getting into the routine

2/9/2008

They say the best way to learn is by teaching. I would like to add to that, the best way to learn a language is by teaching in it. I taught my first art class in Portuguese this week. I’ve never had such a big headache, but within a mater of minutes, verbs that I always hesitated before conjugating became second nature. I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the Portuguese verb for to draw (desenhar) after consulting my dictionary a hundred times during the first art class. (Besides for having the language obstacle for this art class we also have no art supplies, not even pencils or paper. I was originally only supposed to have five people in my class so I was able to find enough paper and pencils for them, but when I showed up I had thirty students. They had to share the pencils and we used paper from the garbage bin.)
I have been going through a Portuguese over load. For the first two month I was here I honestly thought I could learn Portuguese passively, meaning as long as I am surrounded by the language I will learn it with no effort. Not the case. You really have to be an active learner. Now I carry a notebook with me and write down the new words I hear and I study them at night. We used to only speak English in my house because it was the common language, but now that Jerome, and Flavia left, and two Brazilians are visiting, Carol and Mauro, we only speak Portuguese in the house. I can’t escape it. But it’s good. I’ve learned twice as much Portuguese in the last three weeks than I learned in the first two months.
It’s finally getting busy around here. Well, busy for Mozambique standards. It’s hard for things to get really busy here when everyone follows African time, and the sun really doesn’t help at all. I have four Art classes and four English classes. I’m also in charge of planning the open Saturdays. We just had one this past weekend and it was so much fun. Almost two hundred people from the community came. It was mostly kids. First the students put on skits making fun of the construction period (I’ll tell you about that soon). Then we had the choirs from all the different churches in the area sing songs. We had some games (I had a really hard time explaining an egg hunt to them. Each egg had a different letter on it and everyone was supposed to find an egg, bring it to the front of the school, and arrange the letters correctly to spell out a phrase about the school. However, the birds and the children ate most of the eggs before we could make a sentence). Then we danced and ate cookies.
The Open Saturday was meant to celebrate the end of the Construction Period, or what I like to call the most poorly planned month of my life. This is a time when all of the students and teachers come together to build and repair things at the school. I though this would be a great time to repair all of the faucets which leak precious water, but no, we spent most of the time moving sand or rocks from one area of the school to another area of the school. Monday through Saturday, we started at 6: 30 in the morning and ended work at 5p.m. that gave us time to clean and eat dinner before evening classes. For the first week I was in charge of cleaning and painting the pig pens and cutting the grass. Cutting the grass is quite an ordeal. They give about 40 students a bent piece of metal with a handle and for 8 hours they swing the metal back and forth and this cuts the grass. Every week a different group of students cut the grass. It took a month, and by the time we finished the grass was just as tall as when we started. The worst part was that the grass cutting coincided with the caterpillar-mating season. After a long day of cutting grass you were covered in bits of caterpillar. I feel personally responsible for the lack of butterflies in Mozambique.
After this job I was put in charge of keeping track of the students who took a break outside of designated break times. I could not carry out this job conscionably. It was over a hundred degrees every day, and the students were working in direct sunlight for 10 and a half hours with only a lunch break and two 15 minute breaks. I was supposed to write the names of the students who sat down and then if they did it twice I had to send them to mix cement. I couldn’t even stand up for more than ten minutes without taking a break let alone cut grass, so I felt like a terrible hypocrite. As a solution I started carrying my camera with me, and whenever the students saw my camera they all wanted me to take pictures of them working so they would stand up and working harder than ever before. I ended up taking 600 pictures in one week, but I didn’t have to write any names down. I became the official photographer for the school.
Now for the poor planning part: the director in training at the school decided it would be nice to build a bunch of walkways all over the school during this period. Knowing that she didn’t have the money to finish this project she started it anyway. First we dug a trench for the main walkway, and then we filled it with rocks, and put the dug up sand on top of it. Afterwards we put another layer of pointy sharp rocks on top of it. None of this sequence made sense. The director wanted to put cement over this but we couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t even afford the rocks to finish the path, so now we have a path that starts in the middle of nowhere and ends in the middle of nowhere. It’s a big eye soar. The rocks are too sharp to walk on so everyone walks on either side of the path but never actually on the path. The worst part was that we could have built the ugly path in a day or two but someone told the rock delivery guy to dump the rocks as far away as possible from where we were working, and so, we spent more than two weeks carrying buckets of rocks, 2 tons (literally), over a quarter mile distance of bumpy, sandy terrain. The students were so pissed off, and they really held nothing back when they were making fun of directors in the skits for open Saturday.
Speaking of poor planning, while we were building this doomed pathway, the government was building a new road along our school. After several days of work, and several loads of rocks and cement, they realized they didn’t measure things before starting and the road was going through the school’s property lines. For a month now, there has been a constant line of workers pushing wheel barrels of rocks and sand from where the road used to be to where it’s supposed to be. It’s quite comical.
Speaking of comedy, we now have the funniest housemaid. She is the Mozambican Amelia Bedelia. At first I was a little hesitant to have a housekeeper, after all I’m a volunteer. However, when you have to walk to the well to get the water for laundry, cleaning dishes and cooking, you end up spending the entire day doing chores and you don’t have time to teach.

Funny housekeeper story number 1:

We hired this woman, Joaquina, on a Thursday and asked if she could start this Monday. She said that was impossible because it was too soon, so we told her she could start the next Monday. But sure enough she came that Monday and when we asked her about it, she said she thought we meant the Monday that had already passed.

Funny housekeeper story number 2:

On the first night she cooked far too much rice. In the morning I asked her to save the rice for dinner. When I came home that night for dinner I saw that she had indeed saved the rice, but she also made another pot of fresh rice in addition.

Funny housekeeper story number 3:

I gave her money to buy groceries for the week. She asked me what she should buy, and I told her just the basics. When I came home our little refrigerator was filled with sardines. Hundreds of them, and nothing else.

If she wasn’t so funny we would have fired her long ago. I’m excited to come home every day just to see what she does.
Ok, I’m going to the beach now. Hope you enjoy your snow, suckers!

p.s. I never thought this would happen to me, but I’ve fallen in love with beans. They are the best food in the world. The other day I actually traded my piece of chicken so I could have more beans. It makes me think of all the beans I turned down when I was in Nicaragua because I thought they were gross. I wish I could turn back time and eat all of those rejected beans. Speaking of food, I highly recommend the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. If you eat food you should read this book.