Governor’s Visit

This last Wednesday we received a visit from the governor of Tete province.  In
the highly hierarchical African society we live in, receiving the "Big Chief"is a huge deal, and everything in town for the past two weeks has focused on preparing for this event.  At school we had our first faculty meeting of the
trimester to strategize.  Our director divided up all the tasks needing completion, and assigned manual labor to every student cohort.  8th grade was in charge of mopping all the classrooms, cleaning the chalk boards, and removing
spider webs; 9th grade was to cut grass and sweep all the dirt patios, and clean
the student latrines; and 10th grade was to bring trees and bamboos.  This year, Presdient Guebuza has rolled out a national campaign, "one child one tree," requiring every student to plant and care for a tree.  Unfortunately after the initial push at the beginning of the year, our school slacked, and at least two thirds of our 800 plants were dead or missing, so now we had a frantic push to replace all of them in the next few days and build little bamboo fences to protect them from all the cute baby goats who would love to forage on tender saplings. Our vice principal made the students know how important this project was telling them, "Anyone caught vandalizing a school plant will get the Bin Laden treatment."  Everyone who missed the work day was required to haul sand to help in constructing the community hall project our town was trying to complete for the governor's visit.  After the big projects were completed, attention turned to the details. Our vice principal called out several girls with half-braided hair during morning assembly, saying that their unorganized hair extensions were unacceptable for the big visit.  He also told all of the school employees that we needed to be more careful when using the teachers' latrine. He gave instructions on how to pee directly into the urinal, surprisingly no one else seemed to think this was  hilarious, so we tried not to laugh. The puddles of liquid which regularly accumulated from people peeing haphazardly had to stop for this special day.  In the final build-up to the visit there was some controversy over a goat.  All teachers were ordered to pitch in and buy a goat for the governor.  There was lots of murmuring about exactly how much each individual's financial contribution should be and questioning of the justice in forcing the hard working teachers to make sacrifices for the governor, who already lives a luxurious lifestyle. We as volunteers without salaries were exempt from this
sticky situation.  When the VIP visit finally took place we had all the confusion we've come to expect from this type of event.  The governor was behind schedule so he didn't even visit our school we had spent so much time sprucing up.  Luc was the only one teaching class, and the only teacher on campus, but about half the students were in the classrooms, because they hadn't been informed on where to go or what to do.  The meeting with civil servants, for which we and our colleagues walked all the way across town to attend, was postponed.  No one knew if we were supposed to be on the field to greet the governor, but eventually that's what we did since it seemed like most people were walking in that direction.  Our kids had been preparing a theater, but it got cut at the last minute, so someone had to go off into the bushes where they were changing into costume and tell them not to bother.  The governor spoke at length on general education and health messages.  We thought the teachers might enjoy some official acknowledgment of their contribution to society, but none of them where listening.  They were sitting at a distance chatting and typing on their cell phones, out of range from the dust cloud the Nyaus lifted during their convulsive dance moves.  After the speech some common citizens were allowed to voice complaints directly to governor, and we heard all the general concerns like access to healthcare or a school with 11th and 12th grades, along with some more direct requests, like "governor, please give us cows" or "we need gas for the ambulance". The mass assembly began to end around sunset and teachers we were required to go to another meeting afterwards, but no one could tell us exactly when.  We were expected to wait outside the assembly hall until the governor called for us.  We were tired and hungry, so we just went home, as we were suspecting many teachers must also be doing.  We heard the next day that attendance was very low, and that the meeting hadn't started until 8pm, by which time we were already curled up in bed watching one of the new episodes of Glee we just got from our Peace Corps network during Janet's birthday weekend.