Winter Break 2012

Been off of school for a few weeks. Traveled back up north to the deserted beaches of Pangane, stopped by school to turn in my grades, then ran south. Conference in Nampula, hanging around Chimoio, and beaches in Inhambane Province. Some great hitchhiking luck to connect it all, including free beers, free pastries, and some very very long distance hauls in comfy private cars for free. Headed back north tomorrow to start the third trimester.

Some recent highlights:

 Cow finds haircuts pretty boring.

Chiure life; bbq pork over charcoal.

Grilled rat and cassava beer by candlelight. 

 Life is hard in the Peace Corps; beach beers in Pemba.

Card playing to pass the hours on the road. 

Open-backing in the north. 

Back to Pangane. 

Fresh lobster on the beach, Pangane, Cabo Delgado. 

Squid ink eye-black; Vilankulos, Inhambane. 

Life is hard in the Peace Corps.  

Man in the mangroves.

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:

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.

Switching It Up

After a fun thirty hours of travel, I arrived in Maputo to find out from our Country Director that the school in Guro backed out. Some complicated logistics followed.

I'm now moving to Chiure, Cabo Delgado Province. That's way up north. Thatch roof house with no electricity or running water (pictured above). Not a lot of time to write at the moment. Will be in a very rural location. Not easily in touch. Mailing address updated on the main page.

What better way to resume the Cantilevered Spirit Quest...

...than with a guru. Guro (pronounced goo-r00, like guru), Manica Province, Mozambique that is.

My bones are mostly healed. I fly back to Mozambique on Monday. To avoid putting me back around the corner from the accident site, Peace Corps agreed to find me a new place to live. I'm moving up into the mountains in the central region of the country. Guro is a small town about three hours north of Chimoio, the provincial capital of Manica. I'll be the first Peace Corps person the town has ever hosted. I'm getting a new little concrete house with no electricity or running water. I'll be teaching physics, grade-level to be determined.

While leaving behind a comfy bed, a well stocked fridge, home cooking, and family is always sad, I'm ready to get back to Mozambique. Life has kind of been on pause here. I'm looking forward getting back into Portuguese, giving physics lessons to classrooms of seventy kids, seeing friends, and working to turn the blank slate of a concrete shell of a house into my personalized bungalow in rural Africa. It's avocado season. I have some close friends living in the region. And... there are massive stone spires everywhere begging to be climbed. Not sure I have the gear for it, but those things look tempting (see photos below).

My new mailing address:

Derek Roberts, PCV

Corpo da Paz

C.P. 331

Chimoio, Mozambique