Second Week of School

After concluding our box filling fun on Friday, we were told the inaugural staff meeting of lore would be held Saturday morning. This seemed suspicious, but Luc showed up (Janet wasn’t feeling well), and found himself alone again. Apparently teacher salaries had come in that morning so the others had traveled to the nearest bank in the city to withdraw their pay checks; the school year could wait a few more day. We finally got started on Tuesday (albeit at 11:30am instead of 8:30). The school director began by introducing us to the other teachers. Actually he only introduced Lucas, because Janet was in bed recovering from bacterial dysentery (this is typical here, two of the other teachers were also recovering from malaria and other tropical maladies). Luckily Janet was able to make it to the next day for the community meeting marking the official opening of the school year. This formal event included various speeches by local dignitaries, emphasizing the importance of students actually going to school instead of working in the fields, selling goods in the market, or getting married/having kids at a young age, followed by a lengthy account of enrollment statistics and singing of the national anthem twice, to open and close the event. Afterwards we were invited to join the dignitaries for a lunch at the only formal restaurant in our town. We were told that classes would start the next day, although the school schedule was not finished yet so we didn’t know which grades to prepare for! Apparently students never show up during the first week anyway, so it was not a problem. Now we are expecting to start on Monday with actual teaching, but we’ll see what happens!

Parlez-vous francais?
We did eventually receive our teaching schedules and found out that Luc has a full afternoon of 21 periods per week of 8th and 9th grade English, with Fridays off, and Janet was only assigned 8 periods of Biology because there are more bio teachers and because they wanted her schedule open to teacher computer and run a bunch of extracurricular clubs. But our school is supposed to be teaching French to 9th graders and has never had a French teacher, so Janet decided to volunteer herself for these 10 hours per week. We have no French materials at the school, but our director says he will order a textbook and dictionary soon. It is sort of a joke that the kids learn French, since none of Mozambique’s neighbors are francophone and our students will have virtually no opportunity to ever use the language, but it should be a fun challenge and maybe a chance to teach some French culture. Crepes, anyone?