Kwashiorkor

Janet has been teaching her 8th graders about nutrition as part of the digestive system unit in biology. We talk about nutritional excess and deficiency, the latter being of much greater concern here. One of the diseases covered is kwashiorkor, or extreme protein deficiency resulting in distended bellies, brittle orange hair, acetone breath and overall underdevelopment. People in food-wealthy countries may not be that familiar with the characteristic symptoms, possibly even mistaking their swollen bellies as obesity. Unfortunately kwashiorkor is very common here, but now that the kids have a name for it they go around pointing at the most under nourished kids around town and in their classroom chanting “kwashiorkor!” One particularly small kid at our school named Unique has permanently earned the nickname. It’s all part of the African reality.

English Club

This trimester Luc has been giving supplemental English lessons to our most motivated kids Monday afternoons. It does mean three more hours of work per week in our already crammed schedule, but with the smaller group size we can experiment with a lot of the more participatory activities that are just too hard to pull off in the 50+ student classroom environment. We do a lot of talking and dialogues, reading magazines, or at least describing the pictures, and the kids’ favorite, singing along to music. They really like Justin Bieber. At first all they could get was the baby, baby, baby, but after a couple weeks they’ve got the whole first verse down. They want to perform it at the morning assembly, but I don’t know if they have the base skill level to pull it off. Our main goal is to get a core group of kids ready so that we can put together an English Theater group for this September’s provincial competition, which we’re in charge of organizing, and not coming in last place, like last year. Actually, as long as we do a good job and get kids excited about learning, last place is fine.

Journalism Weekend

So to cap off our marathon month of non-stop activity, we organized a journalism workshop at our school, inviting a Mozambican journalist from Chimoio to lead the capacity-building event. Our school was very excited to host an out-of-province professional, so they wanted to put a good meal together for him. Since our school has no resources, we had to pool food from every institution in town. 5 kgs of rice from the health center, another 5 kgs of rice from the primary school’s World Food Program, 4 liters of soda from the local bar, 2 dollars from the immigration office, some printing from the town mayor, and a couple of mothers from night school volunteered to do the cooking in exchange for a meal. The JOMA Peace Corps fund made up the rest of the $20 difference for fish and oil, and paid for the transport and hotel and honorarium for our professional guest. Our counterpart was really excited to ride around town on his motorcycle to all the institutions to gather the donations with officially stamped letters typed with our old school type writers (our computer printers are all out of ink and unable to squeeze out another document, even after getting our students to vigorously shake the cartridges). Our cooks had some miscalculations with the rice, so we had about 20 pounds left over after we all ate, but luckily in Africa starving children are never hard to find, so within ten minutes of announcing our excess rice issue we had a line of fifteen of the scruffiest most malnourished kids in front of the cooking station. Nothing went to waste. Our trainer was a no-nonsense Mozambican and did not hesitate to point out all the areas our young journalist needed to improve, but they needed to hear this. Since the training day coincided with Janet’s birthday, Luc made a birthday cake to cut with our students (any cake cutting here is as ceremonious as a bride and groom cake cutting) during our journalism closing ceremony. Everyone sang the Portuguese Happy Birthday song for here and started clapping and dancing in celebration. Immediately after, back in our house, we had celebration number two, with a bunch of our PC neighbors where we ate birthday cake number two, carrot and walnut with butter frosting. The next day we had to cross the border to photocopy journalism certificates to present to our kids and try to fix Luc’s email account. Our PC Malawi neighbor had baked Janet birthday cake number three in his wood fired mud oven that he built in his back yard, chocolate with peanut butter frosting. Janet said it was her best birthday ever in Africa.

JOMA Conference

The weekend after Janet’s REDES getaway, we were on the road again, this time both of us, for a get together in neighboring Manica province with three other JOMA groups. JOMA is a mixed-gender youth organization fostered by Peace Corps, which focuses on communicating healthy lifestyle messages through various media. Our youths have focused mostly on community theater, which we have written about after our various holiday performances. This year we have added journalism at the request of our school director. The 16 hours of conference sessions focused mainly on gender issues, HIV/AIDS, and sexual health. Since all of our counterpart teachers responsible for presenting the material were men, they called Janet up on several occasions to explain menstruation and the use of female condoms. We also got to share our journalism and theater projects to a receptive audience. Some of the concepts in the curriculum are still too progressive, especially material about tolerance to homosexuals or women’s right to wear sexualized clothing instead of traditional dress, but our kids were receptive to most of everything else. The hosting school was a new World Bank-financed project and extremely fancy, especially when compared to our community-built classrooms. They have a library, where we held our conference, a dining hall, an illuminated sports court, where Luc got to play basketball for the first time in 20 months, grass, which we weren’t allowed to step on, and a student quad, with benches and bulletin boards. All great things, but it did give our group an inferiority complex. We took plenty of photos and ate plenty of food, sometimes at the same time, like when our students asked us to take their picture with them each holding their half-chicken dinners (more meat than they could expect to see in an entire month).
Any time we take high school aged kids on long distance trips it’s an adventure, and this time was no exception. We rented a chapa, the rundown minibus used for public transport, from a local we’d done business with in past, who we recently discovered is the father of one of our worst 8th grade students. His van is older and more beat up this year, but much to the pleasure of our music crazy students, he had upgraded his sound system, turning our transport into a veritable rolling disco. The only problem was the generational divide, which emerged when deciding the play list. Our counterpart teacher held the remote control the first leg of the journey and put all our students to sleep with his “grandpa” DJ selections, but as soon as one of the youngsters got hold, it was all the latest and loudest Zambian hits, which they know all the words to, with a few Ke$ha and Rihanna songs we could sing along too in English. Luckily we had separate hotels for the young men and the young ladies, although this meant we also had to sleep apart, since each of us was assigned to chaperone our respective gender’s hotel. Janet’s room was situated directly above the town’s most popular discotheque, and adjacent to the town’s second most popular disco, so she didn’t sleep much. Luc also didn’t sleep much, especially on the last night, since the young men kept attempting to make unscheduled late night exits. Luckily he was in room 1, so it was impossible for them to get out without walking by his open door. Needless to say with a group of about 35 teenagers plenty of new friendships were made. On the way back our students made us stop at the cell credit store so they could buy the 50 text message recharges with their per diem money they were supposed to use for lunch. We made a grand entrance into town with all our kids waving condoms out the windows and yelling safe sex slogans to their classmates as we drove past the school. Our students were very excited to be seen with us and have everyone know they were trained as youth activists. Our driver was also very excited and wanted to take us all the way to our doorstep, but since there is only a path, he gave up about 100 yards short of our gate, but we appreciated the effort.

REDES Exchange

Imagine 50 teenage girls, hot and sweaty after 3 hours traveling, the sun is setting, and you are responsible for feeding and entertaining them all weekend. And surprise! The school’s water was cut two days ago and the closest source is 1 kilometer away. You have no buckets, it’s getting dark, and sassy teenagers keep telling you they’re thirsty. This was the rough start to Janet’s weekend. As part of REDES, Peace Corps’ national girls’ youth program, think of a Mozambican Girl Scouts program, Janet took a group of 10 girls and a teacher friend, Inácia, to a weekend exchange with three other REDES groups in Tete province. The event was hosted at our friends Helen and Audrey’s school outside Tete city, a large Catholic professional school with a huge campus and great resources. Very unfortunately for us though, the running water in their neighborhood had stopped running. This is no big deal in places that don’t have inconsistent running water, because there are lots of backup wells. But this huge school had no well and most of its buckets were being used for the priests’ important visit the same weekend. But we rallied, borrowed a few buckets, sent the local girls into the neighborhood to find water and started to cook dinner in huge pots. Oh, and our cook ditched us, so we had to do all the cooking. Luckily there was no shortage of girl cooking power, something all Mozambican females do really well. That Friday goes up there on Janet’s list of most stressful days in Mozambique! But after we figured out our water, the rest of the weekend went more smoothly. Janet ran most of the programming, giving lessons on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and hygiene, topics she loves to teach and doesn’t get much of a chance to with French and Computers dominating her teaching schedule at school. The girls sewed purses out of capulanas, the local brilliantly patterned fabric, and participated in a sports tournament. We all slept in one big room, lined up on grass mats along each wall, a giant African slumber party! Mozambicans love to take baths, it is a matter of personal pride and those who are dirty are shamed. So the lack of bathing water was very controversial. “When do we get to bathe?” they kept pestering us. “Where do you see water to bathe with?” we sassed back to their bewildered faces. We managed to get bathing space in a nearby teacher’s house with water, so we walked our girls in little groups the 1 km distance, and, over the course of two hours, managed to get them all clean. At night, as if having no water wasn’t bad enough, the electricity went out too, so we cancelled our movie, lit a few candles and had a dance party instead, each group taking turns to present songs they had prepared at home, using one of the buckets as a drum. On Sunday, after shipping our groups off to home and finishing the finances for the weekend, Janet sat down with the three other volunteers, Helen, Audrey and Hannah, and enjoyed a well-deserved cold beverage!

So Busy

We’ve felt pretty busy in Peace Corps so far during our twenty months here in Mozambique, but this June our service has gone into overdrive. With a REDES conference, a JOMA conference, a journalism workshop, and Mozambican Independence Day, every weekend was booked solid for the entire month. Plus we have Science Fair and family visits first thing in July to prepare for. With the days growing shorter as we approach the southern hemisphere’s winter solstice, our daylight hours are that much more jam-packed. This trimester we’ve had all our clubs related to our secondary projects running, so we’ve been meeting every day of the week except Fridays, with English Club on Mondays, our JOMA group on Tuesdays, our REDES group on Wednesdays, and Science Fair Club on Thursdays. Like always, there is plenty of non-school drama demanding whatever little emotional energy we have leftover after fulfilling our on campus duties. Liston, one of our favorite students and the leader of our youth group, was drafted by the Mozambican Armed Forces, so we might be losing him this month. It’s unclear how he would finish 10th grade, or what would happen to our club without his enthusiasm. Romão is having some sort of back issues from a bike accident he had recently, possibly aggravated from sleeping on the floor or by his exuberant live-for-the-day lifestyle. He bought some “medicine” from a friend’s uncle, which he is mixing with hot chili peppers and rubbing on his body after scratching his skin with razor blades. He says it hasn’t helped to much yet. Our student Zach returned from Tete City after another unsuccessful bid to find employment. He described his experience in a somewhat depressing text message: “I am Zach. What I was to do I did, but fruitless, because I am not well known by people in companies. My credentials are like muck in the eyes of every boss. Now I am less important than a dried blade of grass.” So we are back to our English vocabulary routines with him as we strategize about his life. He found an old edition of Cosmo magazine that a previous volunteer had left in our house where he encountered lots of new and interesting words. Another recent stress was that Luc’s email account got hacked, sending out spam to every contact he’s ever had (sorry everyone). This was probably a result of checking email on some sketchy spy-ware ridden internet café computer, which is basically all computers in this part of Africa. Since his email is linked to the blog, a similar post appeared here too. After all these activities and concerns, mostly we’ve been finishing our days short on energy and ready to curl up in front of the laptop and watch some TV. One night however, the power went out, so we took a little time out and realized how bright the full moon really is; the soft light illuminating everything in a silver hue and contrasting dramatically with the dark nighttime shadows. Later that night it was pitch black as we discovered on a latrine break, which baffled us since there hasn’t been a cloud for the past couple weeks. It turned out to be a total lunar eclipse, whose effects were all the more dramatic in the absence of electric lights.

The Future

Anyone who has worked with teenagers knows how hard it is to get youth to think about the future and the impact their decisions will have on their lives. Here in Africa it is no different. By the end of the year, 10 of our students will be parents. Our school director wanted to know if any of our youth activists were amongst the shameful bunch, luckily the answer was no, even though the leader of one of our youth groups does have a son from a bad decision he made a couple years ago. Given the spat of pregnancies, we got our young activists to perform their play about not having sex for the entire morning high school. Everyone was entertained, but it is unclear how receptive they are to the message. The play concluded with Luc telling the entire school that students should be studying, not making babies, and that anyone not ready to be a mom or dad should not be having sex, especially since they don’t even have enough self-discipline to use condoms despite the high HIV-prevalence and barrage of public health campaigns. Our fellow teachers were laughing just as much as the students and explained it’s only a problem when the female students have sex, so we should just focus on them and not worry about the boys. We obviously still have a ways to go here. We were asking our houseboy Romão about his future, but the very concept just baffled him. “Do you want to have kids in the future?” we asked him. “No, I am just a youth,” he responded. “No, in the future, when you are an adult,” we explained, but he clearly had trouble conceptualizing it, saying, “But I am not in the future.” Janet introduced the future tense in French this week, and taught professions so that her students can make phrases like “I will be a baker” and “You will be a teacher.” The form is exactly the same as in Portuguese, but the kids still struggled with it. And many of them are only familiar with the professions they see here in town, like border guard, customs agent and nurse. When Janet wrote lawyer, butcher, secretary, and banker on the board, the kids didn’t know what they were and Janet had to explain that these are jobs one might have in the city. We hiked up our mountain last weekend with a couple of friends, and found several logger camps on top, cutting down the old-growth trees of the cloud forest in the caldera. On previous trips up, we’ve heard monkeys, been mesmerized by the chirping of unique bird species and cooled by the shaded canopy. This trip we found only 6 or so of the giants still standing, exposing the plants underneath to the hot sun. Janet almost cried and hugged several of the stumps. If the loggers are at all like our students, then they haven’t contemplated what they’ll do next year when there are zero trees left. Growing up in a society that values accumulation, investment and planning it is difficult to live somewhere that focuses only on immediate consumption with little thought for tomorrow, let alone next year or next century. We encourage our students to dream big, make plans and think about what steps they will need to accomplish in order to reach their goals, but it feels sometimes like we’re the presidents of some sort of unpopular Glee “Chastity Club.”