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.