Rainy Season in Tropical Africa

With rainy season in full swing, we’ve been contemplating the pros and cons of this wet hot summery time of year. Procuring our daily quota of water has certainly gotten easier. We can directly harvest the rain from our rooftop or tap our abundantly full well, such a relief after experiencing the stinginess of dry season. Everything that was yellow and dead during dry season is now alive and green, including the moss covered walls of our house. Everywhere food is growing, not only in the fields out beyond town but also in every unused corner, including the parcel around our home. The rains directly affect the availability and price of products in our market, with some more fragile foods, like lettuce, now on hiatus until dryer conditions return. Mud is now omnipresent, making some paths dangerously slippery, others have been severed by seasonal streams. It’s hard to keep the mud out of the house, but dust and ash were equally annoying enemies of domestic cleanliness during the burning season. A lake accumulates in front of our house during storms and our roof has at least three leaks inside, although luckily none above our sleeping area, and any amount of wind sends liquid through our less than water tight windows, but it’s nothing a good mopping can’t solve. The constant humidity fosters an ideal climate for molds; nothing is immune to this nuisance. The abundance of water makes cleaning clothes less troublesome, but drying them is now the trick. With storms able to crop up in less than an hour, we can’t stray far from home with the wash out on the line and even when its sunny the damp air keeps clothes damp and funky smelling. Daily outings are also difficult to plan because you never know when a down pour will ambush you on your way to the market leaving you stranded in some random shelter or completely soaked if you’re away from town structures. Floods and mudslides are a real danger in many parts of the country, luckily that’s not the case in our town, but roads and bridges regularly wash out during this season making already sketchy transportation even more of a nightmare. Electricity and cell networks are also frequent victims during storms, leaving us without power or telephone/internet for undetermined periods of time, unlike during planned outages when we known when service will return. The sheet metal roofs here amplify the sound of each tropical drop into a deafening cacophony making lecturing impossible and even conversations difficult. It doesn’t rain every single day, and when it does come down the intensity usually subsides after about an hour. The rain does cool the sometimes hot summertime temperatures considerably and the lush green look of the countryside is amazingly beautiful. Having both grown up in Southern California we don’t always appreciate having liquid in the sky, but the people here love the rain and hardly ever complain. The lack of rain is more of a reason for concern here, like during last year’s drought which produced endless worry and conversation. Luckily this year’s rain has been much healthier promising an abundance of food and less hunger than last year.

The Sounds of Service

Our little town makes a lot of noise, it’s rare to find a silent moment – maybe at night if the power is out, other than that there are also plenty of acoustic waves floating around. Music is omnipresent, blaring at max volume from poor quality overworked speakers that would have already been retired and discarded in any other part of the world. Here they continue to pump out mostly Chewa music from Zambia and Malawi, other parts of Mozambique focuses more on Portuguese and English language music. TVs are rare in site, but whoever owns one also has it on at all times at full volume. Conforming to this pattern, our school TV remains on even during faculty meetings, although we do turn down the volume. Daily tasks make a lot of noise. We hear loud bangs from people beating clothes on rocks during the washing process, the rythmic pounding of women grinding corn with gigantic mortars and pestles, the sounds of blowing and fanning of girls stoking cooking fires before meal times, the stirring sounds associated with making xima corn paste, the squeky pumping noise coming from the town water pumps or the sloshing of water being poured from wells into buckets, the scratchy sound of people using sand to scrap the black charcoal soot from their cooking utensils. Animals also have their own sounds. Here we mostly hear domestic animals like goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, and dogs, but in the evenings we also hear birds and insects chirping, and frogs croaking. Less pleasant in the evenings is the high pitched buzzing of the notorious malaria vectors, mosquitos (luckily we have our net to keep this annoying and potentially scary noise out of our ears while we sleep). Plants make very pleasant noises when provoked by gentle breezes, but make more threatening noises in wind storms, while various creaking noises cause us to fear for the integrity of our home. Thunder can also be scary and very loud here, and our tin roof amplifies the sound of each tropical raindrop making us feel like we live in a drum line jam session during downpours.

People here are also very loud in general, not only when they are yelling at each other from across the neighborhood or laughing, but people carry on even normal conversations at very high decibel levels. Plus, no matter where you are, there are always babies crying not too far away or youngsters throwing tantrums, especially the little boys who are frequently spoiled, and children are always cackling away as they play their noisy games. The Nyau spirit channelers also contribute their own unearthly growling noises as they run the narrow streets of town beating their machetes. Different parts of town have their own sets of sounds. Our house always has the characteristic sounds of British accents from the BBC World Service. At the primary school you can always here kids chanting the vowel sounds and practicing reading syllables in unison, and at the secondary school we have our French and English students reciting their lessons in chorus. The main road through town has trucks barreling through making their deep diesel engine rumbles on their way back and forth between Malawi and the big Mozambican ports on the Indian Ocean, and the mini-buses zooming back and forth, loading up passengers bound for Tete have the high pitched sound all exhausted engines make when they are continuously operating just below overheating temperatures. Metal workers pounding out their wares next to the meat vendors un-sanitarily hacking away at their animal carcasses with axes and machetes provide various percussive sounds. The little bamboo hut movie theaters intentionally blare their kung fu or bollywood soundtracks into the streets to tempt pedestrians inside. Our newly completed mosque now contributes a loud call to prayer several times a day, broadcast from a large speaker poking out of one of the minarets. In the Catholic church, under the noise of all the singing and praying, you can hear the very subtle sound of breastfeeding from the myriad mothers with suckling babes.

But there are also plenty of sounds we don’t hear. No airplanes, no car alarms, no commuter traffic or honking, no freeway or mass transit sounds. There are no emergency response sirens. We do have an ambulance and our police chief has a motorcycle, but since there is no traffic for them to compete with, we have never heard them activate the whine of their sirens. We also miss out on some of the nuisances common in the big cities, like people yelling or hissing at us to get our attention, or street kids persistently begging for money in their most pathetic voices. Other than the humming of our fridge, we have no appliance noises, no vacuum cleaners, no washing machines, no driers, no microwaves beeping. People do love cellphones, and the few people who have them love showing off their ring tones when they receive calls – no silent modes here. There are no plumbing sounds, no water sprinkling, no showers, and definitely no toilets flushing. There are no havens from sound here, no libraries, no botanical gardens, no museums, no meditation rooms, no places to go to find and savor silence. To generalize, we believe Africa is usually louder than America, and people here don’t seem to mind the constant noise. Most people actually seem to enjoy it – maybe the ability to produce noise makes people in our small rural community feel more modern, or maybe it just reminds everyone that they are alive. Either way sometimes we would really like to enjoy a quiet moment, but giving that up is one of the sacrifices of being a Peace Corps volunteer.

Tete in the House

As the senior members of the Tete crew we had all of our new neighbors over for a welcome to the province event. Since we were the only ones sent up here last year, we're the only second year volunteers in the area, but Peace Corps sent us 7 new teachers this cycle more than doubling our presence from 4 Americans to 9. Everyone made it except for the only other male volunteer, so it was Luc parading around town with 7 females. Our event wasn't a raucous party, there wasn't too much drinking, dancing, music, or gossip worthy activities - it was more like a big sleep over. We did have lots of fun and there was plenty of giggling and girl talk. Our menu tried to provide some culinary inspirations using Mozambican products. We prepared a mediterranean feast with eggplant babaganoosh and chick pea hummus, bean burgers and french fries with ketchup, vegetable fajitas with homemade tortillas, cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and carrot cake with walnuts for
dessert, so we bent the rules a little and used a couple of ingredients from USA and Malawi. Janet also gave out mini-care packages she had assembled from assorted American delectables garnering some cheers doling those out! She also had some posters from the hit series Glee to help decorate some of the new houses and we gave away some of our less used kitchen items for those who didn't inherit anything from previous volunteers. Sleeping arrangements were a little tight, but no one had to sleep on the cement and everyone had mosquito protection. Sunday morning we all hiked up to one of the border markers that the British and Portuguese built in 1956 to divide Mozambique and Nyasaland (Malawi). The trail was a little steep and overgrown making it a bushwacking rock climbing adventure at times, but the views from the top did not disappoint and provided a great backdrop for some Tete group photos. So it was a great weekend; we got to show some PC
hospitality and best of all we now have a group of new friends nearby for support and to share our good times with this year.

Romão's Day of Happiness / Day of Sadness

Romão failed 8th grade on account of Portuguese class, so he has to repeat. Our neighbors tell us he was really bummed when he found out, we were on vacation at the time. His former classmates who are moving on to 9th have been teasing him and he's discouraged about having to spend a whole year with the little kids, as he calls the new 8th graders. But, what luck, when the school schedules were posted, Romão's name appeared on the 9th grade roster. Oh happy day! Romão immediately began running back and forth to tell everyone the good news. On the first day of class he dressed up in his nicest, cleanest clothes, including his ever hilarious snake pants and the new bookbag he bought during vacation, and marched down to school for morning classes when all the 9th and 10th graders study. Unfortunately, as the most responsible people in Romão's life we had to investigate this unexplained windfall. We contemplated letting this one slide, but we knew it
would catch up with him eventually since the school reviews everyone's academic history when they try to graduate 10th grade. Sure enough, Romão's place in 9th was a mistake. Luc went to the school archive, aka an old cardboard box under the secretary's desk, where all the giant class transcripts reside, and using a yardstick to read across the cumbersome document he clearly saw written in red ink 'não transitar' not passing on Romão's line. The vice-principal told Romão to leave and come back in the afternoon to study with the rest of the 8th graders. Romão can't read very well and hardly ever studies, so in a way he doesn't deserve to pass 8th grade, but at the same time there are others worse off academically moving on to 9th, which doesn't seen fair and makes the system seem arbitrary. Romão attributes his misfortune to bad luck. The national exams were the same way with some good kids failing. For us as teachers its hard to motivate students
to study and put effort into school work when they don't see this as directly linked to academic success.

Slowly Slowly

We missed our school's ceremonious opening of the academic year. We were still racing back from our distant Peace Corps meeting on various modes of Mozambican transport, so instead we witnessed the national event unfolding in every community we traversed. We caught glimpses of populations large and small congregating on school grounds, sometimes inside crowding windows and spilling out doors, sometimes outside under the shade of large trees that often substitute for classrooms. We arrived at our little schoolhouse, after some bad luck at the always problematic bridge over the Zambezi that cost us about an hour, just as everyone began spilling out of the jammed classroom venue. We had been officially excused on account of our meeting so our colleagues were impressed to see us and correctly surmised that we must have began at 3am that morning. Our vice-principal was still posting the master schedule we had used the computer to hurriedly design before our
departure amidst intermittant power outages. The teachers playfully jostled for views so they could copy down their assignments and teased each other about who had the best/worst shifts. The actual first day of classes is anticlimatic and unemotional. In Mozambique the entire first week of school is mellow, if school happens at all. Since most kids don't have calenders, they just wait until they see or hear about teaching taking place again before getting school bound. Since many are in the city visiting family or outlying villages working the fields it takes a couple weeks to start getting full attendance. We don't particularly mind since we're also readjusting our time intensive lifestyle to the demands of our teaching loads and Janet is still coming to terms with 7am classes.

Team JOMA

Enjoying a pinapple popsicle

The JOMA crew hanging out after the meeting

Our friend Ethan attacking a gazelle leg

As if we weren't busy enough with our primary assignment as full-time teachers here in Mozambique, we also have all of our secondary projects, like our youth groups, filling up our lives with meetings, at times stress, but also laughter and fun. We are now on the national JOMA team. JOMA, Jovens para Mudanca e Accao (Youth for Change and Action), is a type of club for young men and women who want to use communication skills, like community theater, art, or music, to share messages on HIV/AIDS and gender issues. We have already written a lot about our own highs and lows with our JOMA theater group, but now we're helping to plan the project on a national level. This weekend we had a big meeting at Gorongosa, down in Central Mozambique. This did involve multiple 3am alarm clock mornings for the ever annoying 4am bus between Tete and Chimoio and the need to sleep in various random locations, including with a friendly Zimbabwean family in Tete City our friends recommended. In Gorongoza we got to see Volunteers from across the country, including some we hadn't seen since swearing in over a year ago! We spent most of Saturday and Sunday planning out our 2011 strategy for training counterparts, organizing student workshops, getting our youths to put together community projects, and designing our JOMA T-shirts. All the logistics for these activities are exponentially more difficult in a country with transportation and communications ranging from unreliable to non-existant, but that's part of the Peace Corps challenge. Plus, we still had plenty of time in the evenings for relaxing, barbequing a gazel, and having a good time with our friends. Janet actually had a little too much "fun" the last night and spent the next morning sleeping it off on our various motley modes of Moz transport back towards site.

School Year 2011

The school year was scheduled to start today with formal opening ceremonies across the country, but Mozambique's most famous artist, Malangatana, died, so the entire country is in official mourning, and the start of the school year has been postponed to Monday. That's fine with us, since we're still readjusting to life back in Mozambique. We have been slowly learning about the fate of all of our tenth grade students from last year as we bump into people around town. There have been some surprises. Worst of all, Romao, did not pass eighth grade, so will have to repeat. His classmates have been giving him a hard time and I think he was a little disappointed we didn't use our influence to get him a passing grade. Despite the ethical repurcussions, we probably would have helped, but the teacher who was failing him left town during the final grading period, so was unavailable to change his marks. Our very best tenth grade English student, who was the leader of our English Theater project, failed the sciences portion of the national exams, so has to wait and take them gain next time they're offered, before moving on with his academic career. One of Janet's girlfriends who failed badly during the first round of national exams pulled through and passed on the second round, so she's moving on to eleventh grade. The rest of our youth group tenth graders were all really strong
academically, and all passed exams and are going on to eleventh grade at a new school about two hours from our town in a new settlement built for people relocated by the big mining projects. They'll all board together there in a simple dorm. Our faculty has also had some changes. There was a shortage of teachers this year, so five from our school were transfered to bolster the expanding eleventh and twelefth grades in the city schools. Janet's Science Fair counterpart, one of our best teachers, as well as two of our worst teachers, including one that didn't even show up for class 75% of the time and was responsible for Romao's retention. Our entire geography department was also transferred. Five teachers from the elementray school have been promoted to take their place, but their skills don't match with the vacancies left by the departing teachers, so our school administration has been shuffling people around. Our technical drawing teacher will now be the geography teacher, and one of our math teachers has moved to chemistry, and the PE teacher will be in the English department with Luc now. We have a computer program from Peace Corps that can create school schedules, so that has been a big hit with our
administrators, who usually take days sketching out the various possible configurations that accomadate everyone's criteria. We're hoping that this way we can control our own schedule a little more, and maybe concentrate our classes during three or four days, so we can have longer weekends to work on our secondary projects our travel. Unfortunately a tropical downpour hit right during the process and electricity on the computers cut out, but this is something we are very used to by now.

African Homecoming

Even before we arrived at our stop, friends began spotting us on our crowded mini-bus and shouting greetings. Being the only light skinned people in a town of very dark skinned people makes us an easy target to spy, but after our long stay in multi-colored USA, we had forgotten how much we stand out here. Anticipating an emotionally draining deluge of welcomes with trepidation, the actual experience felt more mellow and loving, although a couple of indelicate demands for gifts proved our initial suspicions not totally unfounded. After our action packed layouer in Dubai, the remainder of our long journey produced little of note. Other than some turbulent skies and evading some dramatic Southern Hemisphere thunder storms, our Emirates Boeing 777 covered the distance between Dubai and Jo'burg uneventfully. Airlink's small jet only flys between South Africa and Tete twice weekly, so we spent the night at a sporadically noisy hostel just across the street
from the main runway where we met several American teachers and volunteers returning from vacations mainly to English-speaking Malawi. Happily we had no trouble at our little immigration booth in Tete even though we haven't yet received our resident visa renewals. Our province has 7 new Peace Corps teachers and we spent our first night with 4 of them in their site within easy reach of our petit airport. The next day it was time to return to our site, luckily Father Ricardo agreed to drive up our two oversized duffles full of American specialty goods when he comes to give mass. Everything is greener and more beautiful than when we left now that rainy season is upon us. The heat is not unbearable, but it is tropical feeling. Everyone is very eager to greet us and tell us how fat we look and inquire about our families. Our chief/mayor invited us to his home to feast with the local head honchos who love hearing even the most mundane details we have to share
about the developed world. It was good to be welcomed with many smiles and have a few days before school starts.

Dubai

Hello from Terminal 3 of the Dubai International Airport. We have spent the last 2 nights in this very different city, taking advantage of our flight stop-over to see what this "Las Vegas of the Middle East" is all about. Dubai is modern, organized, clean and friendly. We took the shiny new metro to our budget hotel and spent the first evening at the Dubai Museum inside the old city fort. It had a fascinating and interactive display about Dubai history and life. We enjoyed some Indian food for dinner, strolling 'Hindi Lane', as our neighborhood is primarily a South Asian area. The 12-hour time change hit us hard around 8pm so we called it an early night. The next day was spent learning about old Dubai in the morning and new Dubai in the afternoon. We toured the many 'Heritage' sites, old traditional homes and forts that have been beautifully restored and filled with historical artifacts, documents, photos and recreated scenes. The museums had a lot of informational videos and dioramas, depicting traditional games. We were offered free coffee, tea and sweet dates at several places too! We took a people water taxi across the Creek to see some of the sites, on a very traditional wooden boat, the main mode of pedestrian transport across the river, as there are no bridges, just an underground tunnel for cars. In the afternoon we traveled out of the old center of the city to the new high-rise zone, which struck us as the Miracle Mile from LA. We passed the Burj Khalifa on the train, the tallest building in the world. It is super beautiful and shiny, and especially impressed Janet, but as the day was rather hazy we decided not to go up it. Instead we went to the Mall of the Emirates, the largest and most over-the-top of the many shopping malls that make Dubai famous. Inside this indoor wonderland we viewed the famous indoor ski slope and many, many high-end shops. We also walked from the Mall to the most iconic hotel, the Burj Al Arab, shaped like a sail and set on a man-made island. We couldn't get close, but did discover a Disneyland-esque Aladdin shopping center, full of Russian tourists especially. We headed back to the old town on the bus, Luc stopping off to see the Jumeirah mosque, one of the most beautiful of the thousands of mosques spread across this city. Overall, Dubai was an interesting mix of tradition and ultra-modernity and was worth staying the extra night to see. And now on to Johannesburg for another overnight and finally back to our little Tete airport on Friday.

Goodbye America

We’ve had a really rich and full vacation and are now packing our bags and heading back to Africa to complete our second year as Peace Corps volunteers. With all the grocery shopping for non-perishable goodies and the care packages entrusted to us by the new Tete volunteers’ American families, our bags are just as packed going home as coming here. Even though we were technically on vacation, we still made 13 picture-packed presentations to classrooms here in California, and gave 2 school assemblies about our experiences in Africa. We really enjoyed reacquainting ourselves with how different the high school experience is in America when compared to our situation in Mozambique, but at the same time realizing how similar teenagers can be despite the radically different circumstances in which they exist. We still had plenty of time to enjoy our families and friends, squeezing in a trip up north to San Francisco to see people up there (and a girl weekend for Janet at Luc’s brother’s cabin near Yosemite), driving the Big Sur coastline on our way were we saw some giant elephant seals and touring the superlatively over-the-top Hearst Castle. With so many visits, we averaged about 5 meals a day, and with so many cookies, cakes, chocolates, and candies we knew we wouldn’t be sampling for at least another 11 months, we each gained 10+ pounds. Our friends back in Africa will be pleased with that since they continuously remind us about our need to fatten up. It shouldn’t take too long to shed the excess love handles we acquired in the land of excess once we return to our Spartan leaf diet. Overall reverse culture shock wasn’t too extreme, Luc was generally a little more overwhelmed than Janet, but we both agree that our mid-year trip to South Africa was more intense than this vacation in America. Despite all the amazing eats, visiting museums and botanical gardens, hiking in the mountains to play in the snow, watching movies, and opening Christmas presents, spending time with our families and friends was the best part about being home; especially our little 22 month old nephew. He’ll be so big and talking so much next time we see him! The last few days have been extra hectic, staying out on the street until midnight, ringing in 2011 while guarding our spot for Pasadena's traditional New year's Rose Parade. We are excited about returning to Africa, but going back to work is never quite as exciting as traveling to vacation.