Hello everyone (which is probably like 3 people, but still..)
Welcome to my blog. I've never done this before, so we are embarking on this blogging journey together. It took me a little while to get things off the ground here (consistent computer and internet access is not easy to come by) but I'm anxious to start sharing me experiences with the thousands of people who have been wondering, "what has Ian been up to?" Here goes..
I arrived in Maputo, Mozambique with a group of 70 other prospective Peace Corps Mozambique Volunteers at the end of September, 2010. We were the 15th batch of PCV's to arrive in Mozambique (they have been taking volunteers since 1998) and represent two different lines of work. Roughly two thirds of us (including me) are education volunteers, which means we will be placed at secondary schools throughout the country to teach English, chemistry, biology, and/or math; and the other third of our training batch are health volunteers, which means that they will be placed with various health-related NGOs throughout the country to promote, among other things, HIV/AIDS awareness, hygiene, malaria prevention, etc.
All 70 of us spent two months together in a small town called Namaacha outside of the capital city of Maputo for training before being sworn in as PCVs. During this training period we took language classes to learn Mozambique's official language, Portuguese, and technical classes to learn essentials about the Mozambican education system and teaching strategies such as classroom management, creative use of resources, lesson-planning, etc. Essentially the goal was to prepare people with no teaching experience whatsoever to stand in front of class of 70 kids with no books or resources except a chalkboard and teach in Portuguese. There are other challenges as well, including corruption, gender issues, and literacy which I'm sure I'll will get into as my experience progresses, but I will leave it at that for now.
That said, training was an interesting time. I stayed with a Mozambican family and became acquainted with Mozambican culture - how to cart water, wash clothes, eat a steady barrage of xima, couve and feijao (mozambican staples), and to appreciate the beauty of Shop-rite (a South African grocery store chain that is 2 hours away but sells cheese and chocolate among other things). To try to summarize the past two months of training in one post would be impossible, so I'm just going to leave it at that and get on to the current events. I will just say that training was a lot of fun - I made a lot of great friends, both fellow PCVs and my Mozambican family, had a killer Thanksgiving feast which included the best mashed potatoes I've ever had and even turkey (not that easy to find here), spent a magical holiday weekend eating pizza (also not easy to come by) on the beach and got prepared to embark on the next two years as a teacher.
So fast-forward to almost present day..The week before swear-in, in what was a very emotionally charged atmosphere, we all received our site placements for the next two years. This crucial decision would, some believed, determine which other volunteers you may never see again and which ones you might be stuck at a site with for two agonizing years. After coming to terms with this decision and successfully completing training, we swore in as official Peace Corps Volunteers on Dec. 3rd at the US Ambassadors house. We had our last night together as a group in a ritzy Maputo hotel before embarking to our sites the next day. I boarded a plane bound for Chimoio, the provincial capital of Manica, a province in central Mozambique.
I was placed at a site called Mangunde and assigned to teach English (despite the fact that I came in as a Chemistry teacher and was trained throughout training as a chem teacher...water under the bridge, I've come to terms). You will hear a lot about Mangunde if you continue to read this blog. If you've read this much are never going to come back to this site, then I'll just say this: it's a large catholic mission school with grades 1-12 essentially in the middle of nowhere. It is in the central province of Sofala, but the nearest town in a good hour and a half away, that is, if it's not raining..when it rains it is completely inaccessible. I have a small house which I am sharing with a continuing volunteer who I have yet to meet and a maid named Gracinda. Right now the school grounds are pretty empty, as school won't start until January and really, there is just a school here (students and teachers generally live on campus during the school year, but then go home during the holidays). I have, however, been finding the positives of a nice quiet life here in Mangunde, and I promise that, if you keep reading this now obnoxiously long blog post you will come to learn what my life is like here. I'm going to stop there for now. Anyway, this concludes my first ever blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment