29/06/10

Today a woman at the mission said to one of the girls, “you should brush your hair you know, you would be very pretty.” The girl responded “but I am too dark. Except right here by my mouth” she has a birthmark “my skin is lighter here!”
Today my director was walking by my classroom when she noticed all the kids sitting on the floor and asked why. I told her that any kids who are late to class or don’t do their homework sit on the floor. “Don’t you have any shame?!” she asked them. Well, no they don’t apparently. Yesterday in one class I hit a new record: 34 kids on the floor and only 10 sitting at desks.
In town a guy asked me if I were going to Maputo, trying to get me onto his bus. “No, I LIVE here!” It still puzzles me that some people still haven’t figured that out. It boggles my mind when I go down into the lower market where no South African tourist has ever ventured, that people still try to speak to me in English and rip me off. I was going to barter for a lower price from one man (though he wasn’t ripping me off) because we had been talking for a while, but then he asked me for my number and I realized that I would have to make a trade. Damn. I just paid the higher price—totally worth it for the all creepy text messages I won’t be getting in the future.
I really should know better by now, but I lent my flash drive to my director for a couple minutes so she could print something and it came back full of viruses. It’s a puzzle to all PCVs here: in a country with so few computers, how can there be so many viruses on every single one?