The Courageous Story of My Friend Alberto

As I get ready to leave Mozambique, there is one person very close to me who has a remarkable story of loss, poverty, persistence and dedication that I have yet to tell.  It’s the story of my good friend and counterpart, Alberto Camisola.   

Alberto lives with his family in a small homestead about three kilometers outside of the mission.  The first time I met Alberto was on my veranda during my first few weeks at site.  He approached me to ask if I could bring my guitar and camera to his house to film his family singing and dancing to a few church songs they had learned.  I thought the request was a bit unorthodox, but I was eager to make friends, so I accepted.  On the agreed upon day, he walked me to his house and we chatted for the duration of the 30 minute walk.  That was the first time I got a brief look into Alberto’s sad yet inspiring story, and was the beginning of a friendship that would last my full two years of service.

 Alberto at his house in Mangunde with his sons Isaias (left) and Camisola (right)

I learned that Alberto was studying in 7^th grade at the time (despite being in his 30s), and was volunteering as an HIV/AIDS community activist at the hospital, as well as working painstakingly long hours on their subsistence farm, in order to provide food for his family.  Since that first meeting, I invited Alberto to be the co-leader of my JUNTOS youth group (HIV/AIDS music group for students), and have seen him ascend into a leadership position with the volunteer activists at the hospital.  In addition, I spent a memorable two days walking with Alberto from Mangunde to Dombe, a 100 kilometer journey that allowed us to spend a night at his family’s house on the first night and brought us closer together.  Now Alberto is working with my former roommate, Mike, to gain funding and build a pre-school for orphans in the Mangunde area.

Alberto leading us and a gaggle of kids on our cross-country walk to Dombe

A couple of weeks ago I went to Alberto’s farm to help him prepare it for planting.  He had his son meet me on the road and accompany me on the 15 minute walk through the bush to find his plot of land.  When we arrived, my jaw dropped at the broad swath of land I saw in front of me.  I had expected a small family plot, and what was spread in front of me was an expanse of cleared land that could have fit five football fields inside of it.  Isaias, Alberto’s son, pointed to a figure in the distance which I presumed to be Alberto. He was standing with his shirt off in the diffuse morning light with a machete on his hip, and the fragmented remains of a tree underneath him.  As I approached him I noticed that hidden beneath his ostensibly small frame was a muscular farmer’s body with wiry and taught muscles, presumably the product of years of manual farm labor.  While Alberto was clearing full sized trees with the only tools he had, a machete and an axe, his wife was on an adjacent plot hoeing the land that had already been cleared with their one year-old son hanging on her back. 

He handed me the axe and we began taking down the next tree in what seemed like an interminable line of trees that would need to be felled before the farm was ready for planting.  I got to work, hacking away at the next tree with my axe, and imagined the kind of dent you could put into this work with a chainsaw instead of an axe and hand-held machete.  As the morning wore on, I decided that there was no better place to hear Alberto’s full remarkable story, from start to finish.  So I asked him to start at the beginning and tell me

everything...

Alberto was born sometime in the early 1980s on a small rural homestead in the Mozambican province of Manica.  The 1980s in Mozambique were characterized by civil war, bloodshed and, for those not doing the killing, fear.  The central region of Mozambique, where Alberto was raised, was an especially active warzone, and rural families lived in constant fear of raids from both sides, RENAMO (the rebels) and FRELIMO.  RENAMO owned the rural districts, while FRELIMO owned the cities, but the whole innocent country was caught in the cross-fire.  If you didn’t take sides with FRELIMO you were assumed to be RENAMO, and if you didn’t join up with RENAMO you were assumed to be fighting for FRELIMO.  This left simple rural farmers, like Alberto and his family, with nowhere to go and no one to protect them.  Thousands of peasant farmers fled to South Africa or Zimbabwe and thousands more abandoned their homes and took to hiding in the mountains of western Mozambique. 

Alberto’s most vivid childhood memories are of putting out the fire and hiding in their house or fleeing into the bush upon hearing army jeeps approaching in the distance.  On one particular occasion, the young Alberto hid in his house as FRELIMO troops approached and accused his father of being in collaboration with RENAMO troops.  Alberto was later told that they forced his father to join the FRELIMO army that day.  I asked him what would happen if he had refused to join.  He laughed and said no one was allowed to refuse; they would simply shoot you.  After all, why would any Mozambican refuse to join the national army unless he was a member of the rebel front? 

That was the last day Alberto saw his father.  He can only speculate that sometime during bootcamp, where thousands of Mozambicans died due to the harsh conditions, or during the brutal fighting itself, his father passed away.  With his father gone, there was very little left for Alberto and his family in Mozambique.  If they stayed in a dying Mozambique, the young Alberto was at risk of being recruited into the army himself; plus, poverty was so sweeping that there was no hope in continuing to raise a family in such a forsaken and war-torn landscape.  I am not clear on all of the details of the next 10 years of young Alberto’s life, but I know that soon after his father’s disappearance he became separated from his family in Manica, and fled on foot through the mountains into Zimbabwe to start a new life. 

Under the governance of the now infamous Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe was actually a somewhat functional nation-state in the mid-90s.  As opposed to the small subsistence farms characteristic of Mozambique today, Zimbabwe was comprised of large plantations normally owned by white land-owners.  While labor on the plantations wasn’t exactly easy living for the poor African farmers who worked them, it was at least a job with a reliable wage that they could take home to their families.  In his late teens Alberto easily found work at a large rose plantation and began looking for a home and a family.  He found a wife and in the late 1990s they had their first son, Isaias.  With the unrelenting work ethic I know Alberto has, he soon worked his way up the ranks at his plantation and gained a higher wage as a foreman of his work group.

In the year 2000, however, there was a major shift in the political landscape of Zimbabwe.  President Mugabe announced that he would be confiscating plantations owned by white Zimbabweans, and redistributing the land to Zimbabwean war veterans and formerly landless black Zimbabweans.  He gave the white landowners only a few weeks before seizing the land, encouraged blacks to invade white plantations, and did not compensate the landowners in any way for their losses.  The result of all this political turmoil was that Alberto, along with thousands of other black farm workers, found himself jobless once again.  Even today, 12 years after the land seizures, formerly productive fields go fallow and the new landowners often fail to achieve the productivity that was once a source of pride for Zimbabwe. Since then, the Zimbabwean currency has tanked (to the point that they adopted the US Dollar as their currency in 2009 to dig themselves out of the massive deflation of the Zimbabwean dollar), and their government has floundered in attempts to right its economy.

After a few jobless years in Zimbabwe, trying haplessly to raise a family, Alberto decided that Mozambique was now peaceful enough to attempt to return to(the civil war had officially ended on October 4^th, 1992, and refugees were slowly finding their way home).  Unfortunately his wife was Zimbabwean and didn’t have any intentions of returning to Mozambique with Alberto.  She elected to stay with their son, Isaias, and Alberto was forced to journey back across a border having lost a family for a second time. 

With no money, no food, and only the clothes on his back, Alberto trudged 200 kilometers on foot through the Chimanimani mountains that lie on the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and tried to start a new life again in Mozambique.  This time luck, or God, as he would tell you, was on his side.  He had heard about a small rural mission called Mangunde that had farms and employed local workers.  He made his way along the same bush paths that he would later guide me through on our cross-country trek this June, and found his way to Mangunde.  There, with no friends or family to support him, he asked the local chief for a small plot of land to build a house three kilometers outside the mission.  As he integrated into the community of Mangunde and became acquainted with the workers at the hospital, he met a special foreigner who he endearingly refers to as Dr. Uva. 

Dr. Uva and his wife were volunteering at the hospital at the time, but took a liking to Alberto, and took him under their wings.  It was just the break that Alberto needed.  They introduced him to other hospital workers and eventually set him up with a job as a community activist for HIV/AIDS.  Step by step, he got his feet underneath him here in Mangunde and made a name for himself.  Realizing that the only way he would be able to have a real future would be if he graduated from secondary school, he began studying 4^th grade in 2008.  This year he passed 8^th grade, and next year has plans to move into 9^th grade.  He remarried a few years ago, and, in 2011, with his new wife, had his wife’s first son, his second, Camisola.  Through his work with the hospital, he received a cell phone and bicycle, two things that poor people simply don’t have, and, with a monthly stipend of 1,000 meticals ($40), he’s been able to add new huts to his homestead, begin raising chickens, and acquire new land to continue farming. 

In June of this year, Alberto received word from Zimbabwe that his ex-wife had fallen into hard times and his first son, Isaias, was not studying, and had been left to fend for himself at the age of 12.  Now that Alberto had a house and a stable situation to bring another child into, he sent his aging mother with money for transport (which PCVs Mike and Mac funded) to Zimbabwe to fetch his first-born son.  Since she didn’t have phone and there was no way to contact his family in Zimbabwe, Alberto had to  wait and hope that his ex-wife and son would both agree, and that his son would make a safe passage through the mountains and into Mozambique to be reunited with his father.  Weeks and months went by and Alberto began to lose hope that his son Isaias would ever arrive.  On a hot day in August, however, we received news from Alberto that his mother had arrived at their house with his long-lost son, her grandson, Isaias.  It was a glorious day and auspicious homecoming.

A few weeks after Isaias’ arrival, Alberto invited Mike and me to his house to celebrate the long-awaited reunion of his family.  Young Isaias was a little timid, and seemed to be confused about all these new people who were now part of his life, but we ate chicken, drank neepa and celebrated for Alberto.  On that particular day, it seemed like we were celebrating more than just the arrival of Alberto’s son; it seemed like we were celebrating every amazing accomplishment that Alberto has been able to scrape out from nothing in this third try at life that he was given in Mangunde.  Getting by on his sheer determination and will to succeed, Alberto took himself from a feeble orphan and refugee in Zimbabwe to a successful and respected man in the Mangunde community.

Mike and I drinking a local beverage at Alberto son's homecoming

Celebrating Isaias' homecoming

While we were taking a water break from clearing the brush on his farm that day, I asked Alberto a question: where do you see yourself in five or ten years?  He told me that the most important thing for him was to finish school.  With God’s help, he said, he could pass 12^th grade in four years.  But then what did he tell me after that?  He didn’t say he wants to be a nurse, or a teacher, or even a community activist, as I would have expected.  No, Alberto’s dream, above all other dreams, is to be a musician.   He wants to be in band, save up enough money to get a guitar, a piano, and a drum set, and produce church music with his family.  That’s what brought him to my house on that day two years ago.  He had seen me playing guitar on my veranda, and it ignited in him his dream of recording music for his band some day in the future.  My first instinct was to scoff at his musical aspirations and write it off as some kind of pipe dream that would never come true.  Currently he is years, maybe even decades, away from getting close to his dream, but after everything he’s been through and come out on top of, I can’t doubt him anymore.  If the cards fall his way, maybe we’ll be hearing Alberto’s family band on the radio someday.  

Standing outside Alberto's family's house on our walk to Dombe

Fishing, Free Stuff and Mangunde Farewells

On the last day I stood atop the open-back truck facing backwards and watched Mangunde get smaller behind me.  It was mid-morning and the refulgent sun had already pierced through the cool morning air, turning the climate inhospitable by 9a.m.  I looked out across the desiccated African landscape and tried to capture the gravity and finality of what was happening.  On my left the first to go was the school and the soccer field.  On my right I saw my house diminish in size until it was gone.  Then there was the professor’s housing area.  Each house blipped by coming into focus and then fading out as hands waved good-bye to me.  At last the truck accelerated past the “Welcome to Mangunde” sign and I saw the massive and iconic baobab tree that marks the entrance to the mission rise up in front of me and then fade out with the rest of Mangunde into the horizon.  

Earlier that morning I had undone in two hours what had taken two years to build in my journey as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  My room was dismantled and compartmentalized piece by piece, each picture taken off the wall representing an epoch of my life here in Mangunde.  By the time I was finished reducing all of my belongings into two medium-sized backpacks of only the necessities my room looked exactly like it had nearly two years before when I arrived – an empty box.  I pulled my two bags out onto the veranda to wait for my ride out and stepped back into my room one more time.  I conjured memories of what it was like to arrive here nearly two years before.  I had been greeted by our maid, Gracinda, and shown to my room.  I stepped in to the room, heard the echoes of my footsteps on the bare walls and thought about what my life in this unknown landscape would be like.  On that day, I closed my door and sat down on my bed for the first time.  I looked at the walls and out the window and tried to shore myself in the promise of the unknown – the possibilities for relationships and experiences that lay in front of me.   

Now, two years gone by, each fading image of Mangunde is connected poignantly to an experience I’ve had here.  In my last weeks in Mangunde I had the chance to reflect on the experiences I’ve had in Mangunde and create a few new experiences before leaving for good.  Before I could do that and officially leave, however, I had to get through the painstaking process of national exams, carried out nationwide for 7th, 10th and 12th graders the second week in November every year. 

It’s funny the way national exam time works here in Mozambique.  For ten months out of the year nobody seemed to really give a shit about anything – professors showed up late and didn’t plan their lesson, or maybe they showed up for 15 minutes and dictated a few lines from the textbook to the students, students skipped class to hang out at the market, cheated on their exams, and copied homework, and the director disappeared for literally two month without a trace.  Essentially, the amount of actual teaching and learning that went on during the school year was negligible.   

Then, around came exam time and the school did a full 180.  The district inspectors were there to make sure there was no funny business, all the teachers showed up five minutes early to sign-in in the morning, and all the seriousness, assiduity, and work ethic that was lacking throughout the school year to actually teach the students the material, suddenly appeared to evaluate them.  In order to prevent corruption and the very serious offense of fraud the school took various preventative measures – two professors of disciplines other than the discipline being tested were stationed in each exam room to proctor the students, each one having the sign each test and piece of scratch paper given to the students, any questions the students had were attended to in the inspector’s presence, the exams were to remain in a sealed envelope and only opened with an officially approved razor blade when the bell rang to begin the exam, and any reports of cheating would be reported as fraud and result in automatic failure of all disciplines by the students involved.  Even the grading process was highly controlled.  Students’ names were replaced by codes to avoid any bias on the part of the professors, each test needed to be painstakingly “locked” before grading, which meant that all of the blank spaces left by student on the answer sheet had to be filled in with red pen so that no mischievous professors could fill in the answers for their students.  Lastly, each exam had to be graded twice by two separate professors. 

While some of these measures seemed like senseless overkill and unnecessary work for us professors, I couldn’t help but be a little impressed, given my previous experiences in Mozambique, with how seriously they were taking this process.  And, by in large, I saw very little corruption in Mangunde.  Yeah, teachers often let students cheat off of each other during the exams, or pass scratch papers around to copy each others’ answers, but these were minor offenses. 

It was only when I talked to some of my friends at different schools that I realized how useless some of these corruption precautions are if a school is really intent on cheating.  Here are only a few of the things people told me went on regularly and openly at their schools: during certain exams, teachers would resolve the test and simply walk in to the exam room and start giving the answers to the students.  Also, after the names were replaced by codes on the tests teachers would walk into the director’s office with a list of their family members, or students that had paid them, and would be given the codes for those students.  Later, before the answer sheets were “locked” with red pen, they would go through the tests and write in the correct answers for their preferred students.  On another occasion, the director’s children copied the answers on a new answer sheet at home, copied their code in the corner, and replaced the test they had previously taken in the pile for grading.  Amazingly, not one case of fraud was reported in all of these exploits.  A few weeks ago I was listening to the radio and heard a representative from the Ministry of Education lauding the schools this year for running their exams so cleanly, only 76 cases of fraud reported nationwide!  Congrats, Mozambique, you have successfully eliminated corruption! 

Once I was finished with national exams and was able to see how well my students did (I taught the same group of students in 9^th grade last year and in 10^th grade this year and they finished with an exam passing rate of 80% - which is quite good and a number I’m proud of!) I was able to focus my last few days on packing up my things, saying good-bye to my friends and colleagues and checking a few last minute things off of my Mangunde bucket list.  My roommate, Mike, asked me in my last week if there was anything in Mangunde that I had always wanted to do but never had the chance.  Without hesitation, I responded that I’d always wanted to hunt ratazana – giant weasel-like rats that people burn the fields for in the dry season and pursue with sling-shots and bow-and-arrows all day and night. I pitched the idea to my friends Alberto, and he didn’t seem too keen on the idea.  Well, more like he didn’t really understand why I would want to do that.  Did you run out of other food?  No.  Do you really like the taste of ratazana?  No, I hate it.  Well… He explained that walking around with bows and arrows in the heat of the day with a slim chance of seeing a ratazana and a slimmer chance of catching one isn’t tops on his list of things to do.  I couldn’t quite articulate my motivation for hunting them to Alberto and I think a few things were lost in the cross-cultural exchange…Because walking around the bush with a bow and arrow hunting giant rats is really bad-ass!  Thus, I abandoned the idea and settled for a close second.  We decided that on my last weekend in Mangunde we would  find the guy in the village who owns a canoe and pay him to take a little river safari while also trying our luck at fishing.   

On the agreed upon day, we set off into the bush in search of Mr. Canoe.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t email or call ahead, so we just showed up at his hut to see if he was available.  We were told that he had just left and was helping the community build a house for an elderly woman nearby.  Undeterred, we set off for the elderly woman’s house in hopes of getting him to put down the sticks and mud and guide us up the river.  We found Mr. Canoe and about ten other men working enthusiastically on this glowing elderly woman’s house.  Unfortunately, few of them spoke Portuguese, so it was difficult to do anything more than just smile, laugh and take funny pictures of them working on the house, but it was an interesting process to observe as we waited for Mr. Canoe to become available.  I asked Alberto about why they were so happy, and he told me that since no one has money and everyone has plenty of time here, they usually work for a local drink called neepa or mapira.  The recipient of the house will make up a couple of batches (usually made from adding corn flour and sugar and letting it ferment until it becomes alcoholic) and every hour or so the workers will take a break, pass a jug around, and then continue on their work.   

When we finally isolated Mr. Canoe he told us that he was busy on the build, but he would send Mr. Canoe Jr., his son, with us in his hand-carved canoe on the river safari.  Earlier that morning Alberto and I had rigged up a makeshift fishing pole – a hook with fishing line I had brought from home attached to a bamboo stick with a ping pong ball in the middle as a bobber, a clump of paper clips as a sinker, and a tear of bread to lure the fish in – and I was pretty excited to toss it in the water and catch us some dinner.  The canoe we took onto the water was literally a hollowed out tree trunk.  You could still see the bark on the bottom and the craftsmen had apparently just taken an axe to carve out the middle of it to give us somewhere to sit, and chipped off the sides to give it a rectangular shape.  We pushed it out onto the water and our adventure had begun. 

Alberto and Mr. Canoe Jr. chose to wait until that moment to tell Mike and I that there are lots of crocodiles in this part of the river.  They were laughing as they said so I didn’t think it was too serious, but I wasn’t necessarily reassured as our canoe was floating only a foot or so above the level of the water.  As we got deeper into the river and the reeds crept closer into sides they would say, mmm, yes, this is where the crocodiles really like to stay…or…yes, this is where the crocodiles will jump out of the river and eat the goats drinking water on the river banks…what about foreigners in a low-riding canoe??  Luckily, we were not eaten, nor did we see a crocodile that day on the river.  Also, despite our efforts, we didn’t catch any fish.  My bread kept falling off the hook and apparently fish don’t just randomly bite on empty hooks for fun. 

After the river safari, I refocused my last few days at Mangunde on packing up all of my things and giving away everything that wouldn’t fit into the two backpacks that I would be taking to Maputo, and then India and Thailand on my COS trip.  I think everyone goes through this stage of regret when they are packing and eventually curses themselves for having brought sooo many t-shirts.  What was I thinking??  Did I really need to bring 800 t-shirts??  Most Mozambicans have one or two t-shirts that they wear everyday (to the point that I usually identify my students not by their faces, but by the t-shirts they always wear) and here I am with a surfeit of useless clothes I’ll never wear.  After a brief hesitation and second looks at those t-shirts with sentimental value I started throwing them into piles to give away.  I wasn’t quite sure how to do it at first.  My original idea was just to walk to the water pump or into the bush with a basket of shirts and start handing them out to anyone who asked.  I thought that this could turn hostile though as t-shirts here are highly sought-after commodities.  Instead, I made a big pile for my friend, Alberto, and a few smaller piles for some of my other friends – Teacher Pedro, our maid Gracinda, and her relatives – and the rest I handed to unsuspecting kids walking by the house who looked like they could use a shirt. 

 

After my t-shirts and stack of dusty Peace Corps manuals were all off my hands, and my room was once again an empty box, I was ready to say good-bye to Mangunde.  On the morning of my departure I walked through the school and said a final goodbye to my fellow professors who were still busy correcting exams, and got my director to sign-off on my departure.  The whole event was rather unceremonious, and while some professors expressed that they would genuinely miss me and that they couldn’t believe that it had already been two years, the director and the other bosses didn’t even look up from the work when I came into their offices and said, well, I’m leaving now…It’s okay though, I was never under any illusions that I had become friends with many of the professors at Mangunde.  While some were responsible, good teachers, who made efforts to welcome me to their country and school, to the majority of Mangunde teachers, I was just another in a line of Americans who came to teach at their school and they didn’t so much as blink when I arrived or left two years later.  The reality in Mangunde has always been that my most meaningful relationships have been with the student’s I’ve taught and mentored throughout my two years.  I was happy when, the night before I left, my closest student, Patrick, came to my house and told me, in his near-perfect English, how much I’ve meant to him and this school over the past two years.  He told me that I would be leaving a whole in his heart, and that my impact on his life and the life of the rest of the students in Mangunde will be spread throughout the rest of their lives.  

So I boarded the open back truck and waved at Mangunde as it disappeared over the horizon.  Will I ever be back to visit, people kept asking as I was making my final goodbyes?  I don’t know.  I’ve heard stories of PCVs coming back to their village 20 years later not expecting to see anyone they recognize and finding, to their dismay, a student they taught or a kid they helped raise, living and immediately recognizing the PCV, as if they had been waiting 20 years for the PCV to return to show them how much they had accomplished because of the lessons that the PCV had taught them.  Maybe someday I’ll be back… 

For now, though, it’s on to my next adventure.  In exactly 30 days I’ll be back in the States, but before that I still have to make it to Maputo to close my Peace Corps service, and then it’s off to India and Thailand for a few weeks of site-seeing before Christmas.  Happy Thanksgiving!

English Theater Competition 2012: A Success Story

Every year in September Peace Corps volunteers throughout Mozambique put on provincial English Theater competitions which invite local schools to prepare and present theater pieces related to a socially relevant theme in front of their community.  In 2011 I was responsible for organizing the competition for the central region of Mozambique.  I invited 15 schools from around the region to prepare 10 minute skits on the theme “Choose Your Future.”  It was an overwhelming responsibility for me to coordinate such a massive event in my first year as a volunteer while I was still trying to learn the ropes of planning things in a foreign context.  Bank hold-ups, communication snafus, transportation nightmares and t-shirt complications were only a few of the roadblocks that I had to negotiate my way though in order for the event to run smoothly for the 150 participants that attended the event.  The $10,000 grant that I received to run the competition didn’t find its way into my local bank account until the day that schools were scheduled to arrive, and even then, I found that I was only permitted to withdraw up to $100 per day from that account.  Despite these problems, I found ways to make it work. The schools showed up, presented their skits, and had a great experience.  All in all, at the time, English Theater 2011 was my biggest success and most harrowing experiences as a PCV. 

In 2012, I figured that I knew what I was doing.  I handled all of the money transfers early, figured out transportation costs and communication with the various schools with plenty of time to absorb any potential obstacles.  This year, as a result of an expansion in the program I split my region into two separate competitions with 10 schools and 120 participants each.  Our theme in 2012 was “We Are All Equal” and schools presented a number of compelling skits related to gender, racial, and socio-economic equality.  Other than the fact that for a second straight year I was unable to find an emcee and had to embarrass myself with some emergency stand-up comedy in front of a theater full of non-native English speakers, the 2012 competition was organizationally a huge success.  I made a few calculating errors and ended up almost $500 over budget, but who’s counting? 

The more compelling story that came from the 2012 English Theater competition is the personal story of one of my dearest students here in Mangunde, a 10^th grader named Patricio, or Patrick.  I’d like to tell you Patrick’s story as it culminated in an inspirational way at the 2012 English Theater Competition in Chimoio.

Patricio Gonçalves is an orphan who was born in Chimoio, in the Mozambican province of Manica.  When he was a child his mother died and his father took him to Zimbabwe.  In Zim, he learned some basic English and studied up through the 5^th grade.  I’m not clear on all of the details, but at some point he was abandoned by his father and he moved back to Chimoio where he had no family and few connections.  As a kid in Chimoio, he was left to provide for himself, trying to earn enough money to live and eventually go back to school. 

In 2005, when he was 13, he met a Peace Corps volunteer also living and working in Chimoio.  He began to work for her, getting her water in exchange for school money.  When the PCVs term was up, she recommended that Patricio move out of Chimoio and enter one of the rural boarding schools run by ESMABAMA, an Italian Mission that operates four boarding schools throughout the province of Sofala, in Mozambique.  Patricio elected to attend Mangunde Secondary School and the PCV agreed to pay for his school fees and minor expenses as she returned to the States.

In Mangunde, Patricio struggled at first to fit it with other students and reconcile his lack of family support.  He failed 8^th grade in his first year, but found hope and motivation in the connections he made with the PCVs teaching there at Mangunde, and in his love for English Theater.  Since 2008, he has been under the tutelage of six different Peace Corps volunteers at Mangunde and participated in the English Theater Competition every year.  While he has, at times, struggled in school because of his past, he loves Peace Corps volunteers and all of the various secondary projects that we do here in Mozambique.  He is a leading member of the English Theater and JUNTOS groups of Mangunde, and has participated actively in Science Fair, taking home 2^nd place at the provincial fair in 2012. 

In 2011 Patricio suffered from an almost fatal bone infection which nearly put him in a coma and forced him to miss four months of school to be flown to Maputo for emergency surgery.  He underwent dozens of blood transfusions, multiple surgeries, a myriad of different medications and a slow and frustrating recovery process to his enigmatic condition.  Despite all of this hardship, throughout his illness and recovery, he stayed focused on the one thing that mattered most to him: what would the theme be for the 2011 English Theater competition?  He eventually recovered and miraculously made it back to Mangunde in time to finish school and participate in the 2011 competition entitled “Choose Your Future.”  Mangunde presented brilliantly and Patricio was a star.  They were disappointed by a 5^th place finish, but, considering what it took just to get there, it was a huge success.

In 2012, Patricio found out that his father had passed away and suffered more and more from complications from his surgery and chronic headaches.  Nonetheless, he stayed focused on English Theater, and, when this year’s theme, “We Are All Equal”, came out he whipped the Mangunde team into shape.  At the competition, despite having to leave the event midway through to go to the hospital to treat a crippling migraine, he stumbled onto the stage in a delirium and accepted the award for Best Actor that he earned from his stunning performance.  Later in the awards ceremony the overall winners were announced and the judge called out “1^st Place…MANGUNDE!!”  Patricio rushed the stage with his fellow students and hugged me in celebration of what was a truly gratifying day after all he had been through.

What does Patricio’s experience tell us about English Theater and the Peace Corps in general?  It tells me that Peace Corps projects such as English Theater do not only exist on paper.  I have learned that when you are dealing with organizations and grant money it can often feel a bit hollow.  They want statistics – how many males and females benefited from this use of funds?  What ages?  Was there an HIV and AIDS component?  Did you offer HIV testing?  How many people tested positive?  Yes, maybe we can say that 98 students attended the event and gained knowledge about HIV and AIDS or that 16 people got tested for HIV.  Those are tangible statistics which are important indicators for success.  The impact of English Theater, however, has roots that go much deeper than HIV testing and numbers on a page. 

To me and to the 100 plus students that I met at the competition that day English Theater represents a passion and a motivation to achieve something more for so many students around Mozambique.  It is an opportunity for students to leave their tiny communities and experience something bigger than themselves; it is a chance for students to get excited about learning and to share in a cultural exchange; it is hope and drive when sometimes they have nothing else to looking forward to.  Patricio is not the only one; I see that passion for English theater in the eyes of every student who is chosen to represent their school and community every year at the English Theater competition. 

As for Patricio, he is back here at Mangunde and even though the 2012 trophy hasn’t even settled into its spot on the shelf yet, he’s already curious about what the theme will be for next year.  In school this year, he’s repeating 10^th grade for the second time, and next week, will have a shot at the National Exam to see if now, at the age of 19, he can advance into 11^th grade.  

As I get ready to leave Mozambique it’s natural to think about the people and places I will miss the most and my buddy Patricio will definitely be at the top of the list.  Because of his experience and friendship with so many other PCVs here in Mangunde he’s one of the few students who really gets us and appreciates the work that we do.  So many students come to us asking for us to do this or that and so rarely do we get recognition for the time and effort that we contribute to this school.  Patrick gets it, and he’s a wonderful person because of it.  This is from a letter that I received from Patrick last year:

I wish you all of the good things, my teacher.  You are very wonderful and a shining star in my life…Forget about the past; think about the present and the future.  What will become of the people you are teaching?  They must be the fruits from your hand…Your student friend forever,

-Black Man Soldier from Jamaica, Patrick

Race to the Finish Line - Killing Pigs and Prepositions Along the Way

Bom dia!  Today is Saturday, November 3^rd, and my time here in Mozambique is quickly ending.  Officially my COS, or close of service, will take place on November 30^th, and I will no longer be a PCV, but will be an RPCV (Retired-PCV).  I find myself in a certain limbo, thinking about the future and trying to plan my post-PC life, but at the same time trying to close my service in a meaningful way.  When you get into the last few months of your Peace Corps service you begin to deal with questions and good-byes that you’re not necessarily prepared for.  Mozambican colleagues all ask you if you’re leaving for good, and whether you’ll come back to visit them; other PCVs ask you where you’ll be living when you get back to the states and what you’re planning on doing; and you ask yourself what this experience has meant for you and your future, and what you want to do with your life after November 30^th.  I don’t have answers to any of these questions yet, so my general strategy has been to focus on my life here in Mozambique while I’m still here to enjoy it and hope that the rest will work itself out when the time comes…

Here in Mozambique the last three months have been a whirlwind of school responsibilities, trips, and Peace Corps functions, and have left me with very little free time, as you may have deduced from the lack of blog posts.  Only now, when things here at school are winding down to the end of the year, my Peace Corps colleagues are already COSing and many of my goodbyes have already been said, do I have the chance to sit down and reflect on these last few months of living in Mozambique. 

In the classroom with my 10^th grade English students this trimester has been all about preparing them for the mandatory national exam that they will take next week.  In Mozambique, 7^th, 10^th, and 12^th grades have national exams that students must pass in order to proceed to the next grade or graduate.  These national exams are notoriously difficult and force many students to repeat the same grades over and over.  Because of this, many of the 10^th and 12^th graders here in Mangunde and around the country are in their 20s, repeating 10^th or 12^th grade for the third or fourth year as they try to pass the national exam.  Try solving these English questions that appeared on the national exam last year and you’ll see why:

I didn’t hear you ------------- in.  You must have been very quiet.

a)      came          b) come           c) comes          d) coming

I must go now.  I promised ------------- late.

a)      I wouldn’t be          b) not been      c) not being                d) to not be

Now imagine that you don’t speak English.  How would you pass the test?  Well, here in Mozambique there are a few ways.  You can study your ass off, learn as much as you possibly can and hope that the questions aren’t all ridiculously difficult like the questions above.  Some students do this and they are the future of Mozambique.  Or, you can find a teacher who will be grading the tests and pay him to pass you.  You can pay him with money, chickens, phone credit, sex, and any number of other benefits that he will have few qualms in accepting, because teachers don’t get paid enough and their salaries never come in time.  That’s the sad reality of the education system in Mozambique.  The official end of the 2012 school year was last week and exams begin next week, so we’ll see how the process plays out this year. 

In 8^th grade biology I finished my final exams and the school year last week.  This year we covered all of the systems of the human body and I ended the year talking about the Reproductive System, always a highlight.  Talking about penises, vaginas and masturbation with 13-15 year olds is pure entertainment.  They all rolled over laughing when I tried to pronounce the words for penis and vagina in the local language (if you’re ever in the area…mbolo and mbetche) and I had to stifle my laughter at some of the questions they asked: “So is this ‘egg’ in the woman like the type of egg we eat from a chicken?”  “What is a clitoris?”  “Can girls masturbate too?”  “How?”  “Is it possible for a woman to give birth to a tea cup?”  So I spent my last few weeks in the biology classroom explaining the basics of sex and reproduction, and, of course, masturbation (munhara in local language if you were wondering), to a group of giggly adolescents, a fitting end to my Peace Corps service. 

Outside of the classroom there has been plenty to do here in Mangunde over the course of the last few months.  In August the provincial Science Fair was held in Beira.  This was an event initiated many years ago by Peace Corps volunteers and is now run jointly every year by PCVs and the Ministry of Science of Mozambique.  It’s a wonderful event that invites the winners of smaller local fairs to Beira to present the science experiments that they have developed and compete for a chance to win cool prizes and, for one lucky winner, for a chance to participate in the National Science Fair.  From Mangunde, there were six students who won the opportunity to compete in the provincial fair in Beira.  Their experiments, by rule, were supposed to use the scientific method and be relevant to problems faced by their local communities. 

Before the Science Fair in August we had what I can now call our annual Mangunde Roast to celebrate my birthday here at site.  There were 10 or so PCVs who braved the journey out to rural Mangunde and were treated with an old-fashioned Brazilian-style churrasco.  As part of the festivities we made our way to the pens where they keep the pigs and were told to pick out the pig that we wanted to eat later that afternoon.  Then the guy asked me if we had brought a knife and a wheelbarrow and who was going to kill the pig.  I’m a softy; I freaked out when I tried to kill a chicken last year and it ended up with the chicken running around spurting blood out of a half-severed neck.  I didn’t want to repeat that on a larger scale this year with a pig.  Actually, none of us wanted to have the burden of killing the pig; we just wanted to eat some pork chops that night.  Luckily for us, Mozambicans tend to be chillingly unfazed about slaughtering animals, and actually often excited about the prospect.  Thus, we had a line of students who had followed us to the pen in anticipation of getting a poke at the poor swine we chose.  Picking which pig would meet its maker that day, however, was the hardest part. 

                                                             

Word to the wise, don’t google “are pigs intelligent animals” on your phone right before you’re about to kill one, because you’ll read that they’re the fourth most intelligent non-human animal in the world.  Apparently they are surprisingly self-aware and have been shown to understand when theire pen-mates are taken away to be killed.  In a completely unrelated google search, pigs have also been observed to have orgasms of up to 30 minutes.  None of this stimulates one’s appetite for bacon. 

We decided, thus, that the only fair way to choose between the four adolescent pig brothers in front of us was based on looks.  We put on the pig masks we had torn out of a book to make the pigs feel more comfortable around us, approached the pigs and made our selection.  We pointed to the ugliest pig with the most black spots and then covered our ears as my eager students jumped into the pen and cornered it. 

The shrieks of his brethren as he was being carried away were blood-curdling.  Did you know that the way you’re supposed to kill a pig in Mozambique is by stabbing it in the heart?  Yeah.  Stabbing it in the heart.  So my students stepped on its mouth so it wouldn’t scream, held him down and cradled him in their chest like a newborn baby and then with one slow motion sunk an eight inch knife into the pig’s chest.  It took 10 or 15 seconds of poking around while the pig was still alive until he hit the heart and finally killed the poor thing.  I couldn’t handle it.  I didn’t watch, just listened to the pig’s muffled shrieks. 

When I opened my eyes the pig was dead.  His eyes were glazed over and his legs were motionless.  It’s funny, though, how this happens.  Each step in the process of turning the once live pig into dinner the pig looks less and less like a pig to me and more and more like a pork chop, and despite my previous horror, the afternoon wore on and I found my appetite tapping me on the shoulder and asking me when dinner would be served.  The pig had to be shaved with boiling water, then eviscerated, decapitated, then cut into small edible pieces.  The students who had killed the pig expected some share of the meat, and were beyond excited when we offered the head, hooves, testicles and intestines to them.  We marinated the pig in a garlic tomato sauce and threw it on the charcoal grill.  As the scent of sizzling pork emanated through the yard and into our nostrils we all forgot about the atrocity that we had witnessed earlier that morning and got ready to feast.  I don’t know if it was because of the garlic and tomato marinade we put on it, or the charcoal fire that cooked it to perfection, or the fact that we had been there for every step of the preparation process, but that was the most delicious pork I had ever eaten.

After the pig roast and Science Fair, there were a still a few events left before the end of the trimester for me.  In the first week of September I worked with the local health center to carry out an HIV/AIDS and leadership training for 40 of the brightest 12^th grade students here in Mangunde.  I can say with confidence that it was one of the most positive experiences throughout my Peace Corps service.  The head nurse at the health center, a wonderful man name José, co-coordinated the workshop with me and was instrumental in making it run as smoothly as it did.  It was only one day, but included sessions given by different nurses, religious leaders, professors, and myself about all kinds of important issues that adolescents in Mozambique face – HIV/AIDS and pregnancy prevention, self-esteem, gender issues, character development, religious perspectives and many more. 

As Peace Corps volunteers one of the biggest challenges we face is finding real local support for our projects in the form of committed and effective counterparts.  At this point in my service I’ve run so many HIV/AIDS workshops that I could practically run one by myself with my eyes closed.  What’s so difficult and so easily forgotten by many PCVs, however, is including local leaders in your projects as well.  I can organize all the students, funding, food, lodging, certificates and transport for an event and then get up and preach to them about the importance of self-esteem, condom use and gender equality until the cows come home, but it’s only going to go so far.  I’m a rich, foreign, white male.  How much is a poor 15 year old Mozambican girl really going to listen to my messages? 

Not all PCVs like to work with Mozambicans on their projects.  This isn’t because we don’t like them, or get along with them.  They’re our friends and neighbors, of course we do.  It’s because working with Mozambicans is often messy and unorganized.  We’re afraid of money being mishandled, people showing up late, and things not being taken care of until the last minute.  It’s much easier to just take care of everything yourself and not have to trust others with difficult jobs.  This is what I’ve done on almost all of my projects throughout my PC service.  “I’ll handle it; you just show up and do what you’re supposed to do…” I would tell my Mozambican counterparts. 

That’s not how I ran this last workshop, and that is why it was so rewarding.  José took on the bulk of the planning responsibilities.  I gave him the form and he wrote the grant, I mentioned a few important themes and he wrote the curriculum, and I gave him the money and he organized all of the meals.  On the day of the event there were a few last minute delays that you can count on in any Mozambican-run event, but all in all it was a huge success.  The students were able to learn from their peers and fellow Mozambicans throughout the sessions and José gained valuable experience in planning a workshop.  I learned that all it takes is a little bit of trust and detachment and you can stand back and see your local projects carried out.

After the training in September, there were two more events that consumed the bulk of my time over the last couple of months.  They were the annual Regional English Theater Competition which I organized and took place in Chimoio on September 22^nd, and an end of the year field trip with the 12^th graders to see famous pre-historic rock paintings in October.  I’m reaching my word limit here for this blog, however, and I want to devote a full post to these dramatic events, so I’m going to end here and pick up where I left off another day. 

Thanks for sticking with me, and I hope to see you all in a few short months.  I forgot to mention that after I COS on November 30^th, I’m planning on going on a three-week trip with Hannah that will take us to India and Thailand before arriving back to the States on December 23^rd.  Just one more thing to look forward to!  Until next time…