Life in the Far North

Eric in our kitchen roasting peanuts in a coconut shell.

Cow the cao in our backyard.

I’ve been off of the radar for quite some time now. The last minute site change sent me to the land of no running water, no electricity, and especially no internet. I’m lucky to keep my cellphone charged; bike rides into town to sit at a barracka drinking Fanta while stealing electricity keep me on the cell network. Internet today is courtesy of our friends living at a teacher training institute in Pemba, the provincial capital of Cabo Delgado.

Hard to know where to start here… a month into life here and a lot starts, stops, continues, and changes.

Chiure, Cabo Delgado is a small town about four hours north of Nampula City (the nearest place resembling a city) and a couple hours southwest of Pemba (provincial capital, beach town on one of the world’s largest naturally protected harbors). Eric (Peace Corps English teacher who I trained with) and I live in a little thatch-roofed house about 6 km outside of town by the old secondary school, Escola Secundaria de Chiure. Our quintal (pronounced keen-tahl), enclosed yard, is protected by a tall bamboo fence and our 3-4 month old puppy Cow (cao means dog in Portuguese, yay for plays on words). Five papaya trees (fruit is almost ready!), a few banana trees, piri-piri (hot pepper) plants, lemon grass, peanut plants, green beans, and a few other vegetable plants give our yard some good character, not to mention the thatch/bamboo gazebo our predecessor built (woven rope bed allows for sleeping outside in the gazebo on hot nights). The inside of the house provides plenty of space for food storage, book storage, and beds, but we spend essentially no time in there. The overhanging thatch roof creates a covered wrap-around porch which we’ve furnished with various chairs, tables, and homemade bamboo shelves. No need to waste time in the dark (no electricity, remember), spider filled (found a few in there bigger than my outstretched hand), rat filled (they live in the thatch of the roof) interior of our house when we got a comfy outdoor lounge overlooking our picturesque yard. Bathroom comes in the form of a hole in the ground protected by a thatch roof and thatch walls. Showers come in the form of sun-heated water in a bucket scooped over our heads; quite refreshing in the tropical heat.

Getting to town is an enjoyable 20-30 minute bike ride down winding dirt paths that are probably something like you imagine Africa to look like if you’ve never been here. Scattered fields of corn and beans interspersed with shady cashew trees and thatch huts float by as you cruise past women in brightly printed fabrics carrying large pots on their heads. Barefoot kids playing in the yards expectantly yell “salaama” (good day, good evening, good night in Makua, the local language) and then erupt in laughter when you finally crane your head around to throw a “salaama” back as you ride on.

Riding into town every few days keeps us furnished with the all the eating basics. Rice, bread, pasta, potatoes, onions, coconuts, sometimes tomatoes, freshly slaughtered goats, and often fish and squid trucked in from Pemba (we gotta trek all the way to Pemba ourselves if we want to buy $8 jars of peanut butter). We generally fast most of the day and then spend our entire evening cooking and binge eating. Our cooking skills squatting over a one-burner charcoal stove can be impressive. Among other great dishes, we’ve enjoyed grilled squid, fried calamari, garlic bread, stewed goat, freshly killed and superbly grilled chicken, and various curried things. Rice or xima (flour boiled until it becomes a flavorless white fluff with the consistency of mashed potatoes – satisfyingly filling when you haven’t eaten all day) are staples. Lately I’ve been making oats and... drumroll… I picked up another Peace Corps person’s extra french press, so coffee! Sweet, sweet coffee.

I can’t have the Peace Corps check this out and think that all I do is read on my porch and stew goat. School does keep me pretty busy. I teach four turmas (classrooms) of 11^th grade math, one turma of 11^th grade physics, and one turma of 12^th grade physics. They each meet three times per week. That adds up to 18 classroom-hours and nine lesson plans per week. Given that I showed up six-weeks into the school year (car accidents throw you off - wrists are strong enough to do pull-ups and handstands already!), I figured I would be given at least a crash course orientation upon arrival. My minimal expectations of organization were a fantasy. I was handed a schedule without a word of direction (I figured out classroom locations on my way to class). I took it upon myself to find the former teachers of the classes I was picking up to figure out where we stood in the curriculum, a curriculum, I should add, that I am still trying to get a copy of. Our school is dilapidated. The roof is caving in on many classrooms. There is no electricity or running water. There are no bathrooms (aside from shells of what must have been bathrooms before the Portuguese left in 1975 – not usable). There is absolutely no sense of cohesion or organization. Many teachers don’t show up consistently. The kids are moved forward a grade-level in disciplines in which they had no teacher the previous year. Yet the national curriculum seems to ambitiously push math and the sciences. I am currently finishing a unit on thermodynamics with my 12^th graders and a unit on kinematics with my 11^th graders (I did a lot of this stuff early in my university engineering education). Try teaching a kid basic equations of motion, not to mention accelerated and varied motion, when he doesn’t understand the algebra that goes into a linear equation. Trigonometry for wave-propagation? Laughable. You find your peace with your role in that system in various ways. I like to think that just by showing up consistently, being clearly engaged in the material, helping kids with school work outside of class, and bringing an element of creativity to the classroom, if nothing else, shows kids that education, learning, knowledge is something more than rote note taking. They may learn zero material from me, but hopefully exposure to something new and different at least piques their general curiosity. Or hey, at least I’m learning something from it. Teaching math and physics in Portuguese to a tattered classroom of sixty students sitting on the floor is a trip. Kids regularly knocking on our quintal gate asking for one-on-one help with class material keeps you engaged (even when the one-on-one session exposes a lack of any grasp of any the material covered up to that point). Anyway, I’m rambling…

Teaching here is the madness that you would imagine it would be. Fun stuff though. A great challenge and a hell of a way to improve your language skills. The unplugged lifestyle, spending a few hours every evening huddling around the charcoal and then feasting by candlelight, provides a satisfying rhythm that maintains a sense of structure in a disorganized and slow-paced world. A lot of reading gets done. A lot of sitting around the yard chatting with neighbors goes down. The dog gets lots of attention. Students periodically swing by the house. And when we feel up for it, the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean are only a couple hours away.

Hearing the rats scratching around the house late at night gets normal pretty quick. You just kill the giant spiders with a shoe when you find them in the house. This lifestyle in general starts to feel normal pretty quick. Then occasionally you tell a story like this one… Our neighbor and friend Elias raises chickens. About forty of them wander around the neighborhood before returning to roost inside of his mud house with him every night. Last week, he caught this feral cat (that had been licking our dirty dishes late at night) picking off one of his chickens. He rounded up his friends’ hunting dogs (they use them to hunt game a few hours north of here), ran down the cat, and had the dogs kill it. When we came out to see what the commotion was about, we found Elias and some neighborhood friends standing over the cat’s mangled body. Elias whacked the carcass with his katana (machete) a few times for good measure then, finally satisfied, buried it. Those chickens are Elias’s livelihood. His mutilation of the feline corpse is far from the crux of this story. About half-an-hour after the burial, another neighbor dug the poor shit up, cooked it and ate it… and you just kind of chuckle at living in this world for a two years.