Ripe Papayas

And no one is more excited than Cow.

(Foreground: my sleeping quarters)

Winter in the Tropics

June 13^th, 2012

Since last writing (on my computer in Word) I still have not had a chance to get online. Plan is to go to Pemba this weekend and sit around all day using internet at a friend’s house. The birthday party went off well. A lot of chicken. A lot of cassava beer. And a lot of people. Can’t lose, really. Except an iPod.

A couple weeks ago we traveled up north to Macomia for an International Child Day Party at a Peace Corps friend’s house. Goat slaughter and wild dancing with Mozambican women. Mozambican women are good at dancing. From there we packed into an openback (overflowing with people, sacks of beans, live goats, and god knows what else) for the dusty three-hour ride down a sandy road to the fishing town of Pangane. Situated on a spit of sand sticking out into the Indian Ocean, Pangane is the kind of place you maybe thought didn’t exist anymore; travel-magazine beaches in a completely undeveloped setting. People live in thatch huts on the sand and pretty much subsist on fish and coconuts. The beaches are spectacular; turquoise water, white sand, calm seas, all under the shade of coconut palms. Most of the town’s men work on a dinky little hand-built wood boats catching fish, squid, and octopus. Most of the fish gets dried out and traded for the beans and other goods that we rode in sitting on top of. The good news: awesome fresh seafood for cheap (about $1.75 for a kilo of fresh squid!). The bad news: the bean sacks we used as seats on the ride in became sacks of aromatic dried fish for the ride out. We showed up in Pangane on a Saturday morning (after spending Friday in Macomia) and decided leaving Sunday wouldn’t do. We stuck around eating squid, lazing in the sand, and camping in a palm grove under a full moon. The truck rolled out before sunrise Monday morning and after two three-hour open back rides we were back in Chiúre in time to teach our afternoon classes. Paradise was a much needed decompression from Chiúre life.

Last week we visited our friend in nearby Ocua. Her town “market” basically sells oil and dried fish. She lives in the middle of nowhere. We sat. We read. We cooked brownies over charcoal. Restful.

Eric leaves this Friday to go to France. He is planning to bring cheese back. All the Peace Corps people in Cabo are very excited about this. In the meantime, he’ll be gone for ten days. I get to hold down the fort here in Chiúre.  Me, Cow, and the neighbors.

Remarkable things that have become unremarkable:

-We and fellow Mozambican teachers don’t show up to any of our classes because we are called to a meeting with provincial education ministry officials to be castigated for not showing up to any of our classes (a good attendance record for our fellow teachers is about 60%).

-We eat grilled rat on a stick (our neighbors put out traps in their peanut fields during the harvest).

-We wake up at night to chase down a rat injured but not trapped by one of our traps to beat it to death with a stick and throw it down the latrine hole (this happens regularly…)

-We can’t make our students put their notebooks away to take tests because they have no desks, sit on the floor, and therefore lack a writing surface.

-I carry a handful of chalk nubs to teach class because the school runs out of chalk.

-Anytime anyone feels a little under the weather, they will tell you that they have malaria.

-A student came by to ask if we can offer him medicine for his “impotence.”

-We came home to find our banana tree bent over because someone reached over the fence, pulled the tree over, and chopped are just-rippened bananas out.

-Our latrine hole is occasionally guarded by spiders the size of an outstretched hand (not venomous) that wait patiently to ambush the roaches that venture out of the hole.

-Neighborhood kids stand at our bamboo fence begging for us to pull old cans out of our trash pit for them to play with.

-In bed before 8 pm and up before 5 am is the norm.

-12^th grade physics students are unaware that -1+1=0.

-Sixth period of the school day is essentially non-existent in the winter months because the sun sets and the school has no electricity to light up the rooms.

-Students are regularly mandated to come to school (a 1.5 hour walk for most) on Saturdays for “limpeza.” Limpeza = digging up weeds in the school yard.

-Teachers charge students money for them to take a test/quiz (this money is supposed to go toward the teacher photocopying the test in town; the money requested is usually more than the cost of photocopies).

-Weird subservient undertones everywhere.

-When we try to teach through sixth period, the head secretary comes and finds us to collect the “turma” book so he can lock up the office; the other teachers, students, directors, and secretaries have already left.

-10/20 is a good grade on a test.

-The national highway is a crumbling road that barely allows cars to pass in opposite directions. It turns to dirt regularly. None of this stops people from cruising through our town at 100+ km/h. 

-Neighbors request that we buy one of their chickens so they can buy soap to clean their clothes.
-I am regularly asked by women if we can make children together.

Grilled bushrat on a stick; in front of our house:

Paradise. Pangane, Cabo Delgado:

Update from May

May 15^th, 2012

It’s now been almost two months since the last update. I don’t think there is much point in trying to summarize all that time. Instead, I’ll recount individually some more notable chunks of time.

End of 1^st Trimester:

 I showed up in Chiúre halfway through the first trimester. You would think that would mean I’d missed a lot, but it turns out that until the March 3^rd “levantamento” school was only semi-in-session. Or something like that. No finalized class rosters. Teachers and students showed up very sporadically. Yet, in theory, curriculum was being covered. My physics turmas had had one class each when I started teaching six weeks into the trimester.

Given no direction and with no sense of organization, I hit the ground running assuming I had catching up to do. Lesson One in navigating this world: a strong sense of urgency will rarely get you anywhere. I would have been better off settling in, feeling out my students a little more, not worrying about finishing off the first trimester material, and saving myself the clusterfuck and confusion of putting everything together on the fly.

In the end, I administered one unit test, or “ACS” grade, and a final exam to all of my math classes. My physics classes turned in one big problem set, took one ACS, and sat for the final. The school weights final exams 70-30 against the rest of the trimester evaluations. Seems like a rough system for high school kids.

The finals I gave were written with my fellow Mozambican teachers who insisted on giving textbook equivalent problems. Result: about a 50% passing rate. And that’s after curving all the final exam grades so that the average was a passing 10/20. Ouch.

Trimester Break:

I spent a couple days in a little gas station restaurant stealing electricity, grading about four-hundred final exams, and entering all the information into Excel sheets. Banging that out quick gave me some leeway to travel. I took off on April 10^th, direction south, to visit Joanna in the mountains of Manica Province (see original site re-placement: Guro). Check out a map to see the distance from Chiúre to Chimoio/Catandica. Then edit your estimated travel time to account for long stretches where the national “highway” is a one-lane dirt road. Two long days of travel, including a stop off at a friend’s house in Alto Molocue, Zambezia Province, many hours on a terrifyingly fast moving bus (see: overland travel anxiety related to car accident trauma), a hitched ride that happened to have a Peace Corps girl in it, and lots of fruit, sodas, and egg sandwiches purchased through the bus window, and I arrived in Chimoio. A pretty pleasant place to be by Mozambican city standards.

Joanna and I went out for beers with some Peace Corps friends living in the city (and some others passing through) and crashed for the night in one of their houses. We hitched up to Catandica the next afternoon; open back truck to the turn off, a two hour wait, then a minivan north into the mountains. Joanna lives in a comfy house that’s part of a World Bank-built school compound at the foot of the Serra Choa mountain range (a known smuggling route back and forth between Mozambique and Zimbabwe). We spent some very restful days lolling about, cooking goat chili, and eating lots of avocados, and one beautiful day hiking way up into the mountains, picnicking on a cool, breezy ridgeline, climbing around in a collapsing old stone Portuguese estate house, and enjoying some stunning views (see photos).

I hurdled back up north on a sixteen-hour bus journey to Nampula city just in time for the north regional Peace Corps “re-connect” conference for our training class. We gorged on hotel buffet and sat around talking about our sites and what we’ve been up to. Thirteen days after dipping out, I made it back to Chiúre to a dog so excited that he pissed uncontrollably upon our entering the yard.

2^nd Trimester Beginnings:

We had been told that the first week back from school is a total toss and that there was no point in showing up. We live down the path from school and were in town anyway so we made our scheduled appearances for week one. I was lucky to have five students in any of my classes. I walked into a few totally empty classrooms. I decided to use the week to do some math review with both my math and my physics students. Turns out most of them don’t know how to add, subtract, multiply or divide negatives. All of them agreed that 0.60 is greater than 0.6. Final exam scores explained. I’m supposed to be teaching physics that requires an understanding of trigonometry. The math curriculum calls for systems of equations this trimester. Unfortunately, my sense of urgency on arrival kept me from doing mid-trimester diagnostic tests.

There are a few obvious faults in the system (more than a few, but I’ll try to hold myself back). First of all, the math curriculum and physics curriculum were clearly planned entirely independent of each other. The material covered in the 11^th grade physics curriculum requires math that 11^th grade students haven’t seen yet. Not to mention that the curriculum itself equates to a basic version of what I was doing my freshman year of college (as an engineering student). Keep in mind, most of these kids don’t understand the decimal system or how to subtract a negative. Secondly, upon review of the “pautas” (official grade books), it turns out that all of the other teachers just give all of their students passing grades. That means students who can’t say “Hello my name is Derek” in English make it to 12^th grade (5^th year) English, students who can’t solve the equation x-1=0 make it to 12^th grade physics and math, and some students even graduate high school essentially illiterate. Once they are in 11^th and 12^th grade it’s hard to know what direction to go with them. I can fail them (someone who can’t multiply shouldn’t pass 11^th grade math) for the sake of the integrity of the system, but they’ll just be forced to scrape together the money to retake the grade until they get a teacher who passes them. They aren’t going to eventually understand trigonometry just because they retake 11^th grade three times if no one ever takes them back to basic math. That’s not going to happen with teachers trained to teach curriculum. And even as an outsider with a critical eye to the systematic issues, I’m apt to teach the curriculum for the sake of the couple students in every class who get what’s going on and actually have some outside chance of doing something with their education.

Anyway, enough with ranting about the education system here. I could probably write you a book about it. The first week back we had no students. That first Wednesday was also “Chiúre Day,” celebrating the 25^th Anniversary of our town. Yay. Bicycle races. Foot races. Dance groups. A marching band. Fun stuff. The second week of the trimester included May Day on Tuesday (obviously a day off in a country run by a socialist party) and we basically still had no students all week. Week-three school finally started back up for real. Since then, we’ve been chilling around town doing the standard. Killing rats. Fermenting smashed corn meal. Trying to save our neighbor’s chickens from our dog. Playing basketball (I’m actually a pretty good player here). Eric and I are both playing for some of our turmas in the inter-turma soccer tournament going on at school (after subbing in for the second half with my team down 1-3, we came back to win 7-3 – I’ve been deemed a good luck charm). Our papaya trees are overflowing with fruit that are a couple weeks from being ripe. This Saturday we are throwing a huge party for my upcoming 24^th birthday. Will have Peace Corps friends camping all over the yard. Plan is to slaughter ten chickens, buy a few cases of beer, and bbq all day with Americans, local teachers, and neighborhood friends. 

Inside the classroom; Eric's photo from inside a 12th grade class that we both teach:

Picnic in the Serra Choa with Joanna:

Daybreak on the national highway in Chiure: