"No more pencils, no more books…"
Classes, which began in late January, came to an anticlimactic end for most of our students during the last week of October. Although final exams took place earlier during the month, there are still two weeks of classes after the tests when teachers rarely teach classes. Without much for students to do, attendance progressively diminishes to a trickle as the school calendar fizzles out, while teachers busily try to correct exams and calculate everyone's grades. To add to the confusion, there was another last-minute holiday, October 19th, to commemorate the 24th anniversary of the death of the Republic's 1st President, Samora Moises Machel, in a mysterious plane crash in South Africa. It's not an official holiday, but our mayor decided to celebrate to show everyone how patriotic we are in our town. Unfortunately, since we were not told until the evening before, we were unable to prepare and many students showed up at school instead of the town square. In general, there are no celebrations for the end of the year, no parties or graduation ceremonies in Mozambican high schools; lots of students don't even know if they have anything to celebrate since they won't know if they are moving on to the next grade or not until final results are revealed several weeks later. Our buddy Romão is currently in this limbo of uncertainty. We wanted to do something for our favorite students, so we organized a simple party for our JOMA/REDES kids. Unfortunately, both the surprises we planned for them required electricity, so we almost had to cancel when power went out unexpectedly. Luckily it came back at the last minute, so we could make pancakes with them and show a PowerPoint of our year's accomplishments.
Halloween at the Dam
To celebrate the end of classes and say farewell to all of our Peace Corps buddies completing their two years of service and soon heading home to America for good, we organized a weekend excursion to Cahora Bassa, the largest hydro-electric dam and artificial lake in Sub-Saharan Africa. Luckily for us it's right here in Tete province, so for once we don't have to travel halfway across the country to see our friends. We turned out grade sheets in to our vice-principal Friday morning and after several modes of transportation (mostly in the back of pickups) we were swimming in one of the few functioning pools left in Mozambique at the old Portuguese social club near the dam. The Cahora Bassa Hydroelectric Project was a joint venture between the Portuguese, British, and South Africans initiated during the 1960s to develop the upper Zambezi River and provide power and employment in what was then a remote and forsaken part of the overseas provinces of the Republic of Portugal. The Portuguese hoped such a massive financial investment would permanently bind Britain and South Africa as allies to the anachronistic colonial order that Portugal refused to relinquish, even after other European powers had given up direct rule of their African possessions for nearly a decade. The dam remained in Portuguese hands all during the liberation struggle and subsequent decades of Mozambican independence. Only last year, with much pride, ceremony and T-shirts did Mozambique finally acquire the full rights to this engineering marvel, which still accounts for over 98% of the country's energy production. After so many years as a virtual European enclave, visiting Cahora Bassa and the nearby town of Songo is like visiting another country. Upon arrival, we immediately noticed sidewalks, grass lawns, functioning fountains, street lights, a supermarket and, as we already mentioned, a swimming pool you can actually swim in. It was our first time back in a pool since the fancy Cardoso Hotel in Maputo we stayed at during our first days of training over a year ago – and what a treat on a hot summer afternoon! We stayed in a lodge right on the shores of the lake in a grove of giant baobab trees, protected here to slow down erosion's destructive depositing of sediments and silt into the reservoir. The lodge caters mainly to rich coal executives and vacationing South Africa on fishing safaris, but we used our Portuguese language negotiating skills to get accommodation within our volunteer budget, sleeping slumber party style in a converted employee bunk cabin. We spent the weekend mostly relaxing, playing cards, talking about the ups and downs of the school year and vacation plans, drinking Mozambican beer, eating plenty fresh fish and even went out on the lake to see crocs and hippos and get up close to the giant dam. It was a little emotional saying goodbye to our friends moving on to life after Peace Corps. Next year we'll be the ones saying 'So long!' to Mozambique!
Conselhos de Notas
The official grading process concluded with a multi-day reckoning in which all teachers presented their students' grades to the class directors, who documented them in pencil on giant grade sheets. Luc, as class director of 8th grade B, had this responsibility, but since he was helping with Peace Corps training that week in Namaacha, Janet filled in. She was quickly disheartened by the amount of corruption that emerged. During the school year things hadn't been too bad in the grade-changing department, but now that we had to decide who would pass and who would fail, every teacher had people they needed to "help", be it family members, neighbors, girlfriends, or simply people who had paid them. They were all pressuring Janet to bump students' grades before finalizing them in indelible ink. The school as a whole is under pressure from the district to have at least 80% passing rate, so the administration more or less condones this rampant grade altering. It's hard for Mozambican teachers to understand why we Americans have such grievances with what we perceive as the corruption. For them it seems so easy to just erase the 6 or 7 (a failing grade) and write in a 10 (a passing grade), while for us, this last-minute adulteration of the system negates our year of preaching the importance of studying, not cheating, and actually rewarding those who learn the material. We had been warned about this process but still, it's hard to not feel dirty after stomaching all of our colleagues' bad behavior.
National Exams
To graduate from 10th grade Mozambican students must pass rigorous national exams in each academic discipline. Since these tests are administered and graded at local high schools by the local teachers, opportunities for corruption are rampant. Actual exam-taking policies are strict: only 30 students are allowed in each room, with only one student per desk, and all tests arrive in sealed plastic bags, which are ceremoniously opened at the beginning of each exam session. No outside materials are allowed in; students can only use special scratch paper with the official school seal. Two teachers monitor each room, so traditional forms of cheating, like copying, using cell phones and cheat sheets so prevalent during normal testing, are virtually non-existent. Unfortunately lots of cheating still happens, mostly actually involving the teachers and often behind the scenes during grading. During testing, teachers go from room to room, "explaining" the test. This ranges from trying to jog students memories with clues and hints, to outright dictating answers (1-true, 2-true, 3-false…). Students pay teachers teachers to grade their exams kindly and even though the answers sheets are coded for anonymity, everyone seems to know whose test is whose and plenty of grades get changed during correction. Our school administrators made a few symbolic examples of punishing cheaters, but calling out 4 students of the hundreds who were cheating is farcical. The school is again under pressure to have high passing rates, so it's in no one's interest to crack down too hard. Some teachers are more principled than others and even call out the most egregious examples of corruption, but everyone participates to some extent, except us. Luckily since everyone understands that Peace Corps teachers don't engage in these shenanigans, we were pretty much ignored during the grade-changing free-for-all, when the other teachers prowled from table to table, checking their little lists of "cases" of students they wanted to "help." Still, we had to witness this disgusting travesty and feel debased by our association with this institutionalized corruption, while suppressing our natural tendency to speak out against such blatant wrongdoing. Sadly, we're going away from the school year with a bitter taste in our mouths, but now that we know what it's like, we're hoping to come up with better strategies to deal with this situation next year.
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