August 23rd, 2012

Dog days of summer. Or I guess winter. After the July travels, I returned to a shitstorm in Chiure; getting organized after being on the move, starting the third trimester, organizing my local science fair group, coordinating the provincial science fair in Pemba, and dealing with our newly sexually active dog (he has only one testicle but still manages to leave the yard and terrorize the neighborhood bitches from sun-down to sun-up nightly).

The busy-ness culminated with the realization of the Cabo Delgado Provincial Science on August 4^th. We (me/Peace Corps and the Pronvincial Delegation of Science and Technology) had over one-hundred students from all over the province presenting group projects from their respective schools. The governor of Cabo spoke. A bunch of Peace Corps friends stopped through. A few of my students got to see the ocean for the first time in their lives (even though they live about 100 km from it). Aside from the hotel-to-venue bus full of students running over a person (as in under the wheel) on the way to the fair, things ran pretty smoothly by Mozambican standards. The idea is for students to be exposed to critical thought and scientific method. In the end, most of the projects are just kids mixing some honey with some leaves, calling it medicine, and pretending that that is science. Still a cool experience for all the students to get to travel, meet kids from other schools, get a certificate, and feel like they accomplished something academic (not a lot of positive reinforcement exists in schools here).

Since then, things have calmed down a lot here. August may be winter in southern Africa, but it somehow feels fitting that its waning weeks carry a semblance of the slow, stale days of late summer in the States. Four of the last eight schools days have been cancelled (teacher died in a motorcycle accident, governor came to town, governor came to town again, last day of Ramadan). Of course, school is never cancelled in advance, nor is its cancellation ever announced. Rumor just kind of starts spreading through town and then when only a handful of students shows up, the few teachers waiting around just leave. They say Africa has an “oral” culture…

We’ve taken advantage of those empty days to complete the mud oven in our yard. Mud base, mud dome, and a layer of concrete to protect it from the rain. The plan is to fire it up for the first time this weekend; pizza, banana bread, calzones? We just need some cheese. Wood-fired mud oven-roasted turkeys for Thanksgiving!

We also re-did the grass walls of our latrine, fixed part of our bamboo fence (including adding a doggy door so Cow can leave and release pent-up energy at night), and fixed our latrine hole (it was sinking…). Possibly already noted in the last post, but we also built a pig pen/house. Plan is to raise some little pigs to roast in our oven at a date TBD.

In the meantime, I’ve got the rhythm of school and Portuguese down well enough that lesson planning and school-stress are at a minimum. The days pass simply and rhythmically. Usually awake no later than 5 am. Go for a run through the dry, burned down, fallow fields. Cow runs alongside chasing the odd chicken, duck, goat, or water-totting woman along the path. Make some coffee with the previous night’s hot water and munch an orange. Stare off into the yard. Sweep swirly patterns into our dirt yard. Bike the 6 km into town to buy the days food (lettuce, tomatoes, onions, oranges, green peppers (if we can find them) and maybe a goat leg if we are feeling fancy). Bike home. Put a bucket of bath water in the yard to warm in the sun. Maybe read for a bit. Eat unrefrigerated leftovers from the previous night’s dinner. Take a lukewarm bucket bath, get dressed, and skip on over to school to impart some knowledge. Physics teaching has been fun (I made an egg float in salt water the other day. Wow!). Math teaching is a bit depressing… systems of three-equations to kids who can’t divide. I typically get done teaching early because I can enter the room early when other teachers are missing. Come home, light the charcoal, bang out another delicious dinner (we eat quite well, really), and stare off into the yard a little more. Sun is down around 6 pm and we usually wrap up dinner not long after. Read by head lamp for a bit, crawl into bed in the gazebo around 7:30 and pass out by 8. If you didn’t already calculate, 8 pm to 5 am is nine hours. I’m worried that when I get done here I won’t be able to adapt back to a high-paced life of seven-hour nights of sleep (I was lucky to get seven hours when I was getting up at 5:30 to hop Caltrain to my Turner projects).

Anyway, no complaints on this end. Broken up the weeks with some weekend beach travel in Cabo. Reading lots of stuff that I figure I probably won’t have the time to read in later years (although hopefully I am wrong about that). Learning how to cook more and more yummy stuff; coconut rice pudding! sweet peanuts! homemade hot pockets! Dicking around in the neighborhood. Just living the Peace Corps life, ya know?

Putting the neighborhood kids to work on the oven.