English Exchanges and Exam Time

Hello family and friends!  Happy 4^th of July!  I imagine that at home the grills are being fired up, the beer is flowing and the days are long and warm.  Not sure if this is accurate, but it’s a nice picture to imagine while sitting inside on a cold and rainy morning here is Mozambique.  I didn’t believe people when they said in June that it was going to get colder still.  We’re in Africa, how cold could it really get, right?  Well, I’m sitting inside on this frosty July morning wearing a hat, gloves and jacket wrapped in a blanket and I’m still feeling the chill. I haven’t bathed in days for fear of the prospect of taking a cold bucket bath.  Waking up in the morning is the hardest part.  Sometimes I wait until I hear the school bell which rings 10 minutes before the start of classes to finally and reluctantly roll out of bed, relinquish my blanket, brush my teeth, throw some clothes on and run across the field to make it in time for first period.  But I don’t mind the weather.  It’s better than sweating through two shirts before noon which is what I was doing in January and it means that I don’t have to water my now flourishing garden as much which flaunts heads of lettuce the size of basketballs, tomato plants the size of small trees, peas that have climbed 5 feet up, baseball sized onions and a burgeoning cabbage patch! 

July in Mozambique also means exam time, and the end of the second trimester.  This week is the second to last week of school in the trimester which, here is Mozambique, essentially means that it is the last week of the trimester.  An unfortunate reality here is that while the mid-trimester break is a full 2 week break, the week before the break, as well as the week immediately following the break are, for all intents and purposes, also breaks.  Teachers will not show up for their classes (even more so than during the trimester), and students will be utterly dumbfounded if you try to show up to give your regularly scheduled class.  Thus, the second to last week becomes the “exam” week, when all teachers fight for class time to try to get their final exams completed and then take off for the city.  I hate exam week.  It is chaotic, stressful and dishonest.  Imagine: there are 25 different class sections, each with 12 different disciplines and 6 periods per day.  In order to fit their exams in and organize them so that they can give their test to all the sections at the same time teachers scavenge and commandeer other teachers’ periods.  My classes have been the victims of these raids on many occasions already this week.  You will show up to one of your regularly scheduled classes to do a review before the exam only to find a different professor strolling around in your classroom handing out her tests to your unsuspecting students.  It’s maddening.  The kids aren’t prepared for the test and my schedule is totally thrown off kilter because now I have to wait around for a different professor to no-show on a class to make-up my lost class, and all for what?  So that this professor can combine all of his classes to take the final exam at the same time so that he can leave school early.  And what happens during these combined final exams?  Considering that these professors are giving their tests to 4 or 5 classrooms at the same time, there is absolutely no control over the test-taking process.  Yesterday, I was sitting outside a classroom waiting for a time to open up to give my class and was in awe watching some of these simultaneous tests take place.  It was a joke out of a scene from Saved by the Bell.  It felt like a social gathering.  Kids were walking around, talking, sharing answers, paging through their notebooks, leaving and entering the room.  No wonder they don’t ever learn to study, why would they if they knew they could just rely on the smartest kid in the class to give everyone the answers.   This atmosphere is angering enough, but what finally pushes me over the edge is that when I give my exams in which there is finally order and control – I watch the students like a hawk, penalizing them for sharing answers, and giving them zeros for bringing in the cheat-sheets that are infamous here – they complain to no end saying that this simply is not fair and certainly not the way that things are done here in Mozambique.  In their own defense, they always tell me that “Inglês custa muito, Teacher” (English is really, really hard) with this supplicating voice and ask me “how are we supposed to actually know the words without cheating?”  So more often than not they fail the test, unambiguously and entirely. 

As if this is not enough, after failing the test, they then come to me for what is called innocently enough, “recuperation.”  With other teachers, “failing” the test doesn’t actually mean “failing” the test.  The teacher will almost always give a small homework assignment, give the test over, or even offer other shadier ways for students to recover points lost in failed tests – personal work, favors, anything they can think of really.  Thus, when kids fail my tests, they show up at my door expecting and then pleading for “recuperation.”  My response is uniform and unambiguous – “Did you study at all for the test?  Maybe you should have thought of that before…”  To this they get even angrier and repeat the anthem to me that this is simply not the way that things are done here in Mozambique.  Never once does it cross their minds that, instead of cheating during the test or asking to do recuperation after the test, they could actually study for the test and learn the material.  For the vast majority of students, studying and learning simply isn’t an option that ever crosses their mind.  In their minds, English is too difficult, and there are simply too many disciplines to actually learn all of them; therefore, they will just try to glide by with cheating and recuperation (which, by the way, works with most of the other teachers), pass with a 50% and be done with school.  The idea that school is a place to actually facilitate learning is not ever considered.  School is just a necessary phase in life that you have to make it through, to many of them; sadly it is not seen to have an importance in itself and the kids suffer because of it.  In the end though, they survive.  Some of them finish school and go on to university, the vast majority don’t.  They drop out at some point, get pregnant or married, get a low-paying job in the city if they’re lucky or go back to live with their family and spend the days laboring in the small family farm.  Life goes on.  It sounds depressing, but perhaps I’m making it out to be more dreary than it really is.  People are happy and life does go on.  I don’t know, maybe it’s also just that exam week always seems to get the best of me.  Before long though exam week will come to an end and I will be enjoying a relaxing vacation in the mountains and parks of Mozambique, so I have that to look forward to!

On slightly more positive note, I have been doing some really cool and interesting things with a lot of great and motivated students this trimester.  While classes and the challenges that go along with this mode of education can be frustrating, I have found that working with my various activism groups here has been a huge success.  I now have three different groups that make up a large portion of my free time here at school.  At the beginning of the school here I inherited an English theater group and an English journalism group from the previous volunteer which have been overwhelmingly fun and successful.  Additionally, at the beginning of this trimester I started a new “JOMA” group with a local counter-part and a number of new younger students.  JOMA is an acronym that stands for Jovens para Mudança e Acção (Youth for Change and Action) and is a county-wide, Peace Corps sponsored activism group.  It is funded by PEPFAR (the stacked fund from the US government that has its target set on the elimination of HIV/AIDS in Africa among other thing) and has been active in Mozambique for six years now.  As part of the funding agreement, all JOMA groups must have a component which addresses HIV/AIDS in the community and a primary project like art, journalism, theater, music or photography.  My group addresses HIV/AIDS, among other related issues like domestic violence, alcoholism, and corruption, through the mediums of theater and music.  It took a while to get the group off the ground, establishing and set of interested students, getting them to understand what having a JOMA group really means, and finding a time to meet in our busy schedules, but now three months or so since the group’s inauguration and I can say that it has been a huge success.  Within our first couple weeks we developed a theater piece about polygamy (which is very common and driving force being the HIV/AIDS epidemic) and domestic violence and have already presented it twice around the community. 

The transformational moment for our group came about a month ago when we hosted a JOMA worksheet here at Mangunde with three other schools.  JOMA groups specializing in journalism, and art from three surrounding schools came to Mangunde for three days to take part in leadership training, HIV/AIDS awareness and team-building activities.  I have to say, I was a bit nervous for this event.  Hosting 45 students and teachers at Mangunde is not exactly a walk in the park.  First of all, just to get here they had to hire out a few old rickety mini-buses to make the muddy and treacherous 25km trek from the main road to the school.  Secondly, if you run out of rice here, you can’t exactly walk down to the corner store and pick up another couple of sacs.  Thus as host I had to have everything very well-planned and hope that no major obstacles popped up at the last minute (which is a dangerous assumption here in this unpredictable country).  The day everyone arrived, we had to take a special trip into town (an hour away on the aforementioned muddy and rocky trail) to load up the hired car with sacs of rice, xima, vegetables, beans, soda an anything else we thought we would need for the whole weekend.  The chicken feast they we planned for dinner would come from my counter-part’s house who I had enlisted to start rounding up and buying 25 chickens from the previous week.  Cooks needed to be organized, sleeping quarters with blankets and mats, cooking pots and utensils, firewood to cook on had to be hauled in and classrooms had to be arranged.  It was a production unlike my students had ever seen before to say the least.  Once the other groups pulled in for the workshop on their beat-up chapas though, it was all fun and games. 

We had sessions on leadership, gender equality, self-esteem, violence, discrimination, and the biology, treatment and stigma of HIV/AIDS.  I could tell that my students were soaking it all in.  Each session was full of hands-on activities, simulations, and lively discussions.  As mature as many of the students were, I was still surprised to hear many of the debates and opinions that many of them put forward.  Nearly all of the boys were near fanatical in their affirmation that “Men are naturally smarter than women,” obstinate in their belief that housework and raising a child is the woman’s responsibility, and certain that the life of a man is more difficult than the life of a woman in Mozambique.  Outside of this, some of the information put forth about biology and HIV/AIDS was downright alarming.  While they all knew that HIV is spread through sexual intercourse, there were a number of misconceptions including people who though you could get HIV from kissing or touching someone, and that if you have just one partner you don’t need to use protection.  Overall though, it was a great weekend and a great learning opportunity for these kids who have never had a chance to take part in something special like this.  At the end of the weekend they all got certificates and t-shirts which they absolutely loved.  For a week after the workshop, most of them wore their new bright blue JOMA shirts unabashedlly, along with their nametag to school everyday showing off to their friends that they are part of JOMA.  As time goes by, I’m looking forward to seeing what this group will develop into and what interesting new challenges we can take on in the community.  I can already see that the group is bonding and taking more initiative since their workshop.  They began meeting a second time during the week independent of me and have already developed another theater piece on their own about the stigma of HIV/AIDS and the importance of seeking treatment early.  We are hoping that we can present the piece at the hospital next week before the end of the trimester. 

Alright, well those are some of the things that have been going on here in Mozambique in the last month.  It has been a busy trimester and I couldn’t possibly talk about everything that has happened, but at least you have an idea of some of the things I have been up to these last few weeks.  I look forward to hearing how the summer has been treating all of you.  It has been awhile since I’ve heard from many of you and I’d love to hear how you are all getting on.  Take care, enjoy the warmth and long days of summer over there!  I’m going to leave you with a particularly nice poem that one of my 12^th grade students wrote for our English newspaper last week!

The Soldiers Came

The soldiers came

And dropped their bombs.

The soldiers didn’t take long

To bring the forest down.

With the forest gone

The birds were gone;

With the birds gone

Who will sing their song?

But the soldiers forgot

To take the forest

Out of the people’s hearts.

The soldiers forgot

To take the birds

Out of the people’s dreams,

And in the people’s dreams

The birds still sing their song.

Now the children

Are planting seedlings

To help the forest grow again.

They eat a simple meal of rice wrapped in banana leaves

And the land welcomes their smiling

Like a shower of rain.

-Issaca (Trouble-free)

Bottle Cap Symphony

I hear the hum of people and see the orange glow of firelight from 200 yards away.  Where Alberto and I are walking, there is no light.  The moon is far below the horizon and the cloudless night has turned the air to ice so that it bites your nostrils upon each breath.  We listen to our feet pacing in a steady rhythm towards the light which is growing stronger in front of us.  We finally reach the town, Nhahumwe, a buzzing metropolis at this time of night.  The “town” consists of about 7 huts lined up in a row along the main path.  While power lines pass directly over the path on the way to the district capital of Chibabava, no one in Nhahumwe actually has electricity.  There is one small stall selling local beverages which brazenly totes one incandescent bulb, powered by a car battery.  We continue on down the main path to where the firelight and commotion is originating from.  People have been talking about this “espectáculo” in Nhahumwe for days now and it is finally here; there is a palpable excitement in the air.  I am not sure exactly what this “espectáculo” has in store, but I will soon find out.  Gaggles of people mill around in the dark on the outside of a crudely constructed canvas wall.  Taller people crane their necks to get a glimpse of what is happening on the other side of the canvas barrier.  Children and miniature adults climb on top of each other or search for holes in the canvas to see the spectacle.  I pay the 10mt (25 cents) cover charge for Alberto and I to walk through the flap and join the party. 

Inside, the party has the feel of a night club you paid too much to get into.  All the cool people stayed in the street and you walked in to an over-hyped club, paying $10 for drinks, and surrounded by a bunch of drunk yuppies.  But Mozambican style.  There are about 20 people on the inside of the canvas wall, as no one else could afford to come in.  The enclosed space is no more than 30 feet by 10 feet and is open to the air on this moonless night.  At the back by the door-flap, a fire pit glows as half of the patrons sit around it, stoking it and warming themselves in the crisp night air.  In the front the entertainment for the night, a local “band,” prepares for their set, which I’ve been told will go all through the night until dawn.  There are three members of their tawdry crew.  A kid, about 10 years old, sits in a stool at the helms of the drum battery.  At first glance, especially in the diffuse light of the night, his drum set seems to be a complete modern-style kit.  Upon closer inspection, however, I see that everything is made out of local materials – the bass drum an oil barrel sliced in half; the cymbals circular cuttings of tin roofing studded with bottle caps and propped up on a tripod made of tied sticks; the toms carved out tree trunks with canvas and animal skins spread tightly across the surface.  Beside him, an older man wearing a second hand suit coat over a poorly matched Mickey Mouse sweatshirt totes an electric guitar.  Much like the drum-set, the guitar is a very organic creation.   Four string stretch from their wooden pegs in the neck along the length of the guitar coming to rest on a larger board where he does the strumming.  Two exposed wires reach up under to string-bed to form some sort of pick-up and plug into an old 1980s tape player.  Person number three is hard to spot immediately.  He stands hauntingly in a shadow in the corner of the hut wearing an oversized hoodie and strumming a guitar as crude and improvised as person number two.

I am curious how they are going perform as a rock band without electricity.  There is a motley assemblage of 4 or 5 small amps and used radio speakers stacked on top of each other and rigged up by wires in front of the band.  I lean over and ask Alberto, ‘how are they going to play their guitars without power?”  As if answering my question, the drummer kicks the bass drum and lays into a shrill dance rhythm.  Alberto says, “Car battery,” and then the guitars slap into action.  It’s not the kind of electrifying entrance you would expect to see in a rock arena, or a bar stage for the matter, but it’s an entrance none the less.  I have to turn my head sideways and clean out my ears just to make sure I’m not missing something.  While I am sure that the drummer is playing, I am still not entirely sure that the guitarists are playing.  There is a faint hum coming from the area where the once-impressive stack of speakers is resting and the guitarists appear to be moving their fingers.  I ask Alberto if there is something wrong with the speakers; “it’s a little weak isn’t it?”  “Car battery,” he says.  So this is it.  Apparently a concert run on car batteries isn’t quite the same ear-splitting experience as a concert you might walk into in the states.  I approach the band to hear the music more clearly and the hum that I had heard before turns into an audible pattern of notes.  The guitarist plays an upbeat Zimbabwean rhythm – duh da da duh da da duh duh duh – that repeats over and over and over…and over.  I get used to the music and start to feel the rhythm.  The few people inside the hut start dancing and from the clamor I hear outside the hut I can tell that the gaggles of people craning their necks have also started to dance.

The dance that accompanies this music is indescribable.  Knees are wobbling, hips are gyrating, and feet arte kicking up dust in a rapid blur of stomps.  It almost reminds me or Riverdance, but with a little more style.  From the waist up, they are motionless, eyes fixed and back straight, but from the waist down it is controlled chaos with movements that I can’t even begin to separate.  I jump into the roped off dancing area and give it my best anyway.  The crowd erupts.  As more curious eyes turn, I notice that I am surrounded by a circle of onlookers with all eyes focused on my haplessly twirling feet.  I’m trying to learn the dance.  I realize, however, that while I have had about 10 minutes of observation to absorb and execute all of the tortuous vibrations needed, the people around me have been practicing their whole lives.   When there are no TVs, playpens, jungle-gyms, malls, soccer trips, Nerf guns, Nintendos, trampolines, swimming pools or family vacations, sometimes all there to do is pull out the pocket transistor radio, buzzing and hissing in all of its glory, and dance.  I am no match for that experience.  I am at best a sideshow attempt to fit in that they seem to appreciate and tend to laugh at – a gigantic white man glowing in the obscure starlight shaking like in a crazed baboon.  After not too long I begin to feel the cardio.  This is a work out.  Take off the sweatshirt.  I’m starting to get it.  I’ll take anyone on.  Jump into the circle and let’s go head to head.  We’re kicking up so much dust that the spectators have to cover their noses.  When is this song going to end?  The guitar player has been playing the same three notes for 15 minutes like a skipping disc.  I tap out of the circle, an icey sweat dripping down my nose.  The band seems to be just getting started.  The same song that I danced to ends up playing for another 20 minutes on repeat, those three notes over and over and over set to a shrill hi-hat rhythm on the cut-out tin roofing that the drummer is blasting away at. 

After the tenth stumbling drunk comes up to me reeking of neepa – a local drink that burns like gasoline – and congratulating me on how well I dance for a muzungue I decide that it’s time to leave.  As Alberto and I walk off into the darkness, the sounds of the tinny battery-powered guitars, and the 10 year old pounding out rhythms on the oil barrel-bottle-cap-drum-set fade into the trees that envelope our journey home.  I remember the concerts that I used to play back in the states with their 6 foot amps, 15 piece drum kits and multi-track sound-boards and can’t imagine how this crude but charming midnight “espetáculo” could have ever seemed normal.