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

One and a Two and a Three

The reason I joined the Peace Corps, and maybe even the meaning of life, has made itself clear to me, in the form of 12 simple hand movements and some wiggling in time to a tune.

I have successfully converted approximately 178 Nauelans into Macarena-lovers, only a few thousand to go.  I wish I could bring you images of the spectacle that took place at the school this past Friday, when 10 of my students and I donned ski masks, dresses, and nose glasses to dance our new favorite dance in front of the whole school. But alas, my camera in now in the hands of another owner, a relocation unathorized by me.

If all I leave with my dear adorable 8th graders is the image of their strange, foreign English teacher trying to shake her butt, this mission will not be a failed one.

Do-it-yourself: Board Games

Materials:

- 1 square of cardboard

- scissors

- colorful pens

- 24 bottle caps

- 2 artistic children

Hello My Name is Inigo Montoya: How to Meet and Greet in Mozambique

First impressions are important. That’s why you should know the Mozambican way to greet people, for when you meet all my friends that I’m going to have by the time you visit me. That’s right, you’re going to visit me. And I’m going to have friends.

Just kidding. I do have some friends. It’s just a long process.

Every time I run into someone I know (which is every 4 minutes, because my town is made up of one street), we perform one of the two requisitory national secret handshakes.

The Down-Up-Down:

1. Grasp the person’s hand in a handshake.








2. Move your fingers up so they’re touching the other person’s wrist, as if you were arm wrestling.








3. And then back down again.

You may have to hold the person’s hand for the entire conversation. Do not be alarmed. They are not trying to propose.* 

The Press-and-Flick: 

Shake the person’s hand, and then press your thumb against theirs and flick it.

The Knuckle Tap:

Warning: be careful not to accidentally tickle someone’s palm, throw yourself onto someone’s bed, or lick your lips seductively, because that is code for “I want to do more than just meet and greet you.” We had an entire training session specifically on this topic, including a demonstration of a seductive lip-lick.

*sometimes they are.

The Things I Carried

Q: What are you glad you brought to Mozambique?

A: 

Next item I will be requesting from home: nose glasses with darker noses