Making it Through Another Trimester!

All teachers probably fantasize at times about arriving to school only to find it devoid of students and enjoying a surprise day off. Of course it's wrong to imagine our already educationally handicapped kids losing more school time, but sometimes we are just dreaming of a little respite from the demanding workweek. We definitely don't have snow days here, but Mozambique has other little ways for miracles to work their magic for teachers limping to the end of a trimester. This Thursday our site happened to host Tuberculosis Day. Coincidentally Thursdays happen to be Luc's craziest day of the week; so after four hours of teaching and a rushed lunch, he was heading back to school for six more periods of repeating, "I AM, YOU ARE, HE IS..." The vice-principal had already assured us that classes would continue as scheduled despite the festivities, but sure enough, Luc showed up to an empty classroom. The electric drumming at the soccer field had drawn
everyone to the Nyau's magnetic dancing and the conclusion of the TB program. Even though the event only burned the first two periods of the afternoon, only about half the students drifted back to campus making a joke of the rest of the school day. The next day it's Friday afternoon and Luc is typing this blog while Janet finnishes student ID cards for the entire 8th grade and we realize not a single one of our colleagues is to be found on campus. Kids are slowly wandering away so its unlikely any classes will take place. A lady selling beans nextdoor tells us a rural chief had died so teachers are attending the funeral; someone else theorizes the district must have deposited teacher salaries that week so everyone has rushed off to the city to visit our nearest ATM. We never got an authoritative answer, but as the last teaching day of the trimester it's an anticlimactic end to ten weeks of hard work. Considering our current state of exhaustion, we're
not complaining.

All of Tete Together

Life in site during the school year gets so busy time just flies by. Janet was a little sick, so she was in bed part of this week, so Luc was extra busy trying to cover her classes. No, there are no substitute teachers we can call to fill in with situations like this. Here in Moz if a teacher is absent, kids just have free time. We try as best we can to make up the lost hour on Saturday or when the kids are free when someother teacher is out. No worries though, Janet is fine. We thought it might have been malaria, but after consulting our doctor it seems more likely to have been the flu or some other virus that resolved itself after some conserted rest. Before we realize it, its already been an entire month without seeing any of our colleagues from PC Mozambique. So with St Patrick's day and a birthday earlier this month as excuses we all got together for the weekend hosted by our buddies up in Angonia. We all talked pretty much non-stop since we all
live in relatively isolated sites in our already isolated corner of Mozambique and don't usually get to hear so many stories and exciting news. It was invigorating to appreciate how much all our new volunteers have developed as teachers over the course of the first trimester. Weighing the good and the bad of our collective experience it seems like we're coming out on the positive side so far, which is encouraging considering how many challenges schools present here. Even more exciting was to hear about who has started dating Mozambicans here in Tete and getting a month's worth of gossip about the larger Peace Corps Mozambique community. Some major revelations included learning that one of the volunteers from our training cohort was sent home for breaking some sort of PC rule, which was disappointing to hear, and that two volunteers from the new group have fallen in love with each other and decided to get married here in country, which was very exciting
to hear! Mostly here in Peace Corps we just occasionally need some time out to relax with friends.

Misadventures in Geography

With very little exposure to television most of our neighbors know little about the world outside our town. Few people have ventured beyond the distance they can travel in a day, perhaps as far as Beira to the South, Lilongwe or Blantyre in Malawi, or cosmopolitan Harare in Zimbabwe. Very few people have seen the ocean, or even relatively nearby Lake Malawi, and very few have ever been to Maputo, the national capital: just a few political leaders, and teachers and border guards who trained there. We have maps decorating nearly every surface in our home, but these convey no more information to our typical visitors than do the out-of-date calendars and the assorted colorful photo posters or religious decorations covering the walls in our neighbors’ homes. When we put up the USA map we tried to see if Romão would be able to identify what to us are the iconic shape of our country. Without hesitation he told us he knew which country it was, it was Malawi. Most locals are able to recognize the contours of their own country, but still have a hard time locating Mozambique on a world or even a southern Africa map, until we point it out. Our own geographic origins present a conundrum to locals as well. Since non-black Africans make up less than 1% of Mozambique’s population, most people assume we are from somewhere else. Since we speak Portuguese, locals quickly rule out Zimbabwe and South Africa, the origin of most whites they meet, but who rarely speak their language. People most commonly assume we are Brazilian, just like all the Portuguese speakers they see on their Brazilian soap operas. The mining boom has drawn Brazilians to Tete, so the assumption isn’t bad. People are further confused when we tell them we are Americans, from the United States. The United States means nothing to most people and they associate the word America with all the countries in the Western Hemisphere, making no continental distinctions between North and South America. They are also surprised to learn that Portugal is not in America, the difference between America and Europe being very hazy. Few understand the location of the American continent, and that a large ocean separates it from Africa; we are often asked if we came from America by plane or by bus. Janet actually met a former geography teacher while hitchhiking who thought the world was a flat disc; he kept asking what was under the earth, or beyond its edges. Recently one of the party leaders in our town died while at an international congress in Vietnam. People merely stated that his body had to be brought from far away, having little idea of what or where Vietnam may be. Only when we throw out the name Barrack Obama out do people finally get what we mean by the United States of America. But then they are confused because they did not know that Portuguese was the official language of USA. Most people don’t believe that we learned to speak Portuguese here in Mozambique, only reconciling the conundrum by reaffirming how different our brains must be than theirs. We remind them that the former president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, spoke 11 languages, and he was a black man with African brains just like theirs. Rarely can we convince any of our students that we learned the entire language during a 10-week training, the approximate length of a single trimester for them.

Romão and the Bicycle

In our previous lives we used bikes as integral parts of our daily transportation solutions. Luc had a phase when he biked over 40 miles a day commuting back and forth over the San Francisco Bay to Stanford from where he lived with his brother in Fremont. We assumed, given the primitive state of Mozambican transport infrastructure, that bikes would give us some options and a degree of freedom from the mostly insane minibuses, at least over short distances. Peace Corps provided us the funds to purchase two bikes, which we did during the first couple months of service. We quickly grew to regret the day the two Chinese mountain bikes showed up at our homes, delivered by some neighbor that caught word that we had 5,000 Mets to spend. We took it as a bad omen when, on our inaugural spin, the handlebars fell off one of our brand new bikes. Basically, every time we took the bikes out we had to do a complete pre-departure tune-up just to get going. Its not that we bought a couple lemons, everyone in Mozambique has the same struggle to maintain their bikes. Despite being very accustomed to doing repair work, methods are frighteningly brutish, almost always involving a hammer, a tool neither of us used during our years of bike maintenance in the States. Every time out something would happen. We made it as far as Malawi, which given our situation in a border town is not too impressive. Once the pedal started to fall off on a regular basis, and having to push the bike back from Malawi, Luc just gave up. The bikes unreliability stripped us of all the joy we had anticipated experiencing on circulating freely driven by our own muscle power. So the bikes are now under the sole jurisdiction of Romão who derives his greatest life pleasure from zooming around on those accursed contraptions. Its about as cool as being a high schooler in the US with a car to be seen driving around town in. Plus, he actual enjoys spending endless hours tinkering with his one tool trying to get the bike into riding form. By cannibalizing the parts of one to sustain the other he has been able to get some remarkable life out of the bikes, especially considering how hard he rides the fragile things. Unfortunately, just before our departure to America the last low quality wheel cover wore through, exposing the frail inner tubes to all kinds of popping hazards, which rendered the bike unusable. A new tire would be 300 mets, or about one month and a half of Romão’s income. So the bikes sat idle, but Romão had a plan. He began fishing and selling his catch. Apparently he’s a pretty good fisherman, because within three weeks he had enough to buy the part he needed to rehabilitate his prized mode of speeding around town. He made a trip to Malawi, and sorte! (good luck!) they had the tire he had been hoping for. He spent every met he had saved, but he was so happy to be biking again that he barely noticed he had no food to eat that night. We felt proud that Romão was able to set a goal and achieve it, although we wish he could get as motivated in schooling or other life improving activities as he does over the bikes.

Drama in the Neighborhood

There is little privacy living in a small town in Africa. Given the dearth of entertainment, gossiping is a major pastime. Our lives here are pretty tame, but even our most mundane events circulate continuously from neighbor to neighbor. Even though with our busy schedules we are less available for idle chatter, Romão usually keeps us informed on the most salacious occurrences. For example, last week our recently widowed neighbor, Marcelina, traveled to the city to visit a sick relative, leaving her eldest son, Fademo, and daughter, Cheila, in charge of the house. Cheila is prone to making poor life decisions, so entrusting her with this degree of freedom was a miscalculation on Marcelina’s part. Cheila did not sleep at home, but snuck out after dark and spent the night with her sketchy older boyfriend who sells Malawian corn beer in the market. Since she failed to close the house properly upon her furtive departure, the late night open door drew our other neighbors’ attention, who upon investigating discovered Cheila’s absence. They later revealed her now not-so-secret tryst to Marcelina upon her return. Considering the high prevalence of HIV in our community, a casual sexual encounter here can have fatal implications, so Marcelina was rightfully furious with her daughter. Now she swears next time she’s out of town, she’s leaving at least two older cousins in the house. As if that wasn’t enough neighborhood drama, the next day, while the shouting and crying from the aftermath of Cheila’s ill-executed night time rendezvous was still resolving, Romão’s mom from Nkondezi, one of the nearby villages, showed up unexpectedly with all his little siblings. Apparently Romão’s stepdad had recently married a new women, his third simultaneous wife, and the new in-laws sent some thuggy cousins to rough up Romão’s mom to get her out of the picture and eliminate some of the competition. Having been kicked out of the home where she lived and with injuries to her face and eyes, she had to flee with several children still unable to walk strapped to her back. We went over to Romão’s house to help him communicate with his uncle who was out of town, and saw his little brothers and sisters lying together on a grass mat trying to retain whatever heat possible from the chilly night. There was no space in his small one room hut for them to sleep. They looked so vulnerable exposed as they were with nothing between them and the heavens above. Luckily it didn’t rain that night. Once Romão’s mother recovers, she’ll have to look for a new place to live. In such a male dominated society, women’s life situations are too precarious. Janet’s recent illness was a less dramatic example of just how immediate everyone’s lives are to each other. Janet had been in bed for half a week with low energy and aches. Within a day of Janet not leaving the house, the entire town knew she was sick; this makes sense considering Romão already assumes Janet is sick if he doesn’t see her before 6am. Upon hearing her vague symptoms, locals nodded knowingly, assuring us of their favorite diagnosis: malaria, the catch-all explanation for every ailment. Janet did not have malaria, likely just a virus. After Janet’s 8th grade biology class found out their lesson was canceled, some of the students showed up at the house asking if they could haul water or do chores Janet was unable to perform while in her enfeebled state. Several other students and neighbors wanted to come by and visit with Janet, since that is the custom if someone is sick here, but Luc turned them away, since Janet is more accustomed to resting when sick, not hosting visitors.

Maputo

There are lots of potential health hazards in the Peace Corps, that’s why Washington requires an annual complete check-up for all volunteers. We would just go to a local health services provider, but apparently Peace Corps cannot find a single dentist outside of the Maputo area that meets US standards, so this yearly ritual requires all of us to migrate to the capital. For us this is a 1000km+ undertaking, but they fly us, much to the delight of Janet and consternation of Lucas, making it a two-hour journey instead of the 4-day odyssey by land (which Luc would prefer). The capital city isn’t a bad place to hole out for five days while submitting three stool samples and a couple of vials of blood (the stool samples provided endless amounts of comedic relief to every conversation). The food selection in Maputo is amazing. We gorged on Thai, Indian, Mexican, and on a splurge: an impressive seafood fantasy platter in a swanky restaurant overlooking the waterfront. One of Luc’s buddies from Peace Corps Honduras works for the State Department in Maputo, so we got to see him and his wife and experience some of their life style. Basically the embassy employees live in little Americas. While swimming in the pool we contemplated what foreign service would be like under these conditions, something that appealed more to Janet than to Luc. For a few days the sheer contrast between the opulence and our comparative squalor was intoxicatingly relieving, so we didn’t think about it too much. Seeing Peace Corps buddies from other regions of the country provided chances to swap stories and enjoy each other’s company. Our office has AC and internet connections, so that’s why there are so many February pictures on our website. Although lounging on the couch watching satellite TV is a temptation many PC volunteers can’t pry themselves away from, we tried to walk the streets of the city a little and were rewarded with some awesome little markets, seaside views, fancy hotel lobbies and the national art museum, which is the only art museum in Mozambique and only has two galleries, but was well worth the 50 cents charged for admission. As we strolled the acacia-lined avenues, admiring the decaying Portuguese architecture, we enjoy imagining Lourenço Marques (Maputo’s former name) in its heyday, although its current state of semi-rehabilitation has a definite charm. We also saw our host mom from Namaacha, Cristalina, who just had a major leg surgery at the central hospital and has been convalescing with her daughter in Maputo. It was sad to see her in such a frail and diminished state, but her spirits were good and her agonizing arthritis pain is gone. She has so much family checking in on her on a continuous basis that we felt reassured. On our extremely crowded chapa to the airport on our way back home we met a man who had known Peace Corps teachers way in the north of the country, and another two ladies who offered to carry our bags turned out to be from Namaacha and friends of our host mom, so even in what we thought was the anonymity of the big city we were connected with people we assumed to be random strangers. Back in Tete, our chapa recognized us walking out of the airport, made a quick stop, and whisked us home to our peaceful town. From leaving our hotel in Maputo, to arriving at our front doorstep, it was a total of five and a half hours, but a world of difference. But then we still waited another hour and a half for Romão, who was house sitting and still doesn’t know how to use a calendar, to return with our sole set of keys.

Cohesion

It's tough serving in Peace Corps. Amongst the myriad of challenges this blog will have already acquainted regular readers with is the persistent difficulty of dealing with isolation. As a married couple we have a built-in support network; many of the solo volunteers serving in remote areas have it much more rough. Helping cope productively with this ever-present tribulation inspired our annual Cohesion event, basically a get together to keep spirits high, held in the pleasant hub-city of Chimoio. The central region of Mozambique, which includes Tete, Manica, and Sofala provinces, is the most sparsely populated by Peace Corps. A staff member commented on how ‘cohesive’ our little group is, and the proud central volunteers have adopted the word like a badge of honor ever since. Last year with classes every day and youth groups on the weekend we weren’t able to get out of site much. We were one of the few to miss the event, but this year with our dream schedule (nothing we can’t skip on Mondays or Fridays) we have more travel flexibility, which is a good thing considering the generally unreliable nature of transport here. We almost missed the event again this year after we had to give-up on our first day’s attempt to get to Chimoio after waiting on the edge of Tete city, begging for any kind of ride for nearly three hours and suffering a massive soaking thanks to an unexpected tropical downpour. Luckily the ordeal was not in vain. One of our Zimbabwean expat buddies with a car who was planning on traveling through Chimoio the next day on his way to perform a Valentine’s Day gig in Beira with his rock band, saw us in our pitiful state by the side of the road. He invited us to spend the night at his place and ride in the back of his pickup with the guitars and amps the next morning. The generous offer, a nice evening stroll around Tete City, and a delicious chicken dinner in the market near the river mostly made up for the harrowing afternoon, although I don’t know if we’ll try to hitch that stretch of road again in the near future no matter how inconvenient the 4am bus tends to make our getaways. When we finally did make it to our get-together one day late after a scenic rain-free ride, it was great. Everyone was there, except one volunteer stuck in site due to flooding, so we got to meet all of the new teachers and health workers who arrived during December while we were in America on vacation telling everyone about the difficulties of life in Africa. We were in charge of the expedition up Cabeça do velho, a cluster of large rocks resembling the face of a reclining old man just outside the city limits, making for a moderately strenuous afternoon of hiking. On top we stumbled upon a colorful church group performing exorcisms (we’re still trying to load the video to YouTube). Otherwise, we ate plenty of pizza, drank moderately, got to bond over a photo scavenger hunt, gave plenty of advice to the newbies, and just enjoyed the company of fellow Americans. No one was really upset or surprised when the Cohesion t-shirts we designed and ordered from a local silk screener failed to materialize, especially those of us starting our second years here in Moz.