"Bonjour, Madame Janet"

Walking around town has a new flavor since I started teaching French
three weeks ago. It was already complicated deciding which language to
greet people in. Portuguese was the default when we arrived ('bom
dia'). Then we learned Chichewa greetings ('madzuka bwanji') so we
hear that a lot now that our neighbor are aware that we know it. Then
school began so we started to get 'Good morning, teacher' from our
students. And now it's coming at us in French too! I was walking home
from school just today and heard 'bonjour, madame' from up in a guava
tree! Adding French to Biology and computers makes for a varied
teaching load for sure. French is more interactive than bio, which I
enjoy, plus the kids are very excited to learn it, having only had
English as a foreign language since primary school. Computers is
different also because I only have 6 students, as opposed to 60. But I
still like bio the best. Right now we have a huge pile of stinking
goat, pig and chicken bones on the porch that my students brought for
extra credit so we can study the inside of them. Luc also scavenged
some comes while out on his runs. Teaching is exhausting though, so I
am looking forward to next week off as we travel to a peace corps
Reconnect conference and see all our buddies to compare our experience
so far. Au revoir!

Bird Collecting

We inherited a Birds of Southern Africa field guide from the previous
volunteers at our site. It is a favorite among our neighborhood kids
because of the many color illustrations, and they often request to
'read' it. Now people have started to bring us bird specimens they
have caught or killed so that we can identify them together. The other
might our neighbor, Romao, opened the door and threw a quail at Luc
while he was relaxing on the couch. Romao and Janet thought it was
hilarious, Luc and the bird thought otherwise. Another day our
neighbor Seni brought a brilliantly-plumed pygmy kingfisher he had
killed with his sling shot. We assumed the killing was gratuitous
until he appeared a few hours later with an extremely small grilled
bird carcass on a skewer, which he seemed to find delectable. We also
tree the guide book to identify a white-faced owl which perched on our
roof one night. While owls are a symbol of wisdom for us, our
neighbors were very worried since here this bird is a sure omen of
death or sickness. Janet did get dysentery that week, but I think the
events were unrelated!

A visit from the elders

We found the Mormon missionaries (referred to as elders) the last time
we were in Tete. We ran across them at the pizza place. They had just
opened up the area as a mission and it was their first day in the
city. We invited them up to our site, and they actually made it last
week. We tried to cook American food for them, the best we could come
up with given our ingredient restraints was veggie burgers and french
fries, coffee cake, buttermilk biscuits, and fresh tropical jam. They
were impressed, apparently their cooking repertoire is more limited.
It was exciting to have Americans around and to compare the different
and similar restrictions that peace corps volunteers and missionaries
have structuring their lives. One of the elders could do magic tricks,
which captivated our neighborhood kids to no end. The elders aren't
supposed to watch many movies, except when someone they are visiting
happens to have one on. So we just had to put on The Bourne Identity
and they were so excited. We went hiking in the mountains during a
break in the rain and enjoyed some great views, and then everyone came
to the school to observe one of Luc's English classes. He taught
colors and used everyday items as visual aids. The kids especially
liked when he pulled a green flip flop out of his bag and used the 20
meticais bill for purple (which is a very hard word for them to
pronounce). Everyone at the school was on extra good behavior to
impress the tall, blond, blue-eyed visitors in suits! We really
enjoyed hanging out with the elders and will stay with them in the
city next time we go.

A Visit to the Countryside

Most people here refer to the countryside disparagingly as "the bush".
The term bush is only relative though. The many small villages in our
district generally lack electricity, medical facilities, and places to
buy things- all amenities which we enjoy here in our town. But i am
sure many people in the city consider our living situation "the bush"
and many people in the more developed parts of the world might
consider the entire African continent as bush! Most people here try to
avoid the countryside, so when a student invited us to visit his
family in a small village about an hour's walk away he was very
honored we accepted. Our hosts greeted us in the traditional manner of
the Chewa, which includes clapping and bowing for men and squating for
women, and they showed us to a small hut where they had set up some
chairs. The use of Portuguese is limited in the more rural you go, so
we made the most of our small Chichewa repertoire and Zacarias
translated the rest. Luckily we brought our photo album, with pictures
of our wedding, family, Spain, and Yosemite, which they loved. They
were particularly intrigued by the picture of paella and tried to
figure out what all the ingredients were. We visited the small primary
school and attended a short religious service as part of our visit and
then waited out a major storm under their straw roof, occasionally
shuffling our position to avoid the multiple leaks. Zacarias told us
about his hopes of completing high school and becoming either a pilot
or a journalist. His first choice seemed suprising considering he has
never even seen an airplane; we told him it might be unrealistic since
the country of Moz has no operational air force and ten civilian
planes in the national airline. On our departure we were given food as
gifts, a large bag of avocados and a sack of fresh corn, which Luc
attempted to carry on his head on the hour walk home, to the great
amusement of passers-by. But we concluded this was not an effective
method of transport for silly foreigners like us.

Romão's Electricity Disaster

Romão doesn't even have electricity in his mud house, but the wires
pass right through his small property. In an ironic attempt to trim a
tree whose branches were reaching dangerously close to the power
lines, he accidentally sent the vegetation right into the wires and
knocked electricity out for our entire neighborhood. Now we will be
without light for an extended period of time, and many people are
upset with Romao. Apparently the power utility won't repair the break
until Romão provides the necessary wire, which is available in nearby
Malawi. But given the current sour mood, people don't want to pitch in
on the purchase and Romão is without means of his own, so we'll just
wait and see how this one turns out. Luckily we can charge our phone
at the school so we can stay in touch as we read, do school work and
crossword puzzles by candlelight.
Post script: Fortunately our landlord, Nelson, was also affected by
the accident and happens to be one of the most on-top-of-it people in
town. He was quick to get on the cell phone and get someone from
Electricidade to come fix the power lines the next day. Way to go,
Dono Nelson!

Luc's First Test

In addition to the challenges already described in the previous post,
my first test session was particularly difficult to administer. It
coincided with a tropical deluge. As soon as it began to pour outside,
rain started dripping onto students' desks and tests, creating mayhem
in the test environment I was carefully trying to control. Students
had to get up and shuffle the seating arrangement as best as possible
given the constraints inherent in a very crowded room with several
major leaks. The thunderous sound of rain crashing on tin roofing also
made it impossible to monitor whispering or other forms of sound-based
cheating. As if that wasn't crazy enough, a health brigade showed up
mid-test to vaccinate all the females against tetanus! Some students
were very dramatic about receiving the shot. I tried to tell them
about how many vaccines we had to get during training, but this didn't
seen to console them or get their minds focused back on their English
test. I was glad when that one was over; all my other tests went much
more smoothly

Our First Tests

Our fourth week of school has been dedicated to testing our students.
Our students have also been dedicated to testing us by trying to cheat
in any way possible. There ways include, but are not limited to:
writing information on their hands, arms, feet, or other body parts,
making cheat sheets known here as cabulas, sealing through the windows
while other classes are taking the test to copy questions, trying to
use their notebooks, hiding info in their flip flops, etc. Cheating
isn't that different here than in the US, it's just much more
pervasive. Cheating is not unique to Mozambique; many developing
school systems rely on systematic cheating to make up for inherent
shortcomings in their capacity to educate, usually due to lack of
resources, human or material. We covered the topic of cheating a lot
during training, so our students' behavions came as on surprise. As
many volunteers do, we made an effort to put the kaibosh on cheating
from the get-go to set a precident for our classes, but the conditions
here present many difficulties in curtailing less than honest test
taking. Each desk seats 2 or 3 students, making it nearly impossible
to control copying. We also must write the test on the chalk board
which creates many constraints and provides prime cheating chances
while our back is turned. The classes are very large, between 30 to 60
students, so it's hard to keep an eye on everyone. Despite there
challenges, we did a respectable job controlling our tests. We made
students leave the room while we wrote on the chalk board, leave all
their stuff in the front of the class, inspected the room for hidden
materials, and Janet even made them dance to shake any cheat sheets
loose. We each caught several cheaters in each class. We later heard
the students commenting on how difficult it was to cheat and how many
of them were discouraged from trying. Unfortunately cracking down on
cheating possibly contributed to low overall performance on our tests.
Hopefully next time they will channel their cheating into studying!