Job Market Difficulties

As teachers, we hope that the schooling experience we provide our students with will help them in life.  We know that many of these benefits are hard to measure or link to our efforts.  Although we will not personally see the results, we have faith that a more highly educated population will eventually lead to a future with better community health, smaller, better-nourished families, and less HIV/AIDS, among other positive outcomes.  The most direct result we would like to see from our teaching efforts is for our students to find jobs with their secondary school degrees, or opportunities to continue their education.  However, we are often disappointed on this front.  Zachariah, one of our best students, who graduated 10^th grade from our school under the previous Peace Corps Volunteer's tenure, just graduated 12^th grade, or Form 4 as they call it in the British system, at a private school nearby in Malawi.  He had studied there because none of the schools in Mozambique where willing to offer him a spot in their classes, which are often reserved for the children of family and friends of those connected with the education system, or those willing to grease the wheels of bureaucracy.  Zachariah was unable to place a strategic bribe in the system and was shut out.  Luckily, this previous Peace Corps Volunteer, now back in America, unwilling to endure this injustice, sponsored his education by paying the fees at the private school in Malawi.  Zachariah eventually moved in with our Peace Corps friend Jordan since he had run out of money for housing and food.  So through various lucky encounters with Peace Corps, Zachariah managed to graduate from secondary school with very refined English.  He often cracks us up with unconventional choices of words from the British-African vocabulary he acquired in Malawi. 

We know that America and Europe are suffering in the aftermath of the world financial crisis, and that unemployment rates are at painfully high levels, sometimes in the range of 20%.  However, Africa is permanently in crisis, with rates oftentimes surpassing 80%.  The only people with formal jobs in our town are the teachers and the schools' supporting secretarial staff, nurses at the health center , the police, the soldiers and immigration officials that man the border, the town agriculture specialist, the staff at our town's one restaurant/hotel, and a few political posts.  Other than that, people try to scratch out a living through subsistence farming, selling products in the market or to traffic passing through town, or exchanging large stacks of Mozambican Meticais for Malawian Kwachas, South African Rands, or US Dollars from Zimbabwe.  People here are fairly resilient in the face of the persistently bleak financial outlook, but life is hard.  Even down in Tete, city dwellers don't necessarily find the job market much easier.  More formal jobs exist, with the presence of the international coal and tobacco companies and provincial bureaucracies, but competition is greater, with plenty of graduates competing for the few coveted spots.  Our student threw himself into the fray, but coming from a peasant family, he had no connections to help him, or even anywhere to sleep in the city while job searching.  After each unsuccessful trip, he showed us the list of places he had visited and the reasons why he could not get a job there.  Some of them need applicants with computer skills or a drivers license, and some simply had no openings.  After several ventures into the city, the only job he could find was as a day laborer with a Chinese construction firm.  Unfortunately the wages were insufficient to live in the city.  So he has given up for now and returned to farming with his family.  It was discouraging for us to see one of our most successful students, with proficient English language abilities, a skill so in demand here, unable to secure viable employment.  He had hoped schooling would bring him opportunities and a lifestyle unavailable to his family in his rural village, but so far it has only brought frustration and disappointment.  Unfortunately, his situation is representative of so many African youths these days, but we're not giving up, and neither is he.  Next school year he hopes to enroll in one of our computer classes to upgrade his resume.