English Exchanges and Exam Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Soldiers Came

The soldiers came

And dropped their bombs.

The soldiers didn’t take long

To bring the forest down.

With the forest gone

The birds were gone;

With the birds gone

Who will sing their song?

But the soldiers forgot

To take the forest

Out of the people’s hearts.

The soldiers forgot

To take the birds

Out of the people’s dreams,

And in the people’s dreams

The birds still sing their song.

Now the children

Are planting seedlings

To help the forest grow again.

They eat a simple meal of rice wrapped in banana leaves

And the land welcomes their smiling

Like a shower of rain.

-Issaca (Trouble-free)

Bottle Cap Symphony

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

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

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

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

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

Broomsticks and Birthdays: Mysticism in Mozambique

Hello!  Good afternoon to everyone!  Let me start this blog with a few acknowledgements.  First of all, happy Father’s Day.  Sunday was Father’s Day back in the states and because of technical difficulties I was only able to get a couple of words in to my dad, so here it is, Happy Father’s Day, Dad.  Also both my father and grandfather have birthday’s coming up in June.  So I would like to wish my dad a happy “Xth” birthday this week and my grandpa a happy 92^nd birthday this year!!  I wish I could be there to celebrate with all of you!

Here in Mozambique life is moving along like always.  I find myself approaching the 9 month mark of my service here – almost a third of the way through.  Wow.  At some point over the course of 9 months, your perspective shifts and you no longer become a wide-eyed tourist.  You come to expect certain behaviors and attitudes from a culture you feel you know intimately.  I can’t make up my mind as to whether I like this feeling or not.  There is a certain romanticism and excitement to the first few months you spend in a new place, insatiably taking in all you can about a new culture – snapping photos every time you see a woman carrying water on her head, and imagining you’re on a movie set when you walk through mud-hutted villages.  Now I pass by these relics like I would pass by an old N’Sync album at a record store.  Yesterday’s news.  Am I jaded, inured, or just integrated?  Hmmm…or maybe I am somewhere in between.  I am not nor will I ever be African.  I’m sure that there are things that I will never fully understand or come to appreciate about this culture, but I can only hope that the fleeting excitement of being a tourist has been replaced by a deeper respect and understanding of not only Mozambicans or Africans, but all of humanity that I may not even realize until I’m thrown back into the American culture that I grew up in. 

As it stands now, while they are fewer and further between, I still occasionally come across moments when I am thrown back into the wide-eyed giddiness of someone who just stepped off the plane.  Last week, I had a conversation with one of my brightest 12^th grade students named Young Marvin.  We were talking about the widespread belief in witches or feiteceiros in African culture and it was one of those moments that made me realize how truly different our cultures are.  The conversation started out simply enough when we were discussing business and potential jobs for him after graduating.  Young mentioned that besides getting an education or a well-paying job you can also make pretty good money if you carry around this special herb in you pocket.  It is a very potent herb that can only be found in special locally sacred places.  It is widely held that any vendor toting this herb in his pocket will sell out his stock in a fraction of the time it usually takes.  A beggar carrying around the herb will have money spilling out his pockets by the end of the day.  If you are going to ask the village chief for money or permission to do something that he would normally deny off-hand, carrying around the herb is said to soften his heart and lead to unprecedented privileges.  Young told me that when he was a young boy his mother sent him out to sell that days’ catch of fish and told him to stow this special herb in his pocket to ensure luck for the day.  He was back before lunch having sold out of all the fish his mother had sent him along with.  At first, when he started touting the mystical qualities of this herb, I thought he was joking and actually had to stifle my laughter when I realized he was being completely earnest.  I couldn’t believe that someone like Young, who is my age and has his head screwed on as straight as any Mozambican I’ve met could believe in something that seemed at the time to be so childish and fairy-tale-like. 

I think Young sensed my skepticism as I smiled wildly back at him, not believing my ears.  At this point, I thought he would back-track and admit that there may be room for interpretation, but instead, he forged ahead assuring me that the work of witches and curandeiros does not stop at magic herbs.  In fact, there exist witches who mount and travel the night aboard broomsticks, arriving in distant districts in a fraction of the time it would be possible to cover over land.  He told me that he actually knows people who live in Mozambique but commute to Zimbabwe in the early hours of the morning via broomstick to start the workday there. 

I know, it sounds ridiculous and impossible.  You’re probably thinking, “Mr. Young can’t really believe that.  He’s just saying that…but deep down he knows it can’t be true.”  Wrong.  If you looked into his eyes and saw the conviction burning deep down you would know that he really believes with all of his heart that witches commute to Zimbabwe on broomsticks.  And Young is not just an isolated case of a crazy man who believes in witches.  He is one of the few people I would expect to have a clear understanding of the world and its physical boundaries.  This is a belief that everyone here has.  The existence of curses, herbal magic and witches are as certain as the dirt is brown and the sky is blue. 

By bringing this up I am not trying to undermine or make light of their belief system, and I am not trying to say that our belief system based more in science and physical explanations is necessarily right.  No, I am simply trying to understand it.  Whose culture is better, richer, healthier, or more abundant because of the beliefs they submit to?  I don’t know.  For that matter, what is it that makes one culture better or richer than any other?  I’m not about to start comparing all of the values and problems with Western culture and the values and problems with different African cultures in this blog post, but I do think that the belief in mysticism is a fascinating cultural and religious difference that warrants some attention. 

After Young was finished with his fantastical anecdotes he again noted my skepticism; he told me, “I know that you people from Europe and America don’t believe in these things, but here in Africa, we are different.”  I agreed with him.  We don’t believe in those things.  I looked him in the eyes and told him “if you said that you believed in flying witches and magic herbs in America, they would think you were crazy.” 

It was a stark realization to come to and got me thinking about how profoundly different our culture is from theirs.  How is it something can be so implicitly accepted in one culture and so vehemently denied in another?  I can’t imagine ever having a serious conversation about business with someone in the states and telling him to toss this herb in his pocket just for today to make a few extra bucks.  It would be a joke.  I can’t imagine losing a soccer game and them blaming the loss on the hexes that the other team put on the goal posts (“Did you see how many balls hit the post?  Not even Pele could score on that cursed goal.”)  These are actual examples, by the way.  I can’t imagine having a student come to me in tears asking for 100mts so that he could go to the curandeiro to catch and put a hex on the person who stole his phone, and then, after refusing to give him the money on principal, having him come back a week later and tell me that the curandeiro made the phone “appear” to him.  I can’t imagine our soccer team taking a 10km detour on the way to a game to avoid the curse that the opposing team put on the main road.  

Here, it’s a fact of life.  Curandeiros are real and witches fly.  I honestly don’t know what it is about the culture, education and upbringing that make such beliefs possible, but I respect it deeply.  I think that we jump to judgments too quickly, I certainly did when Young told me about flying witches.   We think that something that seems to us so outlandish must be objectively and scientificly wrong.  But what if there is more to life in this world than science and physical boundaries?  What if there is more than one way for something to be “right?”  Maybe, having an herb in your pocket doesn’t actually affect your “energy flow” and the mood of your village chief, but if you sell out all of your fish before lunch, does it really matter?  It is easy to jump to the conclusion that these people living in their mud huts believing in witch doctors and working in the fields all day are just brutes who suffer from a lack of information, but I’m not willing to say that.  They may be right, they may be wrong.  For some ailing people curandeiros present one’s only hope for a spiritual recovery.  For others with HIV, seeking cures from curandeiros wastes precious post-infection time and prevents patients from beginning anti-retroviral treatment.  Would Mozambique be a better place if there were no curandieros?  Would it be healthier?  Would be the HIV rate be sky-rocketing like it is now between 15 and 20% prevalence in the population?  Maybe, but it may also lose some other intangible qualities.  It may lose some of the “spirit” that makes Mozambicans who they are.  I don’t think it is my place to say.

I want to leave you with one story which took place a few years ago when I was in Peru.  I was travelling the country with a group of pre-med students, doctors and dentists.  Over the course of 3 weeks we set up small clinics in orphanages, schools and villages and treated over 500 children.  There was one troubling case that still stays with to this day.  We treated a small infant in a distant mountain village.  The child was about 1 year old and had been coughing for weeks, was rejecting milk and was becoming very thin.  With the resources that we had available the most that our small team of doctors could do was to give the child some basic cough medicine and hope for the best.  They didn’t know what was wrong with the ailing child, and there was no “physical” cure available that could help him.  Thus, the doctors recommended that his parents send the baby to the local healer.  As I sat there observing the conversation I couldn’t help but think that it was strange for a Western doctor to suggest such a “traditional” intervention.  I still remember, however, what the doctors told me when I later asked about they’re peculiar recommendation; he told me, “Sometimes when standard medicine fails, all you can really hope for is hope.”  I never found out if the baby survived or passed away, or what kind of treatment the local healer attempted on him.  I do know, however, that the mother and entire community believed in the healer and that belief is a powerful thing. 

Alright, well, I’m going to leave it at that for this week.  I hope that I get the chance to blog again soon.  I had an eventful last couple weeks, full of school activities, clubs, and classroom challenges that I want to eventually share, but those will have to wait for next time.  I want to again wish my dad and grandpa happy birthdays and happy father’s days and assure them that I am thinking about and appreciating all that they’ve done for me.  To close, here are a couple of poems that some of my students published in our last edition of the school’s English newspaper:

Poem About AIDS

AIDS, what do you want from me?

AIDS, you finished destroying my life.

Take with you every dream in my life.

AIDS, your temptations destroy my life,

But you will not succeed.

AIDS, everyone weeps for your cause.

AIDS, we want peace

When you attack us.

I’m in the wilderness

And my outcome is to die.

                   -Marques (Krish)

Tear Of Ache

Don’t put me in your eyes

Because I will fall as a tear.

Put me in your heart, for, in each beating,

You will remember someone who has never seen you cry.

I can’t be the person who consoles you,

Caresses you, cleans you tears, or makes you smile.

I am someone who desires everything good and wants to see you happy

Enjoy yourself when you live;

Don’t fight only for the beautiful girl,

For every girl knows how to love.

                                      -Issaca (Trouble-Free)

 On vacation in Tofo, just after boiling the massive crabs we bought on the beach...Crab peanut curry anyone?

 A fishing boat off the beach in Vilanculos, a small beach town in the South where a big group of us met for the holiday.

 

Representing our region in the beach games on a glorious April day!

 

On the beach in Barra, another beach town in the South just after successful completing our first ever scuba dive...anyone see a paper fish?

 

Back at site, my English theater group celebrating after our theater performance in front of the school!

 

Me and one of my students, Isaca, posing in front of "Wake Up!" the English newspaper written by students in my English club that we had just posted in the school's announcement board.

 Anita, Diana, Me, Linda and Tim working on the pinatas for Children's Day!

 Trying to figure out the water balloon toss on Children's Day

 Just before he almost knocked a few kids' heads off, Pandango, a 12th grade students, demonstrating how to nail a pinata as the rain started pouring down.

About half of my revamped garden behind my house.

Pea Plants, English Plays and Perilous Piñatas

Masoko!  Ure kukumbira kumwa?  Andina kumwa…Hello family and friends!  What I just said in Ndau, the local language here in central Mozambique, means “How are you?  You are asking for water?  I don’t have any water…” which was true two days ago, but after the sudden downpour we had on Wednesday is no longer true so I don’t know why I started my blog post with it.  There is a story behind the rain though that I’ll get to later in this post hopefully.  But first, I hope that you are all well and enjoying summer back in the states.  Now that June has come I’m sure that summer is in full steam with blazing temperatures, slip-n-slides, sprinklers, outdoor tennis, green gardens, long days and dinners on the porch.  At least that’s what I like to imagine from over here.  In this hemisphere of the world, things are also festive and exciting, and since my last post a lot of cool stuff has happened at school that I want to talk about so I’m going to get right to it.

When I came back from my two week school break in which I explored the beaches of Inhambane I have to admit that it was difficult to readjust to the quiet yet busy life here on the mission.  I longed for the company of friends and the care-free sand of the beach.  Soon enough, however, I remembered that prior to leaving for the break, I had set a number of goals for myself to accomplish during my second trimester. 

The first goal was to re-vamp my ailing garden.  When I arrived in January I made a noble but amateur attempt at a garden behind my house.  If you remember me mentioning, the few tomato plants that managed to squeeze themselves out of the soils didn’t grow taller than about 6 inches and the zucchini plants that looked lush and prolific at first only managed to push out one zucchini.  I was not ready, however to give up on growing.  After all, the neighbors all around me had their own plots that seemed to be thriving with corn, squash, and cucumbers.  In order to get it right this time, I decided that I would take a more locally integrated approach than before.  

In my first attempt, I had marched in confidently with my American seeds and my Peace Corps issued permagarden manual ready to show up my neighbors and teach them how to “increase their yield by 400%” as the manual boasts.  I planted tomatoes, peppers and lettuce despite warnings that they wouldn’t survive in the summer heat.  I was convinced that my gardening methods would revolutionize hundred of years of learned agricultural techniques here in Mozambique and that the locals simply suffered from a lack of knowledge.  Once aware of their flaws, it would start with friends and neighbors, and then word would slowly spread until my burgeoning garden would be a beacon of hope for all struggling subsistence farmers.  I would hold information sessions and have a gardening club and they would regale me for the bounty of their newfound harvest.

Well, needless to say, I got a little taste of humble pie as, despite my trenches and berms, double dug soil and water containment strategies, my plants withered and died.  Thus, in attempt number two I enlisted the help of a student friend of mine to get my garden on track.  He informed me that April was a good month to plant tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage and other leafy vegetables, but we would have to irrigate every day because it won’t rain again until December.  I accepted and we set to work expanding our beds.  After a day spent with a hoe in one hand and bag of manure in the other we had dug up about 10 beds ready for planting.  Too stubborn to totally abandon my permagarden training, I made a bet with Nelito (my helper) that I would double dig my beds (the key to prolific bio-intensive gardening according to the experts) and he would carry on with the traditional surface level hoeing that everyone here does and we would see who’s plants grow higher.  We planted tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, corn, sweet potatoes, okra, cabbage, and cilantro throughout the beds and set out watering our creation.  We hooked up the hose, set out the sprinkler and two months later we had vegetables!  Hmmm, not exactly.  Without running water, you have to actually pump and carry the water yourself.  Luckily, out nearest water pump is only about 200 yards away, so every afternoon we fill up and lug back the four 20-liter tanks that it takes to water all the beds.  I enjoy the walk and chatting at the pump with the neighbors, but it makes you appreciate the ease of a hose and a sprinkler.  Now, two months later, our garden looks pretty healthy.  The corn is reaching upwards, the lettuce is almost ready to be cut and the tomatoes are filling in.  I’m proud of our creation and think that the fruits of our labor will taste extra good when it’s finally time to harvest. 

Although the garden is fun, the most fulfilling thing I do here is leading the English Club.  This is something that, before arriving at site, I had almost no interest in doing.  I wanted to teach science, maybe have a biology club and hold a science fair.  Upon arriving at site, however, I was told that the volunteer I was replacing had been the leader of an English Club which put together theater pieces in English and posted a weekly English newspaper.  I was never into theater in high school and while at times I entertained a fleeting interest in journalism it certainly was never a passion of mine.  Looking for things to do here when I arrived, however, I hesitantly decided to follow in the previous volunteer’s footsteps and pick up the English Club that he had left off.  That’s the best decision I’ve made here so far.  Our English theater meetings on Thursday nights are the highlight of my week and the friendships I’ve made with my English club students who are trying so hard to learn English and are fascinated by all aspects of American culture have been the most fulfilling part of my Peace Corps experience so far.  For a few months now we have been practicing our theater skit, a 15 minute piece that one of my student leaders wrote.  It follows a student named Maraba who starts out as a good student but then falls into the wrong crowd and starts hanging out with drug dealers and prostitutes.  He stops going to school and eventually gets HIV and transmits it to a young prostitute.  The play ends with the prostitute renouncing Maraba’s behavior but seeking treatment and finding comfort in her friends.  We presented our skit for the first time in front of the whole school a few weeks ago and it was a huge success.  The kids didn’t back down in front of the audience and, despite the fact that no one could understand the dialogue (as it was in English) they acted it up, catered it to the audience and got a lot of laughs.  It was a site to see and I was so proud of their effort.

Well, I don’t know how interested you all are in the ennui of my day to day life here – I promise I’ll get to more exciting things, but it’s important to know at least a little of  what I’m doing on a day to day basis to get a backdrop for the more colorful stories.  Ok.  Here’s something.  Wednesday was National Children’s Day in Mozambique.  The kids had the day off school, and, given this occasion, Tim and I decided to plan a few events to celebrate.  At noon the kids all ate a big feast of pork, chicken and rice (a huge occasion for them considering every other meal they are served in the boarding school is beans and xima – a flour-based tasteless porridgy concoction).  Among the planned activities was a water balloon toss, a wheel-barrow race, a dizzy-bat relay race, musical chairs and piñatas to knock down for the winners.  We had no idea what would be in store for us though. 

Everything started off well enough.  The night before we had stayed up making the piñatas from balloons, flour-water and strips of newspaper and came out ready to start the festivities with the water-balloon toss.  Here’s the thing, have you ever tried organize 100 swarming children into a line while handing out water-balloons to them?  It was chaos.  First of all, none of them had ever seen water balloons before; they were mystified by these strange flubbery masses.  Second of all, very few of them spoke Portuguese, so we needed to enlist older students to translate to Ndau for us and explain the game.  Third of all, I don’t know if this pertains to all kids, or just this group of Mangunde kids in particular, but they have NO listening skills whatsoever.  I think you could tell them to “TOSS THE BALLOON!  WAIT!  STEP BACK!  WAIT!  NOW, TOSS AGAIN!” a thousand times and they wouldn’t follow.  Kids are throwing balloons back and forth, handing them off, stepping closer, you name it; they pretty much did everything but what they were supposed to do.  Eventually enough people dropped their balloons so that only a few were left and we could select a winner, but it was a mess.  By the end of the water balloon toss, we had used up nearly the whole hour that we had allotted for all of our games and it was beginning to rain (What?! I know it hadn’t rained in 3 months, but I guess the rain gods decided to rain on us the one day we had an activity planned).  We still had another whole tub of filled water balloons though, so we decided to do the only logical activity left to do with them – break into an all-out every-man-for-himself water balloon war.  A hundred kids rushed on the remaining bucket of balloons like it was the last chopper out of Vietnam and the frenzy ensued.  What followed was a blur.  I was shoving whole gaggles of swarming kids out of the way as I groped for more ammunition.  I’ve been here at school coming up on 6 months now, which is long enough to develop a list in your mind of kids that you want to nail with a water balloon.  It was a teacher’s dream.  No rules, no cameras, just revenge.  At some point I grabbed the whole bucket of balloons and put it over my head with kids hanging off me like King Kong stomping through the streets of New York City.  Eventually their sheer number brought me down, but not before I was able to dump the whole bucket, which was now filled with just water from popped balloons on a few of my unsuspecting and very deserving students. 

In the post-war chaos the rain began to pick up steam.  We didn’t realize it because we were all soaked by that point, but the rain was now bucketing down heavily.  We decided to skip the other relay races and musical chairs and head directly for the main event – the piñata.  Ever since we hung the 4 effigies up on a string between two trees the kids had been eyeing them curiously.  We had painted faces on the orbs and everyone seemed completely dumbfounded as to what these crazy American were planning to do – maybe they were religious idols to worship, lamps, giant water balloons, who knows?  Well, given our somewhat limited arts and crafts prowess, we didn’t actually succeed in making real piñatas that were filled with candy as planned, so instead we had just hung up these hollow faces and were planning to have some students be blindfolded and try to knock them down with a stick.  Simple enough, right?  What could go wrong when you have an 8 year old blindly flinging around a giant bat while 100 other kids crowd around to see what is happening?  Let me explain something here.  Again, I don’t know if this pertains to all kids, just African children, Mozambicans or maybe just Mangunde students, but when it comes to observing anything, they are like little iron fillings around a magnet.  You tell them to stay back, but they just keep craning the neck and somehow inch their way closer and closer until they surround you and completely suffocate you.  Maybe a better analogy would be that ghost villain in Super Mario World.  Do you know that ghost who stays put if Mario is looking at him, but creeps  closer and closer as soon you turn around until he is right on you?  Well, imagine that, but 100 kids creeping in on you and Mario swinging around a giant stick blindfolded.  Concerned by the danger inherent in this activity, and to avert any heads being split open by errant swings, we decided to start off by attempting to demonstrate how one should approach and hit the piñata safely and calmly.  We recruited one of our 12^th grade helpers to do the demonstration.  We blindfolded him, gave him the bat, and told the kids to stay back.  He was explaining in Ndau so I could not follow what he was saying, but the instructions seemed simple enough and I was beginning to be reassured that this might turn out alright after all.  But then, out of nowhere, he wound up the bat, and I kid you not, took an all out Ken Griffey Jr. homerun cut at the first piñata!  He nailed it on the head, the piñata crumpled and went flying and his follow-through came to rest no more that 1 inch away from the head of a little 5 year old girl in the front row.  I almost lost it and was ready to sign my Peace Corps resignation for being responsible for the death of a student, but nobody else outside of Tim and I seemed to sense the danger in this activity and everyone was thrilled with the exciting demolition.  Reluctant, but anxious to get this over with and get out of the rain, we haphazardly handed to stick to one of the kids to pop the next piñata.  The following 5 minutes of kid after kid blindly swinging around sticks with a crowd inching closer and closer were tense to say the least.  Somehow, miraculously, no child was knocked unconscious by an errant swing and all the piñatas were destroyed.  Phew.

The mayhem was not over yet though.  I pose one final question.  Have you ever tried to hand out candy in an orderly fashion to a crazed, rain-soaked mob of 100 kids who have absolutely no conception of what a “line” is?   I would not recommend it.  What ensued was what I would imagine happens when there is a fire in a crowded dance hall and only one exit, or if someone was handing out $100 bills on rush hour in downtown Manhattan.  I was engulfed.  We screamed, “form a line!” herding them into a line formation to receive candy one-by-one, but after only seconds the line would inevitably break and the people from the back would crowd around the front desperately stretching out their hands to receive a precious piece of candy or a sticker.  We tried many different ways of organizing them and explaining to them that we had enough candy for everyone, but no matter how we did it, it would deteriorate into a swarm of desperate hands and bodies on the ground.  Kids who received candy would put it in their pockets, cut in front of other and look for more, and kids with enough composure to stay in formation would be trampled.  I have to say, I lost a little faith in humanity that day – I know they are just kids, but come on, it can’t be that difficult! The whole candy distribution crisis probably took about 30 minutes and half the kids didn’t get any candy.  If they had formed a line, everyone could have had candy and it would have taken no more that 5 minutes tops.  I don’t get it. 

Again, maybe it’s just that they’re kids, but it seems to touch on a deeper cultural paradigm here – why can’t anyone in Mozambique seem to be able to form a line?  You go the bank and people will just walk right in front of you and step up to the ATM without even thinking about it.  Forget about it at a bus stop.  When the bus comes it doesn’t matter if you’ve been waiting there all day and the person next to you just showed up, it’s every man for himself when that bus pulls up.  I’ve been struggling to grasp why this happens.  How is it that our culture is usually so orderly and systematic and Africa, or at least Mozambique, is chaotic?  I may be opening a bigger can of worms than I have time to get into right now, but if I were to hasten a guess I would say that it comes down to a lack of resources and a confidence in the system.  In America, we know that there will be another bus that will come at exactly 3:19, and allowing the person in front of you to get on the first bus is not a huge sacrifice; we also know that, in all likelihood, the bank will not run out of money today, and although we like candy a great deal, if we do empty out the free candy bowl at work we probably have the capability and funding to go down to Kwik Trip and buy a Snicker’s Bar.  This is just a thought, but while it is tempting to see not only kids, but self-respecting adults here recklessly cutting people in lines, stealing my flip-flops, and groping for candy and think that there exists some kind of deep lack of integrity, I don’t think we can make that conclusion.  I think there is a deeper complexity in the situation than originally meets the eye.  People will learn to adapt as well as they can to the system they are placed in.  On children’s day the kids that didn’t trample other kids or assert themselves in any way didn’t get any candy.  In the same way, if you are waiting for precious food rations that your family needs to survive and you know that the food sacs will run out at some point you learn pretty quickly to cut to the front, shove others out of the way and get what you need.  One thing that I have learned here, not just in line at banks and on chapas but in all aspects of life, is that assertiveness is rewarded.  Modesty, deference, and passivity, traits that are generally regarded as positive and signs of good character in the States, will not get you anywhere here.  You will end up at the back of the food line without any rice to bring home to your family.  It is the assertive, even arrogant, self-promotional man who will get what he wants in this country.  You cannot sit back looking defeated and hope that others will pick up on social cues and have pity on you like you might be able to get away with in the States – on this continent you will be trampled.  Sorry, random thoughts.  Anyway, I suppose I should wrap up this post as it is now rivaling the tale of the “Tabishan Peach Pie” in length and pointlessness.  For those of you who have made it this far though, I will leave you with a poem that I liked which one of my 9^th grade students wrote to be posted in our last edition of the English newspaper.  Take care!

          I wrote your beautiful name

          On the wall of my bedroom,

          But the paint with jealousy

          Put it out

          I wrote your beautiful name

          Under my shoes,

          But the dirt with jealously

          Put it out

          I wrote your beautiful name

          In the sand,

          But the waves with jealously

          Put it out

          I wrote your beautiful name

          On the side of my heart,

          And there it stayed

          Forever

Grilled Barracuda, the Beach and then Back to School...

Hello again!  I want to welcome the month of May and wish everyone a happy mother’s day back at home.  Here in Mozambique life has been rolling along with lots of exciting experiences to tell of in the past month so I’m going to jump right into it.  Mid-April marked the end of my first trimester here at Escola Secundaria de Mangunde.  It was a trimester full of challenges and rewarding yet humbling learning experiences.  As the trimester picked up steam and we sprinted to the finish line, the responsibilities and work for a rookie teacher like me also increased.  At times, I found the stress of juggling classes, extracurricular clubs, sports teams, and the reality of life out here overwhelming.  Much of the work was fun and very fulfilling, but it did not come without challenges.  By the end of the trimester I was teaching 24 hours per week, meeting once a week in the evenings with my English theater club, the English journalism club, organizing a volleyball tournament, and co-running the computer lab, all the while leaving most weekends to see friends and pick up supplies in the nearest city, a good 5 hour bus ride away.

Despite it being a constant exercise in time management and an emotional roller-coaster, I learned a lot about myself, teaching, and how to get things done in this vastly different culture.  One of my favorite days spent here at Mangunde during the first trimester was a national holiday, Dia de Mulheres (women’s day).  Here in Mozambique there are quite a few national holidays celebrating various groups and it seems like every few weeks the students are getting a day off of school for some holiday or another – there’s children's day, women's day, Mozambican heroes day, and worker’s day, among others that we’ve already had.  On this day, school was not in session and since nearly all of the students here at Mangunde are boarding students, the school grounds were packed with kids chilling in the shade chatting or practicing their dance moves.  Often on holidays like these schools will plan special events to honor the group of people that the holiday is celebrating, so on this particular day, Tim (my roommate) and I decided to plan a soccer tournament solely for the girls.  We ran the idea by the director of the girl’s dormitory and the school director and they thought it was a great idea.  After all, while there is no lack of soccer and other sports being played here at school, the girls are often left out of opportunities like this.  Unlike the boys, who are allowed to roam around the school grounds after school until the bedtime bell rings at 9pm, the girls are literally locked in their boarding school at 6pm, a half an hour after school gets out.  The thought here is that, if left to wander freely after dark, the girls, who are innately promiscuous and devious, would either get pregnant or come down with HIV/AIDS, so they must be protected from themselves.  The sad reality is that this does happen, and if pregnant, a girl is forced to drop out of school at least until the baby is born.  The obvious flaw in logic here is that it takes two to make a baby and it makes no sense to lock up the girls while the boys are allowed to carry on as if nothing happened.  In addition to this, while the girls do have some extra-curricular activities to participate in – sewing clubs, dance groups, choirs, etc – it is the boys who get the lion’s share of the school’s resources.  Every Friday and Saturday night we use a projector to show a film outside of the boy’s dorms while I don’t think the girls have ever had that privilege, the games of soccer, volleyball and futsão (soccer on a mini-field) which are ubiquitous after school from 4pm until dark are controlled completely by boys.  I have never seen a girl even try to enter any of these games even though I know for a fact that a lot of them love to play soccer.  The list goes on, but I think you get the point.  All of this is to say that Tim and I really wanted to take advantage of this holiday (women’s day) to give the girls an opportunity to have fun without having to worry about the boys. 

A week before we let them sign up for teams with their friends and told them that winners would receive sodas, cookies, a notebook and a team photo – all very big deals for them – so needless to say, the girls were very excited.  We started early on the day of the tournament by relining the field (taking a hoe and digging out the lines in the dirt field) and setting up the sound system.  We had music going throughout the day, a scores table with the brackets and prizes, and different acts (poetry and songs) put on by students in the breaks between games. Tim and I refereed all 16 games which, considering the heat by midday was a significant effort in itself.  It was all worth it though.  The event was a huge success.  It was awesome to see how excited the girls got for this opportunity.  As we called the teams to the field for the first game at 7am, they came in dancing and chanting with matching uniforms ready to show their stuff.  All day the whole school crowded around the field banging drums and rooting for their friends’ teams – even the boys came out and were intently shouting and cheering on every kick.  At times the games weren’t pretty, but it was a truly special event for everyone involved.  What made it even more exciting was that the championship game, with the prize of a coveted team photo on the line, was tied after regulation and overtime and went into a nail-biting shootout. The whole school crowded around the penalty box craning their necks to see what would happen.  When the final goal was netted the winning team piled onto each other and carried the heroic goal scorer off on their shoulders.  All in all, it was a pretty cool experience to be a part and a cool thought that we were able to give the girls this opportunity to be the centers of attention for at least this one day a year.

The end of the trimester also brought with it the amping up of many school responsibilities.  As a teacher in the Mozambican school system, you are required to give at least 2 mid-term exams and one final exam every trimester.  Every trimester is supposedly 13 weeks longs.  You quickly find out, however, that this 13 weeks gets shaved to 10 or 11 weeks in reality.  The first week is of every trimester is a joke, the students are still arriving from time spent at home, and the teachers don’t feel the need to show up for classes so will just sign the attendance book and leave.  Likewise the last week is a waste as the teachers will claim it to be a “grading” week, which makes the second to last week an exam week.  Throw in a bunch of holidays throughout the trimester and we’re looking at about 9 weeks of classes max to try to cover a government mandated curriculum that would be ambitious for any well-standing high school in America to reach.  This is just one of many problems the Mozambican school system is facing.  Because of this, I decided to simply throw my curriculum in the trash and wing it this year.  It’s an experiment for both me and the students (considering I’ve never taught English in any context before), and despite the fact that the snail-like progress can be frustrating and downright depressing at times, I’m sure that my teaching methods are working more than simply lecturing out of a textbook.  Learning a language is a very individual process and it’s a challenge to try to reach everyone’s learning style, but it most certainly cannot be attained by simply taking notes out of a textbook.  It seems like an obvious choice, but trying to implement creative teaching methods is not always easy when you are teaching within a system in which every other teacher is simply writing notes on the chalkboard and relying on rote memorization as the students’ primary “learning” method.  It is frustrating to talk to a student about a subject, have him rattle off memorized facts, and then come to realize that he really has no true understanding of what is being taught.  The challenge of continuing to motivate yourself to be creative in the classroom is made more difficult by the fact that often students are confused by your methods.  You want to ensure them that if they buy into your system – student participation, group work, creativity, listening, speaking, etc – they will learn so much more, but sometimes you wonder if it would be easier for everyone to follow if you just got up there are wrote grammar rules on the board like the other teachers do.  Teaching here is a daily exercise in persistence, self-motivation and confidence.

Anyway, all of this school talk is to say that come that last day of school I was ready for a mental break.  As soon as classes ended I packed up my bag and hopped on a truck headed for Chimoio, where I would meet with other Peace Corps volunteers from the region for a mid-service conference to kick off my vacation.  While Peace Corps conferences often leave much to be desired in the way of meaningful training and improvement, one thing you can usually count on is a ritzy hotel and no shortage of food.  The first thing I did upon arrival was take a long hot shower to scour off all of the seemingly permanent dirt that I had accumulated in  the past 3 months of bucket baths.  When you’re pouring cold water over yourself it just doesn’t have the same cleansing effect as a steaming hot stream of running water.  We have a running joke here that you can never really be sure whether you’re getting tanner, or you’re just building up dirt, especially on your feet over the course of your service at site.  Most people emerge from the shower at the hotel a couple of shades lighter than they were just a few hours earlier.  The second thing that I did was go to dinner.  Hello!  Chicken, beef, rice, fries, coke, desserts, eggs, salad – at first it was a thing of beauty, I hadn’t seen so much meat since leaving the States.  Collectively, the 14 of us ate like we were starving dogs.  It was a site to behold, and I can only imagine what the Mozambicans putting out the buffet thought of us.  We left ever meal in clumsy food comas with our stomachs inflated.  I don’t know why we kept eating, maybe we weren’t sure if we would ever see an array of food like that again, especially at our sites where food is almost always vegetarian and typically pretty monotoned with beans and rice or xima (corn meal).  I think after 4 days of this, however, we were sufficiently disgusted by ourselves that we were ready to move on to the next phase of our vacation.  Besides the food and amenities, the conference turned out to be surprisingly useful and motivating.  It was nice to hear what some of the other volunteers had been up to in the last few months and to share teaching ideas with them.  I left the conference motivated to get back to site to implement some of the different teaching methods and club ideas that other volunteers had done at their sites.  The break, however, was not over yet.  In fact the best was yet to come.

The day after the conference we hopped onto a chapa bound for Inhambane, the coastal province just South of my home province of Sofala which is known for its white sand beaches and blue azure waters.  We caught a couple lucky rides and found ourselves on a comfortable bus headed directly to Maxixe, seven hours to the South and the jumping off point for trips to the famous beaches of Tofo and Barra.  We took a fairy across the bay to the peninsula which is home to the beaches that we had been dreaming of in those last hectic weeks stuck in the daily grind of school.  After one more short bus ride we pulled into our beachfront hostel in Tofo, a small touristy beach town.  We camped there for 5 nights for a grand total of 700 meticais – which comes to the ridiculous total of about $20.  To repeat, 5 nights, beach front resort, $4 per night….it was a steal.  We took advantage of our cheap accommodation, however, by spending our money on food and drinks.  We ate like kings.  It was a little weird at first, I have to admit.  Tofo was packed with white people, mostly South African, and you had to accept that here, just like everyone else, you were a tourist too.  Your life at site, your friends and students who don’t have the same privileges or opportunities you have, are far away now.  You justify it by saying that you deserve a break, you have been giving up your time, resources and skills for these people, but, at the end of the day, you are the one ordering barracuda and fries with a beer at a beachside restaurant while they are at home.  It’s a hard reality to come to terms with and it makes you feel like a sell out, but there’s really no way around it.  Also, I don’t want to sound vain, but the barracuda, it turns out, was absolutely delicious.  I don’t know whether it was the allure of the beach, or the intoxicating freedom of being away from site and with friends who understand you but we decided to treat ourselves that week.  It was, however, a sort of bipolar decision.  On the one hand, compared to a typical American vacation on a beach in Florida or Mexico, we were paying pennies; it seemed like a steal and a sin not to take advantage of such an opportunity.  I mean, honestly, people pay more for one night at a Dollar Inn than we paid for 5 nights at a beach front resort.  On the other hand, however, a week like this was far out of the price range of nearly all of the people we’ve known and befriended here; to our students, fellow teachers, counterparts and directors, a weekend in Tofo is a distant dream and spending 300 meticais ($9) on a classy beachfront meal would be unthinkable.  That said, in order to maintain our sanity and piece of mind, we opted to justify our extravagance by taking the former mental approach: we were getting a steal for this luxurious beach vacation and we should take advantage of it.  Thus, we did the rounds of some killer restaurants in Tofo and Barra.  I already mentioned the barracuda, but it’s worth mentioning again, it was fantastic – fresh caught they day, grilled with fries and a salad – and edged out a few competitors for best meal of the week in my book.  Coming in a close second was the stuffed crust pizza from Flamingo Bay hotel in Barra.  Now, I know what you’re thinking – yeah, yeah, stuffed crust, Pizza Hut came up with that like 10 years ago – but you would be wrong.  This is a pizza with two entire mouth-watering layers.  In between the crusts and on top is an assortment of sausage, steak, chorizo and Canadian bacon and filling the crust on the edges is none other than a cut of what could most closely be described as polish sausage.  That’s right, stuffed polish sausage pizza.  Now, I’m usually no slouch when it comes to pizza eating, typically taking down a whole large myself (pizza’s here are thinner than most US pizzas), however I could only manage half of this meaty monstrousity in one sitting.  Yes, we paid 50 mts (usually 15 mts) for sodas at the hotel, but hey, we were on vacation, right?  In a very close race for the bronze medal came the 440 mt cheeseburger I ordered from a fancy beachfront restaurant in Tofo.  No one should ever pay 440 mts for a burger ($13) in Mozambique, but if you’re going to do it anyway, then it should be this one.  Oh my goodness, it was stunning and juicy, with real cheese and not that meatloafy texture that most Mozambican hamburgers have.  It was a very legit burger, and to follow it up with a dish of real vanilla ice cream put the proverbial cherry on the cake.  Honorable mention in this competition was the king crab that we ambitiously cooked ourselves on our last night in Tofo.  The campsite had gas stoves and cooking utensils and at the market in Tofo, there were typically a number of fishermen selling their catches that day so we decided to have out hand at seafood preparation.  It was a toss up between the crabs and crayfish, but, given the persistence of the crab dealer and the whopping size of his crabs, and the fact that he got pinched good by one of the crabs while trying to show us his catch, we decided to opt for crab curry that night.  I worked him down from about 500mts to 200mts for two ginormous crabs and he threw them, flailing and all, into a plastic bag for us and off we were off.  To put its size into perspective for you, this crab had to have a wingspan, claw to claw, of about a foot.  It’s pincers were a solid 4 inches long on both sides.  This was a mammoth.  To illustrate this, after I boiled the water, I tried to lower the crab gently into the pot for what I could only imagine would be an unpleasant way to go, but he didn’t even fit into the pot.  I succeeded in getting his head down into the water, but his giant pincers and half of his body were flailing outside and getting him stuck halfway down.  I had to feel for the little guy, but the only real way to finish him off, sadly, was to cut off his legs and kind of jam him down the rest of the way.  It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done and after 20 minutes or so we had ourselves a pretty tasty crab peanut stew. 

The last thing that we treated ourselves to that week which was surprisingly not related to food was scuba diving!  I’ve never scuba dived before, but apparently you can do a one day scuba course and if you sign enough release forms they’ll actually let you try your hand at a real open water dive.  After a little deliberation and, as always, reconciling the expense by saying that this maybe a once in a lifetime kind of thing, we decided to sign up.  The next day we were watching a corny instructional video and suiting up for our first pool dive.  It was weird and hilarious at the same time.  Between the 4 of us, no one could really get it right, we were a joke.  There were goggles fogging up, masks making strange farting noises and people floating uncontrollably up to the surface all to the tune of our instructor trying to sign to us underwater what we were doing wrong.  Somehow though, they decided that we were proficient enough in the pool to have a go at a real open water dive.  It would be a novice dive, only 10 meters, but would be out at a nice reef that would have some really interesting sea life.  Let me tell you, 10m doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re underwater and look up, it’s way up there.  Once we got out on the open water, threw our suits on and plunged it was actually a really cool experience.  It definitely took me some time to figure out my floatation (you have to inflate you suit just to the right amount so that you’re neutrally buoyant and don’t float up to the surface) but once I got that right, I was just swimming along the reef floor with schools of fish passing by be and all kinds of colorful creature and corals hidden in the cracks.  It was really cool and would recommend anyone who’s never tried it to give it a shot (except you, Dad, you would definitely get sea sick on the boat ride out…people were throwing up left and right off the edges).

After our decadent and relaxing 5 days in Tofo we finished our vacation off by heading north to another famous beach town on the Inhambane coast called Vilanculos.  We had planned our vacation to coincide with a country-wide event that Peace Corps volunteers were congregating there for that weekend.  Tons of other volunteers from the north and the south who I hadn’t seen since training showed up and we all stayed at another beachfront hostel for the weekend while the games unfolded.  I won’t go into all the details of the event, but I’ll just say that it was a good time for everyone and a perfect cap to our vacation.

Well, that’s about it.  Now here I am, back at site, back to the norm.  Classes have started again, clubs are picking up steam and Mangunde is just the way I remember it when I left two weeks ago.  The dried fish isn’t as good as the fresh fish on the coast, the phone service isn’t quite as reliable here, and I can’t pick up sausages on my way through the market, but I’m also a real person here at my site, with a home that I’m comfortable in, students who appreciate me, and friends who look out for me.  I wouldn’t trade that for anything and I’m excited to take on the ambitious goals that I’ve set for myself in this next trimester.

Oh, and happy Mother’s day Mom!