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

This is the way we wash our clothes, so early in the morning

It’s true, though. I wash my clothes at 5 in the morning.

Here is my washing machine:

The first bucket holds soapy water, and then come two rinses, but by the end of the load, all three buckets are so soapy that your clothes will wash you when you put them on with the soap residue that’s in them. Scrub the clothes together for awhile, until you feel like they’re clean. This amount of time varies depending on how visibly dirty the clothes are, how many clothes you still have left to get through, and what time you have to be at your first class. Apparently, there is a correct way to wash clothes, but according to my host sister I just can’t get that scrubbing motion right. But I haven’t noticed anyone holding their nose when they come near me, and I can still tell the original color of all of my shirts, so I’m not too worried.

Here is my dryer:

The sun and wind dry clothes with considerable speed. But, make sure you washed all the dirt out of the butt of your pants, because when you hang them on the line, all the neighbors will be able to clearly see that you gave up half way through that large splotch of mud. How embarrassing!

Does a chicken have lips?

(dedicated to Heifer Farm, where I witnessed my first chicken massacre)
What to do if your dinner is alive when you buy it:

1.      Catch chicken (warning: requires agility, and sometimes leaps and dives)
2.      Until dinner time, store in a safe/elevated location where your friend’s dog can’t reach it

3.      Hold down wings and legs with your feet
4.      Chop off head

5.      Pour boiling water on body to loosen the feathers; de-feather

6.      Slice off the little tail part that no one eats but no one knows why

7.      Hack open breast bone to reveal entrails
8.      Examine heart and lungs and any other organ you happen to find intriguing
9.      Dig hands in and remove guts (picture available upon request)
10.  Put in a pot over a roaring fire with other stuff that you happen to have in your house, like potatoes and tomatoes and chewy bits of stale candy canes

11.  Feed it to friends first in case you accidentally poisoned it

Congratulations! You have prepared a chicken.

(don't try this at home) (but if you do, take pictures)

The Colors of Darkness

(to the tune of Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkle)

Goodbye, silence, my old friend

Been interrupted once again
Because the sound of a drum beating*
Entered my window while I was sleeping
And the echo that was forced into my ear
Sounds so near
Woke to the colors of darkness

Find my phone and press a key

4am, it’s so early
‘Neath the weak glow of my solar light
(it’s dying after being used last night)
Now my eyes are strained trying to read some trash fiction
The light’s too dim
Back to the colors of darkness
 
And in the lack of light I see
A camel spider on my knee
Bugs invading my mosquito net
Bugs on my pillow and in my blanket
Oh wait, no, they’re just hallucinations from
The Mefliam**
I curse the colors of darkness

"Fool," said I, "now you’ve gone mad"
But being crazy’s not so bad
Writing words that don’t have sense or aim
Thinking thoughts I don’t know how they came
To my brain, confused and upside-down,
Swirling
In the colors of darkness

So I get up out of bed
Need to escape from my own head
Locate a candle, try to light the wick
The match is crap, it fizzes out so quick***
Throw the box across the room, giving up, go and sit on my porch outside
Wait for sunrise
To witness the colors of darkness…
 
*initiation rites—the Mozambican equivalent of a bar mitzvah—consist of a lot of beating on plastic buckets, at all hours of the night

**the anti-malaria medication I take sometimes gives me hallucinations

 
***poorly made matches: the flame goes out in the time it takes to travel the distance between the box and the candle, ie about 5 inches
 
Dedicated to the Liebendorfers, who lent me a solar lantern that I use every single day -- and which I have to replace when I get back, because it most likely will not survive 2 years being knocked off the table and accidentally dropped into my bucket bath

If Cockroaches had wings...

Now that I've been in Mozambique for a full 4% of my life, I like to think I have a certain level of expertise on living here. That level is described in the following analogy:

Steph is to life in Mozambique as a 4th grader is to her first concert when she was so proud to be dressed up in black and white like a real performer, but then she watched the video 10 years later and realized she forgot to play the b flats and auditorily resembled a flock of arguing ducks.

So in case you ever find yourself in the same situation, I'm including a list of things I've already figured out for you.

• 6 o’clock means 6am. 18 o’clock means 6pm.
• Do not shake hands or serve food with left hand.
• If you plant something out of season, it won’t grow.
• If you’re cooking something you’ve never seen before, leave plenty of time for preparation, ask for help, and have a back-up plan.
• It is possible to work hard and still get 8 hours of sleep a night.
• Some things get bigger when you prepare them for consumption, like rice, beans, and oatmeal.
• Some things shrink down to nothing, like tomatoes and leafy vegetables, and water if you forget about it.
• If you do something silly, you feel sillier.
• Friendship requires effort, but can’t be forced.
• Bugs can eat holes through a pile of students’ notebooks left on the floor.
• When you are hungry, there are few foods that you don’t like.
• If you trip in front of all your students, just laugh to yourself and keep walking.
• When pouring water any higher than waist level from a full 20-liter bucket, move non-waterproof things in the surrounding area out of the way.
• Cockroaches can fly.

Chicken Soup for the Protein-Deprived Soul: Write-downable quotes that I've come across

“So many things I’ve never done, but oh, how I’ve been loved. And, if such things were to be, I’d live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially.” The Girls

“It was Aunt Lovey’s belief that all people led extraordinary lives, but just didn’t notice.”

“Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things.” –Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman

“Your laughter and tears make my life richer.” –Erik

“Keep putting on foot in front of the other, and voila! Mathematically, you must get there eventually.” –Dad

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust

“To be is to do” –Aristotles

“To do is to be” –Socrates

“Do be do be do” –Frank Sinatra (The Art of Teaching Adults, Peter Renner)

“Come, give us a taste of your quality.” –Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Who did you eat for lunch?” –my students, trying to learn interrogative words. I actually had to bite my tongue keep from cracking up.

“Can we come back tomorrow?” –a student who had come sit on my porch to learn some English outside of class

A Collection of Visual Stimulation

Some of my kids, standing outside my house. Here, photos are not a very silly matter.

I don't even know how this happened. One minute I was sitting on the beach by myself, making a drip castle, and the next minute I was suddenly surrounded and having a sand-meatball toss contest with a bunch of 12-year-old boys.

For my birthday, the 4 volunteers closest to me came to visit and made delicious food (ie kept me from starving).

Funfact: mountains of used bags of sugar that you're supposed to be sorting through are actually more useful for having races to the top and getting really dirty.

Usually when I ask for help with something, someone just takes over completely. So I just stand around and take pictures and make comments, and in the end I help eat the product.