Hello again! I want to welcome the month of May and wish everyone a happy mother’s day back at home. Here in Mozambique life has been rolling along with lots of exciting experiences to tell of in the past month so I’m going to jump right into it. Mid-April marked the end of my first trimester here at Escola Secundaria de Mangunde. It was a trimester full of challenges and rewarding yet humbling learning experiences. As the trimester picked up steam and we sprinted to the finish line, the responsibilities and work for a rookie teacher like me also increased. At times, I found the stress of juggling classes, extracurricular clubs, sports teams, and the reality of life out here overwhelming. Much of the work was fun and very fulfilling, but it did not come without challenges. By the end of the trimester I was teaching 24 hours per week, meeting once a week in the evenings with my English theater club, the English journalism club, organizing a volleyball tournament, and co-running the computer lab, all the while leaving most weekends to see friends and pick up supplies in the nearest city, a good 5 hour bus ride away.
Despite it being a constant exercise in time management and an emotional roller-coaster, I learned a lot about myself, teaching, and how to get things done in this vastly different culture. One of my favorite days spent here at Mangunde during the first trimester was a national holiday, Dia de Mulheres (women’s day). Here in Mozambique there are quite a few national holidays celebrating various groups and it seems like every few weeks the students are getting a day off of school for some holiday or another – there’s children's day, women's day, Mozambican heroes day, and worker’s day, among others that we’ve already had. On this day, school was not in session and since nearly all of the students here at Mangunde are boarding students, the school grounds were packed with kids chilling in the shade chatting or practicing their dance moves. Often on holidays like these schools will plan special events to honor the group of people that the holiday is celebrating, so on this particular day, Tim (my roommate) and I decided to plan a soccer tournament solely for the girls. We ran the idea by the director of the girl’s dormitory and the school director and they thought it was a great idea. After all, while there is no lack of soccer and other sports being played here at school, the girls are often left out of opportunities like this. Unlike the boys, who are allowed to roam around the school grounds after school until the bedtime bell rings at 9pm, the girls are literally locked in their boarding school at 6pm, a half an hour after school gets out. The thought here is that, if left to wander freely after dark, the girls, who are innately promiscuous and devious, would either get pregnant or come down with HIV/AIDS, so they must be protected from themselves. The sad reality is that this does happen, and if pregnant, a girl is forced to drop out of school at least until the baby is born. The obvious flaw in logic here is that it takes two to make a baby and it makes no sense to lock up the girls while the boys are allowed to carry on as if nothing happened. In addition to this, while the girls do have some extra-curricular activities to participate in – sewing clubs, dance groups, choirs, etc – it is the boys who get the lion’s share of the school’s resources. Every Friday and Saturday night we use a projector to show a film outside of the boy’s dorms while I don’t think the girls have ever had that privilege, the games of soccer, volleyball and futsão (soccer on a mini-field) which are ubiquitous after school from 4pm until dark are controlled completely by boys. I have never seen a girl even try to enter any of these games even though I know for a fact that a lot of them love to play soccer. The list goes on, but I think you get the point. All of this is to say that Tim and I really wanted to take advantage of this holiday (women’s day) to give the girls an opportunity to have fun without having to worry about the boys.
A week before we let them sign up for teams with their friends and told them that winners would receive sodas, cookies, a notebook and a team photo – all very big deals for them – so needless to say, the girls were very excited. We started early on the day of the tournament by relining the field (taking a hoe and digging out the lines in the dirt field) and setting up the sound system. We had music going throughout the day, a scores table with the brackets and prizes, and different acts (poetry and songs) put on by students in the breaks between games. Tim and I refereed all 16 games which, considering the heat by midday was a significant effort in itself. It was all worth it though. The event was a huge success. It was awesome to see how excited the girls got for this opportunity. As we called the teams to the field for the first game at 7am, they came in dancing and chanting with matching uniforms ready to show their stuff. All day the whole school crowded around the field banging drums and rooting for their friends’ teams – even the boys came out and were intently shouting and cheering on every kick. At times the games weren’t pretty, but it was a truly special event for everyone involved. What made it even more exciting was that the championship game, with the prize of a coveted team photo on the line, was tied after regulation and overtime and went into a nail-biting shootout. The whole school crowded around the penalty box craning their necks to see what would happen. When the final goal was netted the winning team piled onto each other and carried the heroic goal scorer off on their shoulders. All in all, it was a pretty cool experience to be a part and a cool thought that we were able to give the girls this opportunity to be the centers of attention for at least this one day a year.
The end of the trimester also brought with it the amping up of many school responsibilities. As a teacher in the Mozambican school system, you are required to give at least 2 mid-term exams and one final exam every trimester. Every trimester is supposedly 13 weeks longs. You quickly find out, however, that this 13 weeks gets shaved to 10 or 11 weeks in reality. The first week is of every trimester is a joke, the students are still arriving from time spent at home, and the teachers don’t feel the need to show up for classes so will just sign the attendance book and leave. Likewise the last week is a waste as the teachers will claim it to be a “grading” week, which makes the second to last week an exam week. Throw in a bunch of holidays throughout the trimester and we’re looking at about 9 weeks of classes max to try to cover a government mandated curriculum that would be ambitious for any well-standing high school in America to reach. This is just one of many problems the Mozambican school system is facing. Because of this, I decided to simply throw my curriculum in the trash and wing it this year. It’s an experiment for both me and the students (considering I’ve never taught English in any context before), and despite the fact that the snail-like progress can be frustrating and downright depressing at times, I’m sure that my teaching methods are working more than simply lecturing out of a textbook. Learning a language is a very individual process and it’s a challenge to try to reach everyone’s learning style, but it most certainly cannot be attained by simply taking notes out of a textbook. It seems like an obvious choice, but trying to implement creative teaching methods is not always easy when you are teaching within a system in which every other teacher is simply writing notes on the chalkboard and relying on rote memorization as the students’ primary “learning” method. It is frustrating to talk to a student about a subject, have him rattle off memorized facts, and then come to realize that he really has no true understanding of what is being taught. The challenge of continuing to motivate yourself to be creative in the classroom is made more difficult by the fact that often students are confused by your methods. You want to ensure them that if they buy into your system – student participation, group work, creativity, listening, speaking, etc – they will learn so much more, but sometimes you wonder if it would be easier for everyone to follow if you just got up there are wrote grammar rules on the board like the other teachers do. Teaching here is a daily exercise in persistence, self-motivation and confidence.
Anyway, all of this school talk is to say that come that last day of school I was ready for a mental break. As soon as classes ended I packed up my bag and hopped on a truck headed for Chimoio, where I would meet with other Peace Corps volunteers from the region for a mid-service conference to kick off my vacation. While Peace Corps conferences often leave much to be desired in the way of meaningful training and improvement, one thing you can usually count on is a ritzy hotel and no shortage of food. The first thing I did upon arrival was take a long hot shower to scour off all of the seemingly permanent dirt that I had accumulated in the past 3 months of bucket baths. When you’re pouring cold water over yourself it just doesn’t have the same cleansing effect as a steaming hot stream of running water. We have a running joke here that you can never really be sure whether you’re getting tanner, or you’re just building up dirt, especially on your feet over the course of your service at site. Most people emerge from the shower at the hotel a couple of shades lighter than they were just a few hours earlier. The second thing that I did was go to dinner. Hello! Chicken, beef, rice, fries, coke, desserts, eggs, salad – at first it was a thing of beauty, I hadn’t seen so much meat since leaving the States. Collectively, the 14 of us ate like we were starving dogs. It was a site to behold, and I can only imagine what the Mozambicans putting out the buffet thought of us. We left ever meal in clumsy food comas with our stomachs inflated. I don’t know why we kept eating, maybe we weren’t sure if we would ever see an array of food like that again, especially at our sites where food is almost always vegetarian and typically pretty monotoned with beans and rice or xima (corn meal). I think after 4 days of this, however, we were sufficiently disgusted by ourselves that we were ready to move on to the next phase of our vacation. Besides the food and amenities, the conference turned out to be surprisingly useful and motivating. It was nice to hear what some of the other volunteers had been up to in the last few months and to share teaching ideas with them. I left the conference motivated to get back to site to implement some of the different teaching methods and club ideas that other volunteers had done at their sites. The break, however, was not over yet. In fact the best was yet to come.
The day after the conference we hopped onto a chapa bound for Inhambane, the coastal province just South of my home province of Sofala which is known for its white sand beaches and blue azure waters. We caught a couple lucky rides and found ourselves on a comfortable bus headed directly to Maxixe, seven hours to the South and the jumping off point for trips to the famous beaches of Tofo and Barra. We took a fairy across the bay to the peninsula which is home to the beaches that we had been dreaming of in those last hectic weeks stuck in the daily grind of school. After one more short bus ride we pulled into our beachfront hostel in Tofo, a small touristy beach town. We camped there for 5 nights for a grand total of 700 meticais – which comes to the ridiculous total of about $20. To repeat, 5 nights, beach front resort, $4 per night….it was a steal. We took advantage of our cheap accommodation, however, by spending our money on food and drinks. We ate like kings. It was a little weird at first, I have to admit. Tofo was packed with white people, mostly South African, and you had to accept that here, just like everyone else, you were a tourist too. Your life at site, your friends and students who don’t have the same privileges or opportunities you have, are far away now. You justify it by saying that you deserve a break, you have been giving up your time, resources and skills for these people, but, at the end of the day, you are the one ordering barracuda and fries with a beer at a beachside restaurant while they are at home. It’s a hard reality to come to terms with and it makes you feel like a sell out, but there’s really no way around it. Also, I don’t want to sound vain, but the barracuda, it turns out, was absolutely delicious. I don’t know whether it was the allure of the beach, or the intoxicating freedom of being away from site and with friends who understand you but we decided to treat ourselves that week. It was, however, a sort of bipolar decision. On the one hand, compared to a typical American vacation on a beach in Florida or Mexico, we were paying pennies; it seemed like a steal and a sin not to take advantage of such an opportunity. I mean, honestly, people pay more for one night at a Dollar Inn than we paid for 5 nights at a beach front resort. On the other hand, however, a week like this was far out of the price range of nearly all of the people we’ve known and befriended here; to our students, fellow teachers, counterparts and directors, a weekend in Tofo is a distant dream and spending 300 meticais ($9) on a classy beachfront meal would be unthinkable. That said, in order to maintain our sanity and piece of mind, we opted to justify our extravagance by taking the former mental approach: we were getting a steal for this luxurious beach vacation and we should take advantage of it. Thus, we did the rounds of some killer restaurants in Tofo and Barra. I already mentioned the barracuda, but it’s worth mentioning again, it was fantastic – fresh caught they day, grilled with fries and a salad – and edged out a few competitors for best meal of the week in my book. Coming in a close second was the stuffed crust pizza from Flamingo Bay hotel in Barra. Now, I know what you’re thinking – yeah, yeah, stuffed crust, Pizza Hut came up with that like 10 years ago – but you would be wrong. This is a pizza with two entire mouth-watering layers. In between the crusts and on top is an assortment of sausage, steak, chorizo and Canadian bacon and filling the crust on the edges is none other than a cut of what could most closely be described as polish sausage. That’s right, stuffed polish sausage pizza. Now, I’m usually no slouch when it comes to pizza eating, typically taking down a whole large myself (pizza’s here are thinner than most US pizzas), however I could only manage half of this meaty monstrousity in one sitting. Yes, we paid 50 mts (usually 15 mts) for sodas at the hotel, but hey, we were on vacation, right? In a very close race for the bronze medal came the 440 mt cheeseburger I ordered from a fancy beachfront restaurant in Tofo. No one should ever pay 440 mts for a burger ($13) in Mozambique, but if you’re going to do it anyway, then it should be this one. Oh my goodness, it was stunning and juicy, with real cheese and not that meatloafy texture that most Mozambican hamburgers have. It was a very legit burger, and to follow it up with a dish of real vanilla ice cream put the proverbial cherry on the cake. Honorable mention in this competition was the king crab that we ambitiously cooked ourselves on our last night in Tofo. The campsite had gas stoves and cooking utensils and at the market in Tofo, there were typically a number of fishermen selling their catches that day so we decided to have out hand at seafood preparation. It was a toss up between the crabs and crayfish, but, given the persistence of the crab dealer and the whopping size of his crabs, and the fact that he got pinched good by one of the crabs while trying to show us his catch, we decided to opt for crab curry that night. I worked him down from about 500mts to 200mts for two ginormous crabs and he threw them, flailing and all, into a plastic bag for us and off we were off. To put its size into perspective for you, this crab had to have a wingspan, claw to claw, of about a foot. It’s pincers were a solid 4 inches long on both sides. This was a mammoth. To illustrate this, after I boiled the water, I tried to lower the crab gently into the pot for what I could only imagine would be an unpleasant way to go, but he didn’t even fit into the pot. I succeeded in getting his head down into the water, but his giant pincers and half of his body were flailing outside and getting him stuck halfway down. I had to feel for the little guy, but the only real way to finish him off, sadly, was to cut off his legs and kind of jam him down the rest of the way. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done and after 20 minutes or so we had ourselves a pretty tasty crab peanut stew.
The last thing that we treated ourselves to that week which was surprisingly not related to food was scuba diving! I’ve never scuba dived before, but apparently you can do a one day scuba course and if you sign enough release forms they’ll actually let you try your hand at a real open water dive. After a little deliberation and, as always, reconciling the expense by saying that this maybe a once in a lifetime kind of thing, we decided to sign up. The next day we were watching a corny instructional video and suiting up for our first pool dive. It was weird and hilarious at the same time. Between the 4 of us, no one could really get it right, we were a joke. There were goggles fogging up, masks making strange farting noises and people floating uncontrollably up to the surface all to the tune of our instructor trying to sign to us underwater what we were doing wrong. Somehow though, they decided that we were proficient enough in the pool to have a go at a real open water dive. It would be a novice dive, only 10 meters, but would be out at a nice reef that would have some really interesting sea life. Let me tell you, 10m doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re underwater and look up, it’s way up there. Once we got out on the open water, threw our suits on and plunged it was actually a really cool experience. It definitely took me some time to figure out my floatation (you have to inflate you suit just to the right amount so that you’re neutrally buoyant and don’t float up to the surface) but once I got that right, I was just swimming along the reef floor with schools of fish passing by be and all kinds of colorful creature and corals hidden in the cracks. It was really cool and would recommend anyone who’s never tried it to give it a shot (except you, Dad, you would definitely get sea sick on the boat ride out…people were throwing up left and right off the edges).
After our decadent and relaxing 5 days in Tofo we finished our vacation off by heading north to another famous beach town on the Inhambane coast called Vilanculos. We had planned our vacation to coincide with a country-wide event that Peace Corps volunteers were congregating there for that weekend. Tons of other volunteers from the north and the south who I hadn’t seen since training showed up and we all stayed at another beachfront hostel for the weekend while the games unfolded. I won’t go into all the details of the event, but I’ll just say that it was a good time for everyone and a perfect cap to our vacation.
Well, that’s about it. Now here I am, back at site, back to the norm. Classes have started again, clubs are picking up steam and Mangunde is just the way I remember it when I left two weeks ago. The dried fish isn’t as good as the fresh fish on the coast, the phone service isn’t quite as reliable here, and I can’t pick up sausages on my way through the market, but I’m also a real person here at my site, with a home that I’m comfortable in, students who appreciate me, and friends who look out for me. I wouldn’t trade that for anything and I’m excited to take on the ambitious goals that I’ve set for myself in this next trimester.
Oh, and happy Mother’s day Mom!
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