No one really likes paying bills, but at least in America the process is simple enough. You can just write a check and send it in the mail or even more conveniently, go on-line and with a few clicks pay electronically. Neither of those options exist in our part of Africa. When you get a bill here, you have to pay in person. Since we don't have water or trash services in our town, our only regular bill is electricity. Every month the local Mozambique Electricity representative comes by with our bill, usually about 250 MTs (about US$7) for our three light bulbs, our mini-fridge, the electric stove and toaster oven, and occasional uses of Janet's computer. To pay, we have to actually walk down to the electricity office (crossing the stream on the sketchy tree trunk bridge Janet hates). Business hours here are more of a concept than a reality, so they're often closed or the agents are down in the city. The chief collecting agent got in a motorcycle accident and broke his leg, so the office was closed for several weeks then. The payment system was recently automated, so now there are computer difficulties we have to deal with as well, and ironically payments cannot be made when electricity is out, which is at least twice a week. The in-person system has its advantages as well: you often bump into friends to chat with while waiting in line, and you can almost always talk your way out of late fees. It usually takes us at least two or three attempts before we can actually successfully make a payment, but they'll let you go about a year without paying your bill before they actually cut power, so it's not that big of a deal. Its just a little frustrating for us since we still have an American mindset about getting things done, but maybe its one of those things we'll miss once we're back in the modern world.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Padres
The largest religious group in our community, and the one we are most associated with, is the Catholic Church. Our town has a diversity of churches, including two Jehovah's Witness meeting houses, the revival style Assemblea de Deus (Africano), several churches associated with the Presbyterians, many small family churches often times consisting only of a mud hut with grass mats to sit on, and a new mosque, complete with minarets to call the Muslim faithful to prayer. We also have traditional animists, like the Nyau, but they don't usually have formal houses of worship, and often times many also belong to a formal religion. About half the residents in our town, several teachers, and all of our immediate neighbors, are members of the Catholic parish. Luc goes every Sunday we're in site, and although Janet's attendance is more sporadic, the whole town counts us among the faithful. We often get prayer requests from people too sick or just too busy to attend a particular Sunday service; lately the main item has been for prayers to pass national exams. Over the course of the year we have developed a friendship with our parish priests. Although our town had a religious community during the Portuguese era, their house is now derelict and semi-abandoned; the three fathers now all live at the São João Bautista Mission in the district seat, about two hours away, so we only get official masses about once a month. Two of the fathers are Mozambicans, originally from our very town, and the head father, Ricardo, is Chilean, but has lived in country for almost 15 years now. They are part of the Silesian community, and associated with Don Bosco, so they specialize in working with youth and actively engage the community. They have a primary school, a community radio, agriculture and carpentry projects, computer training programs, and are currently building a sports facility. They also bring over missionaries and volunteers, mainly from Latin America. We've helped give HIV/AIDS training for their groups of youth activists. They've also given us lots of support. When one of our flights back to Tete arrived after dark, they put us up at the mission and even met us at the airport. We enjoyed sharing meals with the padres, praying together, and sharing stories about our different projects with the community. Plus, the Padres always have amazing food.
End of the School Year 2010
"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.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
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Up in the Air in Mozambique
Using a small regional airport is a totally different experience than the one we normally have at LAX, our home mega-airport. Here in Tete there is only one terminal and one runway. There is no traffic and no trouble finding parking, but that's not an issue for us anyway, since we don't have a car. The entrance is not too far from the main road, so it's not difficult to manage on public transport. Last time our mini-bus driver was so excited for us, he left us right at the door instead of having us walk up the long drive-way. Tete's airport was recently upgraded to an international facility, adding a direct flight from Johannesburg to accommodate all of the foreigners rushing in to exploit the province's mineral wealth. It now has an x-ray machine and a metal detector, something the even smaller Chimoio airport, which we used for site delivery, does not have. Security is much more mellow than in the US, sometimes they don't even check ID's, and e-tickets are usually just a handwritten list of names at the counter. Once Luc only had a photocopy of his passport and it was no problem. There is a balcony overlooking the long paved runway, so everyone waits there to see the plane arrive and depart. At night time, you know the flight is arriving soon when the landing strip lights up, and the control tower turns on its beacon. When the plane first appears, it looks like a star on the horizon, growing larger and larger, until finally it touches down, and the spectators applaud. Since only a very select portion of the population has access to air transport it is the country's elite that monopolize the flights, which means you can have some interesting conversations with the people sitting next to you. Last time Janet flew she met the National Director of Forests, the coach of the Women's National Basketball team (the current champions of the Southern Africa region), and several coal executives. Another time Luc sat next to a sharply dressed Lebanese diamond smuggler flying to buy stones under embargo from nearby Zimbabwe to sell as if they had been mined legally in Mozambique. LAM, Líneas Aereas de Moçambique, is the only domestic air carrier permitted in the country and their legal monopoly shuts out any hope for competition and guarantees poor service. Luckily they have a good safety record, and their Brazilian planes are mostly new and comfortable. Still, local English speakers call LAM 'Late and Maybe' since they frequently cancel or delay flights without notice, or add extra destinations, like Janet's last flight which was scheduled as a direct, but made a stop in Quelimane, causing her to arrive two hours late in Maputo. Once for our Reconnect Conference, our group of volunteers had already boarded and taken our seats when the flight attendant demanded that one of our colleagues disembark so a last minute VIP could take his place. When he refused, she made our friend talk to one of the LAM bosses on the phone who tried to convince him to disembark. When he still refused, the airline simply took all of our luggage off the plane as punishment and left it on the tarmac. We got it a few days later, but we resented the insult more than the inconvenience. The power went out during Janet's latest arrival, and since the luggage carousel is useless without energy, everyone had to go outside and look for their baggage on the little service hand carts. Mozambique is a big country, so often times there's no feasible alternative to flying, especially living in far away Tete, so as long as LAM keeps getting us to and from our destinations safely, we shouldn't complain, especially if we compare it to a 35+ hour bus ride.
Trash Management in Africa
There is very little trash management in our part of Africa. In our little town people will sometimes dig a big pit and throw trash in it, occasionally burning it in a process that produces foul toxic smoke. Once the hole is full they'll cover it with some dirt and start again elsewhere. Any trash produced while walking is simply tossed on the ground, there is no concept of littering. This applies to vehicles as well, bus passengers are notorious for simply jettisoning whatever detritus they have out the window: plastic bags, soda cans, chicken bones, corn cobs, etc. Even in large cities, most rubbish just goes onto the street where it accumulates and is blown around by the wind. There is some nominal attempt to collect trash in the most public areas, but even then its just taken to the city limits and dumped so that anyone visiting the city is usually greeted by mounds of junk when entering. We personally do not produce much trash in our site. Most of our waste is organic and goes into a compost heap near our latrine which the neighboring pigs and chickens periodically raid. As for the non-compostable items, we try to reuse as much as possible, using items such as peanut butter jars and powder milk tins for storing our dry goods, scratch paper and odd plastic for starting our charcoal fire when cooking while electricity is out, and our plastic bags as many times as possible when we make trips to the market. The old ladies hawking vegetables think this habit is so funny, but they appreciate it since they have to buy the plastic bags they usually hand out to customers. Some items though just have no additional uses for us, like old toothbrushes, the foil containers our malaria meds arrive in, toothpaste tubes, burned out light bulbs, and what not. Luckily these items are treasures to all of our little creative neighbors who raid our trash pile as soon as we throw it out, and try to make little toy cars out of the junk or simply show people what the Americans were tossing. Since most of the trash is indestructible, we occassionally recognize unique little items that once belonged to us, like an old Snickers wrapper down the street. We've even seen pieces of trash that surely belonged to the previous volunteers, like an old credit card with a large American flag on it our neighbors recently found in the market. Luckily people here have so little in general that even though most trash just ends up in the streets, they don't have that much trash to begin with, so its not a major problem, or maybe we've just become so accustomed to the omnipresence of trash that we've lost our American sensitivity to litter, so it doesn't seem to be a problem to us anymore.
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 10th grade from our school under the previous Peace Corps Volunteer's tenure, just graduated 12th 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.
Running into Nyaus
Staying Connected to the World
Living in rural Africa with minimal access to mass media and frequent prolonged cell phone outages, the world frequently shrinks to the size of our town, with everything beyond walking distance of our home fading into a blur of rumors and random updates. TV viewing is limited to the set in our teachers' lounge, originally bought for the World Cup, where Janet occasionally catches episodes of the 2008 season of Oprah rebroadcast on Angola's TV Zimbo and we sometimes watch national news programs from Mozambique or Angola, but most often Brazilian soap operas dominate our small screen. This year's smash hit is 'Os Mutantes,' a Latin soap opera version of the X-men. We can always tell when it airs because to get in and out of the teachers' lounge, where our colleagues jam pack the chairs and couch, we have to negotiate thick ranks of kids thronging the doorway to steal glimpses of the typically over-the-top plot lines and amateurish special effects. The particularly exciting end-of-the-week episodes can even delay the start of classes or exams. With zero access to newspapers or browsing internet news sites, our only real window to the larger world outside our community is the radio, which we listen to for multiple hours a day. We keep our little solar powered wireless permanently tuned to the BBC. Living right on the border, we get continuous clear reception on the FM broadcast from nearby Blantyre, intended mainly for Southern Malawi listeners. Most of our Peace Corps Mozambique colleagues can only get such quality English language news if they have short wave, and even then its sporadic. There is no real competition on our dial from the other mainly Chichewa language stations. Our neighbors don't understand why we don't tune our radio to the local music, but we already get plenty of that whenever electricity isn't out thanks to the many crackling speakers playing the same few Chichewa songs loudly beyond their audio capacity throughout town. Over the past year we've followed plenty of world stories on the BBC, ranging from tragedies, like the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and the torrential floods in Pakistan, to the farcical, like the BBC's attempt to interview Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim, to the latest music fads in British nightclubs with the weekly Tops of the Pops. Airtime for sports favors British pastimes, with Cricket World, in depth coverage of the Commonwealth Games, and all the latest on Manchester United's woes with their temperamental striker Wayne Rooney. Luc did get to hear updates on the Lakers' championship run last season, which he would anxiously wake at 5AM to catch live. There is zero baseball coverage, although we hear we didn't miss much with an abysmal showing from our hometown Dodgers. The most compelling story this past year for us has been that of the 33 Chilean miners trapped for so long deep underground. At times we felt like we were down there in that pit with them, cut off from the world in complete darkness under hundreds of meters of solid rock. Perhaps everyone has moments when they feel like this, or perhaps it has something to do with us being so far and isolated from home here in Africa that prompted us to identify with these men during their ordeal. We shared their elation when rescuers finally pulled them free from the earth, imagining our own joy when we finally arrive home for the holidays after over a year on the far side of the planet. Recently we heard the budget for BBC World Service has been eliminated as part of the coalition government's severe austerity measures, but hopefully this doesn't mean the end of our precarious tether with the larger world.
End of the Burning Season
We just had our first afternoon deluge this week, the kind with loud thunder and the really heavy drops of rain that make living inside of our tin roofed home sound like living inside of a big bass drum. In the excitement all the children stripped down to their underwear to dive into the pools of accumulating liquid or shower in the water running off the roofs. However, what the sudden appearance of water did to ameliorate the afternoon heat was undone by increasing the equally unpleasant humidity. Farmers are anxiously harvesting what remains of the nyandolo beans, known as pigeon peas in English speaking places. Our region produces a surplus of these nutritious legumes, so businessmen from the cities have been driving through to buy them in large quantities. We have benefitted from this increased traffic with some free rides. Little weighing stations have appeared at strategic locations in the town center and countryside where the beans have been accumulating in huge mountains. We hear that the end destination for the land's bounty is India, where the beans will be processed into vegetable products to help meet the huge and sometimes under-nourished vegetarian population's need for protein. After the harvest, farmers busily chop down the shrubby nyandolo trees in anticipation of the rainy season, when they will plant corn that will hopefully see them through next year. Town residents who have somehow saved up the capital to build a new home this year, including several of our colleagues at school, are racing to use what remains of the dry season to make mud bricks, which must dry in the sun and then bake in large smoky improvised kilns. Many a mango tree has been axed this season to fuel these projects. The summer stormy season is still not upon us and it is still very difficult to get enough water to met the community's daily needs, but this week's harbinger means that relief won't be long now.
