have eight sections of biology and English with 60-70 kids in each class) and I booked it out of Mangunde to begin this first phase of my vacation from a fulfilling yet wearying life here in Mangunde.  The first event on the agenda for break was a weekend conference that had I planned for Mozambican counterparts of the JUNTOS project.  I am the regional coordinator this year for JUNTOS and in April had to put together the “Training of trainers” or “ToT” conference aimed at capacitating Mozambican teachers in leadership skills, technical knowledge of HIV/AIDS and confronting gender issues.   Not much of a vacation from the work and stress of school, but nonetheless a lot of fun and an important event for the success of the JUNTOS project this year.  JUNTOS is an acronym that stands for, in Portuguese of course, Youth United in the Work for Opportunities and Success.  It has a much better ring to it in Portuguese, I promise.  To boot, the completed acronym happens to spell out the word “juntos” which means “together” and is an informal national slogan that all Mozambicans stand behind.  Anyway, across the central region of Mozambique, there are 20 of these JUNTOS groups empowering youth to be leaders and activists in their communities through the mediums of theater, journalism, art or music. 

This particular conference was a two day crash course for the teachers on the basic objectives of the JUNTOS project, and some brief training in how to lead sessions on gender, HIV/AIDS, self-esteem, puberty and others.  Luckily, while I was behind the scenes planning all of the seemingly petty details of the event like food, transportation, supplies and lodging, I hired a trained facilitator to do the dirty work and actually lead the sessions because you couldn’t pay me to step into the conference room and lecture a bunch of adults in Portuguese about the importance of abstinence and the changes that happen during puberty.  The facilitator did a fantastic job with the counterparts, but, like so often happens in Mozambique, he had some last minute changes to the curriculum he wanted to make.  Thus, 20 minutes before the reproductive health session started the facilitator stepped out and insisted that I, as a biology professor, would be more qualified to lead the following sessions on the female reproductive system, the menstrual cycle, and masturbation.  Well great, I thought.  Here we go again.  Luckily, it’s not something I haven’t done before.  Between facilitating my own JUNTOS group for over a year and teaching 8^th grade biology in which we have units on the male and female reproductive system I’ve spent a good portion of my Peace Corps service talking about the infamous penis and vagina.  The 8^th graders tend to giggle when I throw up the poster of a gigantic penis, and are disturbingly adept at sliding a condom over a prosthetic penis, but all in all, reproductive system classes are always an experience.  You would think that the adult teachers attending the ToT conference, then, would be slightly more mature and would have had the ability to say the word “penis” without laughing uproariously.  This was not the case.  By the end of the session they were howling and telling stories about masturbation.  One counterpart relayed a story to us about how he proved that, indeed, you can’t urinate and ejaculate at the same time.  Thank you for that.  Outside of a few minor hiccups—no complimentary toothbrushes and having to eat chicken and fries with spoons—the event was a huge success.  All of the counterparts came away with a great understanding of the objectives of the JUNTOS projects, how to facilitate and motivate their youth, what potential projects they can initiate this year, and, most importantly, that HIV can be spread if an infected male ejaculates into your bath bucket before you take a bath, and, in the process of your bath you clean thoroughly all of your orifices with the infected water. 

After the ToT conference was finally over and the echoes of trifling complaints made by childish counterparts had faded from my consciousness my vacation had finally begun.  There was no time to rest though.  My plan was to hop a bus headed north and not stop until I got to one of the seven natural wonders of the world – the one and only, Victoria Falls.  Victoria Falls, or simply Vic Falls, is made up of a breathtaking stretch of the Zambezi River that lies is on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, two countries that border Mozambique to the west.  In order to get to Vic Falls from Mozambique and not get kicked out of the Peace Corps, you have to either fly directly there or go overland up the length of Mozambique, into Zambia and across to the border with Zimbabwe.  Because of an unstable political situation in Zimbabwe and the ruling dictator, Robert Mugabe, has been unwilling to submit to democratic elections, the Peace Corps has banned all travel to and even through Zimbabwe.  Unfortunately for me, that meant that what could have been a one and a half day jaunt through the verdant mountains of Zimbabwe turned into a two and a half day trudge through the dry flatlands of central Mozambique and Zambia.  No worries though, it was the destination that counted.  On day two of the trip, the three friends I was travelling with and I made the long-awaited passage across the border into an unknown land, Zambia.  To the untrained eye Zambia might seem no different from Mozambique – same dry grassland with rocky hills as a backdrop, and the same narrow pot-holed roads with roadside stands selling charcoal, goats and anything else one could want to stop and pick up on the way out of the country.  If you judged a country simply by its roads and landscape near the border, however, you wouldn’t be giving it a fair chance to prove its true worth.  On closer inspection I found Zambia to be a charming place which I became quite enamored with after only a few days there.  Why?  You might ask…well, it’s pretty simple, actually. 

The capital of Zambia is a sprawling urban metropolis called Lusaka which isn’t particularly beautiful but has clear advantages.  While Lusaka has many desirable offerings, above all, what sets it above any other African city that I have thus far encountered is that Lusaka has, yes, Subway.  The first time I saw it I thought it was a mirage.  I was entering the city on a bus and the yellow and white letters of “Subway” blurred by and teased my imprisoned appetite which lay behind the fogged up window of the bus.  It must be in my head, I thought.  When I was ambulatory later that afternoon, however, and had a chance to check it out for myself, I learned that what I saw was not, in fact, a mirage, but a real live Subway here in Africa!  When I entered it was quite a surreal experience.  From the menu down to the bathrooms, stock photos and wallpaper, it was identical to every Subway I have ever been to in the states.  The only exception was that instead of $5 footlongs that had 19,000 Kwacha footlongs.  Needless to say, I ordered a footlong oven roasted chicken breast on honey oat with extra sweet onion sauce.  Unfortunately, on this occasion they did not have pepper jack cheese which would have completed my fantasy.  Outside of the Subway in Lusaka, I found it to be a remarkably modern city, compared to the cities in Mozambique that I’m used to.  There were shopping malls with movie theaters, restaurants, and supermarkets.  Except for the clear absence of other white people, I could’ve been in downtown Milwaukee.  We stayed in Lusaka for only one night in transit, for the following morning we planned to board a bus headed to Livingstone, a town just a few miles outside of our final destination, Vic Falls.  It’s worth noting that on our one night in Lusaka we went to the supermarket to pick up supplies for dinner and ended up making fajitas with real tortillas, ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes and cheese.  It may have been even more divine than the Subway lunch we had on our way in.  For those who are unfamiliar with Mozambique, there is most certainly no supermarket that sells pre-made tortillas and nowhere within six hours of me that sells ground beef or cheese, so this was a special treat to say the least.

At last, though, it was time to see the one and only, majestic beast of a waterfall that is Victoria Falls.  We spent the night in Livingstone and woke up bright and early the next morning armed with our camera and ponchos to visit the falls.  We heard it before we saw it.  Half a mile awhile you could hear the low rumbling of the falls in the distance.  March through May is the wet and therefore high season for Vic Falls which means that we can at the peak of its volume and it didn’t disappoint.  It is said that Vic Falls flows at an average rate of 10 million liters per second, but that in the high season it’s been measured at as many as 70 million liters per second.  In addition to that, it boasts figures of 108 meters tall (354 feet) and 1.7 kilometers wide (1 mile).  As we approached the falls and could almost get a glimpse of them through the dense vegetation you could feel the sonorous blasts of water almost viscerally.  When we finally peeked through an opening in the trees and got our first sight of falls I was surprised to see that I really couldn’t see anything.  I thought it was maybe just at a bad angle, but every subsequent lookout we stopped and peered through we were struck with the same image—mist, mist and more mist.  It turns out that while Vic Falls is magnificent in its power and sheer size, in the high and wet season there aren’t a whole lot of falls to be seen.  What we could see were vast blankets of mist billowing up from a deep and narrow chasm that seemed to have been chiseled out of the earth.  While shrouded in mist, the strong morning sun managed to pierce through the covering and create a complete and vivid rainbow to give color to the scene.  At this point we had walked along the length of the precipice that looks down into the gorge and while we hadn’t yet seen a whole lot of the falling water we had certainly felt enough of it.  During the wet season, if you going anywhere close to the edge of the 108 meter deep gorge you will be drenched it what seems like a heavy downpour coming down in thick droplets.  It is, of course, the mist billowing up powerfully from the bottom of the gorge.  Because of the booming sound and the thick mist that define Vic Falls it has come to take on the slogan “The smoke that thunders” and you can’t take two steps without a local referencing that catchphrase as he tries to con you into buying one of his “smoke that thunders” nick-naks.  In the dry season, however, “the smoke that thunders” apparently doesn’t quite live up to its name. One can allegedly walk along the cliff as we did without being threatened with even a drop of water.  Additionally one can actually walk out into the river on top of the falls and swim in the small pools overlooking the edge because of the absence of water.

That day we spent most of the morning walking the gorge, hiking down to the riverside, and even walking through a small zebra sanctuary up near the top of the river.  We couldn’t leave, however, without walking across the historic bridge that connects Zimbabwe and Zambia over the gorge and provides one of the best views of the falls from a distance.  The bridge also happens to be the host of a bungee-jumping operation boasting one of the world’s highest bungee jumps.  You fall off of the bridge and plummet 100 meters into the tumultuous mouth of the gorge where, if you’re lucky, the rope with catch and sling you back upward to avoid you falling to your untimely death.  I have to say, I was skeptical about the bungee jumping.  Heights have never really been a point of extreme interest for me.  I was slightly nauseated just stepping onto the bridge to begin with, let alone contemplating the thought of jumping off of it.  Add to this the fact that at this very bridge about five months ago there was an international news story about an Australian girls whose bungee cord snapped during her jump and she miraculously survived the 50 meter fall into the teeming rapids below, and I was downright terrified.  They replaced the ropes, so they say.  It came time for us to make a decision: do we jump or don’t we?  Just my luck, all three of my friends opted for the $150 Big Air package, which includes not only a bungee jump, but also a zip-line across the gorge and a gorge swing.  Hmmm, talk about peer pressure.  If you were me, what would you do?  Risk falling to your untimely death or swallow a little pride and be the cameraman?  I went with a compromise.  I opted for the “kid’s meal” of bungee jumping, the zip-line across the gorge, hold the bungee jumping and the gorge swing.  You can make the zip-line sound really bad-ass if you talk it up, but, in reality, is not that much more adrenaline-pumping than the ball pit in the McDonalds PlayPlace.  I stick by my decision, though.  It was beautiful.  I slid across the length of the gorge 100 meters over the water and spread my arms out to let the moist air blow through my fingers as the sun lowered in the distance.  It turns out my friends did not fall to their deaths while bungee jumping, but they did have some pretty sweet pictures to take home at the end of the day because I was up in the cockpit shooting them. 

After our experience in Vic Falls, we had one more day in the Livingstone area before having to head back to Mozambique.  We decided that we would take advantage of a wonderfully diverse wildlife park that was within walking distance of the Falls.  Thus, we woke up early in the morning and headed to Mosi-ao-Tunya National Park.  We opted for a guided walking/driving tour of the park and spent the next 3 hours or so testing our hands at spotting wildlife.  Over the course of the safari we spotted numerous giraffes, countless impalas, a few elephants, one of which charged the open-air jeep we were in at the time and nearly gave us all heart-attacks, warthogs, wildebeests, a small family of white rhinos and a number of other savanna dwellers.  All in all, it was quite a worthwhile journey.  After the safari we had one last taste of Zambian cuisine – Subway and delivery pizza – and were on our way back into Mozambique.  When we arrived at the Zambia-Mozambique border around noon we quickly realized that we were, indeed, back in Mozambique.  We were in quite a hurry to try to make it all the way down to Tete City, a good five hours from the border, before dark, and we arrived at the border only to realize that the guard was off duty and eating lunch.  We could’ve probably walked through unnoticed but figured it would be a bad idea to illegally enter our own country of residence.  The guard must have decided to also take an afternoon siesta because we waited and waited for him to come.  It’s good to know that Mozambique is really serious about border control.  Next time you need to smuggle drugs into the country, try between 12 and 2pm, you won’t see a soul there.  Eventually, however, he came and leisurely, unapologetically stamped us back into our territory.  The next day I arrived back to Chimoio, the provincial capital, stocked up on food, and thus ended my magical adventure which had taken me to far and distant lands.  I headed back to Mangunde the following day to begin the second trimester. 

I will leave my story there for now.  It turns out that because of a couple of strategically placed holidays in the Mozambican education calendar I only actually stayed at Mangunde for about three days and gave exactly two days of classes after my Zambian adventure before heading off for another week and a half vacation.  I will pick up that story, however, in my next blog.  For now, I hope that all is well at home and that you continue to enjoy the warm spring weather.  Until next time!   

Women's Day

Hello and Happy Labor Day to everyone! In Mozambique May 1^st is Dia dos Trabalhadores (Labor Day) and I am celebrating the holiday visiting other volunteers in the province of Tete, far away from my students and responsibilities back in Mangunde. You see, May 1^st falls on a Tuesday this year which sets up an interesting scenario for anyone actually trying to work at any point this week. A Tuesday holiday will automatically render Monday a day off and, given the nature of most activities on holidays, many consider the day after the holiday to be a informal “hangover” day-off. The week before Labor Day was the first week of the second trimester, an informal holiday week in itself in which teachers and student commonly affirm that there is “supposed” to be class but wink afterward when you ask if they will actually go in to give classes. Thus, here I am enjoying the tail end of a pleasant 4-week vacation which was supposed to only be a one-week break from school. So, how have I spent my luxurious holiday away from Mangunde? Well, I've spent the past month doing many interesting things, visiting friends and getting to know more and more of Mozambique and Southern Africa. Before I talk about my escapades on the roads, parks and beaches of Africa, however, I want to first talk a little about the end of my trimester back in Mangunde.

The last time we checked in was over a month ago and I was gearing up for a year of teaching English, Biology, and computers along with running my JUNTOS, English Theater and journalism clubs. Back in March things were just finding their rhythm again after a long summer hiatus. Students were beginning to get involved in clubs, we had presented out first HIV/AIDS theater in front of the school audience and I was getting ready to give my first exams to a surprisingly active and interested group of 8^th and 10^th grades students.

Near the end of the trimester, on April 7^th, we had the opportunity to celebrate an important holiday here in Mozambique, Dia das Mulheres (Women's Day). All across the country shops were closed and school was canceled to celebrate the accomplishments of Mozambican women. In Mangunde, Mike and I decided to repeat a wonderfully successful event that I organized with my old roommate Tim last year. We organized a girls' soccer tournament with a a variety of poems, music and theaters between the games to celebrate Mozambican women. Just like last year the event was a huge success. Like everything in Mozambique it was a challenge to organize – prizes, biscuits, and juice had to be bought in the city and lugged back into the mission, girls had to be organized into teams, and reminded, as all high school students do, over and over not to forget what time to show up. In addition, this year Women's Day fell on the same day as the Saturday before Easter, which, in the world of Catholic missions, is a pretty big deal. Thus, we were told that we had to finish the event by noon so that the day of prayer and silent reconciliation could begin. Despite these difficulties we were able to put on a great day of games and activities.

At 6 a.m. the girls were out lining the field, which, in Mozambique means carving out lines from the rock hard dirt and dropping ash into the crease. We had a tournament table with the draw posted and a table of juice and snacks for the players. At 7 a.m, the first game kicked off. Both last year and this year I've noticed how important and appreciated it is by all of the girls involved. The girls here in Mangunde are so often overlooked and don't receive the same types of opportunities that the male students receive, so to have an event purely devoted to the female students at least one day a year was gratifying for Mike and I. During the games, male students continually approached me to ask when we would be having the boy's tournament. All I could do in response was laugh and say, “every other day of the year.” The boys play soccer after school every single day on the field in front of the school and refuse the girls access to the balls. In addition, girls are prohibited from leaving the dormitory every evening a 6 p.m. while the boys are allowed to roam free until the bell rings to go to bed at 9 p.m. Add to that the small, insignificant fact that women are typically treated like child-rearing and water-carting slaves to their husbands, and it was about time to have a day devoted to the Mozambican woman.

In between the games, Mike's REDES group (a girls' group devoted to female empowerment in the fight against HIV/AIDS) and my JUNTOS group (boys and girls) gave presentations between the game to commemorate the occasion. After it was all over we handed the prizes (a notebook, pen, cookies and sodas) to the winning team who stormed the field kicking up dust in a wild celebration as the final whistle blew to close the tournament.

After the tournament Mike and I retreated to our house to enjoy a special holiday lunch prepared by Gracinda, our house-keeper. All day we could smell the chicken cooking in our house from the soccer field and were salivating from 10 a.m. on. The chicken we ate on Woman's Day, however, was no ordinary chicken. Any time you have chicken or beef in Mangunde it's a special occasion. Unfortunately, the local market which is composed of about 2 stalls selling a meager assortment of leaves and fruits, depending on the day, does not have a frozen meat section, in fact, it doesn't even have a live meat section. That means that when you want chicken you have to go find yourself a real live chicken. Some households out in the mato (bush) have a collection of of rangy emaciated chickens that you can seek out and buy, but it's not easy...then, of course, you have to kill it and de-feather it or find someone to do it for you. All in all, not an ideal situation for a carnivore like me. Therefore, when we had succulent and tender chickens roasting on the coal fire that afternoon on Woman's Day it was a truly special occasion. It didn't happen overnight though. Let me explain. Last year in November Tim, the exiting Moz 14 volunteer made it his final project to organize the building of a chicken coop for a local micro-finance group. The idea was to providing the funding for the building of the chicken coop and start-up money to buy chicks and then allow the members of the group to raise and sell the chickens in order to generate income to fund their micro-loans. Well, when Tim left and 3 months passed with no chicks, no feed, and missing parts all around the coup I began to lose hope that the building would ever be completed. After I met with them in February, however, to go over their remaining finances, a flurry of activity finally allowed the remaining pieces to be put into place on the chicken coup. The structure was finished, 200 chicks were purchased with feed, antibiotics, feeders and waterers. For 3 weeks I checked in with the growing chicks weekly to see them growing and was assured that come April 7^th (Woman's Day) we would have ourselves some plump young chickens ripe for holiday picking.

A few days before Women's Day I went down to the chicken coop to finally pick up the chicks that I had watched grow into juicy plump chickens. When I arrived I found Sr. Marima, the manager of the finance group and driving force behind the chicken operation, asleep in the miniature chicken house surrounded my 200 scratching and nibbling chickens. When I asked what he was doing he told me that he's been sleeping in the chicken coup for the past two weeks. He seemed exhausted and told me that you can't leave the chicks unattended. While we were talking, almost like a nervous tic, he would violently shake the tarp and chicken-wire wall of the house in order to scare and wake the chicks up so that they would return to eating and drinking. It was fascinating to see how devoted he was to the chickens and I understood why. His livelihood was locked up in that chicken coup. In addition to receiving the initial grant through Tim for the building, the micro-finance group made a significant contribution of personal funds to complete the coup and purchase the chicks. They took a risk and are now hoping that they will be able to sell all 200 chicks in order to turn a profit and make their investment worthwhile. I suppose this was particularly heartening for me to see because here in Mozambique it's can be rare to see foreign-initiated projects with such strong local investment. My experience so far as a Peace Corps volunteer in a developing Africa which is inundated in foreign aid and free hand-outs has been that often people come to feel entitled to the money they are given, pocket it, or simply not care about the projects and only about the money coming into their wallets. This was different. It was clear that Sr. Marima was deeply committed to the chicken coup project. It showed in the chickens. Back at the house, Mike and I chowed down on the best meio frango (literally “half-chicken”) that Mangunde has ever seen and enjoyed a relaxing conclusion to a successful tournament and Women’s Day.

Alright, I’m going to leave in at that for now. Much has happened since I began to write this blog post and which I am now finishing. So…you may find is slightly out-dated. You can be sure that as soon as this is posted there will be one or two closely following because I’m still about a month behind and slowly fighting my way back to keep you all up to date on the meanderings of my insignificant life here in Mozambique. Until next time!

Mangunde Update: 2012...What's New?

So, what is year two like here in the Peace Corps? Here at Mangunde? Is it much different from year one? When I look back on the year that I had last year and the year that shaping up in front of me this year, there are, of course, some things that haven't changed. Mangunde is still Mangunde. There are no vegetables to be found anywhere except for the occasional meal of squash or cassava leaves, and transport in and out of the mission means waiting hours for a car that may never come and giving yourself a bruised behind while you absorb the 25km of rocks and mud on the way out. The students are still as active as ever, participating in clubs and sports and not studying when I tell them that we have a test the next day. Gracinda, our Mozambican housekeeper, is still living with us, fetching our water, washing our clothes, cooking a lot of beans, and gracing our presence with her eternally playful now 21 months year old son, Jacinto. The days are busy, the nights are still hot enough to require a fan aimed directly into my face, and the emotional roller coaster of living in this culture and in this world rides on.

There are, however, many things that have changed, both internally and externally, about my life here in Mangunde. On the surface level I now have a new roommate, Mike. The end of 2011 meant the departure of Tim, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer who had entered Mangunde a year before me and already completed his two years of service, and opened the door for a new Peace Corps volunteer, fresh off the boat from America and freshly sworn-in after training in Namaacha.. Mike, or Teacher Mike, as the students here like to dub us, is part of the Moz 17 group (17th generation of PCVs in Mozambique) and arrived to Mangunde in December, seamlessly taking up lodging in Tim's vacated room, just on the other side of the wall from my now veteran domicile. Much like I had done a year before, Mike spent his first month at Mangunde with virtually no one here to talk to. I was enjoying my break in Malawi, Maputo, Cape Town and then America, while he was here sitting in a barren room trying to integrate into a community that had not yet formed around him. I could relate to his experience. During the holidays, Mangunde becomes a ghost town. The teachers, students and workers that make Mangunde such a vibrant hub of activity during the school year venture to their homes and families during the holidays and leave Mangunde as a shadow of its full self. Despite the difficulty that one's first month at Mangunde tends to present to newcomers, Mike adjusted well and always kept an open mind about what his life in Mangunde might eventually shape into. By the time I arrived back in "The Gunde" as I like to call it, we were ready to take on the year together.

So besides a new housemate, what changed here at Mangunde since last year? Well, in addition to losing Tim, my PCV housemate, we also lost a beloved member of our household here, Anita. Anita is Gracinda's 10 years old niece who was living with us and helping with the baby and chores when Gracinda was at school. Anita's mother has a lot of kids on her hands, and it is very customary in this culture to pawn off your children to a relative who is in a better financial situation to take care of them. That's why, for example, you will often see professors here living with 3 or 4 children who are not their own, younger siblings, cousins, nephews, nieces. Thus, Anita had been living with us here in Mangunde, because we had a favorable situation where meals and housing were provided. Unfortunately, however, she went back home this year and was replaced by two of her older siblings, Inoria and Jose. So our family is growing. Six mouths to feed is a lot. I have to say that while I enjoy the company of all of our guests, especially little Jacinto, I can't deny that it hasn't been a source of minor frustration. Food, which as you know, is a highly valued commodity, and one which takes considerable effort to get into the mission from the city disappears at an alarming rate when it is spread across six mouths. Here is the clip we are riding now: one liter of oil per week, one kilo of rice per day, one flat (30) eggs per week, one kilo of sugar per week... If you are not familiar with metric measurements, let me just say that a kilo is a lot of rice. One kilo is 2.2 pounds. In addition to filling bellies, we also considerably fill our small house. With people coming and going, cooking, crying and playing it can be difficult to find some often much needed privacy. Even in my second year here it can often feel like I'm merely an occupant in someone else's house. Coming out of training and being catapulted into the big time as a real live PCV, most PCVs have the compulsion to take control of some of the more concrete parts of their lives to give them comfort - cook, clean, redecorate their house, etc. In a culture which can feel so different and in a job which has so few observable rewards, it is often the little things that you do for your personal self that keep you going. Here at Mangunde, we never really got that side of PCV life and I can't deny that I've always been a little regretful about it. The upside of having a house full of Mozambicans, however, is that there's never a lonely moment. You can always count on someone being there to talk to or joke around with, and you feel like a greater part of the Mangunde community. What natural separation we have from the community because of our skin color and status is offset by our house being a hub of activity, having Mozambicans always around, not just our live-in family, but also students and professors constantly stopping by and chatting.

What is else is new here in Mangunde? 'Wake Up!' our school's English newspaper has begun its 5th(??) year of action. Every week I meet with my students in a classroom toting a bag of Portuguese-English dictionaries and they delve into stories that they want to post in each week's edition. While it's not the most useful dissemination of information for the school (no one else speaks English), it's fun and a great opportunity for the students to work on something and feel proud about showing off their knowledge and skills to the community. We currently have sections for Local News, National News, Sports, Poems, Curiosities, Music Lyrics, Biography, Story, HIV/AIDS Health, English Language Corner, Interviews and a few more.

In addition, we have an English Theater Club that is now in full swing here. Once a week on the evenings we find an empty classroom and get to work preparing small community theater pieces in English to present at the school or in the community. Mozambicans in general, seem to be naturals at theater, and the students love having the opportunity to perform and learn English at the same time. At the end of the year, we'll write a play and send 10 kids to the regional competition to show off their English Theater talents.

Lastly, I am the leader this year of two separate HIV/AIDS youth groups. Here in PC Mozambique there is a nationwide network of mixed gender youth groups that focus of spreading knowledge and promoting behavior change related to HIV/AIDS, gender equality and other salient social issues. The group is newly renamed as JUNTOS (Jovens Unidos No Traboalho para Oportunidades e Sucesso) and has been hugely popular here at Mangunde since it was first introduced a few years before my arrival. This year I was both overjoyed and overwhelmed when 80 students showed up to my first announced meeting of JUNTOS. It showed me that the students are really passionate about creating change in their communities, or at least don't have anything better to do in the boarding school of a mission in the middle of nowhere. Because of such a flood of interest, I decided this year to divide the groups into two, a music group and a theater group. So far, while it's a job to organize everything, it has been a stunning success. A few weeks ago, each group presented their work, a theater piece and a choral medley, in front of the school assembly.

These are all groups that I began last year and am continuing this year. So it seems, at least on the surface, that year two for me here in Mangunde, is very much a continuation of year one in terms of projects, classes and general activities. I don't know how exactly to describe it, but I can say with confidence that year one is not, in fact, anything like year two in reality. When you arrive to your site at the beginning of year one, you have dreams and expectations, often romanticized, of how your Peace Corps experience is going to take shape. Visions of projects, change, the complete annihilation of HIV and malaria in your community, economic development and complete food security float above your head as your walk through your community for the first time. Your students will learn English in one year and all thank you for the time that you sacrificed to help them. I don't know how to say this without coming off stubborn and jaded, because I'm not and I do value my experience and contribution to the community, but at some point in your first year as a PCV you learn that you are not Jesus. You cannot turn water into wine, or feed 500 people with one loaf of bread and a fish. People do what they know, and listen to what they can understand, and they often don't know or understand us Americans.

Changing people's behaviors, whether it be getting them to study, use condoms, put up mosquito nets, not cheat, make composts, or clean up Jacinto's pee with bleach, is the hardest thing a PCV can try to do. That doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means that it must be done tactfully, and it's one of the most interesting things you learn here as a PCV. I could stand in front of my JUNTOS group and lecture them for an hour about gender equality, and all of them would probably nod and agree that it is also a man's responsibility to help take care of the children, but at the end of the day they will all go home and balk if their wives or mothers ask them to sweep the floor or watch the kids for a day. What is a PCV to do? If my Mozambican counter-part gets up in front of them and leads a discussion about gender equality, however, they are suddenly interested. He is one of us. He understands. We're in this together. At first when I came here I had a big head and wanted to do everything myself, but it took me awhile and a few slices of humble pie to realize the importance of using local leadership in any of your projects. I am hereby announcing that this is one of my goals for the rest of my service in Mozambique - to do as little as possible. When I do things, nothing happens and no one gains. It can be frustrating and counterintuitive, but when I give other people the resources to do things on their own, suddenly it clicks and you can see progress. I should've known that before because it's one of the basic tenets of the Peace Corps and sustainable development in general, and I think I did know it, but it really takes experiencing it first hand to realize how truly powerless you are if you try to create change by yourself. Anyway, that's my take home lesson for the day. Hopefully, with all of my different clubs and events that I'm coordinating I can learn to empower others to make a difference in their communities that is exponentially greater than the work what I could do alone.

Ok, well I went on a personal harangue there for bit, so to close this blog on a more jocular note, I'll share with you a few interesting things that have happened to me here in Mangunde in the past couple of weeks. First thing. Today in my computer class there was a kid who had picked up the mouse and was pointing it at the computer screen like a TV remote. Sometimes the things I see in that computer class are just too much. People thinking it's a touch screen and trying to drag the icons around with their fingers. On another note, I've now become completely comfortable with the Mozambican man-man handhold. I can take a half hour walk with some of my students and maintain the "man-hold" throughout without too much awkward discomfort.

A few weeks ago I was in class singing a song with my students about prepositions of place (it's a pretty technically challenging song: 'in, on, above, below, in front of, behind, next to, we know!!') and for the first time teaching here I lost complete control of the class. They were getting really into the song, which made my day, so I let them keep going and we repeated the chorus three or four times. I even improvised a descant line that soared above the chorus of student singing underneath me. It was a beautiful moment of class participation and harmony that I'll cherish forever. When I had had enough I waved my hands signaling the end of the song. They, however, were not ready to be done with the song. They continued to belt out the prepositions despite my frantic waves, some of them so into the song they were on their feet dancing and clapping excitedly. This went on for what seemed like forever and I eventually put my hands down and stopped trying to tame the preposition-crazy mob. Eventually I looked out the window and saw that there were a good three or four other professors who had left their classrooms and came to see what all of the commotion was about. They looked quizzically in the room no doubt wondering what kind of antics this strange American teacher was up to in his classes. After the students saw the other teachers the finally calmed down and found their seats, but the other teachers laughed it off and my embarrassment was sealed.

Ok! Thanks for reading! Until next time...

The Wonder of Pens

I am in class, teaching a biology lesson about the five kingdoms of living things and my students utterly don't give a shit. It is about 95 degrees and humid in the classroom and instead of taking notes, everyone is using their notebooks to fan themselves. I am soaked. Despite the oppressive heat, teachers are still required to wear pants, shirts, shoes and a thick, white lab-coat. While I'm lecturing about the kingdom Monera and procaryotic cells, I imagine what the students' reaction would be if I came to class in just my boxers and bare feet. I say "heterotrophic" along with a gesture that they know means, "repeat after me;" they say "eeterotrooficoo." A girl is dozing off right in the middle of the front row. I wonder if she is having heat stroke or is just bored. Other than my voice echoing between the concrete wall of the classroom, it is deadly silent in the room. "Protista....Proteeesta." There is a girl in the back corner who is smacking her pen against the table disruptively. She seems completely oblivious to the fact that I have stopped talking and am staring directly at her. She puts the pen up to her eye like a telescope to try to see if there is any ink left. I wait. She then pulls the inner plastic tube out of the pen, presses it up to her lips and starts blowing into it to force the ink out. She is in her own world. No one else seems to notice the fact that I stopped talking 30 seconds ago. She puts the pen down, discouraged. I say, "are we ready to begin again?" She looks up at me with a mixture of anger and surprise, "my pen is out of ink," gets up and walks right past me out of the classroom. I continue, "Fungi....Foooongi." This is 8th grade biology in Mozambique.

Sometimes it's not so bleak and certainly not so docile, but the 8th graders are new to secondary school. 8th grade is the first year of high school and many of the students completed their primary school in far off rural districts where, in many cases, there are no chalkboards, chairs, or even classrooms. Even here in Mangunde many of the primary school classes meet out under a tree because there are not enough classrooms. There is a half sized chalkboard propped against the trunk of the tree and the students sit on a few logs dispersed in front of the board. When students graduate 7th grade, they must pass the national exam and then they can move up to the big time. In many cases in order to enter the 8th grade they leave their homes to go stay with relatives closer to the city or a bigger school, or they stay in the boarding school. When they get in the classroom and are ready for biology class, what they know is to stay quiet and write down what the teacher writes on the board. That is, when they have pens and notebooks.

One thing that I have always taken for granted in my life in the States and will never again underappreciate is the simple, cheap and omnipresent PEN. When I lived in the states pens were like pennies; you could find hoards of them lying dormant and unused in forgotten drawers, on the ground, in the trash, left absent-mindedly on tables or counters for any wandering stranger to pass by and snatch up. Mozambique, on the other hand, is not the glorious haven of unclaimed writing utensils that America is. In Mozambique, pens are veritable diamonds. At the market one can buy cheap blue plastic pens for five meticals, which translates to about 20 cents, a lot for families who have nothing. The standard school arsenal for a Mozambican student is to have one red, and one blue pen along with a pencil, an eraser, and a compass all crammed into a small red pencil box. Everyone has the same little red tin box, the same brand of eraser and the same blue plastics pens that are ubiquitous in this country, and everyone knows how to take care of their pens. In my time here in Mozambique I've found that what Mozambique lacks in infrastructure and development, it makes up for in the form of thrifty pen maintenance. While not all of my students can correctly conjugate the verb "to be" in English, they can all, with confidence, disassemble, assess, repair and reassemble a blue plastic pen in under 10 seconds flat. It's something to hang your hat on.

There are a few basic tenets that you have to live by if you're going to be a successful pen owner here in Mozambique. Rule number one for pen husbandry is that you do not leave a pen sitting out in under any circumstances. It will disappear. Some enterprising young student will no doubt see it lying unattended on a table and add it to his armament of pens. Rule number two for pen husbandry: encostar (Portuguese for "put some shit underneath your paper while you write to make it write smoother"). Try telling a student here to write on a sheet of paper with nothing underneath it to encostar and you will see that this is tantamount to telling someone to cut their finger and start writing in blood. When I give tests I tell all of the students to put everything under their desks and to not have anything on top of the desks. Even now, after a year with the same students, they still let out a gasp and plead, "Teacher....noooo....it can't be this way" when I make the announcement. They are livid that they aren't allowed anything to encostar. That's the best translation I can do, but "it can't be this way" doesn't quite capture the utter despair of the Portuguese lamentation that they let out in reality, "Sr. Professssooor, não pode ser assim...." And then I say, "Yes, it can be this way" and I come by and savagely throw all of their notebooks onto the floor.

Rule number three in pen husbandry is to always have hook-ups in the high-rolling pen community. Everyone knows that one student who comes from the city and has like five blue plastic pens and a bunch of classy red "All-write" brand pens (not the lowly plastic ones, but the one that are clear in the middle so you can see the level of ink as it goes down). If you've got a hook-up like that on the bench and your pen runs out of ink in the middle of a test, which all too frequently ends up happening, then you can go the bullpen and pedir an extra pen from him or her. It's a good strategy for a poor student, but from a teacher's perspective, it's the bane of one's classroom management existence. What ends up happening is students run out of ink, and are constantly asking to leave to fetch or at least pedir a friend for a pen. It can turn into mayhem if you don't control the exchange of pens in a classroom. They don't tell you that in training, but it's survival in the Mozambican education system 101: don't allow pen exchange.

The last and probably most important pen husbandry rule in Mozambique is to never give up on a pen. It sounds cliche but it's true. It is well known that ink it the most expensive liquid per ounce in the world. If you give up on a faulty pen that still has a half tube left then you are throwing away a gold just because you couldn't separate it from the sand. A resourceful pen steward can always eek out the last few drops of ink from a pen that may appear all but dead. Smack it, tap it, blow it, crack it open, I've seen them all. If all else fail, pry off the tip and funnel the rest of the ink into a different tube. Do not, under any circumstances, throw the pen away. When it comes to pens, that's all you have to know.

It's not only pens that people are resourceful with here, however. I think I mentioned in a different blog post the utility of condoms here. Mozambique is inundated with condoms and they all get used, not necessarily for their said purposes, but a good strip of latex and lubricant is hard to find out here in the bush, so people improvise - bike tires, soccer pumps, water mains, electrical lines, all can be repaired with condoms. What I've found that's I think is even stranger that condom improvisation is what people will use as water bottles. In the city you can buy a 1.5L bottle of water for 35 meticals (about $1.20), but out here in the mato (=bush) you can't buy bottles like that, so people have to improvise different receptacles for drinking water. The most common thing for people to use is a 5L yellow jug originally made to cart cooking oil. They are ubiquitous here at the pumps, in the fields, on the heads of women and in the hands of children. Those yellow jugs, however, are also not easy to procure, so people improvise. The other day I saw a student drinking out of a ink cartridge. A few days earlier I saw someone sucking down what at first I thought was dish soap, but was actually just the bottle he was using for water. There was a kid drinking out of an easy-squeeze French's mustard bottle a while ago. Where do they get all of this stuff? From the trash pile behind the American's house. It is a veritable gold mine for useful container. I can take out trash out in the evening, and, no joke, in the morning go out to our trash pile and it will be almost entirely empty. Bottles, empty cans, and other plastic items will be the first to go, without questions, then they'll go for wrappers, papers, and cardboard. I didn't believe it at first when I got here, but there truly is no such thing as trash in the country.

I guess this is kind of a hodge-podge of a blog post, so while I'm talking about random interesting things that I've noticed over the past few months I can't end this post without mentioning a particular conversation I had with one of my good student friends a couple of weeks ago. We were having the conversation over a cold Pepsi-Cola at the boarding school which was interesting in itself because you almost never see Pepsi anywhere Mozambique, it's always Coke, let alone having Pepsi at the little shop that sells sodas in the boarding school. I asked the attended what types of sodas they have and he responded, "Pepsi-Cola and Fanta." I gave a look of surprise and arched my eyebrows when he said "Pepsi" and he followed up with, "it's a soft drink with a similar flavor to Coca-Cola." I couldn't help but laugh at the thought that he thought I had never heard of Pepsi. When I was talking to my buddy Nelito, however, he mentioned that something was bothering him. When I asked him what it was he told me that he didn't like how some people in school were cheating so much, it wasn't fair to the others who were doing honest work. After fighting cheating as a teacher in this country for a whole year, I was encouraged to finally hear from a student who agreed that cheating isn't fair. I asked him what type of cheating specifically he was talking about at which point he told me about the people that inject roots in their veins to pass tests. I thought I must have misheard him, so I confirmed..."roots, injecting, veins." Check, check, check; nothing lost, that's exactly what he was talking about. "Yeah, those kids inject the roots and then they pass the mid-terms with 20s (the maximum grade). They might write all of the wrong answers on the tests, but when the professor grades the tests, all of the answers will be right and he will magically have a 20. It's just not fair. I don't do that." A year ago, I might have challenged Nelito, and told him that magic roots don't exist! No one is injecting roots and getting perfect scores, period! This year, however, I'm trying to be a little more open-minded. I've barked up this tree before and I never end up convincing Mozambicans that the magical herbs and roots they boast don't exist. This time I decided to go with it. At least Nelito had the right sentiment. People cheat, and it's wrong. You have to learn to accept your victories when they come and this was a victory in a small dose. I found a student who doesn't think cheating is good. So I said, "Yeah, that's not right. People cheating to get ahead when everyone else is doing the work. Stay away from magic roots, Nelito, you're doing the right thing."

I'm going to end my blog post right there for now. Next time, which hopefully will be sooner than 6 months from now, I will do my best to update you on how life in year two is really going for me! I'm enjoying myself back at school and doing a good job of staying busy. Although it took longer to get things back up and running this year than I thought it would, I'm finally meeting consistently with my JUNTOS group (HIV/AIDS youth group), my English theater group and my English journalism group in addition to teaching biology, English and computers at the secondary school. I'm coordinating a volleyball tournament here that I set up for the kids on the weekends and am juggling all of that while I'm running the JUNTOS project and English theater projects on the regional level, coordinating funding and activities for over 20 groups of each. Between that and keeping up with friends and visiting other Peace Corps volunteers, I've had my hands full in a good way. 

Mangunde Poetry

Father Samora Moises Machel

Father Samora, always your name lives in Mozambican's memory;

For your big power,

For your lovely ideas,

For your big courage,

Tonight we are true Mozambicans.

Father Samora, always your name lives in Mozambican's memory;

For your powerful voice,

For your love with Mozambicans,

Our force lives in Mozambicans,

The slavery is finished.

Father Samora, always your name lives in Mozambican's memory;

In spite of your absence,

Your ideas live in Mozambicans.

Father Samora, yesterday, today and tomorrow,

You are always our father.

by Marques (Krish) 12B

Peace Corps

The Peace Corps English Club is my father;

I know that you are my identity because

When I listen to you talk about English

I remember the Peace Corps.

Peace Corps when I listen to you talk about Peace Corps

I think of the teachers that taught me like Natalia, Vanessa,

Who are now in America, Bau from Buzi, Tim and Ian that are now in Mangunde.

I know that English is not exactly my language,

But I'm proud of you, Peace Corps,

For making me a friend of English.

So, now, congratulations to everyone who helped me

Speak English.

by Marques (Krish) 12B

An Afternoon at the Cruzamento

Last week I made my triumphant return to Mangunde after having spent nearly two weeks in the capitol city of Maputo for a mid-service Peace Corps conference. Maputo was glorious. All 62 of us that are left from our training group (Moz 15) congregated to do our mandatory medical and dental examinations, receive more training sessions from PC staff and to catch up as many of us hadn't since each other since we swore in and left training back in December 2010. PC put us up in a pretty chic hotel with hot running water, AC, big clean beds, TVs and a pool...as I'm writing this, I'm realizing that this isn't necessarily a description of a super chic hotel, but when you've been taking bucket baths, have been eating nothing but beans, leaves and rice for a year, and sleep on a foam mattress who's size could generously be equated with a prison bed, a $20 room at Dollar Inn would seem like the Ritz Carlton. Again, take this in perspective, because it would be easy to sit there from America and be like, pshhh, I can call Dominoes and have a hot cheesy pizza delivered to me in 10 minutes, and then I can run to the store and pick up a pint of ice cream and a case of beer to make a night of it, but, sadly Dominoes doesn't deliver to schools so far in the middle of nowhere that it would take an air drop a 4x4 to get the pizza there. That in perspective, when I say that there are at least 20 pizza places in Maputo, three Thai restaurants, Indian food, a gelatoria, and that you can even get beer on tap, you have to respond with a jaw-dropping, “no way Maputo is unbelievable, it's like heaven on Earth.” Ok, with that out of the way, at some point I knew I would have to leave this veritable paradise that we call Maputo and enter into the real Mozambique, the one that ranks 165 out of 169 countries globally on the development index, the one who's national HIV prevalence is 12% and the one in which my friends and colleagues live and toil through everyday.

My journey back to school had me fly into our provincial capitol of Chimoio in the smallest most terrifying plane I've ever flown in, take a mini-bus to Inchope, a town halfway to my destination, and then catch a semi the rest of the way to the turn-off to my mission. This is a trip I've done many times. It's not too bad, and depending on your luck with various rides can take anywhere from 3 to 5 hours. The tricky part is that the road to my school, 25km of rocks and mud, doesn't exactly have the most reliable transportation schedule. It operates under the systems and wait and hope. You arrive, you wait, you wait, and you wait for a car to pass by heading into the mission, and then you hope that it has space for you when it does come. Some days, and how beloved they are, you arrive at the turn-off and a car happens to be heading into the missions simultaneously. Other days, however, you arrive at the turn-off, and six hours later the sun has set, the women who were also waiting there pack up their things, put out their fires, head home and warn you that you shouldn't stay out here because there are bandidos that come out after dark. Normally though, you wait about 3 hours and a car eventually comes. I can't say yet that I've come to enjoy those three hours waiting at the cruzamento, but I can say with confidence that, after a year in Mozambique, maybe I've adopted a more African mentality, or maybe I just don't care as much about being on time and predictable, but I don't mind the waiting as much as I used to. When you do enough waiting and sitting around, you learn to adopt a certain mindset to get yourself through the inexorable hours of nothingness. Waiting long hours at the cruzamento, I find that my mind enters a nearly transcendental state of clarity, or deep meditation. The only other time in my life where I felt I could enter such a state was during my year of organic chemistry in college. Back in college we called it “zoning out” but now I realize that I was just practicing a skill that would come to be very useful later in life. Despite its imperfections, an afternoon spent at the cruzamento can be an opportunity to soak up a culture's personality and float into a greater understanding of why they do some of the things they do. I guess, at the end of the day, that's why I don't mind it as much as I used to.

I just stepped off of the semi on the road side of the EN-1 at the cruzamento to my school, Mangunde. The semi-trucks here are all shipped second-hand from America and have the drivers side on the left despite the fact that they also drive on the left side of the road here. Therefore, when I step out of the passenger side of the towering cab and hop three feet down onto the pavement I am already in the oncoming lane. Normally I would be careful and check both ways before crossing the only and thus largest highway that spans the country from Maputo in the south to Pemba in the north, but I realize that we are in the middle of nowhere and there won't be another car that goes past within a half hour and so just walk. When I told the driver to pull over here he had peered ahead squinting his eyes and said, “Here? Are you sure? Where is a white like you going to go out here?” The driver and other passengers that he had picked up on his shipping route down to Maputo to make a few extra bucks had been talking about how dangerous southern Africa was and how many times his cargo or phones had been robbed out of his truck in Congo and I don't think they knew that I was listening or understood their Portuguese because when I chimed in that I had also been robbed they seemed to respect me a little bit more. They were impressed with the fact that I used to have an iPhone and I told them what a magical machine it had been until it was stolen. They couldn't believe that you could take pictures and post them on the “internet” instantaneously, and then have a map guide you to wherever your destination might be. Pure witchcraft they thought.

Anyway, when I tell him that I am getting out here, on a random stretch of nothing on a 150km stretch of the EN-1 halfway between Inchope and Muxungue, two towns which, in themselves, are nothing but dirty truck-stops, I tell him my reason for being here. “I am a teacher. There is a mission school 25km down that dirt road and I teach English and biology there.” I've told this to enough people now that I'm usually able to predict their reactions. A switch seems to go off in them. People respect you. It's a wonderful thing. Whereas before I was maybe a backpacker, or a South African trying to go to the beach, using their country for its cheap thrills and no rules, now I am not necessarily one of them, but at least closer to them. A teacher is a very respected profession here in Mozambique, and a white person who, in their minds, has given up a life of big houses, cars and wealth to come teach in Mozambique is not only an enigma, but also quite laudable. This particular driver gives me a surprised, “ahh...you are a teacher...” when I tell him why I am getting off at this inconspicuous dirt road, and arches his eyebrows in dismayed admiration. When I offer to pay him for the ride down he waves it off and wishes me luck in my second year here.

Waiting at the entrance to the road to the mission there are 20 or so women who are most likely anticipating a ride into the hospital at the mission. In order to get to them, however, I have to wade my way through a hoard of pineapple bearing children who are all trying to jimmy their way closer to the truck driver who is now taking a pee on the side of the road. They have all picked up their most precious pineapples and ebb past me to get a shot at a sale. This is pineapple month and at some point in the past couple of weeks all the kids in Mozambique put down their buckets of mangos and picked up stacks of pineapples. Now it is a frenetic, “fifteen, fifteen, fifteen...ten, ten...take two for twenty-five...” I squeeze my way past them and find a nice shady spot on the dirt to put down my bags and start waiting. Everyone is watching me. Why is it that I can't go anywhere in this country without everyone watching me? They are talking in dialect and looking right at me. A woman laughs; now everyone is laughing. How could I possibly have done something funny or even remotely interesting? I had simply walked across the road and put my backpack down. Why am I always a joke to these people? I feel like I did in 7^th grade when I didn't have anyone to sit down next to at lunch and just ended up sitting by myself. Eyes press on you like little thumbs poking into your sides and back. I could take out my iPod but that would just make it worse. How about a crossword puzzle? Worse yet. I decide to leave my stuff where it is and go over to the little snack stand that some entrepreneurial Mozambican smartly built in a place with a captive clientele. There's no energy here, so the soda is warm, but I'm parched. “Two Lemon Twists please.” In Mozambican style I down each 300mL glass bottle in one extended swig. Sated, I mosey back over to my stake out where I left my bags. The women are still watching me, but not as intensely as they were before. They have probably figured me out by now. “He's probably another one of those Italian donors for the mission, or maybe a teacher.”

Every single woman has a child on her back. I count 18 women and 22 children. I realize what it must be like to be a woman and not have a child in this country. The questions and the gossip. There are two other men there waiting. One seems to be healthy and accompanying his wife and child to the hospital, the other is lying on a blanket behind me. He is weak and frail. His face is young, maybe 30 years old, but the gray streaks through his hair and beard and his tired sagging cheeks betray him. My first thought is that he must have AIDS or TB or both. Then I realize how horrible it must be to know that everyone's first thought when they see you is “He must have AIDS” and I feel guilty for even thinking it. I think of how horrible it must be to have an expiration date on your life. No one with AIDS in Africa lives for more than about five years after their infection. No one talks about it either. When you go you just go, disappear. So and so was sick, passed away last week. There was a patient at the hospital a few weeks ago who passed away. She had come from far away to get to the hospital and didn't have any family with her. When she passed away, there was nothing to be done. I asked if a family member would come to get the body, or if a service would be held and was told that she didn't know anyone here. She literally had no one. They would bury her out in the small anonymous cemetery behind the hospital. No service, no words of remembrance, no tears, just disappear. I wonder if the man lying on the blanket behind me will share her fate and have a place next to hers in the cemetery.

The sun is dipping down and the once sweltering afternoon sun is relenting just slightly. As a small herd of goats stumbles out onto the road from seemingly nowhere and sniffs the ground for shards of leftover pineapples, I realize that soon enough a car will come by and I will be forced into what is always an uncomfortable situation. The car that comes will not have space for all of the women hoping to make it in to the hospital today. At best the white Toyota pick-up that the mission sends out to pick up patients will fit half of the women and children into the back of the pick up in one trip. Maybe another car will come, maybe not. Maybe they will have to wait and hope for another chance tomorrow. I, on the other hand, will be put in the front seat. Regardless of how much or little space there is left in the car, the first spot always goes to me. I am a teacher, I am a visitor, I am white, I am important. I'm not sick, I don't need to go to the hospital, I'm just coming back from a party with other PC volunteers. Can I get a ride? If I got HIV, I would not just disappear. I would be sent to America, receive state-of-the-art drug therapy and could have the chance to live out a very productive life. So what am I supposed to do when I get put in the front seat and the car pulls away with a full load of patients stuffed in the back and another 10 patients left behind at the cruzamento to wait for tomorrow? Get out and give up my seat to someone who needs it more than me? Make a fire and camp out at the cruzamento until tomorrow? I'll tell you what I'm going to do today. They are going to offer me a seat in the front and I'm going to take it because I hate riding in the back on the bumpy road into the mission and I'm scared of bandidos. I'm going to feel guilty for a few minutes, but eventually I will rationalize that I'm already doing a lot more than is required of me by being here in the first place and that someone will take care of those people. Is this wrong? Am I a bad person? The truth is, even if I give up my seat to some deserving patient, I know that no one will take it. It would be unheard of. It's just the way it is here. The driver would frown in confusion and the patient would hesitate, wondering why he's deserving of such treatment. I get on the truck and wave goodbye to the cruzamento and the patients that have been left behind. I hope that the mission will send another car today to pick up the rest of the past and ease into my seat as the driver turns the radio up to Rihanna. Even if it doesn't change you completely, being here in Africa, here in a place with such austere contrasts, will make you look in the mirror and think about the decisions you make. Every decision has a consequence, and by the sheer weight of your privilege in life, your decisions are no longer just yours, they are collective and have a much wider impact than you ever thought an insignificant little person like you ever had the power to make. Now I look at myself in the real rear-view mirror in the car and realize why they were laughing at me when I first got there and put down my backpack at the cruzamento. I have sunscreen all over my face, not rubbed in.

Around the World and Back Again...10 Months To Go!

(two weeks old...stay tuned for a more recent blog update!)

Feliz ano novo e bem vindo a Moçambique! I just went to my blog page and saw that my last entry was on November 3^rd, 2011! Yikes, that was last year; it's been over two months. I apologize dearly for my long intermission, but I assure you that the past two months, while full of ups and downs and many unique challenges, have been positive for me and the promise of my next year here in Mozambique. So here we go, year two, bring it on!

Before I look forward to the year in front of me, I want to first take a moment to look back on the year that was, 2011. If I had to sum up my 2011 in a few words, I would say “new, humbling, and non-stop.” Considering I had never taught anything to anyone at any level before, figuring out how to teach biology, English and computers at a new school and in a new culture was a formidable enough challenge for me. Combine that, however, with the exciting but new challenge of running my English theater, journalism and JOMA (HIV/AIDS theater) clubs, and I often had my head spinning. I managed to figure it all out though and put all of the pieces of my life at Mangunde together. I found ways to commit time and energy to all of my projects and to make them fulfilling for me and my students. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, though, Mozambique found a way to throw a few more challenges my way to knock me off balance again. There was malaria, then there was a bus accident, then there was the break-in with the crazy machete-men in which I lost my computer, camera, phone, and ipod, then there was another bus accident and more malaria. Despite these setbacks, however, I was able to carry on and finish my year on a very positive note. October meant exam time and the end of the school year along with the regional English Theater competition that I organized in the provincial capital. I went into detail about the competition in one of my earlier blog posts, but it was a perfect grand finale to my first year here in Mozambique. Between running to and from the city, calling restaurants and hotels, and suffering through headaches at the bank, the competition ended up consuming every free hour of my life down the stretch. It was a glorious event, however, that made me remember why I am really here and the kind of difference a few committed Peace Corps volunteers can make in the lives of many, and I don't regret it for a minute. Needless to say, I was ready for a break in November.

November and December took me all over Mozambique and to three other countries. I began my break by making a journey down to Maputo to participate in the training for the new group of volunteers that were arriving to Mozambique. Suddenly, I looked in the mirror and realized that I had been here in Mozambique for over a year and was now “an experienced volunteer.” Thus, for a week in Namaacha, the very same town that I had spent two formative months a year ago for my own training, I dispersed my sage advice and broad experiences to the wide-eyed newbies. It was fun, and I was even able to spend some time with my old host family – Mama Joana, Papa Justino and their kids. After training, I was able to meet up with other volunteers in Vilankulos, a beach town on the way up the coast, for a few days, then head to Gorongosa National Park for a Thanksgiving celebration. Among a gathering of about 25 volunteers, we were able to procure a turkey and all contributed to have a feast of mashed potatoes, stuffing, squash, and pumpkin and apple pies for the holiday – now the fourth Thanksgiving in a row I've spent abroad. After Thanksgiving, I jaunted around the country a bit, seeing other volunteers and traveling to new destinations until, finally, it was time for me to go home. On my way out, however, I was able to stop in Malawi and South Africa. Both English-speaking countries, they served as a sort of half-way point between Mozambique and the upcoming month I would spend back at home in a developed English-speaking country – America!

Before I get to America, though, let me say that Malawi was gorgeous, well, parts of it. If you refer to your map of Africa, you will see that Malawi is a long and thin country that slices right through Mozambique, splitting between the northern provinces of Tete to the West and Zambezia to the East and riding the border of Lake Malawi, one the largest and most beautiful fresh water lakes in Africa. People say that Malawi is the knife that cuts right through the heart of Mozambique. As it's essentially in Mozambique, and it's another very poor country in Southern Africa, Malawi offers a lot of similarities to Mozambican culture: it's hot, public transportation is shit, and it seems to be full of many friendly people willing to stop and help you out. Allow me to elaborate on the public transportation. If you have read any of my previous blogs, or the blog of any PCV in Southern Africa for that matter, you've probably gotten the feel that public transportation can be a vexing, dangerous and pesky pain in the ass. The situation in Mozambique is one that I have gotten used to and now with an iPod and a sensible forgiving disposition can be made tolerable. When I stepped across the border into Malawi, however, I had no idea that I had just walked into a different playing field. I was trying to play football while someone had switched the game to field hockey at half time.

The first shortcoming of the Malawian transportation system that I found: the Malawian Kwacha (their currency) is tanking. It's depreciating at such a rate that it'll be cheaper to start using their bills as toilet paper in a few months. When we got there you could get 1000 Kwacha for about $4, but only a few months earlier it was probably double that and in a few month it'll probably be less. The result of this massive shift in values is that there are no stable prices in Malawi. Day to day, week to week, prices are in flux. Therefore, when you get on a chapa (public mini-bus) there are not established fares. Each passenger has to bargain the price independently with the money-collector for each different route. You could have 12 people in a van all going to the same destination but all having agreed to different prices with the collector. Being white doesn't help your bargaining power either. We found that collectors routinely began offering prices at least double what the other patrons were paying. Even after bargaining the price down to something that seemed reasonable for us, we found that the collectors often would not be satisfied by giving us the same prices as other Malawian passengers and would deny us passage. What's more, the other passengers would often refuse to tell us the rate that they agreed upon with the collector forcing us to bargain without any good reference. That was strike one for Malawi. Strike two was not having a cue. Let me explain. Let's imagine that there are five chapas that operate a route from A to B. Normally, that is, in Mozambique, there will be a line. Chapa 1 will sit at the front of the cue and wait to fill up with passengers while chapas 2, 3, 4, and 5 wait for their turn to fill, only accepting passengers when the chapas before them filled up and departed. All the passengers that come would file happily into chapa 1 and it would fill up quickly, allowing everyone to get where they're going in a somewhat timely fashion. Here's a hypothetical question: what would happen if the line system broke down and every collector was competing with every other collector to fill up their chapas first and leave? The answer...you would be in Malawi and ti would be CHAOS. You arrive to a town and immediately you have five different collectors preying upon you, breathing down your throat, forcibly trying to shove you into their chapa so they can fill up. They grab your bags and try to stuff them into the trunk, they honk their horns, and rev their engines all in a desperate attempt to get you thinking that they are going to fill up and leave first so that you will hop in. This is not a fun environment to wander around if you have just arrived to a new town. I came dangerously close to punching many collectors in the face after they tried to snatch my baggage out of my hands and force me to their chapas. Aside from creating a very hostile, noisy and stressful environment, you can probably guess what other shortcoming this pernicious filling strategy suffered from – chapas would take hours to fill up. There might be five different chapas each with five people in them waiting to fill up to 10 or 15 more spots, honking around and revving to seduce newcomers into their vans. If they could just consolidated their efforts and fill up one chapa we could all be on our merry way. It was extremely frustrating. If there is one thing I've learned in my first 15 months here in Africa, though, it's that things are never as simple as they seem.

Apart from chapa headaches, Malawi was really quite breathtaking. My destination was Cape MacClear, a small beach town on the coast of Lake Malawi. The water was crystal clear, fresh and calm. On our first full day there we rented kayaks and kayaked out on the lake, stopping at various islands to hop off and do some snorkeling. I heard later that Lake Malawi is home to the most species of fresh-water fish in the world, or something like that. Whatever it is, looking back, I don't doubt it at all. Just sticking your face under the water you could see hundreds of shimmering cyclids and vibrant blue tropical fish darting through the water. I had never seen so many tropical fish concentrated in one place before; it was a snorkeler's paradise and it was in a serene and transparent freshwater lake. We later looped around the back of one the islands and saw a whole population of bald eagles scanning the water and periodically swooping down to pluck a fish right out of the water. It was idyllic and almost worth the levels of transportational hell that we went through to get there.

After Malawi I headed to South Africa, another stepping stone on my slow re-initiation into the modern world. There are many parts of South Africa that are extremely poor, like Mozambique, but, unlike Mozambique, there are also parts of South Africa that are extremely wealthy. It's this juxtaposition that have made economic and racial tensions in S. Africa so volatile in the last 50 years, but also what makes it a very pleasant vacation destination for someone coming from the doldrums of undeveloped Mozambique. In Maputo, my girlfriend Hannah and I had met up with two other volunteers, Janet and Luke in order to travel South Africa together. We spent the first day in Johannesburg. While still fresh and embellished from its World Cup fame in 2010, Johannesburg couldn't hide its dark side. Racial tensions still run high as it boasts one of the highest murder and car-jacking rates in the world. Blacks still live in the mega-cardboard box townships that they were relocated to during apartheid and whites operate big businesses in skyscrapers downtown. Despite this, there were a couple of noteworthy destinations that we stopped at in our 24 hour stay in Joburg. First, I had breakfast at McDonalds...Egg Saugage McMuffin and a McCafe coffee. To the conventional American, it might seem trite to crave such cheap complaisance from the commercial and corporate world, or it might even seem to be a shameful forfeiture of all the values I learned in the Peace Corps over the past year to covet such a sinister symbol of obesity and materialism as the Egg McMuffin. But, folks, let me tell you, it was more than just a two dollar English muffin with a slice of processed cheese and a perfectly symmetrical cut of scrambled eggs stacked on top of each other. No, as I dipped my hand into the brown paper bag with the yellow “M” on it and furrowed my brow at the thought that McDonalds is still using the slogan “I'm Lovin' It” after 10 years, I felt as if I was dipping my hand into a little bag of home-grown comfort. Call me cheap, call me gluttonous, call me insensitive to the fact that McDonalds is brain-washing our country into an obesity-related coma, but to me, that Egg McMuffin on my first day in South Africa represented a little taste of home.

After the McMuffin, we went to a slightly more wholesome, but equally frightening destination in Joburg: the apartheid museum. Now I can't go into the same kind of detail with the apartheid museum as I went into with the Egg McMuffin, because, frankly, I don't remember it as vividly. I can, however, say that the museum was extremely well put-together, and daringly honest about the atrocities that took place in South Africa during the period of apartheid. The accounts of bold-faced unquestioned racial discrimination that were enacted by the white South African government between 1948 and 1995 were chilling. Black Africans were identified and systematically stripped of all opportunities to succeed in life by the perverse government – they were relocated and given bare-bones housing and broken down schools to ensure subjugation. Harrowing, though, were the stories of Africans like Nelson Mandela who rose up against the white government and eventually won his people's freedom back in such a noble and non-violent way.

Joburg was merely a jumping off point, however, for our final South African destination of Cape Town. All in all, we spent five glorious days in Cape Town. What can I possible say about Cape Town that hasn't already been captured by the stunning panoramas that I snapped and conveniently posted on “facebook” for my readers' pleasure? Well, not much, Cape Town has a breathtaking landscape and a lively atmosphere that make it a fantastic holiday destination for thrill-seekers and romantics alike...that's what I would say if I worked for Lonely Planet. It's true though. If you didn't get my hint before and follow the link to the photos, I'll give you a brief geographical description. Cape Town is a historic city on the beach-lined coast tucked into the rugged hills of the Western Cape. Providing a backdrop for the city is the magnificent Table Mountain, which sits majestically behind the city pinning in against the coast. As the sun glazes Cape Town in its warm summer rays, the perfectly flat mountain top watches over the city with its notorious shroud of clouds, known as the Table Cloth,” rolling up and over the mountain-top. When we were there our activities included climbing Table Mountain and taking the cable car back down, climbing Lion's Head, an adjoining peak, visiting the famous Fort, touring the wine country of Stellenbosch, walking along the waterfront and beaches, and visiting the Cape of Good Hope. At the Cape of Good Hope we ran into some unexpected guests – it was full of wild ostriches, baboons, and, best of all, penguins! Cape Town was pretty amazing, and there are about 1000 amazing restaurants to choose from. I felt that I had come a long way from Mozambique and had once again sold out to a material world that my friends and students back in Mozambique would never understand...but...it isn't hard to rationalize and tell yourself that you deserve something when you're gallivanting around a city as beautiful as Cape Town. After that, I think I was finally ready to go back to America...

Home. What was the first thing that stood out to me in America? Wealth? English-speaking? Obesity? Food? No, actually those things came later. I flew into O'Hare in Chicago, where my parents picked me up to drive back to Madison. My mom waited for me at the arrivals gate and I saw her anxiously craning her neck to see through the door as I walked in, still wearing flip-flops and shorts from South Africa in the December weather. She seemed to whisper to the crowd of women standing around her when she saw me and I saw them all give her nods of approval. I imagined her explaining to them while they all waited for their loved ones that she was waiting for her son who had been in the Peace Corps in Africa for a year. I can't deny that I felt a little validated. After seeing my dad and our dog, Maddie, in the car we drove off down the largest highway I had ever seen, towards Madison. That reminds me, what was the first big thing that struck me about being in the States? The roads. Driving on I-90 from Chicago to Madison we were on three lanes of glorious one-way interstate. Bright, freshly painted lines and reflectors marked the lanes, barriers separated us from oncoming traffic, bumper strips protected a robust shoulder and signs marked turn-offs for every possible destination one could have. I had never been so taken by such a simple concept as a well-maintained road. What can one good road do for a society? The answer is everything. People, goods, money and services can MOVE! Movement is a wonderful and entirely under-appreciated commodity. With a little bit of movement, people can start businesses, transport products, go shopping, and see their families. I sat there in awe, watching the signs and reflectors flash by my glassy eyes and imagined what Mozambique could be like with one road even half as nice as I-90. While not as eye-opening as the drive home, the rest of my stay in America was wonderful. I spent most of my time in Madison, catching up with my immediate family and grandparents who still live in Madison, playing tennis(!), jamming with my family on piano and bass, and eating my mom's delicious steak. I also had the chance to visit a few of my cousins, aunts and uncles, spend time at our cabin on Lake Superior and stop through Minneapolis to see my sister's place and catch up with some of my good friends from college. For New Year's I was even able to go down to Chicago to meet up with Hannah, who is from Michigan and was also back in the States visiting family for the same time period as me.

Like almost all PCVs who look forward to returning to the states for a brief stint in the middle of the service I had been compiling a list over the past year of all the things I wanted to do stateside that I had been missing. Sometimes when you're feeling lonely and restless over here, the most appealing activity is to fantasize about all of the good food and American things you are going to do when you get back home for those three weeks. While not the most productive activity for your service, sometimes it's a necessary escape. Cereal and milk, check, Subway roasted chicken breast on honey oat with pepper jack, check, Rocky Rococo pizza, check, Indian food, check, juicy home-cooked steak and salad, check....hmm, seems to be all food up to this point. Tennis, check, Christmas cookies, check, piano, check, ESPN, check, watch the Packers lose their first game in over a year, check, watch the Badgers lose the Rose Bowl, check, use a laundry machine, check, use a dish washer, check, use a micro-wave to heat up left-overs for lunch, check, sleep in my giant comfy bed, check, and finally, eventually get so sick of the ridiculous comforts in the US that I'm compelled to return to Mozambique...hmm, I kept expecting that to happen, and it never quite materialized. Nonetheless, January 5^th rolled around and it was time for me to say good-bye to my family, the comforts of home, and board a plane bound for Africa again. Stepping onto the plane and facing up to another 12 months in Mozambique wasn't as easy to confront this time around as it was a year ago for a few reasons. As some of you may have heard, while I was at home, there was a tragic road accident in Mozambique in which two of our fellow Moz PCVs lost their lives. While I didn't know the new volunteers that passed away particularly well, it was still a huge blow to our PCV family here in Mozambique and something that made facing the ever-present dangers and palpable grief back in Mozambique extremely daunting. Death affects everyone differently. For those people close to the deceased volunteers, I can only imagine the grief and loss that they are continuing to feel. For those of us, however, who may not have had close personal ties, but share the responsibilities and lifestyles of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mozambique, it serves as a haunting reminder of how fragile all of our lives our, and the kind of risks that we submit ourselves to on a daily basis. That said, while I vacillated a bit in the days leading up to my departure, I eventually decided to come back to Mozambique and fulfill the rest of my service with respect to my school, my students, my friends, both in the Peace Corps and Mozambican, and for myself.

Now back in Mozambique, back in Mangunde, school has begun and I am glad that I made the decision that I made. When I arrived to my house I was greeted by a new Peace Corps volunteer, Mike, who will be my roommate for this year, our wonderful friend and housekeeper Gracinda, and her adorable and ever-growing one year-old son, Jacinto. I have been at site for a week and find myself slowing getting back into the flow of life here in Mozambique. The sounds, smells, and colors of Africa are all coming back. It's mango and pineapple season and Mike and I have already begun to satiate ourselves in the succulent nectars of Mozambican fruit. On Monday our school had its opening ceremony, and later that night we sat down with the pedagogical director to make the schedule. At the end of the day, I came away with almost exactly what I wanted: four sections of 8^th grade biology, the same grade that I taught last year, and four sections of 10^th grade English, the same students that I taught English to last year in 9^th grade. I may or may not pick up a few more classes, seeing that we are currently without any biology or chemistry teachers for 11^th and 12^th grades. We'll see what happens as the next few weeks unfold. For now, though, I am happy where I am and looking forward to another productive year here at school. Thanks for sticking with me through this, as usual, marathon of a blog post. In the future, I hope to post more frequently than once every three months and to keep the entries below five pages, something I failed at today. By the time I post this entry I will probably already be in Maputo, as I am leaving tomorrow (Saturday) to attend a week-long mid-service conference that all PCVs from my group will be attending. I'm looking forward to seeing volunteers that I haven't seen since training, and even though I feel like I just got back from the states, spending a week in the comfort of a Maputo hotel. I hope that everything is well back in the states and that you all finally got some snow! You're probably sick of the cold now and anxious for it to start warming up, but here I would die for a day in the 20s as it's already hot and humid in the thick if the rainy season here. Until next time! Peace and love. Ian.