You're still alive?

'Chapas' are old Japanese mini-buses which have been reconfigured, as
is so common in Africa, to fit the maximum number of passengers,
animals and cargo with little considerations for travelers' comfort or
safety. The legal max for one of these vehicles is 15 people, but they
won't leave without 4 people per row (designed for 3) and another 2 in
front, plus the driver and fare collector (20 people total). Then you
have luggage, babies, goats, chickens, bags of fruit, boxes, crates of
soda, packs of coal, dried fish and any passengers along the road we
happen to pile on top of laps, making for guaranteed discomfort. These
ingredients also make for a very particular chapa odor which is
difficult to describe in words. Given the general degree of disrepair
in which you commonly find these vehicles and the African roads they
ply, any ride is potentially dangerous, but it's the only practical
means for transportation available to those without private cars or
motorcycles, like Peace Corps volunteers and 90% of the people in our
town.
This being said, we traveled by chapa on our last outing to the city.
We arrived safely with none but the usual complaints. Sadly, the next
chapa out had a terrible accident. News like this travels quickly in
Africa, but not always accurately. Many people had seen us waiting to
travel that morning, and rumors spread rampantly. Eventually everyone
in our community had heard we were on board the ill-fated chapa, and
most people were convinced at least one of us had died (it was unclear
which, though most people were leaning towards Janet). Unfortuately
while we were out shopping and taking care of city business, our phone
was in our bag at our friends' house and we missed a couple of calls,
which people took as confirmation of our demise. We returned after a
fun weekend, unaware of all of this until halfway back when some
passenger boarded and exclaimed "Gracias a Deus! You're alive!" Then
we started to put the pieces together. When we got off the chapa at our site we were greeted by incredulous stares. Our vice principal was at the stop and told us about the ordeal they had been through. Our neighbors were crying when we got to
our house and hadn't eaten or slept from worry. People had been checking with the hospital to get news. Our friends were especially sad and tried to convince us to travel separately in the future, just in case anything should happen they would still have one of us! It's been over a week since our return and we still have random people approaching us on the street to express their disbelief and relief to
see us alive. We felt a little uncomfortable to have upset so many people, but it was also nice to feel so loved by our community. Hopefully this story doesn't make anyone back home worried about us, accidents can happen in any country, and we are relatively safe here in general, despite the dangers associated with travel.

Romão's First Birthday

Romão is not a baby, he is our 18 year-old semi-orphan neighbor and
friend and student and helper. And like many Africans, he did not know
his actual birthday... until this year. His official documents claimed
he was born in April 1979. This being clearly inaccurate (i.e. forged
by his uncle whom he lives with), we encouraged him to investigate.
With the incentive of a birthday party, he made the long bicycle trip
to his mother's home to ask her. To the best of her recollection, his
birthday is February 15, so we celebrated. Janet made a cake and we
bought and wrapped some very practical gifts (like soap, school pens
and a small bottle of cooking oil). We had the neighbors over and all
sang Happy Birthday in Portuguese and English. Then Romão made a wish
and blew out his birthday candle (we only gave him one since it was
his first birthday). Even though it was a small event, he was very
happy - he stated that his goal for this year is to study very hard.

Going to Town!

After about a month at site, we were itchin’ for some city life so we met up with our fellow volunteers at the provincial capital, Tete, at the home of some Brazilian ex-pat friends. What a treat! We enjoyed many of the amenities that you often take for granted in developed countries: running water (eg showers and toilets), dairy products (milk, cheese, ice cream) and satellite TV. We were also able to connect to the internet, which is making this blog post possible, as well as the photo update (ps. Check out the picasa album, link on the right under our picture). Tete city is reputed to be the hottest place in Mozambique, so our midday shopping foray resulted in seriously soaked t-shirts, but luckily our friends have AC. We also got pizza and met some new young Mormon missionaries at the restaurant who are just opening the Tete region so we were able to share some of our local knowledge with them over some mozzarella veggie pizza. So we are happily heading back to our little home, toting a backpack full of olive oil, ketchup, soy sauce and olives, refreshed and ready to continue our work and our spartan Peace Corps existence.

Mozambican Heroes Day

February 3 is a national holiday here celebrating those that died in the various national struggles for independence. It commemorates the date of the death of Eduardo Mondlane, a national hero and the first leader of the independence movement. Instead of going to school, everyone instead went to our town’s ‘Praza dos Heroes’ or Hero Plaza, which is a cement sculpture in the shape of a large white star. The original star sculpture is huge and is in the middle of a roundabout in the capital, Maputo. It houses a crypt within that contains the bodies of Mondlane, as well as the first president Samora Machel, a famous poet, Jose Cardineiro, and other national heroes. Every city and town in Mozambique has a smaller version of this sculpture and it is used for ceremonies on days like this. Because it was raining heavily, the 8am ceremony didn’t take place until closer to 10am when the rain let up. A district representative came and gave a political speech and a wreath of flowers was placed on the sculpture. After lunch, the teachers organized an exhibition soccer game between the teachers and the border police. Luc was recruited to play defense, and Janet happily cheered him on from the sidelines. When we saw the haphazard, pot-bellied, middle-aged group of teachers assemble before the game, we thought we were done for. But we ended up with a few real star forwards and ended up beating the border police 5 to 3. It was a very merry event since it was sort of joke game, and the students loved watching their teachers run around and get sweaty!

Unexpected Tragedy

Our second week of classes began with an unexpected tragedy. As we approached school on Monday, we encountered an unusual silence… no students. We figured it was some Mozambican holiday we didn’t know about. Actually, there had been a terrible minibus accident on the road the evening before and sixteen passengers were killed, including our vice-principal’s nephew, whom he had raised as a son since the child had lost both parents. School had been cancelled and most of the school personnel had spent the day and previous night helping prepare for the burial, such as finding transportation to retrieve the body, going to Malawi to procure a coffin, digging the hole for the grave, and making rope to secure the coffin to a stretcher for transportation to the cemetery and lowering it into the hole. By the time we got to our vice-principal’s house most people were just sitting, segregated by gender, as close female relatives entered the house where the body lay and wailed while the men sat quietly in the yard. When all the preparations were complete we all accompanied the casket to the graveyard, just as a huge storm broke and began to pour buckets of rain. We all got very wet on the 20 minute walk and shivered through the ceremony. It was a very sad affair. The young man was 25, just like Janet, and had made it through 10th grade and was just starting at the teacher preparatory school. He had been traveling to finalize some paperwork for enrollment. Everyone in town was talking about the crash, and it seemed like everyone stopped by the ouse or went to the cemetery to show solidarity during this tragic episode.

First Week of Classes

So after much anticipation and a couple of false starts, we finally taught our first week of classes. We teach the afternoon shift. Given the general lack of infrastructure in Mozambique, it is very common for a single school to offer three shifts: morning (7:10-12:15), afternoon (12:30-5:35pm) and night (6:00-10:30pm). We have six classrooms in two main blocks, and a nearby satellite block with an additional 2 rooms. Groups of about 50 students make up a term, which inhabits one of these rooms, as teachers move back and forth each period. Luke teaches all the afternoon terms three English classes per week, for a total of 21 45-minute sessions. Initially he had no Friday classes, very exited to have three-day weekends, but in a later reshuffle that luxury was lost. Janet workds with 4 terms, 2 classes each per week, and despite Luc’s jealousy over this dream schedule, she is looking for ways to add to her 8 periods by possibly adding French and computers. It’s still unclear if that will happen. Despite all the normal stresses associated with the fist days of school and lesson planning, things turned out fairly uneventful. We work with mainly 8th graders, in the first year of secondary school – so in general they’re still too timid to act up. they are also very reluctant to participate in any other way of learning than copying information off the chalk board, which is what they have grown accustomed to as typical Mozambican students. Add to this the fact that many of them have very low literacy levels (ie. slowly sounding out the words and still getting some letters mixed up), and we have some unique teaching challenges. Attendance has been high, but we’ve heard it tapers off as the trimester progresses. Students are generally very respectful of teachers, and stand to greet us in chorus when we enter the room (in their best English for Luc’s classes). There’s still a few holes in the schedule and classes we don’t have teachers for yet, like agronomy and visual design, so there always seems to be at least one classroom on break (a.k.a. making noise). And given our location right in town, there are always people stopping by to look at us teach through the windows or to play just outside our class, or try to sell snacks to students. It is very different than high school in America!

Rainy Season

According to our site reports we’re supposed to have monsoon rain every day during December and January, but we’ve had a very dry summer so far, which explains all the spontaneous joy unleashed by our first big storm last week. Kids stripped down and danced in the water, showering in the runoff from our roof and singing and dancing all the while. When it pours, our flat front yard turns into a shallow pool which the youths turned into a slip-n-slide. Even adults were visibly happy. Today got another dose of rainy season weather with persistent drizzle and occasional downpours. Unfortunately in coincides with a visit from two PCVs from dry Namibia on their way through Mozambique to Kenya. We laughed at them bundling up in what they considered cold weather. It is unclear whether this late rain will be enough to avoid a food shortage this year. The corn has grown significantly in the past week, but it is late and many fields dried up before the rain started. The local radio constantly reports on drought conditions, water shortage and food rationing. The UN also increase our food security status to ‘vulnerable.’ For people like us and others with a steady income, it should be fine. The most vulnerable are the subsistence farmers who don’t have cash flow to buy food when their crops don’t produce enough. But most of our neighbors are glad to have late rain rather than no rain. And we are learning what our ‘monsoon’ season should have been like: muddy feet, loud metal roofs that amplify the pounding storms, and even more power shortages, usually right when we start to cook dinner!

Mango Season

We are reaching the peak of mango season here at site. Mangos are everywhere, as are small children perched in mango trees stuffing themselves! We have a tree in our yard, so we’ve eaten our fill. It also guarantees a constant stream of visitors. Between us, neighbors, and random mango seekers, we’ve picked over 50 fruits everyday for the past month. We never do any of the actual picking, we leave that up to the kids. The tree seems to be just running out of abundance now. The countryside is full of people carrying giant baskets of mangos to the road to try to sell them to transport heading to the city. Unfortunately this means the already crowded vehicles are not only packed with passengers and all their stuff, but bags and bags of mangos. One major downside of the season is the piles of mango peels, pits, and uneaten fruits rotting in the street, fostering stench, insects, and slipping hazards (a mango peel is a veritable banana peel when it comes to slipping potential). We love it though, and will miss our fresh mango jam, mango porridge, and just sitting on the porch eating perfectly ripe mangos, but we have avocado and tangerine seasons to look forward to in the near future.