11/06/10

Last night I mentioned having to get up early in the morning to teach to Natalia and she said “you have classes tomorrow? But isn’t that torch thing happening tomorrow?” I told her nobody had said anything to me but I wouldn’t be too surprised if I showed up to school tomorrow and found out we didn’t actually have school. During morning announcements my pedagogical director said that we would be ending classes early, but that we would continue to have them until it was time and the announcement was made. I asked my colleague if we really didn’t know when we were leaving and he said “I think we know, but we just can’t say because otherwise all the students would split. So you can just teach until it’s time to go and someone will tell you.” I was one of only a handful of teachers who gave lessons this morning which is just miserable and near impossible because the other 400 students whose teacher didn’t show up that period were outside making noise and distracting my students outside the classroom door. I made it through four of my five lessons before we were told it was time to go which is good because we have a test next week and the kids need all the preparation they can get.
I don’t know many specifics, but every five years Mozambique has a tradition in which a torch is lit up in the very north of the country, and over a series of months it travels down the country by car and by foot until it reaches the southern end of the country, during which time the torch is never extinguished. This tradition celebrates the unity of the Mozambican people. The torch was coming from inland from Panda on the road that runs by the school Emma teaches at, so at the said time all the students and teachers from my school walked the 50 minute walk from our school to the other secondary school in town, Emma’s school. Once we got there, we just had to wait for the torch to finally show up. Two hours. Then everyone gathered by the road, shoulder to shoulder so that the 4000 people could be stretched as long as possible and everyone was directly on the road. A few trucks came by with people leading cheers and music playing which made it seem like the torch would be following soon, but it eventually became apparent that it wasn’t. People eventually began to drift away from the road to go sit in the shade like I did and wait another 35 minutes until someone said the torch was actually here this time. Accompanied by all sorts of important looking people, when the torch arrived at the line of people (and therefore Inharrime) a man got out of the truck and carried it so that each person could briefly “hold” it as if it were being passed down the line of people, though this really meant that each person just got to reach out their hand and touch it, myself included. The torch made its way slowly to the district government building where people made speeches but after four hours I decided I had had enough and left. I was told that the torch continued to make its way around town until 4:30pm, when it left for the next location.