JUNTOS WORKSHOP 2012

JUNTOS workshops happened in June and July.  I was fortunate enough to be able to work and help out with two workshops, one in Gaza province and one in Maputo province. At each conference participants from 5-6 local JUNTOS groups were invited to participate.  At the Gaza conference we had 8 participants from each group, 5 facilitators, a tech trainer, and an enthusiastic group of volunteers present.  The weekend consists of educational and informational sessions on topics like self esteem, leadership, HIV and AIDS, gender equality, sexual health, and more!  The workshops are a lot of work in the weeks before: buying all of the food, arranging someone to cook, getting the t-shirts made, and making sure everyone is prepared!

At the workshop each group leader facilitates some of the sessions and the tech trainer deals with the more information sensitive sessions (HIV and AIDS, sexual health, gender).  The tech trainer was wonderful in terms of technical experience.  He is a musician and works at a music school so taught the kids songs about HIV and got their creative juices running in terms of other art projects.  In terms of the HIV and AIDS education part, he wasn’t completely prepared and I had to jump in and run some sessions, but in all it was fun!  I used to have such a fear of public speaking especially for a large number of people, but I think that my two years of teaching (in Portuguese) for classes of up to 80 kids has cured me!  The kids had a really great time.  The only down side is that we have so much information to cover, that the kids don’t get as much free time as they’d like.  The solution?  A group of the participants woke up at 4am every morning to get a game of soccer in before breakfast (seriously). 

The workshop only lasts 3 days, but at the end the kids were all hugging and exchanging numbers like they had been at summer camp for months.  Although somewhat exhausting, it’s great as a volunteer to be able to expose the kids that I work with to new experiences.  Here are some pictures of the whole group!

Catching up!

So I realized that I have completely abandoned my blog over the last few months so I am going to attempt to redeem myself with multiple blog posts today!

Happy Children's Day!

Today we celebrate Children's Day here in Mozambique.  The primary schools don't have classes, but the kids usually still go to school and play.  For Francelino's siblings and other kids in the neighborhood I bought them some candies and we're currently we're having a dance party in the living room.  Later the plan is to make popcorn and watch a movie (probably Shrek or Puss in Boots; those are their favorites at the moment). Why don't we have a Children's Day in the US?  (I think my parents used to say that every day was Children's Day, and thinking about all of the opportunities that many kids have in the U.S. growing up compared to kids here, I'll take that answer).

My JUNTOS workshop is coming up in a week so little by little I have been buying materials for the students attending.  I went and signed a contract with a nearby school to be able to have the event there and I am going shopping with a woman from the school on Tuesday to buy food for 60 people for the weekend!  I'm getting really excited for it!

Yesterday was Tobacco and Drug Awareness Day so my JUNTOS group presented a skit and dance for our school.  They did a GREAT job! I'll add some pictures of their intro dance below I tried to upload a video but the internet is just not strong enough. They did a skit about peer pressure and the consequences of drinking and smoking.  It was a hit!  Working with them is really fun and usually a bit more interesting than just teaching classes.

I gave a test to a few of my classes today.  With 70-80 kids per class and 3 kids sharing a desk, you have to be strict and creative to prevent kids from cheating! I made two versions of the test that looked almost identical but had slightly different questions and slightly different answers.  It took the kids a while to catch onto this and on the way out many kids said to me, "teacher you are very clever!" because some of the cheating kids did not catch on that they were cheating off of tests different from their own. GOT 'EM!  I have been tough enough on them that at least now they don't try to use cheat sheets, dictionaries, or their notebooks as much, but cheating off of each other is still a problem!

Hope you enjoy pictures of my cultural group dancing below!

The Adorable Children of Mozambique

These are mostly pictures of Francelino's brothers, sisters, and cousins, but the kids here are just so cute and love having their pictures taken! I figured everyone would enjoy these...

Third World Challenges

Lately things have been going well with work here, however I can't help but be constantly reminded of how the simplest tasks can be so complicated here!

About a month ago Francelino was visiting and the TV hadn't been working well so we took it to Xai-Xai to get it fixed.  So clearly there are no fancy Best Buy-like stores with professionals that do this sort of thing.  There are places where some guys run their own little business out of a straw and wooden booth.  They rehabilitate TVs with one soldering iron, some coolant fluids that they squirt out of an old soda bottle, and old parts that they take out of old broken TVs.  You also have to negotiate your price with them. It helps that I don't have to do a lot of this alone because as a white person they always try to overcharge me.  Once we decided on the price, they opened up the TV, messed around a little, and in 10 minutes had it fixing without a problem.  Feeling that we were ripped off since they fixed it so fast, Francelino made them agree to give us a verbal guarantee, in case the TV stopped working again.  They agreed to give us a 2 month guarantee and we were on our way.  The next day he went back to school, and hours later the TV stopped working again.  

Unfortunately this meant that I would have to take it back by myself to get it fixed.  This is no tiny TV and it's rather heavy so it's not easy for me to carry it more than 10 feet.  

Luckily, the first time Francelino asked his cousin to go with me.  After arriving and letting the guys there tinker with the TV for a while, it was clear that this was going to be no easy task.  I ended up leaving it there and planned to come back the next day.  Over the course of 2 weeks I went back maybe 3 or 4 times.  Two times they closed early, once I went and sat for hours, but it still wasn't finished.  My patience was waning!

Finally it was ready to be picked up and I had to go by myself.  I found a boy near the market with a wheelbarrow who agreed to cart the TV to the chapa stop for 10 mets.  Luckily I got a front seat in the chapa and was able to rest the TV on my knees.  Once I got to Chongoene, I called Francelino's mom and she sent one of the kids out with a wheelbarrow so I could wheel it back home.  

Since then it has worked well!  I find myself missing customer service, phone calls when things are ready to be picked up, and having a personal vehicle to transport things around in! It makes things so much easier!

I also went to visit a neaby volunteer's school on Wednesday.  It's about 13 kilometers away, but the transportation is so reliable here that I left myself an hour to arrive.  I gauged it about right because 50 minutes later I was arriving.  She works at a higher education school where the students live in dormitories at the school.  We have workshops coming up for our JUNTOS groups and I wanted to run a workshop there over three days.  The school agreed and we worked out the financial agreement.  The workshop will invite approximately 50 students and have 3 days of activities and educational sessions about HIV and AIDS, sexual reproduction, puberty, self-esteem, leadership, and domestic violence.  The workshop that I will be running at that school should take place in 3 weeks and I am busy planning the food, materials, etc!  It's a lot of work, but it should be really fun!

There will be 16 workshops run throughout the country in the next few months and all of the participants get t-shirts.  I was in Maputo last week to pick up the t-shirts from the place where we ordered them.  Along with the national financial coordinator, we sorted the t-shirts by size, re-packaged them and then dropped some by the airport to fly them thousands of kilometers to various places around the country.  I took all of the southern shirts with me and will be distributing them to the different areas this weekend. 

I always think of home and miss friends and family, but I am keeping busy here and things are going well. Until next time!

World Malaria Day!

This week we had a week of school vacation, marking the end of the first trimester.  Somehow I felt like I was more busy all this week and suddenly it's Sunday and I have to lesson plan and get ready to go back to class on Monday!  I spent most of the week working with my JUNTOS group at school which is an extracurricular theater group.  With my students' input, I had organized activities with them to commemorate World Malaria Day (April 25th).  For Friday the 20th, we invited another theater group to our school.  We had a theater technical trainer there who worked with the kids to better their theater skills and to give them ideas about communicating certain issues or topics to the community.  Each group came prepared with a skit about malaria and in the afternoon each group rehearsed their skit and received critiques and commentary from the other.  After a long day of activities, we ended and the participants stayed for a while and played soccer before heading home.
On Saturday, the groups arrived bright and early at the health center in Chongoene.  We were told to get their early to present so that we could catch people waiting in line to be treated before the hospital opened.  The theory was that no sick patient would sit and watch skits if it was their turn to see the doctor.  We were a little bit concerned about patients not wanting to move to be able to watch the skits more closely with the fear that they would lose their spot in line.  Two of my students decided to go explain to the people waiting that we would be presenting skits for them and the students handed out pieces of paper with numbers on them corresponding to each person's place in line so they wouldn't lose the order if they moved.  Surprisingly, the people waiting at the hospital caught on very quickly to this idea and there were a continuous stream of people asking for numbers so that they wouldn't miss out!  We didn't exactly start our skits on time ( I mean, this is Mozambique), but then again the health center didn't open on time either, which worked in our favor.  Each group entered and presented their skit and then a member of a third group gave a short informational talk about how malaria is caused, how to prevent malaria, and what to do if you get sick.  I didn't catch everything he said because it was all in the local dialect, but I understood enough to know that he got all of the main points right.
The skits presented focused on the use of mosquito nets when sleeping, clean living conditions in and around the house (i.e. no standing water), vulnerability of pregnant women and children under 5 to the disease, and the importance of seeking treatment at a hospital instead of by a traditional healer.
We had a pretty good turnout and even when the health center opened everyone stayed outside and watched until the presentation was completely over.
It was great for the kids to have an opportunity to present to members of the community and to work with youth from other communities on this project as well.  They are all so motivated and enthusiastic and I hope that we can work with other groups to reach out to the community many more times this year.
Malaria is the 2nd leading cause of death from infectious diseases in Africa, after HIV/AIDS.  This is a disease that affects so many people in Sub-Saharan Africa and so much can be accomplished by educating people about prevention methods and treatment! By giving communities the tools and resources to reduce malaria infection and deaths caused by malaria, we can save millions of lives.

Catching up for lost time!

Many apologies for my faithful blog-readers. I do realize that it's been about 2 months since my last post. I'll try to sum up what's been going on and give you a few tidbits that you may find interesting.

Francelino got into a teacher training institute. It is a year long program that prepares students to be teachers in primary or secondary schools up to the 10th grade level. He is in the English Teacher's program so he is being trained to be an English teacher here in Mozambique. The location where he took the entrance exams and interviews is only about 20 minutes from Chongoene, but once you are accepted to the program they can send you anywhere! They sent him to a school in Homoine, Inhambane which is about a 6-7 hour trip from here. It was exciting news to hear that he had gotten into school because higher education here is unattainable for most people, but it was sad that he was headed so far away! He lives at the school with all of the other students and I'll be heading up to visit him for the first time on Friday!

It was difficult at first to re-adjust to being all on my own again. I had gotten so used to always having someone around to talk to and to be with, and now he's gone! I still spend a lot of time with his family and his little brothers and sisters are fun to play with around the house. I try to keep myself busy with lesson planning and other activities in my town.

I got my flu shot yesterday Peace Corps style! They pulled up in a car in front of my school, I hopped in the car, got the shot, hopped out, and they were off! It was so convenient that they came through my area instead of me having to make the trip to the capital to get a shot!

I sometimes show movies to Francelino's little brothers and sisters on my computer in the afternoons. They get stuck on one movie for a while and eventually move onto the next one. The first movie that they loved was UP. Every day they would ask me in Portuguese, "Can we watch the movie with the balloons?". They catch onto the dialogue in movies pretty quickly too. Their most recent favorite film is The Sound of Music. They have been yodeling around the house and yelling Lieutenant! at each other which is pretty entertaining. I think they like it because of the songs.

We are almost through our first trimester of the school year. End of trimester exams start on Thursday and continue into next week. We will have a week off in April, and since we have no Peace Corps conferences, I have a free week where I haven't even decided what I'll do with it yet.

I frequently stay after school with my theater group and let them ask me questions about the United States. The kids in the group are between 16 and 21 years old and love hearing about airplanes, the food we eat, schools, universities, driving a car, and other things that they can only dream about here. Sometimes I wish I could just take them all back with me!

The second year of service is definitely tougher than the first. I can see a lot of the same problems at my school as we had last year, and although I spoke up and tried to present a solution last year, I can see that no change was made to try to resolve said problems. The thing you have to do as a volunteer is take one day at a time and know that you can't change everything!