More photos

Woman from riverside community

Cows pulling

Ladies carrying sticks on their heads

Cemetery with too many freshly dug graves

Here are some photos of the areas near my home.

Typical thatch roof mud house

Another cute house

Kids by the canal

Yours truly painting watercolors of the river


The river, said to be home to crocodiles, hippopotamus and schistosomiasis

Knowing the proper color and consistency of good manure

Hi blog readers! I was excited to hear how many people are reading this blog, so I am posting again.

It’s Sunday and I’m enjoying the breeze from my open door. It’s raining again. I can see neighbor kids run by in their underwear, splashing through puddles. I’m baking cookies for my girls group. We were supposed to paint a mural at a daycare today but it has been cancelled due to rain (i.e. due to mud).

I was working in my garden early this morning, when the rain started. At that point I welcomed the downpour because it forced me to stop (I was already exhausted) and because I could watch the drainage pattern off the roof and perfect my irrigation channels. The soil is compacted and I am digging very deep, so it’s exhausting work. Plus, the only tools I have are a hoe, buckets, and a borrowed wheel barrel.

The garden is an experiment really. I’m trying out a method we learned in training, a combination of permaculture and biointensive gardening. I dug irrigation channels and water holes with berms where I will plant perennials like papaya tree, aloe vera, lemon grass, sweet potato vine. In the center I’m digging two long, narrow beds for annuals. I dig deep so I can plant things close together. In one bed I will have corn, beans and pumpkin. In the other, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots and onions. It’s polyculture. And it’s all organic. The only inputs are manure (later I will use compost), coal, ash, seeds/plants, and some hard work.

I’m learning a lot. For example, making a garden is definitely a community activity. It started with digging the ditches. I recruited neighbor kids to help me, seeing as they had nothing else to do. “OK teacher,” they said, “but what is our salary?” We decided that cookies were an appropriate payment. Once word got out that the American was paying in cookies, I had a whole hoard of children chipping away at the rock hard ground with hoes. I baked a lot of cookies the next day.

Next, I had to collect manure (a source of nutrients and helpful microbes). There are cows and bulls wandering around our school so I knew there was manure somewhere, but it proved surprisingly difficult to find. When my students saw me wandering around with a hoe, a bucket and a band of small children, they offered their services. It turns out that you can’t take any old cow poop and stick it in your garden. It has to be properly seasoned. I was instructed in the appropriate color and consistency of good manure and we filled several wheel barrels full.

Wood ash (minerals and pH balance) was also easily found. The students who live in the dorms cook over coals in an outdoor kitchen. Out back was a pile of used ash ripe for the gathering.

The last soil addition was charcoal fines. They hold water and house microbes. Plus, they sequester CO2 from the atmosphere, adding carbonic acid that loosens up soil nutrients for plants. How’s that for an off-set? They’re free too. My friend showed me where ladies sell charcoal in the market. There are always bits leftover that are too small to sell. I explained and then he translated to Xangana. The ladies agreed to let us fill our rice sack on the premise that I will bring them some of my corn so they can see if it really works.

Lastly, I needed seeds and plants. A friend who works for Africa Works, a faith-based NGO in town, offered to help me out. His wife fed us lunch and then we drove around all afternoon in his truck, gathering seeds from various stores and at the end of the day we visited the NGO’s fields. The sun was getting low and people were harvesting corn, cassava leaves, okra and other things to sell at the market in the morning. The fields are split up and managed by families affected by HIV/AIDS. The harvest is split three ways: the families keep some to eat, they must give some to neighbors in need, and the rest is sold to finance the project. A gas-powered pump takes water from the river to irrigate the fields and I could see that this corn was in much better shape than corn on smaller landholdings where people can’t afford irrigation. In the fields we met a beneficiary of the project who promised to get the perennials for my garden free of charge. He also gave me some fresh corn for the road.

In my garden quest I have found so many willing helpers asking for so little in return. It makes me feel like part of the community. They give to me and I will give back, be it in the form of cookies, corn from the garden or sharing the knowledge that I gain in the process.

Ultimately, I want to recruit my students to help me build gardens for people in surrounding communities. There are a lot of people suffering from HIV/AIDS in the area and they are often too sick to walk to their fields, but could easily tend a small plot near their home. There is less weeding and watering to be done because of the way we plant (close together, polyculture, natural fertilizer…) and they get high yields of a variety of foods right outside their front door. Another target group would be families whose children have suffered from malnutrition. A friend of mine works at a hospital that receives a lot of HIV/AIDS and malnutrition cases. We’re hoping to work together and make this happen.

All things take time, of course. First, I need to see if I can make anything grow at my own house! Also, this is one of several side projects on top of my regular teaching load. I’m busy, but it’s a good kind of busy. Things move slowly, so there is always time to stop and chat with neighbors, play with puppies, or watch the sunset.

Going native

Hello friends!

A lot has been going on here in Mozambique as I’m sure is true back home. Seems strange to think life stateside doesn’t just pause while I’m gone and start again when I come back. I’ll catch you up on various happenings over the course of the next few blog entries.

I am feeling more at home here. For example, I used to dread going to the big market, navigating the stalls, being catcalled… but now I love going. I go at the end of the day when it’s cool and the market ladies are finishing up. At that point they’ve had enough of selling and get very silly. We joke around and I practice my Xangana. I’ll say “inhlekani” and they’ll squeal “inhlekaaanniii! Hey everybody look! The mulungo speaks Xangana!!” Then they’ll start rapid-fire Xangana lessons and point to all the vegetables at their stalls. People at the market are even crazier now that it’s the season for making canyu (a fermented fruit juice) and they quit early to go dance and sing.
Some might say I’m “going native,” a little bit more every day. I wear a capulana around the house, I bought a hoe in town last week, I know how to grate coconut and pound peanut flour and cook xima. I find myself singing and dancing to the music blasting on chapas. I’ve even begun to adopt the Mozambican style of small talk that is, telling people what they are already doing.
- Good morning!
- Good morning!
- You are walking.
- Yes, I am walking.
- Me too, I am walking.
- Yes, good, we are together then.
- Yes, we are together.
- Good bye!
- Good bye!

Josefa (a friend we hire her to wash our clothes and clean our house) is convinced that we are getting fatter and darker and are going to marry a Mozambican, preferably her son. She’s probably right on two accounts, definitely not the third. Everyone wants to marry an American and go to the United States. I’m always getting asked if I will marry a Mozambican. If it’s a man, he’ll propose right there; if it’s a woman, she’ll set me up with her son.

There are ups and downs of course. Sometimes it hits you all at once (cultural barriers, ignorance, poverty, hunger, discrimination, homesickness…) but most of the time I feel good. I’m happy, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here.

Photos - my house
They're small files but they can give you an idea of what things look like.

My house in the professor's neighborhood on the school compound

Our guard dog, Rex

Our kitchen, complete with water barrel, gas stove and refridgerator

Our spacious living room. On the back wall is a list of words in Xangana.

My bedroom with fan and mosquito net

The chicken coop attached to our house. I hear students outside my window late at night and early in the morning taking care of the chicks.

Teacher, you know Akon?

Sorry for the lack of updates. Things have been a little hectic here, adjusting to the sudden change of plans. I accepted a Peace Corps position to teach Biology, completed a three-month training for that purpose, spent one month at site anticipating it… only to have the rug yanked out from under me. But I have pulled things back together. I got an English teaching position at a nearby school and am teaching a computer class at my original site. I feel like I’m shooting from the hip (I have never taught English or computers before and didn’t have any time to plan) but I’m learning a lot and I hope that I can say the same for my students.

Yes so… teaching! I’ll recount my day on Friday to give you an idea. It was raining when I woke up, which meant cooler weather but also lots and lots of mud. As soon as I stepped off my front porch I slid and nearly tanked in the mud. I waited under a tree until a chapa came screaming up the wet road. I waved it down and it pulled over about 20 yards ahead of me and started beeping. I ran towards it, again barely escaping a mud bath and leapt into the open door only to find the chapa was already over capacity. So ducked inside the best I could, my butt against the window, my back on the ceiling and my face very much in someone’s cleavage and braced for the ride.

The chapa kindly dropped us off on the school compound and I navigated more mud until I had solid footing on the cement walkway outside the classroom. I stood there watching my students in their clean pressed uniforms carefully pick their way across the soggy courtyard. While we waited, some students asked me the meaning of random phrases in English (e.g. Teacher, what is meaning the word “hustler?”). One of them pointed to a beautiful moth with dark brown eyes on its wings. I explained that it was a moth and asked them not to touch it.
- “Yes teacher, we do not touch. É venenoso (it’s poisonous).”
- “What??”
- “É venenoso, o pó que tem na ala (it’s poisonous, the powder it has on the wing)”

For all I know they were right. There are all sorts of venomous creatures here that I have never encountered before. Later that night Valerie and I saw that Charlotte (our pet black widow spider) had invited a friend. This one had an egg sack on her back. In my mind were images of black widows hiding out under water jugs, in my running shoes, climbing up my mosquito net at night… eeek!!! I grabbed the Baygon (insecticide) and held it at the ready… then handed it to Valerie and stood behind her squealing as she sprayed poison all over our back porch.

Right… back to school. So Fridays are my marathon teaching days. I had three double periods (90 minutes) in a row with less than 5 minutes in between. Those five minutes seem even shorter since in Mozambique it’s the teachers that move from classroom to classroom while the students stay put. As a warm-up activity we sang “Row, row, row your boat.” They learned this the week before when they were identifying parts of speech (you know… “gently” is an adverb, “your” is an adjective, “boat” is a noun etc...). So I had them stand up and they sang at the top of their lungs while I conducted with my arms and walked around the room. (May I pause for a moment to inform you that this is 11th grade English and that some of the students are my age?) Luckily my high schoolers are not too cool for this kind of thing so class is a lot of fun.

Once I settled them down again we reviewed future tense and then played MASH (remember that game from grade school?). The categories were: profession, name of spouse, town/city, number of children, and hobbies. I put a chair in the front of the room and a brave volunteer sat with their back to the board while we told their future. In my second period, the volunteer refused to sit in the chair, claiming it was dirty. I saw a few little specks of dirt and tried to wipe it off with my hands, only to have it smear all over my hands. I ran to the open window and poured my water bottle on my hands to wash them off. “What is that?!?” I asked my class. They were yelling some word in Xangana. I told them I didn’t understand. Finally one student says “murcego!” (“bat!”) and points to the ceiling. Of course! I remembered the flapping and high-pitched squeaking that had been going on in the false ceiling over our heads and saw brown smears dripping down the sides of the walls. It was bat shit. Lovely…

Having cleaned the bat shit off my hands, I continued with the lesson and gave them their first Friday Quiz. I had written the quiz on a large piece of paper (since I can’t print anything) but did not remember to bring tape. I tried clipping it to a nail on the blackboard but a strong breeze kept causing it to fold over. I walked over to shut the window, only to find that there was no glass in it, so I was stuck in the front of the room holding the paper down for the duration of the quiz.

My last period ends at 12:05, but one of the teachers decided to let his class out 20 minutes early. This caused all kinds of disruption since my students insisted they ought to leave too. Sorry kids, no dice. In the last minutes of class I opened the floor. Some of the questions/comments I received:
- “Teacher, you know Akon?”
- “Teacher, you know Beyonce?”
- “Teacher, how old are you? you married? how many children you have?”
- “Teacher, I want Barak Obama come to Mozambique. You give me his phone number?”
- “Teacher, my name ‘Reeems man’ (‘Rhymes man’), I am gansta.”
- “Teacher, I want you take me to Ameeerica!”

I’m always in a good mood after class. My students are so darn cute. They crack me up. It’s not all sunshine and butterflies though. I won’t lie; it’s stressful trying to make it up as I go with these English classes. I would prefer to have all my lessons and units planned out in advance, following the curriculum. Unfortunately that would require the students to have learned all they were supposed to during their last three years of English classes, which is definitely NOT the case. Many of them can barely form a sentence. So it’s a process of trying to figure out what they do know and filling in the many, many gaps. If anyone reading this blog has TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) advice, please send it along!


P.S.
I will post more photos I promise. I just haven’t taken any yet…

So... there has been a change of plans!

To my surprise, I discovered that Biology classes (the ones I would be teaching) are not offered until August. I found this out from talking with a student a week and a half before the start of classes. Needless to say I was quite vexed with my supervisors for not telling me this in the first place. I have since scrambled last minute to find another occupation for the next six months. Lucky for me, there is a secondary school about a 30 minute walk from me that was in need of an 11th grade English teacher. I got the job on Monday and started classes on Tuesday (not much time to prepare!). Thus far it is going well, though I am scrambling to put together lesson plans, syllabi, etc… at the last minute.

In addition, I will be filling my time by working as a computer teacher at my original school, teaching a class and helping the administration to streamline some of their procedures. At the moment, they have computers but still do everything by hand. It takes days to do what you could do in a few hours. My first priorities are teaching them to use the computer to make class schedules and calculate grades.

To be honest, I have come to expect situations like these. A curve ball is thrown at me at the last minute and I am expected to pick up the pieces. Nobody holds your hand. Peace Corps told me I would have to be flexible and independent, and I guess this is what they meant.

I think it will all come together in the end. I have only taught one day of English classes but already have some great stories to tell. I’m having fun, the students are learning, I am learning... I’d say things are going well.