So Much to be Thankful for!

Living in Africa with our share of hardships and inconveniences, its often easy to think of all the things we had in America and have been doing without for the past two years, but the truth is we have lots to be thankful for here as well. We've been healthy, without any major problems besides that gross bout with intestinal parasites, we've been very safe with no attacks or break-ins, our community loves us, and we have a huge network of fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, who, after two years serving together, feel like our family here. These were our thoughts as we gathered with a group of 20+ volunteers in the Gorongosa National Park to celebrate Thanksgiving. Obviously food is a big part of this holiday, so we did our best to recreate all those dishes everyone was craving with plenty of improvising due to all the African x-factors. We did have the park's industrial kitchen at our disposal, but half the appliances wouldn't work, and the electricity kept cutting out. Luc headed up team pie, and assembled two apple and two pumpkin pies from ground zero, discovering just how much extra work it is to make that orange goo that just comes out of a can back home. We even had a turkey, and although she was a scrawny bird, she provided that all-important Thanksgiving touch to our plates. Janet made everyone get up and say something they were thankful for before digging in, we both mentioned how grateful we have been to have the opportunity to serve for the past two years in this country that has grown so special to us and how much we have appreciate all the support and love from back home for our efforts. We held our festivities in the eco-friendly environmental education center, which blends in with the natural setting of forest and open countryside. Even though we didn't see any wild animals or go on any game drives, we did stay in the fancy safari tents, right out in nature, and drive out to an overlook above the park to watch the sunset with all our friends. It was an especially emotional time for those of us finishing our two years of service since the holiday meant our last chance to say good-bye to many of those gathered.

Beach Getaway

In Peace Corps volunteers abandon all aspects of their lives to fate. We were placed in a little mud brick cottage up in the mountains near the border with Malawi, while we have friends serving in modern air-conditioned teacher's college professor housing next door to beach resorts with views of the ocean. Sometimes it's easy to get jealous, but every site has its pros and cons. Mozambique is famous for its coastline, and Peace Corps Mozambique has a strong beach ethos component to its culture that we feel totally removed from. Now that we're on vacation and done with all our school responsibilities we decided to spend a few days relaxing on the sand down in Inhambane province to decompress from our big end-of-the-year sprint. We met up with a bunch of our teacher friends also on holiday and crashed at our buddy's pad down on the beach. After two years in country, it was our first big beach trip and we thoroughly enjoyed eating fresh seafood, riding horses through the surf, doing crossword puzzles under the coconut trees, and just enjoying catching up with everybody's hilarious PC stories. The beach is also a little edgy. The coast gets a lot of tourists, and coming from our small town where everyone recognizes us as the local school teachers, it was hard being treated just like a cash opportunity for annoying drunks and street hustlers. We've gotten pretty good at dealing with these inconveniences and just focused on enjoying an awesome beach weekend, with plenty of sunshine and good times. It's awesome having a tropical paradise within two days of hitch hiking from site.

Giving Stuff Away Without Creating a Feeding Frenzy

There is only so much we can or want to take back with us to America. Most of our stretched, faded, or torn clothes have had a rough two years here in Africa, with the tropical sun and hand washing. These rags would be embarrassing back in America, but here in Africa there are many who would cherish them. It is Africa after all, and some stereotypes about the poverty here are true. Unfortunately giving stuff away isn’t as easy as it would seem. One volunteer who recently left simply informed her neighbors to come to her house on her last day in site and take things that could be useful to them. Starting at 5am, her neighbors swept through her home cleaning out everything in less than an hour, someone even took her half full coffee mug and the open can of cat food she had bought as a going away present to her pet. We’re trying to avoid this kind of free-for-all, not only for our own sanity, but we don’t want to reinforce the perception that all white people are primarily a source of freebies for locals. Having been on the receiving end of countless begging encounters here in Mozambique, we know how this type of irresponsible behavior can permanently impair community relations for future generations of volunteers. The begging relationship seems likes a continuation of the dependency on the rich Patrão the relatively wealthy Portuguese deliberately fostered over centuries of colonization in these parts. After plenty of opportunities to see charity gone wrong, like the kids at popular tourist destinations who temporarily suspend their laughter and street games to approach white visitors and request in their most obsequious voice possible, “Pencil boss,” “Give me 10 meticais,” or just simply “hungry.” As our departure date draws neigh, people have no shame in coming up to us and suggesting we leave them lembranças, souvenirs to remember us by. A souvenir could be our flash drive. “Do you really want my flash drive as a lembrança? Or do you just want a flash drive?” So, we’re not handing out anything to people who randomly show up to ask for things. Instead we are earmarking things for favorite students, helpful neighbors, and special people, and trying to give them away as discreetly as possible. We also made a trip out to Zach’s village with ten items of clothing for the large family, plus a couple dictionaries and books for Zach’s ever curious mind and Janet’s old sandals for his new wife. Luckily, we will be replaced by new volunteers, so we’ll just pass on most of our stuff to them.

National Exams

Since our secondary school only has the first cycle (grades 8-10), the 10th grade National Exams are the culmination of our students’ academic careers. National Exams are high stakes, anyone failing to pass has to repeat 10th grade and try again the next year. As the name implies, National Exams are a Mozambican-wide phenomenon, each 10th grade student taking the exact same test at the exact same time from Maputo all the way to Tete. That’s why on Thursday when Maputo city suspended exams for its municipal holiday, everyone else in the country had to stand still, and wait until Friday so that everyone could take the Math exam together. Exam sheets arrive in top-secret envelopes, held in high security fashion until the bell announces test time. Then the envelopes are all simultaneously opened ceremoniously by a student picked at random. Most of the time the student is too nervous and can’t tear the opaque black plastic, so the proctoring teacher has to mock him and take over. All teachers are required to wear their white coats and no one is absent. Cell phones are strictly prohibited to prevent students from texting for help, and to prevent teachers from texting answers. The cheating so endemic to Mozambican testing is strangely absent, our school hasn’t caught a single cheater in National Exams, and at least the two of us are actually looking. It would be difficult for even the most ambitious students to cram 3 years worth of material into a single crib sheet, and the stakes are so high, academic fraud during National Exams carries an automatic 2 year suspension from school. Also, there is no need to cheat during exams. Since the test is graded locally by the same teachers who have been teaching you over the past three years, it’s easier to convince one of them to grade your test favorably. All the tests are coded, so a student’s name never appears on their response sheet, but since they are coded in alphabetical order it doesn’t take a Rosetta Stone to figure out who is who. In fact every teacher carries a small sheet of paper with all his or her cousins’, nephews’, sister-in-laws’, or whoever’s secret codes on them and hovers around his colleague’s table to make sure they get a passing grade. So much wrangling goes on that the biology teachers, including Janet, who were still actually trying to grade had to leave the chop-shop and find somewhere quiet to work. People know we, as Americans, don’t condone this perversion of the academic system, so they get a kick out of being extra blatant in front of us. They mean it more of a joke but they don’t understand the degree of disdain we have for the corruption so damaging to the society. The final day we had to make public everyone’s results, which involved a complicated set of calculations. We have to average each student’s national test score with their high school grades, and then average all of those. No student can pass if their total average is less than 10 (everything here is out of 20), neither if any of their national exam scores is lower than 7 and no student can pass if they fail either Portuguese or Math. All the results had to be meticulously documented in a gigantic grid, in duplicate. Basically we set up a grading sweat shop with teachers clustered around the giant grids, with one teacher reading each name and test score, another calculating averages on a hand held calculator, and another two writing down the results; something excel could do with one click. It felt like a Victorian accounting firm from a Charles Dickens novel. It took 18 teachers six hours to do a job Janet and I could have done in an hour on the computer. It took all day and we had to work through lunch to finish the task, but it was our last official duty at the school, so it felt good to be done.

Posting Grades in Public, No Secrets Here

So it’s the end of the school year. Back home in America kids’ might be nervously monitoring the mailbox to intercept their grades to inspect the good/bad news before their parents get home. Here in Mozambique there is no mail and there is no mediating the day of reckoning. Our school director simply calls all the parents down to the school and has each term director post their students’ grades on a giant poster-sized report card for everyone to see who is passing on to the next grade, and who will be repeating the same level again next year. The palpable excitement translates to cheers of joy and smiles for those on the positive end of the year’s account of tests and grading, and disappointment for those on the negative side. Most kids have a good idea of were they should be by this stage, but there is always room for surprises, like the case of our kid Romão. By all objective measures he’s had a terrible academic year. We have quizzed him several times on various class subjects and his responses never fail to disappoint. “Romão, what does the digestive system do?” Response: “Is that the lungs?” “Romão, this one is easy, what is 5 divided by five?” Response: “Oh yeah, I got it, it’s zero.” “No.” “Oh yeah, its two.” Sometimes it just seemed hopeless and too painful to try to help. He brought home negatives from end of the year exams in every subject except for a couple of passing 10s in Physical Education and English. A basket full of mangos for the teacher got his Portuguese grade into positive territory, and hauling several loads of bricks to the math teacher’s new house helped that discipline. Various rounds of begging and chores got most things straightened out, but still, he had a 2 in Physics, so far from the minimum of 10 needed to pass. Well, something happened, because when we checked his name on the report card he was passing physics. Maybe the physics teacher did it because he knows Romão works for us, or maybe his Class Director, our theater group counterpart Artur advocated for him, or maybe nobody wanted him to repeat 8th grade for a third time. Whatever the reason, Romão is moving on to 9th grade, but can still barely read or do any math beyond simple addition or subtraction, so it’s unclear weather we should be happy for him or sad for the whole system, or both. Romão will definitely be pleased with the news; he’s out in the fields for the week planting corn. Looking at the long lists of names on the grade sheets made us realize how connected we have become with our student community, as most bring to mind faces and warm memories from class or clubs during our two years here.

The next Generation

Its that time in our Peace Corps cycle where the young new trainees come out to visit the older and more experienced volunteers out in their sites. We both had great site visits when we were in training and wanted to give our trainee visitors the same. Peace Corps had already warned senior volunteers not to be too cynical or bitter with the impressionable trainees, and while we’ve not been immune to negativity during our service, we’re riding high and full of sunshine for the next generation, coming off the end of the school year and a very successful English Theater. When making plans to meet them at the Tete airport on the phone, the trainees wanted to know how they would recognize us, not knowing that our one terminal airport never really has more than a few dozen people at a time. “We’ll be the sweaty looking Peace Corps Volunteers, jumping up and down yelling your names.” Sure enough, there was no confusion, but plenty of heat and sweat down in the ever scorching Tete city airport where all the black tarmac just amplifies all the heat creating a microwave oven and leaving us feeling like little popcorn kernels on the verge of exploding. Peace Corps sent six visitors for the Tete area, which made a nice excuse for a little welcome party and get together for the rest of us volunteers in the area. Training can be a trying time with culture shock happening in so many was, and your entire life scheduled and controlled by the training staff, so we wanted all the newbies to know how much better life would be once they graduated into actual Peace Corps service. Unfortunately, intensely hot Moatize threatened to turn all of our plans into a big pool of sweat the first night, especially when power went out leaving us to cope with the sweltering temperatures without the relief of any kind of air blowing devices. Luckily a summer shower broke the oppressive heat, and the next day we escaped to our cool mountain site with our two trainees, Bitsy and Jill. We basically talked non-stop for the five day visit, trying to sum up our entire experience in words as best as possible, often failing to capture all the emotions, but they’ll experience them for themselves soon enough. Peace Corps headquarters hasn’t made site assignments yet, so we don’t know if Jill or Bitsy will take over for us or end up in some other random corner of the country, but everyone they met in our town said they would be praying for them to get assigned here. One of our main goals was to make as many delicious recipes as possible during our visitors’ stay, and despite several sabotage attempts by the electricity, we did pretty well with our tried and true repertoire of crowd pleasers: lasagna, bean burgers, quiche, cinnamon rolls, and fresh veggie salads. The site visit came during final exams, so our school was off-limits to outsiders, but they got to peek through the windows at the rooms full of kids quietly trying to apply all the knowledge they were supposed to have learned during the past three years to each of the 90-minute tests. We were busy most mornings playing our proctor roll in this, the most solemn of secondary school rituals, but that left plenty of time in the afternoons for hiking and exploring our little town. The girls also bought capulana clothes and had outfits tailored during their stay! A massive Nyau funeral at the house just opposite the window of our guest bedroom added some spice to the last evening. We tried to warn Bitsy of the all night stamina of the mourners and offer her some earplugs, but she refused and probably lost some sleep with the nonstop drumming and yelping from the costumed dancers until the wee hours of the morn. The proliferation of the intimidating growling unearthly men-creatures also made walking to and from school a dangerous endeavor as unruly Nyau clogged the arteries on which we normally circulate in our crowded neighborhood, and sent us darting in and out of random hiding places. We got them to the mini-bus safely and set about sweeping and tidying up our little house for our last few weeks and washing a mountain of laundry.

English Theater

Mozambicans really love theater and Mozambicans really love English, so English Theater is the perfect Peace Corps project. Despite the overflowing interest, it takes a lot of work to make an event actually happen, and we’ve been building up to this one for months. Saturday, October 29 was the big day, but we left a day early to get details sorted out down at the mission in Moatize where the event was taking place. We made another massive withdrawal from the bank and rubber banded all the various stacks of cash for each expense. Most of the kids from our nine participating schools in Tete province could travel to and from the event the day of, but a couple of the schools four hours away needed to spend the night, so we greeted them and got them set up at their air conditioned hotel. We were staying at the non-AC mission, but at least we had a fan, essential during the hottest week so far in the hottest town in Mozambique (it hit 115 degrees). We didn’t get much sleep anyway, since we were up until 10PM moving pews over from the chapel, setting up the jury tables, and decorating with posters we borrowed from the Chimoio event which was held the week earlier. October 29th started at 5:30AM and Luc was immediately sweating in the epic heatwave temperatures. Janet started by signing all 200 some certificates for all the participants, judges, and special prize winners. Luc corralled some of the mission youths to help move our cookies, T-shirts, and dictionaries into the theater room. Students started arriving even before we got our breakfast, which was a good sign here in Africa when people can show up hours late even after texting to say their mini-bus is about to arrive. Luc commandeered a few students to buy extra cookies, pens, and other random last minute items and Janet started running around managing all the little details that constantly pop-up when you’re in charge of everything. As do all events in Mozambique, we opened with the national anthem, and treated the crowd to a special rendition of the US national anthem, which most of the Mozambicans had never heard before, and some students even recorded with their cell phones. Then we drew numbers from a hat to determine the order of performance. One by one the schools presented their plays that they had been rehearsing for weeks back in site, some more nervously than others. Our school had probably practiced more than anyone else, and it showed. Everyone of our students had their material down, and their costumes were much more involved than anyone else. Every volunteer in Tete brought a team, and we even had two schools with no Peace Corps affiliation prepare teams, one of which had our graduates from last year who were now studying 11th grade down near the city at the new high school with boarding facilities built by the coal mining companies to replace the one on top of the coal deposits they destroyed. Lunch arrived an hour and a half late, but that was beyond our control. Luckily everyone here is accustomed to waiting. After chowing down on some delicious beef and chicken, and leaving nothing but the bones, everyone reconvened for the exciting awards ceremony. We were thrilled when the jury gave our team second place overall! We came in last place the year before, so we really enjoyed coming out on top this time. Our narrator took the Best English Speaker, something he’ll cherish forever considering how proud he is of his language abilities. First place went to the team composed of our graduates, so we were proud of them too, especially since the team was entirely student initiated. After the emotions calmed down, everyone wanted their pictures taken in their new English Theater t-shirts. And with the close of English Theater comes the close of our Peace Corps responsibilities! School’s out, grades are in, and our big final project was a success. Now all that’s left in our last month at site is proctoring and correcting national exams, then packing and farewells!

Health in our part of Africa

This Halloween the world’s population reached 7,000,000,000. Our town has definitely contributed its fair share of babies, all you need to do is look towards the women’s section at church to get a visual on population growth here, every female of reproductive age has a baby strapped to her back or breastfeeding, and several more running around the kids section. Things may be changing though, as many of our students claim to want families of only 2 or 3 kids. We’ve taken our youth groups to the health center several times to learn about family planning and all the free contraceptives available that no one seems to be using. This extreme fertility made sense in a world where half your children died before the age of five, but is unsustainable in a town with even limited access to modern life saving vaccines and health care, like ours. So what is health like here for all these new people entering such a poor part of the world? We still have plenty of people dying from totally preventable causes, like dehydration for infants with diarrhea, meningitis due to the lack of diagnosis in the case of two of our students, childbirth for many women with complicated deliveries, and any sort of accident or emergency since we have no rapid response team and our ambulance is chronically out of fuel. Do we have starving skeleton people dying on the streets? No, but we do have plenty of toddlers with distended bellies, brittle orange hair, and bowed legs, signs of different nutritional deficiencies. We see goiters, something iodized salt totally eliminated from the devolved world. Everyone has parasites, including us, but we won’t talk about it since our stories tend to gross people out. It is very rare to see an obese person. Only the richest people here have access to excess calories, so getting called fat is a big compliment that people use generously, even with the not so fat, much to the dismay of many an American volunteer trying to watch his or her waistline. This includes Janet, whose extra few pounds get regularly “complimented.” HIV and AIDS continue to plague our community, with infection rates above 20%. Everyone knows people who have died as part of this epidemic; even we have lost several people close to us during our two years here. Recently a New York Times article highlighted some success our town has had in distributing the life saving anti-retroviral therapies with the help of Doctors Without Borders (Click Here to read the complete article). We were quite surprised that our random African town was featured in one of the world’s most famous newspapers, but people here, most of whom have never seen a newspaper, didn’t seem to appreciate the significance. Of course other diseases, such as malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis also kill lots of people, even though they are all very avoidable with the use of mosquito nets, proper hand cleaning and hygiene, or basic medical treatments. Life expectancy is low, and anyone over 50 is considered really old here, as some of our family visitors have been told! Despite all the scary health issues linked to our tropical environment and general poverty, we’ve remained very healthy. Once we get back to the America we’ll have obesity, cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and all the other developed world diseases to worry about.

Making a Difference

Every teacher has at least a few students who make them feel like they really made a difference. Zach is one of those students for us. We don’t get to see him often since he is working as an office assistant down in the city, but this last weekend we met up while we were down there preparing for English Theater. His life doesn’t seem that fabulous at a casual inspection. Despite leaving his rural village for the city, he still lives in a one room mud house with a dirt floor and no electricity, and walks to and from work, at least 4 miles each way with no respite from the hot sun. He works 6 days a week for less than $80 a month. Still, this is an achievement here. Zach looked skinnier so we took him out to lunch and fed him beef. He casually let us know that he took his girlfriend from the village to live with him in the city and that they are married now. He’s still so eager to learn, and reminded us several times that we should leave him our Chewa-English dictionary when we leave since it will be of little use in America. We made good on a promise to teach him how to use the internet this weekend. We took him to the mission and sat him on the computer for two hours going over e-mail. We opened his own yahoo account and showed him how to write all the different volunteers which have passed through his life. What he really liked was facebook. He told us he had forgotten what the volunteers looked like. He also wanted to see Google Earth and locate his home. He let us know how marvelous the internet is. He also used the bath room at the mission which was his first encounter with a western style toilet. He couldn’t figure out how to make it flush, and then once we showed him how, he was worried about how to make it stop flushing. We let him know it would stop on its own.

Hot and Dry

We’ve had several people follow up on our water situation after we wrote about the drought affecting our region especially with all the international news about Somalia and the Eastern Horn. It’s dry here where we are, but no one is starving. We did get one big storm on Teachers Day, so that replenished our wells temporarily, but now a couple weeks later water is just as difficult as before. We’ve made it by this week on just six 20 liter buckets. Luckily we manage our personal water situation conservatively, so we’ve never run out of drinking water, unlike Romão, who routinely uses his last liters for bathing or washing his shoes, and then complains at dinner time that he has no water to cook rice. We’re still in the dry season, so even though it’s extra dry, it’s not unexpected, but if rainy season doesn’t start on time, people will really start to worry. Locals have already tilled their little plots of land and are ready to plant corn as soon as the first showers arrive. This week brought a major heat wave. Just today our thermometer recorded 98° indoors and 109° outside in direct sun, and we’re lucky to live in a relatively cool high plateau site for Mozambique, our friends down in the Zambezi valley regularly get readings at least 10 degrees warmer than us. Luckily we have the keys to the computer lab, the only air conditioning in the entire town. We’ve been coming up with things to do on the computer just to escape the oppressive heat. Luc gets especially overheated regularly sweating through his shirts. One of our Peace Corps buddies Audrey texted us from her hot hot site down near Tete city wondering if she could get water poisoning. We also drink lots of water, and even though we’re not worried about water poisoning, we decided to count how many liters of water we drink. Janet weighed in at 4.5 liters and Luc at a mighty 7+ liters in one day. We’re definitely getting our 8 cups a day.

Lasts

At this time in our service we start running into a lot of lasts. Earlier this month we taught our last classes, then we proctored our last finals, now we are calculating grades and filling in all those tiny boxes on the grade sheets for the last time. Eventhough the school year is almost over it doesn’t feel like it for us yet since we still have our big English Theater competition coming up the day after school officially ends. We’ve held practices every day this week to get ready, and spent last weekend down in the city running around trying to take care of all the details, buying soda, ordering lunches, making reservations at the hotel, picking up all the T-shirts we ordered, coordinating transportation. All these things are so much harder here when cell network drops for hours at a time, shops close at random hours, the person in charge never shows up, and in general people keep claiming it’s too early to plan things until the week before our event. Luckily the Padres are hosting English Theater at the mission and they have a proactive mindset more in line with ours. They are giving us lots of support, like driving us around in their truck and letting us stay in our little VIP room at the mission. If you’re wondering why we’ve posted so many pictures lately, its probably because they have wireless internet. It’s recharging spiritually to hear about all the projects the Padres have been able to accomplish and joking around about life in Africa as we eat meals together at their long dining table. You can think of us on Saturday when we finish this, our last secondary project, and finally start to feel like we’re done with Peace Corps.