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