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.