Samora Machel Honorary Ceremony - Mbuzene, South Africa
November 11th, 2011
The average training day for the first five weeks looked something like this:
Wake up to honking ducks in the yard around 5:30. Rooster may or may not have already been crowing for a few hours. Out of bed at 6:00 to heat up water over the fire in the yard (if my mom started it already) or in the electric water boiler in the house. Take a hot bucket bath in the shell of a bathroom that at some point (I assume sometime in the 70’s when our house was probably owned by a Portuguese family) had running water. Throw on the Peace Corps required “business casual” clothes and sit down for a breakfast of bread and jam with tea. By 7:30 I’m starting language class in the garage at another trainee’s house. Our teacher leads me and the three others in my language group through a morning of intensive Portuguese lessons (from day one, the teacher is speaking not a word of English). We go strong until lunch time with occasional brakes to stand outside the garage, compare the snacks our mothers packed us, break into English (ah! I can fully express myself!), and enjoy the sweeping views over the golden rolling hills of southern Mozambique (something like northern California in summer but without as many trees). I stroll home on the red dirt roads of Namaacha in time to find my mom or sister pulling my fried lunch of french-fries, fried sausage, and fried egg out of the frying pan on the coal stove in the yard. I eat lunch alone in the main room of the house (family eats lunch later while I’m back at class). I wolf down the food (I am generally a fast eater, but I think the low-protein diet here makes me especially ravenous come meal time). I spend the hour or so after eating napping in my bed or lazing around in the yard exchanging the occasional word with my grandma, mom, or sister. By 2:00 I’m back at school. This time it’s me and the eight other math/science teachers-to-be at the “Math Hub,” a house that Peace Corps is renting out for a teacher housing and some learning space. Class is usually held outside under a big lychee tree. We run through various exercises to teach us how to teach. Most of the time, I find myself completely lost in some weird meta-analysis of the class where I’m not sure if what the teacher is teaching is actually what I am supposed to be learning or if I am actually supposed to be learning her method of teaching by observing her teaching something that I do not need to be learning… Teaching about teaching is weird… especially when they are integrating the methods of teaching that we are supposed to teach with into their teaching us how to teach. Anyway… that usually goes on until around 5:00 pm. Evenings are generally occupied by basketball matches against Mozambican teenagers or drinking $1.30 beers (the local Laurentina Preta is pretty good!) at one of the local barracas. By 7:00 pm, I’m home helping chop vegetables, kill chickens, and generally get dinner underway. I munch down dinner with whatever scattering of my family is present in a generally unstructured manner. The TV is always tuned into Brasilian soap operas (us Americans discuss “Caras e Bocas” episodes at the bar – everyone’s family is a fan) and people eat at random – no waiting for everyone to sit down or whatever. By 9:00, I’m passing out on my saggy bed under my mosquito net, ready to do it again the next day.
As far as language training goes, you couldn’t ask for anything much better. 4-1 student teacher ratio for 4-5 hours/day, six days/week. Then you come home to a Portuguese speaking household. Peace Corps conducted official language testing interviews last week and I managed to read in at “advanced-low” level on some international standard scale. Yay for speaking Spanish before I left.
The repetition of that schedule has been broken up a bit by some notable events: Going to Mbuzene in South Africa to check out the 25th Anniversary Ceremony honoring the plane crash death of revolutionary leader and first Mozambican president, Samora Machel (try Wikipedia if you want some more details). Some days off to hike in the surrounding hills. Big Halloween party at a PCV’s house here in Namaacha. A lot of other stuff goes on (at least I feel like my time is occupied…) that seems to keep me busy in between. Us Americans pretty much hang around talking about where we might get sent for site placement. The lack of control and uncertainty of where we will be living and working for the next two years pretty much occupies 80% of conversation. The other 20% is saved to discuss fried meals and the correct form for shitting in a hole or decapitating a chicken. It’s fun though. Really.
The aforementioned language interview marked a turning point in training. The day after the test, everyone shipped out to various sites around the country to hang out with current PCV’s (that’s Peace Corps Volunteers, for the uninitiated – constantly referring to each other as volunteers starts to feel really normal once you get over the initial weirdness of that title) and to get a feel for their sites. Language classes will pretty much drop off now in favor of intensive teacher training (run in Portuguese).
I returned to Namaacha today after nearly a week of travel in the notoriously hot Tete province in northwest Mozambique. Pretty much the only thing any non-Tete inhabiting Mozambican will tell you about Tete is the following: “Tete is hot.” In addition to high temperatures (try 45 celsius!), Tete province is home to a provincial capital, Tete City, that houses an odd mix of expats and non-local Mozambicans working at the nearby coal mines. The surrounding countryside is brown (but I hear it turns green in rainy season) and dotted with baobab trees. If you don’t know what a baobab tree is, google image search it. Baobab trees are cool looking. Another PCT (that’s Peace Corps Trainee!) and I spent most of the week with a couple PCV’s in Moatize, basically the coal mining capital of Mozambique. We cooked lots of food. We danced with Brasilians (and some American lawyer from DC working for one of these mining companies?). We wandered about. We hitchhiked out to another site in the “mato,” Portuguese for bush (beautiful morning ride in an open-backed truck, sitting on rice sacks, cruising through the scrubland and mountains of northern Tete). The PCV there requested to have a site mate and to work at a “secure” site. She ended up opening a new site (as in, no previous Peace Corps teachers there) in the mato by herself with no cell service. Isolated but beautiful place. She had come to love it. We spent time cooking, exploring her school, and wandering around in the bush country behind her house. Bean stew over an open fire was on order for dinner under a nearly-full moon.
I returned to Namaacha today after nearly a week of travel in the notoriously hot Tete province in northwest Mozambique. Pretty much the only thing any non-Tete inhabiting Mozambican will tell you about Tete is the following: “Tete is hot.” In addition to high temperatures (try 45 celsius!), Tete province is home to a provincial capital, Tete City, that houses an odd mix of expats and non-local Mozambicans working at the nearby coal mines. The surrounding countryside is brown (but I hear it turns green in rainy season) and dotted with baobab trees. If you don’t know what a baobab tree is, google image search it. Baobab trees are cool looking. Another PCT (that’s Peace Corps Trainee!) and I spent most of the week with a couple PCV’s in Moatize, basically the coal mining capital of Mozambique. We cooked lots of food. We danced with Brasilians (and some American lawyer from DC working for one of these mining companies?). We wandered about. We hitchhiked out to another site in the “mato,” Portuguese for bush (beautiful morning ride in an open-backed truck, sitting on rice sacks, cruising through the scrubland and mountains of northern Tete). The PCV there requested to have a site mate and to work at a “secure” site. She ended up opening a new site (as in, no previous Peace Corps teachers there) in the mato by herself with no cell service. Isolated but beautiful place. She had come to love it. We spent time cooking, exploring her school, and wandering around in the bush country behind her house. Bean stew over an open fire was on order for dinner under a nearly-full moon.
The cool breezes of Namaacha have been a welcome welcoming back to the south end of the country. From here on out, training will mainly consist of “model school” lessons that we will run with students from the local secondary school. At home, I’ll be back to chilling with my twenty-one year-old Mozambican cousin (passenado is the generally accepted pastime – google that), being babied by my host mother, being laughed at by my seventeen year old sister, enjoying desk side Van Morrison inspired dances from my two-year old sister, and feeling an odd sense of power imparted on me (as the oldest male in the house) by my strong-willed grandmother, the clear matriarch of my huge family (any understanding of familial structure eludes me).
So that’s pretty much where I’m at right now. I’ve surely left out a ton of what’s gone on since I’ve been here. I guess that’s to be expected when you start writing this far in… I’ll try to keep up in the future (I’m writing these in Word and will just copy and paste them into this blog when I get rare chances).
Life is good. I’m learning a ton and staying psyched to keep doing so. Should be a hell of a fun ride for the next couple of years.
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