Small Victories

            It is all too easy to get stuck in a rut here because the honest truth is, while two years seems like a long time, we are  not here long enough to make any sort of dent in the problems we become so acutely aware of during our service.  So why are we all still here? (A little bragging is in order, here.  Out of our unprecidentedly large training group of 67 volunteers, none have thrown in the towel and gone home.  Someone tell me, is that some kind of Peace Corps record?)

            I won’t speak for the others, but sometimes, it’s sheer stubborness that gets me out of bed and makes me walk around before I can get back into bed and wait for it to start all over again.  However, most of the time my engine runs on small victories.  Tiny events that produce a “high on life” feeling that hopefully doesn’t wear off until you encounter the next.

A small collection of small victories and moments that made my day:

            I never thought that my first house would be the left half of a concrete duplex without running water in Eastern Africa.  Technically it is not my house (it is owned by the school I work for) but I will live in this house longer than any other house outside of my family home.  Nothing makes a house feel more like home than buying your first piece of furniture.  Mine happened to be a 12-hook wooden wall rack purchased at a whopping 100 mets (about $3 dollars).  The moment I hung up my capulanas and my bata (the white lab coat worn by teachers) was the moment that room became MY ROOM.  Since then, I have suspended a bamboo rod from the ceiling for clothing on hangers and sewn my own curtains.  While I seem to have taken a break from furnishing my room, Will is dissatisfied with my continued use of my suitcases as furniture.  Apparently it’s not acceptable to live out of your suitcase for 6 months… A bamboo dresser is in my future.

            I have one of my 12^th grade turmas during the first period on Wednesdays.  The class starts at 6:30 but kids roll in as late as 7:30, if they roll in at all.  One particular student of mine can be a bit of a handful so the other day when he suantered into class about 45 min late, I was fed up with his disrespect for me and his classmates so I made him come straight up to the board to solve a chemical equilibrium problem I had just written.  I knew he couldn’t solve it by himself but I’d be damned if I was going to let him sit down before solving the problem even if I had to tell him every single step.  Ten minutes later, he had an answer on the board and I saw the lightbulb go on in his head.  He hadn’t just robotically written what I had told him, he had solved a problem (almost) by himself.  While he still doesn’t always show up to class on time, he is now actually paying attention in class, participating, and LEARNING the material instead of just copying it down.  Now if only I could afford the time to be that stubborn with every single student…

            Our neighbor, Rodasa, is just over a year old and just learning to talk.  My name is now Na-Na and Mireya, Eeyayah. 

            Rodasa’s cousin, Suel, is about 2 and a half and in the prime of her terrible twos.  She is very good and getting in your way in EVERY way possible, for example, helping you do laundry/dishes by taking things out of the rinse bucket and throwing them back in the soapy bucket.  One particularly charming habit is trying to steal whatever treat might be on the table.  She has a weakness for juice and cookies and if she can reach it, it’s gone before you know she’s in the house.  I was in the middle of trying to build a baking soda/vinegar volcano or bottle rocket and the last thing I wanted was Suel coming into the house and making more of a mess of things than I already was.  Of course, her timing is always impecable, and there she was when I turned around, downing the glass of vinegar and baking soda colored with a little red kool-aid.  DEFINITELY NOT JUICE.  She looks up at me with a red stained mouth and a horrified look and sqeaks out, “agua?”  Nope, no water for you, you can savor that bad taste of taking things without permission. 

            It can be very difficult as a female volunteer to make male friends in the community.  99.9% of the time, your relationship reaches an awkward impass of “no, I will not date you and take you home to the US.”  One of my first “friends” outside of my school community was a guy selling mangos in the market.  He was the only one who didn’t try to overcharge Will and me those first few times we shopped for groceries and he has never once harassed me (more than I can say about nearly everyone else in the market).  I wave hi if I don’t stop to buy something and he waves back and usually that’s the end of our interaction.  The other day as I was walking by, I waved and instead of waving back, he shouted “Anda ‘ca!” (Come here!) and signaled for me to come over.  No good conversation has ever come from me responding to a guy in Mozambique telling me to come over and talk.  I thought for sure this was the end of my nice, not-creepy mango guy.  He stands up as I walk over and pulls something out of his pocket – a 5 Euro note.  He just wanted to know if it was real.  I have no idea how he got 5 Euros (or what the current Euro looks like, so I couldn’t really answer his question) but more importantly, I don’t know how I managed to find who seems to be one of the only genuinely friendly guys in the market.

            Sometimes getting our REDES girls to take ownership of the group activities can be more painful than pulling teeth.  We had decided to raise money to have a little party for Mozambican Women’s Day by selling the purses they had made last year and banana bread on the side.  So the day before we were supposed to go sell bags and bread, I whipped up 30 pretty little banana bread cupcakes in our charcoal Dutch oven.  The next morning, NO ONE shows up to help us sell so we didn’t raise a single metical.  Not exactly a victory, but when Mireya and I recognized the ridiculousness of trying to hold a bake sale in Mozambique, we laughed uncontrollably until our stomachs hurt.  Or maybe our stomachs hurt because we had so much banana bread to get rid of, who knows.

            I’ve always hated missing class.  For me, it’s always more of a pain to make up work or catch up.  However, there is a difference between having a cold and listening to someone talk to you and having a cold and being the one to do all the talking.  I had a cold and lost my voice the other week and so decided not to go to class.  I dutifully had Mireya tell my classes that I would not be in that day.  When my students heard I was sick, they used that free period when they should have had chemistry to visit me at home.  So much for resting my voice.  Not actually getting to take a sick day was worth knowing that my students cared enough to come check up on me.  I also managed to win Mozambican brownie points with my students by answering the door in a capulana.

Final “small victory” for the post is one word:  Cheese.

Diva

The first time I met Diva, she was demonstrating the patience of a saint while entertaining my toddler neighbors.  The scrawny little cat was hunkered down next to our bamboo fence when I rescued her from Suel and Rodasa who thought that petting a cat included hitting it with a spoon.

            That was about a week after I had moved to Montepuez so Mireya had not yet returned from her trip to the states and my house still felt too empty.  When the cat showed up again looking for a little food and affection, I was more that happy to oblige.  She would climb into my lap when I sat on the porch or sprawl out in the sun in front of my house for a few hours before disappearing again for a few days.  The friendlier I became with her and the more food I offered, the more frequently she started appearing.  Eventually she worked up the courage to follow me into the house but she would scamper from the door to hide under the kitchen counter afraid I might kick her out.   

Behind the trashcan?  Really?  Could you try to be more pathetic-looking?

           After a week or two of my allowing her to take naps in various hiding places in the house, she decided that this wasn’t a half-bad place to be and that I wasn’t going to throw her outside if caught her in the house.  She started coming nearly every day to spend the whole day, sleeping on my bed, sitting on my lap while I read, and sharing my meals.  When Mireya came back, the little cat took pretty well to her, too.  We would watch movies on her bed with the laptop and a purring cat between us. 

You are not a lion and this is not your habitat - inside joke for the family ;)

            We still didn’t think of her as “our” cat until another teacher came to visit and saw her sleeping on our porch.  He knew the people the cat really belonged to and said that if we wanted her, we just needed to talk to them because he always saw them throwing her out of the house; they didn’t want her.  Up until this point, we had just been refering to her as “the neighbor’s cat,” not even knowing which neighbor she belonged to.  With this news, we decided we could claim her as our own could finally give her a name.

            Only one name seemed appropriate considering how quickly this African stray had adjusted to the pampered life of a house cat: Diva.

Mireya and Diva.   She definitely earned her name.

She even got her own dressing room.

            At this point, we were Diva’s main residence.  Mireya and I were eventually suckered into letting her sleep in the house at night after she came home one morning with a torn ear to constantly remind us of how narrowly she had escaped a fight.  Diva had no problem with that.  She loved to snuggle.  However, 4:30 am would roll around and Diva would start getting restless to be let out and do her business.  Not the most convenient time, but it’s still more convenient than cleaning up presents.

            While she turned out to be easily housebroken, she still left us presents to clean up.  Bugs were usually not worth her time but she LOVED chasing the geckos that live in our house.  The only problem was she chase them, catch them, and play with them until they got so scared they lost their tails (a gross self-defense mechanism for geckos).  Diva would then leave the dead gecko and it’s still wriggling tail for me to sweep up…  Either way, cats are great for pest control.  This includes toddlers.  Suel was afraid of Diva so whenever she wandered into the house at a bad time, we would chase her out of the house with the cat in hand.

This how much Diva cares about the imminent termite invasion.  Yes, I came home from a weekend away from site to find termite mounds growing out of a crack in my floor...

            Diva wasn’t just a star in our house, she also started attending our REDES (women’s group) meetings.  She loved to hang out in our alpendra while we sewed bags with our girls.  We joked about Diva being the REDES mascot and the girls loved her.

It is unfortunate that I waited until now to talk about the cat that we had.

Had.

            About a week ago, Diva started acting lethargic.  She was quiet so we immediately knew something must be wrong because she usually never shut up.  She deteriorated over the course of the week despite our efforts to keep her fed and hydrated.  While she still had the strength, she would get out of the baby bath lined with towels that served as her bed to go outside and do her business but she started getting weaker and then started walking in circles.  We knew then that it was probably over but we tried to keep her comfortable.

            Mireya and I were both home when she died and we were able to bury her under a bamboo cross in our yard.  Our neighbors thought we were crazy for crying over a stray cat but most of them respected our little “funeral” anyways. 

We may not have had her for long, but at least she finally found a family that loved her.

Cheater, cheater, pumpkin-eater

I gave my first test two weeks ago.  Oh boy, was that fun.

Phase 1: Preparation

            Of course my test would be fair but challenging.  It would be multiple choice so that it would be easy to grade.  I would give my test to 11^th during their double period so I could divide the class of 90+ in two groups and limit students 2 to a desk.  We don’t get free copies from the school so my options are writing the test on the board for the kids to copy onto their own paper, collecting money from the students to make copies, or to just suck up the cost of the test myself. 

            I wanted to cover as much material as possible on my test so asking the students to waste most of their test time copying the test down onto their own paper is out of the question.  At 2.5Mets a page, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to request that the students pay for their own 1-2 page test, afterall that’s what most of the other teachers request.  Then I’m reminded that chemistry is one of 9 subjects that my students buy tests for.  On top of that teachers aren’t above charging students for a 5 page test when the test is only 1 page while another would demand their students pay for a 10 page info packet.  I’ve already asked my students to supply their own copy of the periodic table and to buy two notebooks for my class.  That leaves me to buy all the copies for 300 students.  I could easily spend 1000Met out of my 7000Met monthly allowance on those tests. 

            It took forever but I finally produced two versions of a multiple choice test that fit on half a page.  I even wrote a third version to go over as a review before the test and teach the students how to answer my questions.

Phase 2: The Mission

            My 11^th grade test during 1^st and 2^nd period was a mess.  I made all of the kids put their stuff at the front of the class and told them to only take out a pen.  Of course I still had to kick out four or five students for trying to use their notebooks under their desks.  I didn’t even bother kicking people out for talking.  I would have kicked out the whole class. I told them up front that there were different versions of the test and that they would probably have different questions than their neighbor. I still got questions like “Teacher, there is a mistake.  I don’t have the same choices for question 3 as my friend.”  Time after time, I say, “No mistake.  Look at your own test.”

            They really just have no concept why teachers give tests in the first place.  School is all about getting good grades.  You're not actually supposed to learn anything.

            My original plan for 11^th grade was to split the class into two equal groups and give the test to one group during the first half of class and then again to the second group during the second half to minimize crowding.  It turns out that this is hard to do when you don’t actually know how many students to expect.  I had a full classroom for the first period and 4 students second period. 

            My 12^th grade tests went a little better.  I made them all get up and then I sat them down one by one.  This worked out great for two reasons: 1) I achieved the maximum space between students 2) Sudents who wanted to sit near each other were separated and students who wanted to sit in the back were seated in the front.  The bonus benefit of surprising my students with random seating was cheaters were no longer seated near their hidden notebooks!  The students were much more willing to admit there was a notebook under their desk when it wasn’t their own. 

            I did have one good moment in my last test for 11^th grade.  My students finished their test very quickly and with almost 15 minutes still left in class, all but one student had left.  The last girl watched the second to last student leave, looked down at her test, then looked at me, and started to get up. 

            “You have until the end of class, you know.  Take as much time as you need.”

            She looked so surprised that I was willing to stay just for her but she sat back down and ten minutes later handed in her test.  I was glad to show her teachers should care but unfortunately I don’t think the extra time helped her…

Phase 3: Debrief

            I knew that I was going to have a high fail rate so 50 pass/50 fail for 12^th grade and about 70 pass/30 fail for 11^th grade.  All and all, not bad.  It was really funny to see the rediculously wrong answers students had selected because they had copied someone with the other version of the test. 

            The hardest part by far of the whole testing experience was handing back the exams.  I learned the hard way that I need to circle all of their answers in my own pen and fill in all of the questions they left blank.  As soon as I handed back the test, my desk was swarmed by students with claims of errors in their grade.

            “Teacher, I put the same answer as so-and-so and you marked it wrong.”

            “That’s because you had different tests.  Your answer to your question is wrong.”

            “But Teacher”

            “No.”

            “Teacher, you forgot to add points for this question.”

            “That’s because when I graded the test yesterday, you hadn’t answered the question.”

            “But Teacherrrrr”

            “No.”

            “Teacher, you marked this question wrong.”

            “That’s because you marked two answers.

            “But TEEAAACHHHHERRR”

            “EVERYONE SIT DOWN.  I’m not changing any grades.  I’m going home.”

Mummies and mud in Mariri

The opportunity for a day trip from my site is extremely rare (you can imagine why based on my last post).  Reliable transportation between Montepuez and Mariri is even rarer.  Mariri is a tiny village 17km out in the middle of nowhere.  No one there owns a car except for the director of the school and maybe a handful of other people.  In fact, except for when school is in session, no one even really lives in Mariri.  That is why when our missionary friend Chad said he’d be heading out that way for the day, Will, Mireya, and I couldn’t pass up the chance to visit Liz and Jamie. 

            Every few weeks, Chad drives through several villages in that area to pick up people the missionaries are training to run the churches and take them to a meeting.  In other words, we got the very scenic route to Mariri (not that any route in Mozambique isn’t “scenic”).  What we learned is that the government provides money to maintain roads, but not through the small bush villages.  Those roads are up to the people of the village to maintain.  Well, since most folk in the bush don’t have cars or even have much reason to leave their village, the roads aren’t really roads.  Washed out dirt paths barely wide enough for Chad’s small pick-up connect each village. It was really neat to get out of our city and literally get off of the beaten path to see another side of Mozambique.  This route would prove even more exciting on the way home…

            Anyways, the girls were pretty happy to see us, or at least the baskets of vegetables that we had brought them.  “Tempo de fome” (time of hunger) in a city like Montepuez just means food is expensive.  Tempo de fome in Mariri means all you can really get are things like rice and onions (I’ll refer you to Liz and Jamie’s blogs for more details).  We were also able to bring them powdered baby formula. Powdered baby formula? What?  The guy in the store was just as confused by my buying it as you probably are.  Liz and Jamie rescued a day old kitten!  A neighbor had found in their bag of charcoal, umbilical cord still attached and eyes closed.  The neighbors also said that it wasn’t a feral domestic cat, but actually a wildcat of some kind.  I’m reluctant to believe that but that kitty sure does have some mean-looking paws!

            After feeding the kitten and eating our own lunch, we headed out for the grand tour of Mariri.  This is where our adventure really begins.  Liz and Jamie showed us around their secondary school.  In its hay day, the secondary school of Montepuez was THE school to attend in the north.  Even the son of Mozambique’s first president attended that school.  Now, not so much…  The school is beautiful but the only thing it has in the ways of teaching materials is a life-size model skeleton hanging in the corner of the teacher’s lounge.  Feeding off of each other’s confidence and adventurousness, we decided to explore the old student housing behind the school.  The windows were covered and most of the doors were locked except two.  Both rooms were so full of trash that we couldn’t really enter.  What we saw from the door was quite enough.

“OMG that looks like a body!”

            Liz was the first one to look in the room.  Of course the rest of us had to take a look.  If there was any place or time in which we were likely to find a dead body, it would be in the abandoned building behind a school in a part of the country that only stopped fighting a civil war about 10 years ago.  Sure enough, we peek around the door of the dark room to see the unmistakeable profile of a face attached to what looked like at least part of a torso.  Once the initial shock wore off, we worked up the courage to investigate further.  We couldn’t get into the room because of the trash and Will’s camera flash was not enough to confirm what exactly was propped up in the middle of the room. We noticed that the high window on the opposite wall was open so we scurrried to the back of the building hoping for a better look.  Will climbed up wall a bit and flashed a picture.  Turns out it was just the soft-tissue anatomy mannequin that probably came with the skeleton in the teacher lounge.  For a better story, we decided that we should just tell everyone it was the corpse of the last Peace Corps volunteer they sent to Mariri...

What we could make out from the door...

Meet the "former PCV of Mariri"

            That wasn’t enough of an adventure so Liz and Jamie took us to a grotto with a shrine to the Virgin Mary and then for a short hike up a small mountain behind their school.  The view was spectacular!  I can’t wait until we have time to climb our own mountains in Montepuez.  Folks, I present to you Cabo Delgado:

View of Cabo Delgado from Mariri during the rainy season

            We returned back to the girls’ house just in time to be picked up by Chad.  It had rained a good bit since we had arrived in Mariri and we were forced to take an unscheduled pit stop in a ditch that suddenly appeared in the middle of one of the lovely village “roads.”  Where is AAA when you need them?  Luckily, nothing draws more attention in a tiny Mozambican village than a bunch of white people climbing up out of a side-ways truck.  After some serious heaving, ho-ing, skilled backing, and somewhat of a small miracle, the truck was freed and we were back on our way to Montepuez.

Gives new meaning to "it takes a village."  Also note the stylish purple parka.  It's probably a fresh 75F out so obviously we need to bundle up...

            Who knew you could pack so much adventure into such a short trip to such a small town?  Mariri, you did not disappoint.