January 19th 2012
It has been a slightly comical point in my life lately how much I change between subsequent blog posts. I only post once every two or three weeks and since these last few months have been such a roller coaster, every time I finally sit down and write something I feel like a new person. I think over the next few weeks however things are going to quite down.
To catch you all up on my life for the past few weeks I left Maputo on January 8th or 9th to head back home to Mangunde. Upon arrival I felt a great since of relief. For the three weeks before I finally returned I home I had been traveling all over for the holidays, and for Lena and Alden’s services. There has been a lot of movement and a lot of being around large groups of people, so to finally be in my own house felt great. Once I got here I did a bunch of cleaning and for the following few days just hung around and tried to chat with as many people as I could around my village. A few days later my roommate Ian came home from his trip to America (Ian is a Peace corps volunteer who started in December of last year) and then after another day or two my empregada (maid) came back with her almost 2 year old and the house was complete. We have all now been living together for about a week now and I feel as though everything is going splendidly.
Now to update everyone on my school life, at the time I am writing this blog post I have just completed my second full day of teaching and although I have a long way to go, I feel as though my presence here in Mangunde will be a positive one. When I had originally received my invitation to come to Mozambique as a Peace Corps Volunteer they told me I would be teaching Math. Upon arrival I found out that there was a good chance I could end up teaching physics. This got me really excited to see where I would be placed. In the end however (Although I was given ample warning that this could happen) my school has me teaching English, Computers, and at this point one class of Physical Education (I’m a PE teacher!!!). At this point I am going to diverge for a second to describe the meeting in which I was assigned the following disciplines to teach. The meeting I went to involved having a majority of the teachers meet outside of my pedagogical directors ( kind of like an Asst. Principal) office 3 days before classes were supposed to start and then having the director name a discipline and all those who have the ability to teach it (or who needed to obtain a certain number of hours a week) put their name in to be picked (This is a much longer process then it should be ). The first discipline they called of interest to me was Physics and I proceeded to tell them I would love to teach physics. This is where I learned that all of the Mozambican teachers had to have 24 hours of class time a piece and that only after all of those hours were filled would they tell me what I was going to get. This more or less meant that I was going to get English, and Leftovers. And as it turns out leftovers means Computer class and Phys. Ed. At first I was a little disappointed given that I spent my entire undergraduate degree studying physics and math, and that I’m far more comfortable teaching those two classes even if it is in Portuguese. However after letting myself think about the situation for a bit (and some pep talks from my roommate) I’ve come to accept the fact I’m teaching something not necessarily in my field of interest, but incredibly valuable to the students here. On the subject of English, the majority of the surrounding countries of Mozambique have large populations of English speakers, add that to the fact that English is used as the go to language for the rest of the world makes teaching English a very important part of a Mozambican education. As for computers, most of the students in my class have had little to no experience with computers in their lives. I recently gave my first lesson to a bunch of 12th graders (whose ages range from 17- 40) and only one or two of them could do anything at all on a computer without direct help. However everyone has an extreme interest in computers here and they pick up the little things quickly. Keeping all this in mind, being the person to expose my students to computers, is going to be a very rewarding experience. Little side note: I have never in my life thought myself an expert on computers. Most of the time I would consider myself a novice with the occasional spurt into the intermediate level, however here in Mozambique I am considered an all knowing force about computers, and anti-viruses.
So moving on to some of the more day to day idiosyncrasies of my life I first want to talk about my house and specifically my toilet. When I moved into my house a little over a month ago my first thoughts were this is nice and spacious, my room is a decent size, but there is some serious untapped potential here. There was this table sitting in the corner of my living/dining room area that was taking up about a third of the space, and under it were years of random stuff that had piled up, the kitchen was a bit dirty and didn’t have a lot of free counter space (though still more counter space than my apartment had back in America!), and the bathroom…well we will get to that later. Now Ian and I with a united front to change the face of our Mangunde house for the better have made some serious improvements. We trashed the ugly cluttered table in the corner, revamped the kitchen, cleaned all of the cob webs, and dust, which has a way of taking over everything, and even moved our bookshelf (which has a boast-able collection of fantastic books) to be the highlight of dining/living room. Now I can honestly say that I have a kick-ass African house. (And now there is talk about buying a couch, and a floor lamp for our reading area!). Then there is the bathroom…our dirty indoor toilet that clogs and takes about 3 gallons of water (if you have the patience to poor that much water into it) to flush down a poo. Just a reminder there are very few places with running water in Mozambique, so pouring water from a bucket into the toilet to flush it is the norm. I’m not lying when I say that I would give anything to have a hole in the ground in the back yard (i.e. a latrine) instead of this toilet! Pheww, it felt good to get that one off of my chest!
Another fun little side adventure I would like to share was about a run I took about a week ago. I went out on my morning run like I usually do around 5:30 in the morning and I decided to be adventurous and take a new path. Instead of going straight down the main road leading into Mangunde, I took a left about a mile up the road from my house heading down this small dirt road towards the district capital of Chibabava, Chibabava. The run was going well and I was feeling great, it was a nice temperature and Mangunde is a beautiful place to get lost in nature. And as it turns out that’s exactly what happened. When I turned around to run back to my house, at some point I crossed over the main road and found myself in a completely unfamiliar place, after about 20 more minutes of running I was certain I had taken a wrong path somewhere and tried my hand asking some villagers for directions. The national language of Mozambique is Portuguese, but only about 50% of the population actually speaks the language, the native language where I live is Shindau. So needless to say asking for directions back to Mangunde was not the easiest thing to do. After asking a few people which direction Mangunde was I only felt like I was getting more and more lost because they all kept pointing in the same direction of which I was starting to get convinced wasn’t the right way. Finally I came upon a small settlement of villagers, one of which spoke Portuguese and will be my student this year, and I asked how I could get back to Mangunde. Than the man said (his name was Mateus) ‘you are in Mangunde’. At this point the lightbulb went off over my head as I realized that Mangunde was a broad term used for the entire area in which I live and that to ask someone ‘How to get to mangunde’ they are going to send you to this little village I stumbled upon where the village elder/Chief (a wonderful man named Aaron who speaks decent English and has invited me to his church this Sunday) lives. Mateus laughed when he figured out my plight and put on the right path back to the Mission of Mangunde (keyword mission!). Mateus spoke to a woman who was heading to the mission of Mangunde to sell some wood that she had cut up and was carrying on her head, who only spoke Shindau, and she ended up being my guide back to town. On top of the bundle of sticks on her head she also had a large bag of mangoes that she was planning to sell at the market; after asking her a few times she finally let me help her carry them. So for the hour walk back to Mangunde I carried a bag of mangoes on my head. I have to say even though I went out for an hour long run and it ended up being 3 hours of being lost and maybe a little worried, while walking back to my house with a bag of mangoes on my head next to a very friendly woman who didn’t speak any language I was familiar with I was completely content that I was in Africa! And to top it off she gave me four mangoes, 3 of which didn’t make it more than a few steps (I was a little hungry after 3 hours of running/hiking) and the last one I gave to a little kid who beat me on a race back to my house. All in an average Monday morning before 9am here in Mozambique, I guess.
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