A new member of the family

The big news this week is that I got a dog! Last Friday when I came to Xai-Xai I was low on food and planning on stocking up on some necessities, but instead Naa and I ran into a guy who had promised to try to get us dogs. He asked us if we wanted to see some right then so we said, why not? He brought us, in his car, to the house of someone he knew who had two cute black and brown dogs and we jumped on the opportunity and took them. We didn’t even have to pay for them, just for the gas money to bring them home in the car.
So I basically had this dog at my house with me, but no collar, no leash, no food. Time to improvise! I made a collar out of a piece of rope that I had. I then used a carabineer that I had and hooked it onto my clothesline outside to act as a sort of runner and then attached the carabineer to his collar with another rope. He did NOT like the leash and so that set-up didn’t last very long. At their previous house they were only outside dogs and basically roamed free on the property, but apparently were disciplined very well (they were probably hit a lot). I eventually gave up on the leash and just let him hang out. Luckily he seems to be a smart little pup and stays close to the house. He doesn’t chase after people and will stop chasing after pigs and chickens when I yell at him.
He also follows me everywhere, which is super convenient when we go on walks because I never use a leash and he never strays from me, but is a HUGE problem when I need to go places without him. I was travelling to a nearby town on Saturday for a little PCV get together so I had arranged for a teacher at the school to come feed him that night. I tied Baloo up, got my backpack, and left. I got to the chapa stop and 30 seconds later, here comes the dog running to meet me. He had apparently chewed through the rope in record time and chased after me. Luckily the teacher who said he would feed him was around and sat with me at the chapa stop until I got on my way, and then he walked the dog back to the house.
He later told me that after that the dog started following him everywhere, and had a hard time getting rid of him. Since then, he has taken a liking to being inside the house some so he stays inside while I teach at the school and then I come home and let him out when I have breaks. It’s nice to have a little companion around and many Mozambicans are afraid of dogs and think that he bites so I think that he will keep away unwanted visitors.
Things are a little bit more organized at school this week. I finally have curricula for both grades and have the trimester all planned out, although I still don’t know exactly when the trimester ends. I have asked my director three times, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know either.
I was assigned to be “director de turma” for one of the 11th grade classes which means that I am kind of like their home room teacher and if they have any problems, I am the one that they come to. I find it kind of funny because I really don’t know what I’m doing, but I guess I’ll figure it out. I meet with them once a week to give announcements or information from the school directors. I had my first meeting with them Wednesday. I went over the info that I had and then we had a lot of extra time so I taught them how to play 7-up. It was a hit, but they all cheated, oh well.
The kids are very respectful of all of the teachers at the school. At the beginning of every class the kids stand up when the teacher enters and welcome them with this little routine:
Students: “Bom dia Professora” (Good morning teacher)
Teacher: “Bom dia. Como estao?” (Good morning. How are you?)
Students: “Estamos bem de saude, obrigado/a” (We are in good health, thank you)
Teacher: “Eu tambem estou bem. Podem sentar” (I am also well. You can sit.)
Then they sit down and we start the class. It’s pretty fun. They sometimes come take the chalkboard eraser from me and erase the board so I don’t have to. Once I was at the office in another building and some of my students were there and they carried my bag for me on the way to my classroom, which isn’t a weird thing to do here, and I didn’t mind. Also, during my night classes, especially when it’s raining, all the bugs come out and there are a ton of mosquitoes and spiders in the classroom. The kids always tell me if a mosquito is on me or they chase spiders out of the room if they come to close to me when I am teaching. I’m not a huge fan of the 90 minute classes that I have to teach because it just feels like such a long time, but otherwise teaching is going well.
The days are a lot longer now since I get up around 4:30 or 5 and then when I teach at night, I don’t get to sleep until 10:30 or 11, but I’m glad to be busy and I use the afternoons for yard work or washing clothes or cleaning the house. Last Saturday students were asked to come to school with their garden hoes to do some school beautification so around 8 there were a couple hundred kids around hoeing the dirt and cutting the grass. Since my house is right by the school they cut the long grass near my house and in my yard, which was awesome because it was getting really long and I didn’t know what to do about it. My director told me this week that I should have my empregada (maid) clean up my yard and get rid of all the cut grass because otherwise snakes would get in it. Right now she just gets my water for me and I like to be self-sufficient and do the rest of the household chores so yesterday I set out with my rake to clean up the yard. My director saw me out there and brought me a better sturdier metal rake and commented that I was a very hard worker. He said that he was impressed that I clean my own house, wash my own clothes, and do my own yard work. He then said that I am just like an African woman and was just born on the wrong continent. I took that as a big compliment because African women are very hard workers!
Yesterday the Government of Mozambique declared an Institutional Red Alert for the next 60 days because of all the rain we have been getting here in the south. I guess a lot of roads are flooded and they will be closing many roads if the rains continue. Hopefully I don’t get stuck anywhere! Today I’ll have to stock up on some food and stop by the bank for money so hold me over in case they do cut me off from the city.
That’s all for now. Hopefully, if I don’t get cut off from the city, I’ll have another update next Friday.

Really random pictures

A HUGE snail that crawled onto my porch the other day...the neighborhood kids then threw rocks at it later on and killed it

Cute and delicious pineapples and other food that I eat

My kitchen

My living room area and the mosquito net that I expertly rigged up when Anne came to visit

Me outside my house in my back yard

One of the classrooms that I teach in

Cute little lizards that climb around on the walls in my house.

First week of school!

Okay, sorry this post is so long, but it's a compilation of many days of entries and it has been an exciting week!

The last week has been full of eventful days and surprises!
Firstly as mango season winds down in southern Mozambique, pineapples have started to show up at the market! They’re not the big, fancy pineapples that we get at home. These are much smaller and a little bit sweeter and they are delicious! I went to the little food stand in my town and got 4 of them for 20 meticais which is just over 50 cents, great deal!
So all last week I kept bugging the directors at my school about when we were going to do the schedule and each day they kept putting it off until the next day. I knew that school started Monday the 17th so by Friday afternoon I was getting a little stressed that I still didn’t know what I was teaching! One of the directors ended up calling me Saturday morning and I worked a full 9-5 day with him making the schedules for all of the secondary school. We probably would have been there longer, except that the power went out. Also, I get my electricity from the school so whenever they lose power I lose power. Electricity here is bought ahead of time instead of being billed like in the US so you have to go to the electricity place and pay for it up front. I realized on Saturday that the school just waits for the electricity to go out, they then realize that they need to buy more, and then they go purchase it. So I think I will have less power outages now that the school is up and running because they will be more attentive when they run out of electricity (I hope). Anyway, I am teaching all chemistry classes for the 11th and 12th graders which is a little bit intimidating! 12th grade especially has pretty challenging coursework and the kids then have to pass the national exam at the end of the year so there’s a little bit of pressure there. A lot of kids fail grades here. It’s fairly common so they end up repeating years or some will take a few years off and then go back to school so some of my 12th graders could very well be my age. They also didn’t have a curriculum for me on Saturday, but I finally got one on Sunday so I could really start lesson planning! Finally! Also each class has 3 hours of chemistry a week. One is a double block and one is a single block so I have to plan a bunch of my lessons for 90 minutes, which is a long time to teach! (Or at least it seems like a long time to me since I haven’t taught before). Needless to say, I am very nervous for my first week of teaching here. I am just hoping that at least the kids behave themselves the first week and don’t make fun of me too much.
I also had the following conversation with my director as we were doing the schedule on Saturday (in Portuguese, of course):
Me: So when do classes start again?
Ped. Director: Classes start Monday
Me: Hm…..so if we’re doing the schedule now, and we just decided what teacher was going to teach what class, how do the other teachers know how many lessons to plan for Monday?
Ped Director: There are no classes Monday! Everyone comes for the school opening and we have a meeting. (In a tone of voice that seemed to say, “obviouslyyyy”)
Me: Oh so the students don’t come until Tuesday?
Ped Director: No, the students come Monday also, but there are no classes.
Me: Okay so when do classes start?
Ped Director: Classes start on Tuesday.
Me: Oh…okay.
Anyway, the point is that I have to constantly ask questions here about when I’m supposed to do what and where I’m supposed to be when because they just assume that I know all of that stuff when really I am clueless. At least I could be there when they were making the schedule so I could tweak some things. I currently teach Monday-Thursday mornings, and Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. I teach a total of 18 hours a week and I have Fridays free!

Everything around town is going well too. I think people in the community are finally really used to seeing me around and are much friendlier and always greet me in the street now. The first week they just stared at me with gaping mouths as I walked down the street so it’s much more comfortable for me now. A lot of people also know now that I am a teacher at the school so I am greeted by a lot of people as “Senhora Professora” or “Professora Michelle” which is what the students will call me in the classroom. I must say, it makes me feel pretty important being referred to as Professora all the time.

Okay so today was the first day of school and the best word I can use to describe it is a word they used when I was in Argentina—a quilombo! Quilombo was a word they used there to describe a chaotic mess, which is what today felt like. I arrived at school at 6:45, when I was told to, and there was only one other professor there and one of the assistant directors. I have 50ish kids in each of my classes and grades 10-12 were all supposed to be there, but at 7 (when classes were supposed to start) there were probably a total of 40 kids there, instead of the 700 that should have been there…
Anywho, the other teachers were just relaxing as they arrived. They checked their schedules and just hung around the office. Basically the kids hung around outside around the classrooms and socialized and the other teachers weren’t really making a big effort to get classes going or anything. I wandered around and talked to all of the teachers that I know and finally got the impression that teaching today was kiiinda optional, and most teachers pretty much spent half an hour or so with some of their classes just to introduce themselves and talk a little bit as a class, so that’s what I did! I gathered my first 12th grade class and got them into the classroom and introduced myself, talked about what Peace Corps was and why I was there, and I let them introduce themselves and ask any questions they had for me. This is just a smattering of the questions I was hit with:
Have you ever seen Obama in person?
Can you dance well?
Are you married?
Do you have any kids? (It’s pretty rare to be 23 and not have kids or be married)
Will you take me to America in your suitcase when you go back?
Do you know Michael Jackson?
How old are you?
Do they have dialects like Changana in the US?
Since you don’t have any children can I live with you in your house and be your child?
Etc, etc, etc…
It was actually really fun and I just chatted with the students for a while which really calmed my nerves.
The disorganization can be frustrating, but hopefully classes will start to follow an actual schedule soon and it won’t be so casual.
As for the teachers here, all of them seem really great. They are all so friendly and always want to talk to me. Most of them are between 25 and 35 years old so it’s definitely a young group, which is fun for me. There are maybe 5 other female teachers and the rest are male. I feel like most of them don’t live in Chongoene, which is too bad, but I’ll be spending a lot of time with the other teachers at school.

First week of school is over and overall it went well! I started teaching material to my classes on Wednesday and Thursday (even though lots of other teachers still weren't) and most of the lessons went very well. My Portuguese is good enough so the students understand everything and since they are 11th and 12th graders and maybe a little bit better behaved than the younger kids I havent had to do much disciplining yet. I'm very happy to have a busier schedule now and it's nice to be in an active environment with so many students and other teachers on a daily basis.

Back to School (almost!)

As of Saturday I have been at my site for one month! Sometimes it went by really slowly, but overall it’s been interesting. I’ve definitely gotten more comfortable in my town in the last two weeks. I’ve met more people and the people in the community have gotten used to seeing me around and have been more friendly towards me. I’ve also gotten better at occupying myself at home and being okay with not being super productive since I don’t have that many things to do!

A guy that I had met a couple weeks ago through a friend tracked me down after church on Sunday and invited me to a party that he was going to with his family. I accepted and as we walked through town he also invited me to come to a meeting of a local group who gives aid to poorer local families. When I asked what kind of help, he said that they check in on them, make sure they have food for their meals, help them build or fix their houses, give them rides places, basically whatever they need. It sounded interesting enough to me and I was excited to find someone who was interested in community volunteer work in my area because I really want to get involved with that when I’m not teaching at the school. I went to the meeting on Tuesday and my friend who is the new president of the group introduced me to everyone and explained that he had invited me to join their group. At the meeting they were voting on positions for the next two years within the group (President, Vice president, secretary, moderator, director of activities, treasurer, etc.). When they passed me a piece of paper to vote on I said that I shouldn’t vote since I didn’t know anyone and they all looked at me like I was crazy! They said that if I didn’t know anyone I should just pick a name and vote at random. Again, I thought that was silly and tried to refuse but they forced me to vote. Also names in other languages are really hard to spell! I’m pretty sure I spelled all the names that I voted for wrong and they probably knew which paper was mine, but at least I don’t think I influenced any of the votes at all. The next meeting is on Sunday after church so hopefully we will get more into the activities that they are planning then.

Here are some other fun things that happened this week:

-I watched a bat fly around my room for about an hour last night hoping it would find its way out the door while I hid underneath my mosquito net. It didn’t find its way out and instead crawled back into a hole in my ceiling: bummer. BUT I caught him the next night, yes caught, in a bucket. Also caught one of his friends the following night...I am really started to get sick of these bats...

-Both of my clotheslines outside got stolen at night. Clotheslines? Really?

- I was called to my school to “work” 3 days this week! The amount of time spent at the school probably only amounted to 5 hours total, but it was nice to have real work to do.

-I found a big hairy spider the size of my hand in my shower room. I tried to wait and go back later to take my bucket bath, but it was still there so I bathed very carefully and never took my eyes off of it and luckily it didn’t move while I was in there.

-I treated myself and bought skim milk and yogurt in town this week! (I haven’t had either of those things in 3 months so it was pretty exciting).

Okay, I won’t bore you any more with this stuff, but life is good here. I’m learning to be really patient with people and time and everything. I can never stay in bed for too long in the morning because there’s no telling when someone will show up at my door to ask for something so I always feel like I have to be dressed. One of my school’s directors came over at 6:45 a week or so ago to see if I had a cable to put the pictures from his camera onto a computer. I didn’t, but said I could probably figure it out and put the camera memory card right into a computer to put it on a flash. I figured they were probably pictures of some school event or something and sneaked a peek at one of the pictures while I was copying it. Turns out they were pictures of his friends and family drinking and partying on Christmas, haha. Oh well, I did it anyway for him and now I am always prepared for visitors early in the morning.

I think classes officially start on Monday the 17^th and planning and scheduling happens the week before so hopefully I’ll get some more info on what grade I will be teaching very soon!

New Year's 2011

I decided to spend New Years with a friend and the family that she lives with to meet some new people and see the way the Mozambicans ring in the new year. I spent the day with here walking around town and greeting people as we went. Most people in her town speak Changana, the local language, so she has been learning it with the help of a local teacher and I was SO impressed! She carried on simple conversations very well and Mozambicans are always thoroughly impressed when you come out with a phrase in their local language, let alone an entire conversation like she was able to do. In the afternoon on the 31^st we were sitting in the shade of the cashew tree in the family’s yard and just before 5 o’clock, the father of the family decides it’s drinking time. He invites us to drink with him and since it’s new year’s eve, why not? The man goes into the house and brings out a table, a bottle of whiskey, and three glasses. My friend asked what we would be mixing with the whiskey and he said that he didn’t mix anything with his whiskey, just drank it as it was. So that was that. The three of us relaxed in the yard, chatted, and sipped on some scotch.

The family had indicated a pig in the yard earlier that they would be killing for dinner that night and my friend and I said we wanted to watch when they killed it since we had never seen anything like that before. I can’t say that I regret the decision to watch the pig killing because now I know how it’s done and what it’s like, but I can definitely say that I would prefer not to watch one again. If anyone is on the fence about being a vegetarian, this will make up your mind. The short version is that two men tied the pig’s front legs together, back legs together and it’s snout shut, but that pig knew what was coming. The entire time it was squealing as hard as it could, kicking, biting, and it was tougher to watch then I thought it would be. They then took a big knife and slit is throat so the squeals and growls from the pig slowly sounded like gurgles as the pig took its last breaths. (Sorry if this is morbid, but I feel the need to share the full experience). I stopped watching around there, but it was a sad and scary sight to see that pig’s eyes as he fought for his life in the last few minutes. I will not personally be killing a pig during my stay in Mozambique.

My friend and I returned to our spots in the shade and continued to chat and relax as the food was cooked and the hours passed. [Note: I’ll probably talk about this in a later post too, but Mozambicans have perfected the art of sitting in the shade on hot days for hours and doing, well, nothing. This is a skill that I have yet to fully attain because I prefer to be moving around or talking or doing something, but I’m sure I’ll have it down after two years.] Anyway, we sat, and sat some more. We each received phone calls from loved ones at home, coincidentally at the same exact time, and then resumed our spots once again in the shade. While dinner was being cooked, my friend and I were each served a bowl of what I was told to be cow innards. I’m pretty sure it was cow liver and intestines, but I’ll never really know. That part of the cow is the best part to the Mozambicans so normally it would be served to the male of the household, but since we are outsiders and I was a guest, we were given this honor. In short, it did not taste good, but to be polite we ate as much as we could. My friend actually finished her bowl and I got pretty close, but the taste and texture with only whiskey to wash it down was a little too much for me.

Soon after, we ate a meal of rice, xima, pork, beef, and wine. The family had brought their television outside so that we could watch the countdown in Maputo on TV as the new year hit. During the evening, instead of watching the Brazilian telanovelas that they show on TV, the family put on a DVD of music videos by a Mozambican artist who goes by the name “General Musica”. The music videos looked like they were made by a kid who had just discovered photo shop. They included many fake backgrounds including one of him dancing in front of the White House, and lots of scenes of “General Musica” replicated five times dancing to the camera. It was pretty amusing and held our attention for a while, but we were exhausted. Remember, our schedules here in Mozambique are dependent on the sun so most nights I am in bed by 8pm and up in the morning around 5 or 6am so staying up until midnight was a task. We only sort of made it and ended up taking a nap in my friend’s bed from 10:15 to 11:30.

At midnight we rung in the new year with a countdown on TV, ate some grilled pork and cake, and then I went off to bed soon afterwards because I was exhausted and knew that I would be up with the sun again at 5:30am (which I unfortunately was). It was one of the tamer new year’s celebrations that I have had in recent years, but I must say that it was one that I will never forget. Happy 2011!