5th of July

With an infinite reserve of unpredictable variables to complicate our plans, Africa routinely thwarts even our most calculated efforts to pull off a smooth event. Ironically with our latest effort to stage a complex operation, picking up Janet’s family at the relatively nearby international airport in Lilongwe (~250kms from our house, but a lot closer than Maputo, 1500kms away), it wasn’t any of the typical African things. The driver we hired was on time (we got started at 4am, you've always got to start early in Africa!), his vehicle didn’t have any major mechanical trouble, crossing the border was smooth, we were prepared for the fuel crisis in Malawi picking up some reserve drums of petrol while still in Mozambique, no trouble with the police or road blocks, the Malawi SIM card we got from our PC neighbor across the border gave us good cell coverage, no natural disasters. What threw a monkey wrench into "plan recieve family" was our visitors’ flight from London to Johanesberg, which arrived two hours late. They spent the night in a fancy South African hotel while waiting 24 hours for the next connection to Lilongwe; we got a call over 200 kms from home, and just 15 minutes from the airport, informing us that they wouldn’t be there. Then the craziness. Janet had to find a place to stay for herself, Alfonso (the driver), and Arturt (our Mozambican teacher counterpart who we had invited to come greet our family). Luckily Alfonso didn’t mind the last minute improvising and agreed to spend the night and drive everyone the next day. Luc had to race back to school to give English finals the next day, and with no regular transport it was a crapshoot. In the end, Janet worked everything out on the transport side and was at the airport with a car to greet her family, and Luc just made it back home just after sunset hitching a ride on the last semi truck crossing the border. So our best efforts at a 4th of July feast for our visitors, all the bean burgers and potatato salad had to wait in the fridge as we postponed celebrating our nation’s independence a day. But July 5th was great, with a full house and plenty of food. Patience and flexibility are indispensible to life no matter what your circumstances are, but here in Africa, as Peace Corps volunteers, these virtues are all that keep us sane.

Visitors to Africa

Part of our Peace Corps mission is to share Mozambican culture with Americans back home. This blog is an effort to do that, also last winter we gave 15 school presentations while we were on vacation in America, but what better way to share Mozambican culture than having visitors here to experience life in Africa for themselves. Today we are recieving part of Janet family, her Dad, stepmom, and twin brother and sister, as well as one of her best friends Rabecca. We rented a private mini bus so they're not getting the 100% Africa experience, but its just too crazy with a big group to deal with public transit here. Luc's older brother Noah will also be in our site for a couple of days on his way back to America from Zambia, where he was volunteering through his company to support the health sector there. So, our little house will be jam packed, luckily we have a tent to accomodate overflow. Janet's brother and sister have never left the USA before, so we are excited to see what they think of the bigger world. They are just starting high school, so they are the same age as the students we teach here. Our living conditions are primitive, but we're hoping everyone can adjust to bucket showers, squat latrines, new foods, and occassional power outages. Noah says he reserves the right to stay at the hotel if things get too crazy. Since it also July 4th, we are going to try to recreate a USA style Independence Day barbeque celebration; with no meat we're making veggie burgers instead.  We feel lucky to have family and friends willing and abel to travel so far to share the Peace Corps experience with us!

Bamboo, The Wonder Grass

Romão just came over to ask for a hammer.  He dropped the bucket down the well and now wants to nail together two long bamboos to fetch it out.  People here use bamboo so much.  Rooves are usually made of long bamboo beems, and small construction projects, like shower rooms, can be made entirely of bamboo covered in grass.  In more tropical parts of Mozambique we have volunteers that live in homes with walls made from slender bamboo reeds tied together in thick bundels.  Furniture, like tables and chairs, can be made of bamboo; we have several examples serving usefully in our home.  At school it's not uncommon to assign students to bring bamboos to build fences or other school projects, so at most times there is usually a large pile somewhere around campus.  Almost all fences are made of bamboo, including what's left of our own.  Unfortunately bamboo makes a great firestarter, so on occasion we've had small portions of our fence disappear just before dinner time under the cover of darkness.  Bamboo can be used to protect young trees or gardens from animals.  Bamboo is essential for all kinds of kids' entertainment. They use it to make little cars or toys, or use it just to fight with.  Bamboo can enhance almost every aspect of life.  Getting fruit out of tall trees is a lot easier with a long bamboo, especially papaya trees which are so hard to climb.  Our grass mats for relaxing in the shade during hot summer days are made from split bamboo.  People use bamboo for fishing poles. Bamboo can be used to build extended luggage racks on the backs of bicycles for transporting bulky items like bags of charcoal, mangoes or goats.  Also popular are portable bamboo chicken coops, known here as capoeiras (the Brazilian martial art inspired by cock fighting got its name from these bamboo cages).  The best thing about bamboo is that it grows so abundantly here.  Plus every year new shoots will replenish previously harvested material, making it a renewable resource, unlike our old growth trees which are rapidly disappearing and take hundreds of years to return after harvesting.    

The Never Ending Electricity Drama

Despite our efforts to be good customers and pay our electric bill regularly, our drama with the power utility continues.  Last week some men from the district power office showed up at our house and informed us they wanted to cut our power.  We had just paid,  so luckily we were present when they came by so we could show our receipt.  After seeing our documentation they confessed that their list was incomplete, and that we could be spared this time.  No one else
in our neighborhood was that lucky, and come nightfall, every house was dark
except ours, so folks congregated in our front yard, taking advantage of the dim
illumination cast out by our little front light bulb, which was more light than
anyone else had.  The especially dark sky made great star watching, but Luc seemed to be the only one appreciating that bonus. Apparently there have been some irregularities with our local office. Rumor has it that money has been disappearing, which is why the main office sent out these henchman.  Not even our school was spared with the electricians simply cutting the line wiring our school.  Luc was typing a document, but our computers have a five minute back-up battery since power is so irregular here, so he could still save his work and close down.  Our local utility usually extends the school some courtesy on late payments since cutting power means canceling night school, but these guys from the city were really no-nonsense.  Our vice principal had to get a dispensation promising we would pay as soon as the district office transferred the funds, which were late as usual, so we are back on the grid.  Even so, power has been cutting out more frequently, with three outages this past week, including one during the governor's visit, which local officials were happy about so he could experience what they have been complaining about.  People just blame it on Malawi, which is where our power comes from, and keep bringing up the governments promise to connect us to the Mozambican grid, and the neighboring Cahora Bassa dam, the largest hydro-electric power station in Sub-Saharan Africa which ís Mozambican.  I don't think we'll still be around to see that day.

July 4th for Mozambique

This June 25th marked 36 years since Mozambique gained independence from Portugal. Basically its July 4th for Mozambique except no fireworks or barbeques. Since it feel just 3 days after the Governor's visit, the biggest holiday of the year was left mostly unplanned. The plaza ceremony was supposed to start at 8, but didn't start until 10. Our mayor showed up at 9 and was upset that he had to wait for the population to show up, instead of the other way around. He said he preferred to go into the villages for holidays where people always show up because they have no other excitement. After the ceremony, which was quite short because it only had three official speeches, we all paraded to the other end of town for the cultural events, which were only our two student groups, who did a great job. The mayor was also upset because his friends hadn't planned a party for him, so he had to put one together himself. To our great surprise, the 'party'was just us and two colleagues and the mayor. Even more surprising was that his cook was sick, so he cooked us dinner himself while we drank endless sodas and watches music videos on his TV. His menu featured Portuguese delicacies that we love like olives and fried chorizo. We're pretty sure he was honoring us by cooking, but the whole thing was kind of awkward, mainly for us because we weren't quite picking up on all the cultural cues. When we finally left the sun was beginning to set. A huge Nyau performance was happening just outside his yard, making it difficult for us to exit. The majority of the spectators were Malawi peasants from surrounding villages who
came in for the festivities. We could tell they were foreigners because they were gawking at us instead of the elaborate, costumed spirit-dancers covered in feathers and mud (local townspeople got over our novelty last year). We wanted to walk the streets to soak in the holiday atmosphere, but we found so many drunken students and colleagues and kids asking for holiday treats that we retreated back to our home, and, you guessed it, watched another Glee.

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.

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.