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.

Déjà vu

I
teach 9 classes of 8^th grade English, which means I teach the same
lesson 9 times. Each time is a little bit different, because I learn from my
mistakes (I actually spelled ‘correct’ incorrectly in one class) and
misunderstandings (I was trying to ask the kids how many people are in the
world, and they kept saying, “two - man and woman”), but all the classrooms
look so similar that I could accidentally walk in the wrong classroom and teach
a lesson I had already taught them and probably no one would say anything. Who
knows, I may have done that already and I’ll never even know.

But
the personality of each class is beginning to develop. Classroom A always has
way too much energy, and when I ask them to repeat words back to me, their goal
is to shout as loud as possible (they loved when we sang Anything You Can Sing
I Can Sing Louder). Classroom I has the oldest students, some my age or older,
so they are more contemplative. Classroom E likes to laugh and is very sassy
and starting to test my limits. Classroom F asks questions. Classroom B loves
songs.

My
goal is to learn the names of all 438 of them. Currently, at the end of the
first trimester, I know about 3.7 in each class. Moving right along!

Déjà vu

I
teach 9 classes of 8^th grade English, which means I teach the same
lesson 9 times. Each time is a little bit different, because I learn from my
mistakes (I actually spelled ‘correct’ incorrectly in one class) and
misunderstandings (I was trying to ask the kids how many people are in the
world, and they kept saying, “two - man and woman”), but all the classrooms
look so similar that I could accidentally walk in the wrong classroom and teach
a lesson I had already taught them and probably no one would say anything. Who
knows, I may have done that already and I’ll never even know.

But
the personality of each class is beginning to develop. Classroom A always has
way too much energy, and when I ask them to repeat words back to me, their goal
is to shout as loud as possible (they loved when we sang Anything You Can Sing
I Can Sing Louder). Classroom I has the oldest students, some my age or older,
so they are more contemplative. Classroom E likes to laugh and is very sassy
and starting to test my limits. Classroom F asks questions. Classroom B loves
songs.

My
goal is to learn the names of all 438 of them. Currently, at the end of the
first trimester, I know about 3.7 in each class. Moving right along!

Activity: Spot the Differences

Steph, before training

Steph, after training, before service – bigger butt and rounder stomach (from too much xima, not
because I decided to start a family in Mozambique), muscles weak and succumbing
to gravity’s relentless tug

Steph, after service (prediction) – now able to lift a 20-liter bucket of water onto head, but
consequently spinal cord is slightly compressed

My eighth-graders

Most of them failed my mostly multiple-choice test, while cheating. But I still look at them and can't help but smile.

I think that means it's true love.

The Journey Home

The road to Nauela is not a long one (cue that song from The Russians Are Coming “it’s a long road to…” when they’ve just gotten off the submarine and are walking along the beach) by Mozambican standards, but when it poured the night before and left mud pits, and a particularly pointy piece of charcoal from the sack you’re sitting on is digging into your right buttcheek, and that sack of flour that appears to have a hole in it is starting to slide on top of your foot, you feel every bump in the dirt road. And just when you thought they couldn’t possibly fit another person, here they are slowing down so someone else can squeeze in among the tangle of limbs and babies and chattering and chickens.

I don’t mind these cramped hour and forty minute rides (or much much longer, if you’re going any further. Be warned, there are no facilities on this vehicle). When I can stop paying attention to the corner of that wooden table - which is also hitching a ride, along with a stack of plastic chairs, buckets of various shapes and sizes, a broom and 2 pots (they’re with me) and 9 boxes of gin - to make sure it doesn’t gouge my eye out, there is a breathtaking (or maybe that was that last bump, which almost made you bite your tongue off) 294˚ view of mountains and valleys and mango trees.

I yell for the driver to let me off outside my house (door to door service – what more could I ask?); he doesn’t hear me because he’s in the part of the truck that is actually made for human beings, and I’m out in the wind in back, so someone reaches around and bangs on the side of his door. My neighbor calls my name and comes running, and takes my broom and pots for me as I try to get off the truck without landing on the ground in a horizontal position (usually by this time my feet and a good part of my legs are numb). I walk around to the back of my house to greet my family and receive comments about how dirty I am. I climb the stairs to my porch, wondering what someone dropped at some point to cause half of the second stair to be missing. The metal grate that serves as a screen door makes a familiar scraping sound as I pull it open. I kick aside the crunchy cockroach corpses that accumulated in my absence, and I’m home.

Animal poop

During training, we designed mini-lessons and presented them to each other for teaching practice. During one person’s lesson, a volunteer was teaching about the environment, and asked us to write on a small piece of paper examples of sources of contaminants of local water. So I wrote down “animal poop.” After the activity, I stuck the paper into my Portuguese-English dictionary, thinking (and I specifically remember thinking this), “Maybe I’ll look fondly back on this piece of paper in 40 years. Might as well save it.” Fast forward 3 months, one of my students stops by my house to return my Portuguese-English dictionary that I had lent to him, and he says inquisitively, “I found of piece of paper inside that said ‘animal poop.’ So I left it where it was.” I have no doubt that he looked up ‘poop’ in the dictionary, but I didn’t attempt to explain the story behind the 2x2” piece of paper, which is still in the dictionary and just as I am typing this I remembered that the dictionary is currently with my colleague who also teaches English. But this time when the dictionary is returned to me, I will be prepared to tell the story.