Matakatira! It’s a hot and tired afternoon here in the sweltering doldrums of Mozambique. My fan is oscillating its head back and forth in my room like a prison guard sweeping the grounds from high up in his tower. Every time it turns towards me a flush of hot air pushes the old stagnant air out of my face and dries the sweat that collected since its last rotation. Outside, my zucchini plant, which managed to pool all of its collective resources and moisture to push out one modestly sized zucchini, is now yellow, as are the two tomato plants that stopped growing about two months ago and never quite had the courage to bloom a flower or a fruit.
No, it’s now March, and it’s been awhile since the last rain. The rows of maize, squash, and watermelon that are ubiquitous in the fields surrounding the school are drying but still managing to hold onto life and a semblance of fertility. Despite the relative drought that we have been experiencing, the effects of a pretty good wet season can still be seen in the very modest market that is just down the road from my house. On a good day, the local market here on the school grounds is replete with little fat cucumbers that are chocked full of seeds, watermelons that are white on the inside (also full of seeds – I guess the seedless watermelon hybrid hasn’t made it to this part of Africa yet), squash, and on one special day last week that made my heart skip a beat: tomatoes, okra, bananas and garlic. I don’t know whether that was just an anomaly or whether the tomatoes will keep coming, but I was pretty excited to see some variety so close to home!
But yes, the heat is relentless, and the rain has reportedly left for good. People talk of month in August and September when the desiccated soil won’t have felt the replenishment of water for 6 months and the landscape has turned a monochromatic brown. It makes me appreciate these months during which rain is hard to come by but at least the plants are still clutching to their greenness. The silver lining of these arid months that lie ahead in the calendar, however, is that they promise to be cool. People talk of June and July as if it is the stuff of myth and legends. I hear fantastical stories of whole months in which fans can be put into storage and sheets, blankets and even jackets can be taken out of the closet. I have a sweatshirt and a fleece that have been resting on a nail on my door for 3 months collecting dust so I am anxious to see whether these cool-weather fantasies will ever come to fruition.
With all this talk of heat and deserts I feel like it’s only appropriate to tell you about my encounter with a sinister little creature that embodies the spirit of the desert. Yesterday, I was reading in my bed on a warm afternoon with the fan sitting idle just a couple of yards from my face when Anita, Gracinda’s niece who lives in the house with us was passing by my open door and said somewhat non-chalantly, “Teacher Ian, há uma cobra no ventilador.” At first I didn’t understand what she was saying. It seemed out of context and I often don’t understand what people say anyways so I just smiled and went back to reading my book. Then Gracinda came to my door, seeming a little more alarmed and repeated what Anita had said, “tem uma cobra no ventilador!” Again, I didn’t understand her well because of music in the background and people talking. She seemed to be pointing to the window with a worried look on her face though, so this time I perked up a bit. I finally pieced together that she was talking about a “cobra” or snake but I looked at the window and didn’t see anything anywhere. My next thought was that this was some kind of prank. This has happened before. People will come up to you alarmed and point to your feet “Cuidado Teacher, tem uma cobra!!” You jump away and look down only to find a stick on the ground and a group of little brats laughing in your face. So I was skeptical on this particular encounter. As a precaution though, I stood up and started to walk out of the room, right past the fan. Anita, Gracinda, and Tim, who were now all standing outside my door looking in at the spectacle all yelped and frantically gestured for me to stop moving! They pointed to the fan, now just a couple of feet away from me and there it was, a snake resting right there on top of the floor fan in the doorway! “Ah, the ventilador!!” His tail was wrapped around the wires of the fanguard and his head and neck where poised perfectly still and erect surveying the area and tasting the air no more than 3 or 4 feet away from me. He was a perfect statue and it actually took a couple of moments for me to believe that it was real. It could have been a rubber snake toy with its fluorescent green back and the way it posed so perfectly and motionlessly on top of the fan. Full of trepidation, I stealthily slid past the snake and out the door of the room into safety while the snake turned his head apprehensively and watched me slip by. Now that I was safely out of the death-room, it was time for this snake to die.
If you have ever spent time in Africa, or Mozambique at least, you know that they have a somewhat mythical relationship with snakes here. Snakes are the embodiment of evil. They are sinister, insidious creatures that sneak up on their prey and bite innocent unsuspecting victims. Regardless of what species a snake may actually be, if you ask someone here, any particular snake has the most potent and deadly venom and is probably a black mamba. To put it simply, snakes are not a pest taken light here in Mozambique. A few weeks ago we found a snake lurking in the hedges in front of our veranda. The high alarm went out, and within seconds there were hoards of boys and men toting machetes, hoes, sticks or anything they could get their hands on in order to get a crack at the snake. Let’s just say that the snake didn’t have much of a shot, they beat it to a pulp. A similar fate was about to befall my fan-dwelling friend, so we thought. Word started to spread about the snake in Teacher Ian’s room and soon enough we had a small gathering of boys wanting to get a look at this spectacle. One of our good friends, Nelito, came in and Tim and Nelito pulled out two bows meant for hunting gazelles and bush-rats that, up until that point, had been purely ornamental, hanging from a hook on our door. We came up with a plan: I would throw a towel over the snake, still resting attentively on the fan, and Nelito and Tim would start swinging their bows to beat the snake dead. Step 1: I tossed the towel on the fan. Bulls-eye. Unfortunately, however, when the snake was under the towel, Tim and Nelito were swinging their bows blind and couldn’t hit a damn thing. I guess that wasn’t the brightest plan. The snaked flipped out and slithered out from under the towel, starting a flight for his life that took him behind my bookshelf and eventually behind some boxes that were under my bed. During this high-energy pursuit, Nelito went crazy. I was filming, Tim was yelling, and Nelito was swinging the bow around the room like he was Neo in the Matrix trying to fight off 25 agents at once. Nobody actually connected with the snake in round 1, but in his frenzy, Nelito did manage to nail the bottle of Gold Bond powder on my shelf with such force that it popped the cap off and coated the room in baby powder, he then took another swing that connected with and tore the plastic apart on my power converter. It was anarchy. Once the snake was out of site, though, we all calmed down and try to formulate plan B. We knew it was behind the bed, so Nelito decided it would be best to empty my room out and leave that little bastard no where to hide. There goes the bookshelf, the mattress, guitar, one by one, we disassembled my entire room until we had the snake cornered and hiding in my big duffle bag which had previously been under my bed. The new plan, we decided, would be to beat the duffle bag until the snake either died or tried to escape. Thus, round two commenced and they started swinging away again. Nelito seemed to have his eyes closed the whole time and wasn’t hitting anywhere close, but Tim managed to get a few good shots in on the snake and the wounded and desperate snake made one last dash across the room and over the bed frame that was now pushed into the middle of the room. He was headed right for us and we were jumping up and down frantically in the doorway. Unlucky for him, trying to slither across the bare bed spring turned him into a sitting duck that even Nelito couldn’t misfire on. Both of our sharpshooters got a couple good blows to the head in and our sinister friend writhed in one final exasperated show of life before being beaten to a pulp on the floor of my room. It was dead, the deed had been done. Danger averted. Nelito, for whatever reason though, didn’t seemed to be convinced. He dragged the poor mutilated creature outside and with a genuine look of concern on his face showed us that the tail was still moving. He proceeded to take about 10 more swings with the bow to the snakes head and then chucked it into the brush across the road. If this wasn’t enough, Nelito then grabbed some large rocks, located the snake in the brush and began slinging rocks at the snake lying lifeless in the grass. “To teach a lesson to his friends” he said.
Besides snake encounters and the relentless heat, I have been having a rather satisfying, but very busy couple of weeks here at Mangunde. This week marks the completion of my third month at Mangunde. It seems like a long time, and one would think that I would have gotten the hang of things after only a couple of weeks here, but it has definitely taken all three of my months here to really start to figure out what is going on, how things work. what I want my role to be here and what the students and school need my role to be here. I thought I was going to be able to walk in here and within the first week have friends, counterparts for projects, and a clear idea of what kind of difference I can make here. I now realize that I was a bit naïve. I heard somewhere that the first 3 months of one’s Peace Corps service are the hardest 3 months that you’ll have. I don’t know how they settled on 3 months as the magic number of months for things to start turning around, but as I sit here typing almost exactly 3 months since I pulled into Mangunde with a truck full of boxes and a head torn between naïve optimism and fear, that number seems to be just about right. It took all 90 days of those three months to inch my way into a tenuous integration, but I’m finally feeling like I have the lay of the land here at Mangunde. While I have yet to start all of the projects and goals I’ve laid out for myself, I am at least at the point where I know what I want to do and have an idea, more or less, of how to take the first of many eventual steps to do that. It sounds like a minor accomplishment, but believe me, it’s a better feeling that being lost in a foreign world without friends, support or any idea of what’s what and who’s who.
One thing that I had been thinking about for awhile and wanting to get underway in order to get my foot in the door and start interacting with students more was a volleyball tournament. We have a volleyball net on the recreation grounds and I had brought a ball from America, so all I needed was students to begin my campeonato. I put some fliers up in the internato asking for teams of 5 players and promising a prize of sodas and biscuits to the winners and was happy to see that people were very interested. Last Saturday, we had the first round of the tournament which was an overwhelming success. We brought speaker out and played music while I stood on a chair by the net with a whistle and called the first two games. The students all had team names, and with the official-ness of a referee with a whistle and a chair being present, got really into the game. The tournament is set to continue next Saturday with the finals already scheduled for April. If the volleyball tournament goes well, I am planning on starting a chess tournament in the upcoming month, and, as soon as we get a rim for our now rim-less basketball court, a basketball tournament!
Ok, that should just about do it for this blog post! If you see Jean Claude van Dam or Jet Li over there in America, let me know. My students have been asking me whether I’ve seen them recently and I want to keep them up to date on what my buddies are up to. For some reason, Jean Claude van Dam is probably the most popular movie star in Mozambique. I don’t know if Jean Claude has ever thought about going on tour to Africa, but I think it could be huge. I try to tell people that Jean Claude van Dam is not popular at all in America, but people here can’t seem to wrap their head around a whole in which Jean Claude van Dam isn’t the end all and be all of stardom. I usually succeed in convincing at least one or two students a day that Jean Claude is my brother and that I know him well. It’s always good for a laugh if you’re feeling down and want to put one over on a gullible student. If you ask a few of my students, they will also be able to tell you that I killed Jet Li with my bare hands. I used the double eye poke followed by the upper cut to the nose. Instant kill. So anyway, yeah, let me know what they’re up to, and what you are up to as well. I hope that all is well on the home front and you’re getting ready for the snow to start melting and the college basketball to get crazy!
Take care!
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