How’d you like to see my House?

I may have said it before – honestly, I can’t remember – but the house I’m currently living in, even with it inconsistent amenities, is nicer than anything I ever occupied during my tenure as a student living in Boulder.  I am extremely fortunate to have been given such an incredible home to live in.

In Colorado, I moved with every single opportunity I had, never staying in one place longer than a year.  It wasn’t because of crappy housing conditions (albeit I lived in some really crappy houses), I just really like moving. Crazy, I know, but there’s something that really excites me about having the opportunity to create an entirely new, yet comfortable living environment using whatever tools and items are at your disposal.  It’s like being given a blank canvas, and your personal items and whatever is available at the local hardware store are different colors of paint.

In Boulder, I could fill my palate and paint with just about any color I wanted.  A wide-variety of stores, ranging from Target and Costco to Circuit City (RIP) and that place I got parts for my dishwasher one time all provided me with access to just whatever resources I needed (money typically being the only limiting factor).  In Mozambique, it’s a bit of a different story.  Money stills limits what I can buy, but so does the underdeveloped capitalistic society in which in I live.  I have access to the basic colors like black, red and blue, and then sometimes green and yellow if it’s not raining and the roads aren’t flooded.  If I want something that I didn’t bring with me from home, I either have to mix together the colors that I do have to try and make it, or just settle for living without. A lot of the time, you just have to settle.

Over the course of the last two months, I’ve worked hard at making this place my own.  I’m really happy with the results, and although it was already pretty comfortable when I arrived thanks to the electricity, running water, and some nice art that Chris left on the walls, it’s now a place that truly feels like home. 

So, without further ado, I present to you my Casa.

My Veranda out front.

Front Yard...Growing some Grass

Shot of the living room from the front door.

Entering the kitchen from my living room.

Looking back towards the living room.

My sink!

Pantry.  On a good day.

Another shot of the living room.

Spare bedroom.

Looking into the casa de banho from the living room.

Inside the Casa de Banho.

My bedroom!  Observe...storage!

Some Shots of the Machamba:

View of the Machamba from my back door.

My Corn!

Looking back towards my house.

Four Month Anniversary.

Today marks the four month anniversary of my start as a Volunteer with the Peace Corps (Thanks for the reminder Anna Brandt).  Four Months ago today, I arrived to staging in Philadelphia, 27 years old and feeling uneasy, curious, and enthusiastic about the next 27 months of life. Today, I still carry the same set of feelings, although this time it’s my stomach that’s uneasy and not my nerves.  I think it was the Cabanga I tried on the street that got to me… don’t judge me for drinking street food.

Cabanga (I think that’s the name…subject to change when I learn it for real), is a homebrewed alcoholic beverage they make here by fermenting what is essentially just corn flour and water.  It’s thick, off-white, soupy and sour.  It’s got a consistent texture on par with watered down corn-flour pancake batter, which is essentially what it is, less all the stuff that makes pancake batter taste awesome.  The taste reminds me a lot of the fermented mare’s milk they drink in Kazakhstan to quench their thirst on hot days, except that was a delicacy and from what I understand, this is more of a desperate substitute for alcohol when people are unable to afford the $0.66 fifth of plastic-bottle gin.

Cabanga, yo.

There’s tons of people who sell this stuff all over the place.  They make it in a big bucket and then set up camp somewhere to sell their product to you – still festering as it ferments in the bucket – by the cup for five mets (about $0.17) a pop. It’s a steal, really is.  When you give the brewer (typically a woman dressed in a flashy capulana and sporting a pejorative facial expression that makes you feel like you just kicked a child) payment for the viscous libation, she hands you a small plastic mug to drink out of that she’s just used to scoop out a hearty portion of a substance that probably should be baked rather than sipped.  You then sit, relax, and chew the fat (and the drink) with the other locals enjoying their inebriating bread water.  When you’re done, you hand the cup back to the woman, who then uses it, unwashed, to serve another patron.  Yummy.

Kind of like every trip to Vegas ever, the experience itself is a whole lot more pleasant in the moment, than the feeling you get when you walk away and start thinking to yourself “Oh my god, what did I just do to my body.”

When you’re up, you’re really up. But when you’re down…

Thus far, Week #2 of School has done a great job of further reinforcing the idea that service in the Peace Corps is like riding an emotional rollercoaster:  When you’re up, you’re really up; but when you’re down, you give new meaning to the term. 

 

The past two days sucked.  Then they got worse.  Then they got a little better, and then I showered in the rain and it was awesome.  But then the rain stopped and I was reminded that I still had to lesson plan and teach tomorrow so they started sucking again. But let me explain…

Yesterday, one of the head-honchos at my school decided that he wanted to redo the schedules for every teacher and class.  Why?  I don’t know.  And I don’t think he did either.  Maybe he did.  I don’t know. Thing is, I had already spent four lunch-less days during the week right before classes began designing the original schedule by myself using a nifty little computer program and some information he had given me.  Everything was good and everybody seemed content with the finished product, but for some reason, things needed to be changed.  Such is life here in Mozambique.

I finished up my final class for the day around 1130am, and feeling hungry, anxious and sleep-deprived, I was eager to get home, eat and start lesson planning for the two double periods I had the next day so that I could try and get to bed a little earlier.  Nope.  Somebody had other plans for me, and rather than those plans featuring a delicious home-made lunch, I was served a nice hearty portion of raw stress. I was told to wait at school for the guy to arrive, who would then give me some instructions on what to do.  So I waited.  And waited.  And then waited some more.  Finally, after an hour and a half, I decided to start walking home.  Wouldn’t you know it, but right as I turned the corner of the school complex and had my house in site, the man I had been waiting for pulled up in his car right in front of me and whisked me back to school.  I spent the next three and a half hours hunched over a computer redo-ing all the work I had previously done two weeks before.  At least this time was a little bit easier since I was more familiar with the program and able to use my old model as a template.  I finally finished in the late afternoon and immediately went home to violently devour the first edible items I could find and begin lesson planning for the next day. 

Because it’s been a while since I’ve browsed a Physics textbook, it usually takes me an equally elongated amount of time to write up a plan.  The reason for this is because I have to re-teach myself the material prior to putting anything on paper.  Problem is, my primary resource is a Portuguese textbook.  Luckily, I’ve got a little internet access every so often, so I can put google translate to use as needed.

I worked late into the night, and finally finished somewhere between midnight and one-in-the-morning.  Then I showered and went to bed, and woke up five hours later because it is impossible to sleep past 6:30.  After eating some breakfast and doing a quick once-over of the lesson plan on Uniform Rectilinear Movement that I had written in a zombie state the night before, I ran off to school to start my Wednesday.  It would have been better if I had just stayed home.  

My lesson bombed.  The plan I had worked so hard on was a complete disaster.  The students had no idea what I was talking about, and I soon discovered why.

For starters, I did a crappy job of presenting the material.  That’s on me.  But, I soon discovered that my previous suspicious about my students math skills were way more accurate than I had hoped.  The horrible truth is that the majority of my 11^th and 12^th graders are lacking even the most basic of math skills. I’m supposed to teach them things like Mechanics, Thermodynamics, and Introductions to Atomic and Nuclear Physics, yet some of my students can’t add or subtract.  And an even bigger portion of them can’t comprehend the concept of a negative number. Commence freak out:  Wait…what?! How did this happen?  Holy shit, what am I supposed to do about it?

Well, I did the only thing I could do; I persevered and pressed on.  I spent an hour and a half struggling through the class trying to make on-the-fly alterations to my junky lesson plan all the while trying to stay positive and energetic. 

There’s no question that teaching, albeit an incredible opportunity to shape young hearts and minds, is a tough job.  The task is daunting enough when you have to do it in English, and it’s even harder when you have to teach in a different language. But this feels like I’ve been assigned to climb a mountain on the moon without a space suit or shuttle.  In the words of my sister:  Whomp, whomp.

School!

It’s funny, I’ve been so wrapped up in everything else going on in life that I’ve totally put off writing about the primary reason I was actually sent to Africa in the first place: to teach!  Last week was the first week of classes, and oddly enough, here in Mozambique it is apparently also the least important week of the entire year.

We got warning after warning about how students wouldn’t actually arrive until the second or third, and sometimes fourth week, but it was hard to accept that as truth.  “Why would kids not come to school when it starts?” we thought. “Why would they just not show up even though they know they have to?”

Well, it’s because it’s Mozambique, and here in Mozambique they do things differently.  So, during the first week of classes, when I actually had students show up (my largest class was 8 kids, my smallest was 0), I wasn’t really able to do anything.  If I were to teach something, it would only have to be repeated to those who had falta’ed and decided not to come to school that day, which was a serious majority of the class.  So instead of teaching anything, I decided to just introduce myself, talk about classroom policies and rules, and then play a little math review game.  It all went pretty smoothly, and actually turned out to be a huge language confidence booster. But the game on the other hand, was a much different story. 

If the small sample of the students I was actually able to work with is any sort of accurate representation of my classes universal mathematical abilities, then it’s gonna be long year.  Imagine a group of 12^th graders that are studying advanced principles of physics, chemistry, and biology, yet aren’t able to do simple algebra.  Now imagine that multiplication and division are not strong points either.  Now, imagine that same group can’t even add or subtract numbers very well.  Now you have a better idea of what I was working with.