"Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Thanks for the Grub"

This Thanksgiving season, I have much to be thankful for.

Hugs

The occasional protein (above: meet our Thanksgiving dinner)

Fellow volunteers

A roof over my head

My guitar

The ability to laugh at myself

Students who make an effort

And, most of all:

Fresh pao (bread) and peanut butter for breakfast

How to...eat a coconut!

1.      Choose your coconuts wisely. If you shake it and don’t hear anything, it might not have any water in it. If you hear too much sloshing, it has a big air bubble and therefore only has a little bit of water.

2.      Smash it on a rock or use a machete to crack it open. 

Stay far away when Steph wields the machete

3.      Drink the water. Slurp as noisily as possible, otherwise it will dribble down your chin.

The water doesn't taste as good
if you pour it into a cup. Drink
it straight from the coconut.

4.      Consumption Option 1: Use a pocket knife to slice out pieces of the inside. Eat until your jaw gets tired of chewing. Consumption Option 2: grate the coconut to make coconut milk, and prepare coconut rice or cookies or bean stew.

A "ralador" is a little bench with a grater on the end, used to
shred the coconut. When it's sufficiently mutilated, you can
strain water through the pieces to extract the coconut milk.

My dear friend Lona, ralaring coconut

My dear friend Leah, ralaring coconut.

Feel free to compare Lona and Leah's techniques, and constructively criticize.

5.      Save the shell to store garlic, borrow lit charcoal from your neighbors to start your stove, or make a coconut bra.

A kitten fiercely defends the
saved coconut shells.

To Whom it May Concern,

Don’t get me wrong. I will happily stuff my face with granola bars. I downed an entire bag of jelly beans in one day. I have no self control when it comes to peanut butter M&Ms.

But when I reached the bottom of a package I received in the mail and found more than a baker’s dozen of envelopes, each containing a letter from someone I love, I swept all the wrappers aside, stopped looking for another Dove chocolate hidden among the Sudoku puzzles and smiley face stickers, and started reading.

Given my slight aversion to facebook and irrational dread of talking on the phone, I’m a big fan of letters. That pile of paper and words and thoughts was the best box stuffer I have ever encountered. 

Here on this cyber communication forum, which is uncomfortably public but the best way I’ve found to give general updates and display pictures, I write about what I see and learn and do. And yes, it’s all very new and exciting, but truthfully, it can be lonely. It’s comforting to know that the people I think about are also thinking about me.

Peanut butter M&Ms will last for about 8 minutes; letters I will save indefinitely.

Rooster Rears and Bicycle Spokes

Last Friday was what I would describe as a very Peace Corps Day.

I was risen from my slumber sometime in the 6^th hour of the morning by the sound of students’ voices on the front porch, calling “excuse me!” so I went outside in my PJs to greet my eager learners. They took my two empty red buckets and went chattering to the water pump to fetch water for me.

I had decided to visit the family of one of those students, Rassul, who was currently pumping water. He lives way out in the mato (the bush). But my bike had a lot of broken spokes, so the first task was to find someone who could fix my unreliable 1.5-wheeled transport. My neighbor, who is capable of doing the job, was out of town, and it’s a mystery as to when he will be back. So we walked to the market to find another handyman, but his house was empty. He had traveled just the previous day. We went to the third guy and last option…success! If I went to buy the new spokes, he would install them for me. This whole process, summarized down to 7 sentences, actually took about 5 hours.

The bike-fixer was next to the house of two of my other students (see the post “The Things I Carried” for pictures of these two hilarious brothers in nose glasses) so they brought us chairs and water and we sat waiting for my bike to be fixed. After a test run on the new spokes and a fee of 15 mets (60 cents) Rassul and I were on our way.

He assured me that it only takes 30 minutes to get from the school to his house by bike, but let’s remember that he makes this trip every day, twice or sometimes four times a day. So imagine a small hiking trail through the woods that goes up and down over hills and across rivers (I rode across two log bridges, with no railings. I didn’t fall off.), and me trying to navigate this pathway on my rickety bike with no gears and 30% brakes. I am certain that Rassul made me go in front just so he could watch me struggle. On some of the uphills, I had to get off my bike and walk because my legs are simply not that powerful. On some of the downhills, I had to get off my bike and walk because my brakes are simply not that powerful. I was afraid of losing control and plunging into the forest. And my wise sister once taught me from firsthand experience that even grabbing onto a tree would not have given me safety.

I finally made it huffing and puffing to his house. I was offered a straw mat to sit on, and Rassul brought me a glass of water, which I gratefully gulped down in one breath, because my throat was so dry (I think it was the water that made my stomach hurt for the following 5 days...but I'm all better, mother, don't worry!). I wondered to myself how he makes that trip every day for school. School starts at 7, what time must he have to leave his house? Suddenly all my complaints of living “far” away from my high school seemed ridiculous.

I sat on my mat, admiring the quantity of chickens and pilaos (a giant mortar and pestle to grind corn to make cornmeal mush patties) that his family owns. On his family compound, there was the main house, made of mud-bricks like most of the houses in Nauela. There was also a round structure with a straw roof that serves as the kitchen, a chicken coop, and a number of other small box-shaped buildings that I couldn’t identify. I sat amidst the chickens, which wandered around me and sometimes hopped on top of my bag or pooped on the ground near my feet, for about 45 minutes. A giant rooster strutted around with his tail feathers high in the air. Then he settled down outside the kitchen with his rear end facing me. It looked like he had buttcheeks, but it was just bunches of feathers. Of course it struck me as hilarious, but there was no one around who I felt comfortable sharing this with.

My stomach rumbled. Rassul brought out a plate with some mini bananas. I ate 3 of them. Being hungry, I’ve learned, makes everything taste good. After another 45 more minutes, his mother brought out a plate with 3 hard-boiled eggs, 4 cornmeal mush patties, and some cooked tomatoes. Lunch! I was overjoyed. Rassul and I each helped ourselves to one cornmeal mush patty and one egg, and some tomatoes. We ate with our hands, as is the custom for most of Nauela. Plus, food tastes better when you eat it with your hands. 

After lunch, I talked to my Rassul’s mother about the possibility of him applying to an international high school. He’s one of the most motivated students in the school, and I want him to know what kinds of opportunities exist for his future, besides his grandmother’s field (see the last paragraph of blog post “It’s Not Ee-gor, it’s Igor”) where the bananas came from.

And then we sat around for awhile longer. I watched his siblings catch a chicken – a very entertaining spectacle. The chicken squawked and tried to find sneaky hiding places to escape from the gaggle of kids chasing it around the yard, but after a few minutes, it was dragged out from under the chicken coop by a triumphant little girl. I imagined the family would eat well tonight; chicken is a rare treat.

As we were getting ready to go, we noticed that my bicycle tire, the very same that had been fixed that morning, was once again flat. Rassul found some makeshift tools in his house and took the tube out of the tire. He put it in a bowl of water until he spotted the culprit, a hole in the tube, easily located in the water by a small stream of bubbles. I sat to watch him and learn – now I was the student and he was the teacher. As we were sitting there operating on my bike, I heard his little sisters chatting “My name is….” They were speaking in English.

“I teach them English,” Rassul said. “At school, I am student; at home, I am teacher.” Are we sensing a theme here?

As the bike recuperated from surgery, I got ready to leave, and his family brought me a kilo of beautifully bug-free dried beans. I poured them into my bag. Then they brought the unlucky chicken over to me. I didn’t take it right away, because I couldn’t think of a way to say, without being rude, that they should keep it for themselves.

“Are you scared of the chicken?” they said.

“No I’m not scared of it!”…I just don’t know how to explain that I’m shocked that you’re offering me a chicken! That’s what I was saying in my head. It was very generous of them to give me that gift. I tried to say thank you in their local language. I think I said it correctly, but they just laughed.

It would have been impossible to get lost on the return trip, because there weren’t many turns, but Rassul accompanied me almost the entire hour to my house, before turning around and making the trip for the 4^th time that day. He carried the chicken for me on his handlebars, because I was afraid of crashing my bike and prematurely ending its life. On one of the uphills, when I had to walk my bike, the book The Little Engine That Could popped into my head, so I told Rassul the story, in a mix of English and Portuguese.

I would not be killing a chicken that day. My colleague had invited me over for dinner, and we were going to eat rice with dried fish, but now we had a chicken! So I dropped it off at his house on the way back. I went home to shower, and he called me when he was almost finished preparing the chicken. Once at his house, I sat on another straw mat in another yard waiting for a delicious dinner, also to be eaten with our hands.

Colleagues and straw mats...

...and food, eaten with the fingers. This is not finger food. This
is rice and beans and salad. I love eating with my hands.
Don't tell my parents.

I had to share this picture with you.
You can just see the evil emanating from my eyes.

The Exponential Power of Spices

If you think rice and beans are boring, solve this math problem. 

A true Mozambican Meal consists of 92% massa and 8% carril. Massa literally means mass, or dough. It’s a ball or scoop or chunk or plateful of some type of starch, consumed with the sole purpose of filling the stomach. Usually it’s either rice or xima (cornmeal mush patties – more on these later. They deserve a post all to themselves. Pronounced “she-mah”). The carril is something to give the massa a little flavor, to help wash it down, and to get some protein or fiber into your diet. The most common Nauelan carrils are beans, dried fish, cabbage, tomatoes, leaves (leafy greens, not like mango tree leaves), or, on rare occasions, chicken.

So let’s say every meal must have either rice or xima. And those two types of massa can be eaten with one of the 6 aforementioned carrils.

2 x 6 - 1 = 11

Already, we have 11 different meals! I took one away because cabbage doesn’t go well with xima.

Throughout the year, with the help of care packages (thank you! These are lifesavers for my mental health, and threats to my physical health) and trips to city grocery stores, I’ve built up a small collection of spices. I have about 10 different spices - chili powder, cumin, thyme, basil, cinnamon, curry powder, lemon pepper, parsley, ginger, and “spice for rice.” So each of those 11 meals can be prepared with a different spice.

11 x 10 - 1 = 109

Voila, we have now jumped up to 109 different meals! I took one away because I don’t think cinnamon would go well with xima and dried fish. Although, I’ve never tried it. Experiment for next week, puh-haps?

Here’s where the exponential part comes in. Think, just think! You are not limited to just one spice per meal! You can use two spices in the same dish! So in addition to the 109 different meals that can be made with one spice only, we have a whole new selection of entrees, using double spices! Oh, my taste buds are hurting just typing this!

109 + 109 x 9 - 36 = 1054

I took away 36 because “spice for rice” doesn’t go well with xima. And, now that I think about it, it’s not stellar in rice either. But I’m not looking for gourmet meals here, just something to wash down my xima. And since it’s 9:45pm, it’s 2 hours past my bedtime, so I’m having a hard time thinking through the math, but no matter. Even if I’m 10 or so meals off, I already have enough of a variety to eat a different meal every day for 2 years of Peace Corps. I would only have to repeat meals if I decided to extend a third year.

So have I convinced you that you wouldn’t get bored with a diet of rice and beans and dried fish and tomatoes and cornmeal mush patties for 2 years? If so, please contact me ASAP and help me convince myself.

And send any recipes you find that utilize a combination of the edibles mentioned in this post.

Just ignore the housefly on the rim of the bowl.

"I am healthy to be, I don't know about yourself?"

Test-correction time is a time of red pens, stiff necks, and entertaining assertions from students who don't quite understand what they're saying in English (or maybe they do...?). Let me share a few of them with you:

"In Nauela, live many animals, rational and irrational."

"I like to eat rice and stove."

"How is ya'll's life in Mozambique?" (copied directly from a letter sent to us by students in Alabama. Sometimes when a student doesn't know an answer to a test question, they just copy any random sentence they find when they sneak a peek into their notebooks)

[in response to the question, 'what would you like to be after finishing school?'] "Quero fincar professora." Fincar is not actually a word but I think she meant to write "quero vingar professora" which means "I want to get revenge on the teacher."  Should I be worried?

My test was copied incorrectly onto the board by another teacher - there's no photocopier so we don't hand out paper tests, we write them up on the board - so when the students copied it onto their papers, instead of the response I was looking for, 'big dog,' I got a variety of responses such as:  "bong bing," "bing tong,"and "dong bing."

In response to the question, 'how old are you?' a student tried to write sixteen, but just wrote six, and spelled it "sex" (a common mistake). In addition, he wrote "I have..." instead of "I am..." (another common mistake, because translated directly from Portuguese, it would be "I have 16 years," like Spanish) so the result was, "I have sex."

The charred pot: a persistent presence in my sink bucket

Moments ago, as I was posting the previous post, I was simultaneously but unintentionally burning my lunch, a pot of beans. Coincidence? Power of suggestion? Self-fulfilling prophecy? I'll never know.

Mini-Dictionaries and Ugly Jesuses

No matter how the play turned out, two things were inevitable: the phrase “what the heck!” would be incorporated somehow, and at least one boy would stuff his chest.

When we began writing a skit for the annual English Theater competition, I tried to explain why I thought an all-male cast presenting a play about gender equality would be a contradiction. I tried to use questions like “look around you – is there gender equality in this room?” but my blossoming male feminists were determined to use that particular theme.

Sometimes it’s hard for kids to understand why it’s so difficult for girls to get a good education. Students see their colleagues, who are mostly male, and conclude that boys are smarter than girls. But at home, children are expected to do a lot of work – cooking, cleaning, carrying water, taking care of younger siblings – chores which are usually delegated to the girls. It leaves little time for studying. In addition, many girls marry as teenagers – one of my strongest female students just got married at 14 – and as wives, there is no reason for them to continue their education, because their job is to have kids. Therefore, there are very few girls in our English group, and those that are didn’t succeed in memorizing the audition text I had assigned to choose the final group for the competition. Ideally, to communicate a message about the importance of gender equality, I would want half girls and half boys in the group. But maybe the fact that we couldn’t even get one girl shows how important it is for us to address the issue.

In our skit, the husband comes home hungry after working in the field to find that his wife has not cooked. Thus, the students were able to apply a recent lesson I had taught on calão (colloquialisms) and our favorite line “What the heck! You didn’t prepare the lunch?” (with a Portuguese/Lomwe accent) was born. The husband goes to his in-laws for advice, who say that “everyone must divide the jobs equally.”

Competition weekend started off with a giant pot of beans, which I, contrary to past attempts, did not burn. I delegated the preparation of the corn-meal mush patties to the students, because I haven’t been able to get the consistency just right (“I am not eating this,” my neighbor announced when she tasted my handiwork). After rehearsing one last time, the kids (9 boys between the ages of 14 and 19), my counterpart (the teacher I work with, also 50% of my friends) and I ate dinner all together. Since we had to leave at 4 the next morning, and some live an hour away by bike, I had the bright idea of having them all sleep on my living room floor.

Unsurprisingly, Mozambican slumber parties are just like US slumber parties: there is no slumber involved whatsoever. My dear, studious, well-behaved boys shut their eyelids for a total of about 17 minutes. The rest of the night, they were rocking out on my guitar, listening to Michael Jackson and Hey There Delilah on repeat, reading all my text messages, and chatting animatedly in 73% Portuguese, 84% Lomwe (their native language) and 43% English. At midnight, a solid 4 hours after the entire town had gone to bed, they put on leotards and danced in the street. At 2am I heard, “I feel like going for a walk,” so 3 boys disappeared; five minutes later the other 6 were wide awake and dancing the Macarena.

There were 7 groups at the competition, all presenting skits with this year’s theme “We are all equal.” We didn’t win, or get second place, or third, or fourth, but they each received a mini-dictionary and T-shirt, which they have been carrying and wearing proudly every day since the competition. It was their first time acting, but they got their message across, showed some strong potential for next year, and made me laugh until my stomach muscles were tired. My favorite line of the weekend: one kid put on a coat that looked like a robe and pranced around, and another kid declared, “You is Jesus. You is ugly Jesus!”

Countries that start with "M"

I spent a total of 351 Rotations of the Earth in Mexico...

...and last week marked my 351^st Earthly Rotation in Mozambique.

My experience in the latter M-country is proving to be nothing like the one in the former, but since I love patterns and pictures, here are some things I did in both countries:

Consumed some edibles (Mexico izquierda, Mozambique direita)

Did some work

Extended my family

Gained some weight

Played with cute kids

Took a moment to ponder the meaning of life…

…and then realized there’s no such thing

Met some people I’ll never forget

525,600 Minutes

How do you measure a year?

• Thunderstorms
• Sunrises
•  Jars of peanut butter
• Cups of Cabanga (a drink made from ground fermented corn)
• Kilos of beans
• Cornmeal mush patties (the staple food in Mozambique)
• Boxes of matches
• Mangoes
• Burned meals
• Pumpkins
• Buckets of water
• Cockroaches
• Heads of cabbage
• Mataquenhas (friendly little creatures that nestle under the skin of your toes)
• Punctured soccer balls
• Students with confused expressions
• Minutes waiting for a ceremony to begin, a meeting to start, people to show up, transportation to arrive, internet to work, waiting, waiting, waiting…

Here's to another year full of minutes!

"It's not Ee-gor, it's Igor"

In the beginning of the year, I went to my first day of classes to find 438 faces staring back at me, and a list of 438 names.

Of the original 438, about 30 are now considered “desistidos,” (the opposite of ‘exist’) which means that they stopped showing up to classes and consequently were scratched off the school roster.

I tried to leave No Child Behind. But when there are more than 400 of them, and sometimes only 9 students in a class of 50 show up, it’s difficult to assess the situation of each one. With vastly different levels of ability in each class, before designing each lesson I find myself having to decide which students I want to teach to today: those who can follow my grammar explanations and speak up when they don’t understand and correct my Portuguese when I make the same spelling mistake on the board 6 classes in a row, or the students who have made it all the way to eighth grade without learning how to read?

That is why most of my students are stuck. In the high school I high-schooled in, a student who was struggling might catch the attention of teachers, and be picked up and put back on their feet before they needed to repeat a grade. In the high school I am teaching in, 23 over-worked teachers cover 12 different subjects for 1,000 kids. A struggling student can easily slip by unnoticed, simply because there is not enough staff to seek them out and address their needs. Even the most motivated kids may end up failing a class because they happened to be absent on the day of the test that determined their grade for the entire trimester, or they won’t continue past 10^th grade because their family can’t afford to send them to live in the city 1.5 hours away, the nearest location offering 11^th and 12^th grade. Regardless of my efforts, many of my kids will be stuck working in their family's field for the rest of their lives.

The least I can do is learn their names.

Did I mention I adopted fiftythreeuplets? They are now 13 years old.

I found this plea at the end of a homework that a student handed in

Singing and snapping to our favorite song, "I am running and I have the ball"

Meet the director of the General Secondary School of Nauela.
No, I am not posting this picture just because I look tall.
I am actually the one on the left.

Which switched witch watched which switch watch?

Sometimes, to really understand something that you think you’ve known all your life, you need to look at it from the point of view of another viewpoint.

I am speaking, of course, of tongue twisters.

First of all, do tongue twisters really twist your tongue? I don’t remember my tongue ever accidentally curling into a triple pronged clover, or whatever you call that cool trick, during an attempt to describe where She sells her seashells.

Second of all, let's look at the sentences themselves. After failing to find the equivalent of “tongue twister” in Portuguese, I settled on calling them senseless sentences, because that’s what they really are. Don’t let them fool you. How do you pick a pepper that’s already pickled? Or is Peter Piper not actually in his garden picking peppers, but in the grocery store, picking out which brand he wants? Does he want sweet and sour, or a jar of wickles?

These Sensless Sentences are tricky, too. For almost two decades, I imagined a woodchuck gnawing on wood, seeing how many logs he could get through. Only when I was in front of my class explaining the meaning of the sentence in Portuguese did I realize that “chuck” actually means “throw.” Now the image of the woodchuck, who, until this revelation, looked kind of like a beaver in my mind, has grown muscles and is in a field chucking wood, javelin-style.

We start off every lesson with a senseless sentence. Now, I’m wondering if it would be appropriate to teach my kids this one: I am a mother pheasant plucker, I pluck mother pheasants. I am the best mother pheasant plucker that ever plucked a mother pheasant.

above: my colleague teaches our English club a song and dance