A Uniquely Mozambican Field Trip

In case you have been waiting with bated breath since I first told you all about the rooster that has been eating my precious garden vegetables, I am happy to inform you that there has been a development in the status of the aforementioned and much maligned rooster. About a week ago I walked back from class and encountered the rooster frolicking about freely in my garden pecking at the lettuce gleefully and scratching its lanky feet into my fertile soil. Well, I had had enough. I enlisted the help of a few nearby students, we cornered the rooster onto my veranda, closed in on it and once and for all caught that wretched rooster! Without a second thought I pulled a knife and a wash basin out of the kitchen, handed it to one of the students and said, “Kill it.” Within seconds it was all over. I think I have been in Mozambique for too long and have become desensitized to the killing of live animals because seeing the flash of that knife and hearing the chicken utter its final squawk was like music to my ears. I had warned the padre (the rooster’s owner) twice of his rooster’s transgressions and on the final time told him that the next time I caught his rooster snooping around in my orta I would be putting his galo directly into the panela and not returning it to him, if you know what I mean. The killing of the infamous rooster came at an opportune time for us because that night Mike and I happened to be hosting a high-ranking Peace Corps staff member who was coming through for a visit, and we were able to serve a rare and wonderful chicken stew! Bon appetite!

Now, all is well with the Mangunde garden. The lettuce is growing unabated and the cabbage doesn’t have to look over its shoulder in fear of seeing a rooster beak bearing down upon it. That’s what I thought, at least, until recently I noticed that there are a number of other chickens who have been wandering around the premises presumably looking for a meal. Now, I can’t kill all of the chickens in Mangunde, or at least I don’t think it would be a good idea for my public relations here, but what I can do is tie them all up. Thus, I have issued a standing order that any of my English students who catch and tie up a chicken wandering through my garden get 5 points of extra credit. It’s only been a day, but I’ve already got one chicken. We’ll see how it goes…

On another note, the second trimester is winding down here in Mangunde. Today, we finished our final exams, but there are apparently a bunch of idiots in charge of writing the school calendars, because we officially still have two weeks of school left before the break. How many teachers do you think are actually going to show up to give classes after students have taken their final exams? I’ll give you one guess…none! Anyway, final exams went as well as I could have expected and classes are going well. I decided to change my strategy this trimester for exams and the jury is still out on whether it was a good decision or not. After a year and a half fighting against rampant cheating, no studying, hassles with photocopies and students who simply don’t understand test instructions, I decided that I had had enough with formal written tests. They were a waste of time for everyone and only made me feel like a failure when I would see half the class failing. Thus, I decided to go oral. Three times before the end of the trimester, each student has had to come up to me outside of class and be quizzed on the past simple tense and past participle of a randomly selected verbs. Seems pretty simple, right? Well, that’s what I thought at first. Keep in mind, however, that I have over 200 students in English alone and Mozambicans are known to be illustrious procrastinators. 200 students times 3 quizzes per student is 600 quizzes, multiply that by an average of 2 minutes per quiz because, when it comes to English, Mozambicans are also notoriously slow, and that’s 1,200 minutes, or 20 hours of pure oral testing. It’s driving me crazy! There are lines of students outside my door, I can’t sit down to dinner without someone poking their head in the window and wanting to be tested. I’m hoping that it is all worth it because, on the positive side, it’s forcing the students, for at least once in their lives, to study and think about English outside of class.

As I said before, however, my life in the last couple of months has been consumed with extracurricular activities – there were JUNTOS trocas in Mangunde and Estaquinha, there was a volleyball trip to Machanga, and there were JUNTOS workshops in Mangunde and Machanga. Each one was, in itself, a wonderful and challenging event to organize with its own benefits to the students and to me. Even though I’ve been here in Mozambique for what seems like forever now and have done a countless amount of these trips and events with my student groups, I find that I can still be surprised by the way things are often run here. When I compare these Mozambican “field trips” with all of the field trips that I went on as a student in the states I can’t help but laugh at some of the contrasts.

Can you imagine a school field trip in the states in which the arranged transportation is a flatbed truck? When we took the soccer and volleyball teams to a nearby school for a sports trip, we packed 60 students onto the back of a flatbed truck and rumbled on down the rocky road that leads out of the mission. In order to all fit into the truck, we had to be packed like sardines, literally. Everyone sat on the floor of the truck and spooned the person in front of them, and there were still kids that seemed like they would fall off the edge of the truck with the slightest change in momentum. Enterprising boys used it as an opportunity to get close to their crushes and fights broke out to sit behind the cutest girls in the truck. Girls would also pine to get a spot right in front of Teacher Mike or I and nuzzle up to us, which was slightly awkward at first because they were our 15 and 16 year old students, but in a culture where touching and hand-holding is so common and there is no other way to get from point A to point B than to spoon your teenage students, it was entirely acceptable and unavoidable behavior. To top it off, at the end of all this, our loaded down truck had to take a bumpy back road to arrive at the school because the driver was afraid of passing in front of the administrator’s house with such a flagrant violation of traffic safety laws.

Can you also imagine a school field trip in the states in which the school director orders the driver to stop at a roadside liquor stand and picks up his entertainment for the weekend? In the same trip that I mentioned earlier the truck driver stopped on an empty stretch of highway and called into seemingly deserted woods beyond. A man came scurrying out with a twenty liter jerry-can of an acrid-smelling local alcohol called mapira. The director grinned and loaded it up onto the back of the truck with the rest of us. Meanwhile, half of the kids had gotten out of the truck and were buying pulls out of the mapira jug from another man that had emerged from the woods with his own jerry-can of beverage. Everyone laughed and we went on our merry way.

Can you also imagine an overnight trip in which the kids are expected to sleep on the floor of one of the classrooms with nothing more than a floor mat. People here are wonderfully adaptable and used to the most austere living conditions. Thus when you roll out a quarter-inch thick floor mat with no blankets or pillow and say, “sleep!” they lie down and do just that without a second thought. Also when you tell them that the next morning they will be expected to wake up at 5am to sweep the floors, clean the bathrooms and pick up trash around the school they actually do it. I can only imagine telling that to a school group in the states. I think the protests would be so insistent that it simply wouldn’t happen.

How about this: a drunken man walks into the girl’s dormitory in the middle of the night and starts trying to kiss them all. The girls told me about this the next morning laughing casually at the situation, but I can only imagine the outcry and calls home that this would elicit if this happened on a field trip back in the states. Here’s another one: our privately rented bus stops along the side of the road to pick up a friend of a friend of the driver who is drunk and homeless and asks if he can come with us to the next town. I can’t say no, because although in my mind this is entirely inappropriate and would cause unnecessary delays in our already late arrival, in Mozambique, this is acceptable. The driver ends up not only waiting an hour for this man to show up on his bicycle after being called, but then proceeds to stop only 15 minutes down the road and load up 6 twenty-liter jerry-cans of mapira, the same local alcohol that our director delighted in earlier, to sell in the next town.

Well, if I have learned anything from all of this, it is that you have to throw away your expectation and go with the flow. If you try to compare the conditions here in Mozambique with those of the states, you’ll drive yourself crazy. Everything has its context, and when you accept the fact that it’s funny for the judges of your local science fair to be drunk by the end of the fair because one of students made a local wine for his project, then life here becomes a lot more manageable. They don’t say hakuna matata for nothing…well, they actually don’t say that here, but they do live it, and that’s what matters.

This may be my last post for a while. At the end of this week, I am leaving school for my much anticipated holiday and probably won’t return here for about a month. I’m kicking off the break with a jungle walk to a nearby school. I’m very excited and ever since I found out that there is a shortcut through the mato to a fellow volunteer’s school I’ve wanted to walk it. So on Thursday Mike and I will load up for a two-day hike to Dombe, which locals tell us is 100km west of here. There we’ll meet up with a bunch of other volunteers who are meeting there for a party, and from there head to Chimoio. After that I have plans to climb a few mountains that I’ve had my eye on here in Mozambique for a while. There’s Mt. Binga, the tallest mountain in Mozambique, and another mountain in Malawi that me and a few friends might try to challenge. After that my parents will be visiting! I’ll meet them in Vilanculos, a beach town close to my site, we’ll spend a few days on the beach relaxing and snorkeling, and then head to my site. We’ll spend a few days here at school and then finally fly out together to South Africa where we’ll spend a few days in Kruger National Park trying to spot wildlife.

Have a great 4^th of July and talk to you all soon!