My how time flies...

23 August 2013

2^nd trimester has come and gone and I am 3  months away from COS (Close of Service)!  My how time has flown.  It’s funny, I can’t imagine a time when I wasn’t thinking that.  Originally when I was thinking about joining the Peace Corps, 27 months seemed like SUCH a long time (as I’m sure it does to all volunteers – not to mention their family and friends), but I cannot think of a time when I wasn’t thinking “Wow, it’s already (insert date here)!” And, while I am certainly ready to be back home with friends and family, I cannot believe that I only have 3 more months here in Macomia.  I never imagined it would, but this place really has come to feel like home.  I wish I had time to get to know it even better.

As it has been sooo long since my last blog entry, I think I’m going to do more of a highlights reel of the things that have happened in the past 3.5 months.  I’m sure as I get even closer to finishing up my service, my posts will become more reflective and philosophical, but for the moment there are still a lot of happenings to report!

• Teaching – 2^nd trimester was a HUGE improvement over 1^st.  I really enjoyed teaching, particularly my 11^th grade English students.  I gave them much harder material and tests and they really rose to the challenge.  And I saw definite improvements in their speaking and writing abilities.  It’s going to be sooo difficult to leave them at the end of the year.  I really wish I could accompany them through graduation, at least as an outside source of help if not their primary teacher. Noções classes went well too, and fortunately the P.E. teacher is now back so my workload has diminished slightly.
  
• English Theatre – Our English Theatre group is finally underway!  During the week of testing at the end of 2^nd trimester, I held auditions for 11^th and 12^th grade students interested in participating.  We had pretty good turnout with 16 students and it was really hard to turn down anyone, but I chose a group of 10 really strong students (including 2 girls, yay!) to be the participants.  Last week, we sat down to write the play together and it came out really good.  It was entirely initiated by the students.  The overarching theme of the competition is “The choice is mine, the future is ours.” so we designed a play that shows some different choices available to students in terms of their education and how that will affect the future.  The play also sheds light on some of the corruption present in the Mozambican education system.  Again, it was all their idea! I’m merely there for support (and translation, pronunciation, etc.)  We’ll be traveling to Montepuez at the end of September to compete against 3 other teams.  Wish us luck!
  
  
• New member of the family – We got a kitten because we have rat problems. It’s a boy, but we named it “Fofa”, which means “Cutie.” The kids love it.  We love/hate it depending on our level of patience at the given moment.
  
  
• Music – Since the last time I blogged, my involvement in music here in Macomia has exploded!  I had been playing a lot of guitar with one of the 12^th grade students, Zito, and we were able to perform at the Macomia Day celebration downtown.  Since then, I’ve recorded 3 songs with he and his group “Niggas Estranhos” – I explained to them that this term was offensive in the states, but here they just think it means someone who is involved in Hip-Hop and far be it for me to crush their dreams.  The group is made up of Zito, his cousin David (another 12^th grade student) and one of my 11^th grade students, Alfane.  Zito writes some beautiful songs and he and the other boys write lyrics to go with different instrumentals that you’ve probably already heard.  We’re working on 4 more songs to get recorded before I leave.  In one of them I rap(!)  I secretly hope we don’t manage to record that one because, while these ‘talents’ might be appreciated here with my high school students, I’m pretty sure it will just provide reason for laughing from all of you back home!
  
  
• Radio – They started playing our music on the local radio station.  It’s community radio, but actually reaches pretty far – past the boundaries of our district.  One of the DJs also asked us to come down for an interview one weekend, which ended up being a two-night event! We had such a great time! It was fun to get my voice out there and be introduced to a new community.  Of course, the boys are ecstatic to be getting there name out there and feel famous.  It’s really fun to see.  The DJ actually asked me to come down and help him broadcast sometime.  He wanted to get a female voice out on the radio to encourage more girls to become involved.  I finally went down and participated last weekend and will probably do so again! I started off feeling very out-of-place, and I’m sure it was obvious to the listeners as well.  It was hard to know what to say and I just didn’t have the radio lingo down.  But by the end of the night we’d gotten into a good rhythm.  Lots of listeners called in and said they’d enjoyed the program and hoped I’d be back on the next night!
  
  
• Vacation – Eryn and I had a WONDERFUL vacation just getting to know our own province.  It started off rough – we went up north to Mocimboa da Praia and the roads were so bad that Eryn got sick.   That was an interesting experience.  It’s a very Muslim town and since it was the middle of Ramadan, we couldn’t even find a place to eat lunch!   Everyone was fasting.  But we enjoyed walking around the fish market and seeing another part of the Cabo Delgado coastline.  Then we went to Mueda, which was an equally awful trip: 30 people in the bed of a truck filled with cargo in the middle (thus the hottest part) of the day.  It took us nearly 4 hours to go about 100 km (if memory serves me correctly).  Mueda was….ok.  We did some good shopping.  We came back through Macomia for a night to do laundry and sleep in our own beds, and the next morning headed out to the beautiful island of Ibo!  The trip went very smoothly.  We hardly waited between cars and got a very comfortable cargo boat to take us out to the island once we reached the coast.  We spent a lovely 4 days there, just wandering around and eating delicious seafood and enjoying good cocktails at the chique tourist lodges.  It was a much needed break after an exhausting trimester.  After that, we headed straight to Pemba for some sand and sun!  The break was restful and we saw a lot of people.  It definitely rejuvenated us for this 3^rd trimester.
  
  
• Post Peace Corps Plans – Well, one of the biggest parts of my life these days has just been to think about my after Peace Corps plans.  In terms of traveling, my plan as of now is to fly to Portugal and spend a week there before heading back to Cape Verde for a couple weeks.  I should be home by Christmas!  And…thanks to some researching on my dad’s part and some soul-searching on my part, I decided to apply to law school before getting home!  I’d always intended to apply, but had planned to wait until next fall so that I could have some time to rest.  But I’ll be home for a good 9 months before school starts and by that time I think I’ll be ready to get going.  So…it’s happening!  It’s been a challenge due to our lack of internet, but I’ve got a good draft of my Personal Statement and resumé done, so now it’s just a matter of waiting for my letters of recommendation and for the actual applications to open.  I’ve actually had a great time doing the research.  There are so many incredible schools and opportunities out there!  I’ve been pleased to find that many schools have programs that focus on public policy or support work in the public sector, which is where I’m interested in using my law degree.  So…I’ll keep everyone posted as the process continues.  Keep your fingers crossed!

I’m sure I’ve skipped over a million other fun/exciting/mundane things that have happened, but this is already long enough.  From this point on, I’ve just got to take advantage of each day because, before I know it, I’ll be done!

A much-needed "rest"

First and foremost – Happy Mother’s Day to the most wonderful mother in the world (next week)! I wish I could be there to celebrate with you, but I guess I’ll have to make up for it next year J

We’ve just begun our second trimester of school here in Macomia.  After provincial exams and a few days of very painful “conselhos de notas,” we were able to take almost 2 weeks to do some traveling.  I met up with the rest of the Northern MOZ 19ers in Nampula.  There were there for In-Service Training, or “Reconnect,” which I did not take part in because a) I’d already done it in CV and b) I needed to be here to represent myself and Eryn as directoras de turmas during the conselhos de notas.  From Nampula, 16 of us rented a private chapa to meet the central and southern volunteers in a beach spot called Vilankulo in Inhambane province.  The ride down was probably the most painful 30 hours I’ve had so far in Mozambique – both physically and mentally.  16 volunteers + 3 Mozambicans + a cramped car + really bad roads + a 4-hour pit stop to repair the car + transit authorities out to make a buck off the foreigners + a distance of more than 1200 km = the recipe for an incredibly exhausting 10-hour road trip.  But…it was totally worth it.  We were welcomed by nearly 70 volunteers from the central and southern regions and spent a good 48 hours just being crazy and catching up and finally descansando cabeça after a slightly stressful first trimester.

We spent two days with the rest of the volunteers and then most of them headed back to start classes again, but since we’d traveled so far, we decided to stay a few extra days.  We relaxed on the beach, read books, cooked delicious seafood – we made a gourmet crab meal for 3 for about $8 – and just enjoying not being in a classroom or a car for a few days.  The beach was absolutely beautiful, and since we were staying at a backpackers we didn’t break the bank and we met some really cool people. All were sad to leave, but we had to get back to school so eventually it was time to make the trip back up.

The return trip took us 5 days and approximately 10 different cars/vans/trucks/SUVs.  We were lucky to be able to stay with some PCVs on the way and had a night of relaxation (and yoga!) at a hostel in Nampula.  It was exhausting, but overall really fun.  We got to see a lot of the country, met some cool expats and some cool Mozambicans, and best of all got to catch up with friends that were placed far away.  A highlight for me was seeing Alexandra, my roommate from Cape Verde, albeit only for a day.  But it’s nice to know we have friends near and far.

And now we’re back to the grind.  I have to admit, I kind of missed my students! Classes went well this week and I’m anxious to get my English club started.  That might be all for me in terms of secondary projects, however, because I just found out that my teaching load is moving back up to 25 hours.  We lost a P.E. teacher during the break, so I have to cover 3 more turmas of Noções de Empreendedorismo so the teacher who was teaching them can teach P.E.

Anyway, not a very detailed update, but since I was getting online I figured it’d be good to post something.  Can’t believe it’s already May!

The road lined with cabulas

We are in the last week of our 1^st trimester here in Macomia, and my what a trimester it’s been! I’m currently sitting in the front of a 9^th grade classroom doing “vigilância” for a Physics test, which is what we would call “proctoring,” but here really is more like “vigilance.” The kids in the first few rows are staring at me with daggers in their eyes, waiting for me to stop paying attention for a few precious seconds so they can try to sneak a peek at their cabulas or cheat-sheets.  That’s because they’re the same kinds I caught with cheat-sheets during their History test on Monday, which meant I gave them a 0 on the exam and moved them to the front today to avoid having the same problem again.  They’re not even attempting to just do the test without the cabula, which is incredible to me.  If they spent half the time studying as they did writing cheat-sheets, they might actually do OK.  When proctoring on Monday, I caught a kid showing another kid his cabula for the following test.  Of course I couldn’t give him a zero on the test I proctored because it wasn’t for that test, but I did confiscate the cheat-sheet.  He had the gall to demand that I give it back to him! His reasoning was that it wasn’t for the exam I was proctoring so I had no right to take it.  I told him he had no right to cheat.

Today when I walked up the road to school, I saw that it was lined with an unusual amount of trash.  It almost looked like confetti.  Upon closer examination, I realized that it was just little bits of cabulas that had been torn up and scattered EVERYWHERE.  I guess that’s how you know exams are almost over.

These particular exams are provincial exams, meaning that everyone in the same grade in the province takes the same exam, probably a measure used in-part to prevent corruption in the grading systems at schools and also to make sure all the kids are learning the material set forth in the curricula.  This week classes were suspended so that all turmas of a given grade level can take their test at the same time and the teachers are divided between the rooms to vigilar.  Today I walked into the classroom to a collective groan from the students.  They kept saying “Teacher, you can’t proctor here. Go to a different classroom.” and “Estamos a pedir mudança!” meaning, “we want to change.” Well…good. My work here is done J

Anyway, no more ranting about cheating.   Life here in Macomia has been pretty good as of late.  We’ve gotten into a nice routine and my schedule is much easier because I’m no longer teaching Biology! I am now a professor of Noções de Empreendedorismo, or Notions of Entrepreneurship.  So basically, business!  I’m not going to lie, I really miss Biology.  I was learning so much and had gotten into a nice routine with my classes.  Plus, moving to 9^th grade has been challenging.  But my schedule is certainly easier and while the students don’t take Noções very seriously, I think it’s an important discipline, especially in this province.  Jobs are seriously lacking and until some of this industry gets developed, entrepreneurship is a necessary route for many Mozambicans.  It’s important that they learn some of the basic concepts.  I think it will also present an interesting opportunity to teach some other important life skills.  I plan to host some sort of career fair, talk about job applications, and even doing a personal budgeting project (a skill lacking for even the more educated Mozambicans!).  So we’ll see how all that goes.

The last few weeks have been a bit of a mess because things just keep coming up – changing turmas and subjects, riots in the streets due to a cholera outbreak, cleaning the airport field because the president is coming, no class because it’s Good Friday, two weeks of classes canceled for provincial tests, etc.  In February, a bunch of the Cabo Delgado volunteers came to our site to celebrate my birthday, which was very fun.  It’s nice to be able to share our site with people! We’ve been to Pemba a couple of times for banking and just to enjoy the beach, and we’ve got a pretty nice little system down for traveling there too.  It’s much less stressful now.

Last weekend we attended a meeting for JUNTOS, a program started by PCVs in Mozambique.  It’s a common secondary project for volunteers here.  You get a group of youths together around some sort of an art/performance idea (dance, theater, music, journalism, etc. – even debate!) and spread awareness and information about some of the more serious issues in Mozambique – HIV/AIDS, sexual health, gender equality, domestic violence, etc.  Lots of the Cabo volunteers came here to Macomia for the workshop.  It was very inspiring to participate in the sessions with the Mozambican counterparts. Sometimes the difficulties facing this country seem so pervasive that you start forgetting that you have to start SOMEwhere.  And it’s really nice that there are host country nationals working towards the same goals. Eryn wants to start a group here, and I plan to help as much as possible.  My sitemate, David, wants to start a girls’ group and I’m super down to help him with that.

Well, that’s about it for now.  It’s coming up on time for me to decide whether or not I want to extend.  I haven’t made a firm decision yet, but to be honest it’s hard for me to imagine spending another full year so far from family.  I’ll keep you posted once the decision is made and I know my homecoming date.  Thanks for all the e-mails and facebook comments, etc. etc. Oh, and Happy Easter!

A new year, a new start

17 January 2013

We’ve been at site for a little over a month now. Some days it feels like we got here yesterday and other days it feels like we’ve been here for years!  On the whole we’ve got few complaints.  There have been a few issues with security in the professors’ houses (break-ins, robbery, but so far it doesn’t seem like there’s been any sort of violence,  just people trying to get the valuables that are out in the open.  We haven’t had any issues at our house so far, though we’re not holding our breath.  We’ve got decent locks and also have started barricading our doors with heavy (and noisy) items so that if someone did try to get in while we were sleeping we would hear it.  Worrying about this kept me up every night for almost a week, but I’ve been sleeping much better as of late.

Aside from that our biggest difficulty so far has been in traveling.  Our site is a little bit hard to get to. There’s a lot of transportation, but it’s not very regular or reliable and fills up quickly.  We went to Pemba for Christmas and about 45 minutes from arrival, our bus broke down. So we spent 2 hours on the side of the road and when still no one had appeared to try and fix it, we decided to grab the next available vehicle.  The way back was worse.  We took 4 different vehicles, one with a driver that was trying to overcharge everyone in the car (and even stopped in the middle of a deserted road and refused to continue until he got everyone’s money) and arrived at site after dark, where we still had to try to find our way up the big hill to where we live. Fortunately, a nice Zambian man picked us up in his truck and took us up the hill. 

Other than transportation difficulty, Christmas was wonderful!  All of us 19ers stayed with some 17ers who treated us to delicious meals, wonderful stories, and even had stockings waiting for us on Christmas morning.  Christmas Eve was spent with a bunch of 16er health volunteers as well who had been staying at a cool little camping center by the beach.  We ate delicious American food and watched 80s music videos and enjoyed all being together.  I actually came down with some sort of throat infection on Christmas day, so I didn’t spend too much time partying or at the beach, but we had a great time watching Christmas movies and just lounging and eating cinnamon rolls…etc. All in all, not a bad way to pass the holiday!

We were back at home for just a day before leaving site again to go to a nearby beach called Pangane.  Everything we’d heard about it was true – beautiful, deserted, remote.  It was a long (and hot) ride out there, despite being only about 40 km from our town, and we experienced a bit of harassment by the locals once we arrived, but soon we were hanging with some of the 16 and 17ers who’d come up the night before and we ended up having a great time- ate delicious sea food and camped under the stars. Definitely worth the visit! 

New Year’s Eve was pretty quiet. Eryn and I stayed at site and went over to our neighbors’ house for a little while.  They’ve become sort of our “host family” here at site.  We helped Fatima bake cookies and talked to her husband, a French teacher at the school, and played with the kids.  We ended up coming home around 11pm because we were wiped, but we did manage to stay up til midnight to at least wish each other a happy new year before hitting the hay.

Other than that this whole first month has just been getting comfortable at site, “passear”-ing, and  doing our best to learn some of the local languages.  We made a deal with a couple of students that we would pay their registration fees if they came over a few times per week to teach us Macua.  Beyond that, most of our time has been spent prepping for school to start. Eryn and I got lucky and they told us what we were teaching as soon as we got here – which for me was a bit of a shock because I’m teaching biology! But at least we had a good month to become comfortable with the material for the levels we are teaching. I’m not great with science, so it’s been a bit of a challenge.  I’m teaching cells, DNA, genetics, evolution, and ecology to 10^th grade students.  The evolution and ecology stuff I’ve got down, but the genetics stuff is a bit more complicated.  It will be a challenge as well because 10^th grade is a year they take national exams to pass from “primeiro ciclo” (8-10^th grade) into “Segundo ciclo” (11-12^th grade), which means they’ll be tested on material from 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th grade…which means I have to understand all that material and help them review everything! But it’s a fun challenge and now I get to learn/review some biology concepts myself as well.  I’m also teaching 11^th grade English, which I think is going to be really fun. They have class 5 hours a week, so we’ll have a lot of time for discussions/debates/projects, etc.

 All in all I’m teaching 25 hours a week, which is both more than Peace Corps technically allows us to teach AND about 10 more hours than I taught in Cape Verde, but our school is so hurting for qualified teachers that I can’t bring myself to complain. Plus, I’d rather be over-worked than under-worked.  I do hope to still have some time to work with the kids outside of school, either by starting a girls’ club or a music group or an English conversation group or something.  We’ll see how it goes…

I spent the last week helping with “matriculas,” which I guess we would call registration in English.  It was fun to meet some students ahead of time and see how some of the more bureaucratic aspects of the school work.  It’s interesting in comparison with American schools where the process would have been completed (digitally, most likely) months ago, but here class lists come out on the first day of school and professors don’t know what they’re teaching until the Saturday before.

School started this week and it’s nice to be back in the classroom and meet the students.  Most of my classes are supposed to have between 45 and 60 students, but so far the most that have shown up is 30.  I guess the first week here is kind of a joke, which is unfortunate because we’ve got a lot of material to learn! But up until now my impression has been that the students are pretty well-trained in terms of behavior and fairly respectful.  I’m going into it with a much more serious attitude this time around, especially in Biology class, because it’s easy to become nicer, but much harder to suddenly become more strict.  I’m also kind of enjoying the mix of teaching in English and in Portuguese.  I definitely feel more “in-my-element” teaching 11^th grade English, but it’s nice to be able to converse with kids at a more intellectual level in my Biology classes.  Teaching a second language is always a bit limiting in terms of complexity of speech.  Plus teaching Bio is a great opportunity to practice and improve my Portuguese.

Let’s see…other things of interest…

Resources are certainly lacking here – 3 students to a desk, small chalkboards, and a “bell” that consists of a large piece of metal that the secretary hits at the end of each class and the start of the next.  Not to mention the teachers’ bathroom is a pit latrine (albeit very well-maintained).  However, the irmas have done a wonderful job building and running the school and so far the professors I’ve met have seemed to be very welcoming and hard-working. 

Well, as usual I’ve rambled on for too long, so I’ll sign off here. I hope all are well and in good health in this new year.  Wishing I could be home with my parents and Jenny and my grandparents who are there visiting right now!  Hopefully I’ll be home next Christmas, whether it’s to visit or to stay I don’t yet know! J

May the new year bring you much joy and peace.