07/09/10

“Folha” literally means leaf but, like in English, it can be used to refer a sheet of paper. During morning announcements yesterday my director was reprimanding the student on how dirty the school was, especially with all the “folhas” on the ground. It is a frustration of mine that the students, when sweeping their classroom, simply sweep papers and whatever trash is on the floor onto the sidewalk outside their classroom. So I agreed with my director that these papers needed to be picked up, until I looked around me and thought to myself, “there’s really not that much trash here this morning.” The director told each student to pick up three “folhas” and put them in the trash, so all 300 or so student picked up 3 tree leaves and put them in the trash can. And my mind flashed back to a time during training when I watched a woman walk around her yard picking up leaves and putting them in a trash bag, while stepping around an old bottle and a chip bag which she ignored. And the time during the REDES conference when we had a trash pick-up contest on the beach and we said no to the girls who came walking up with armfuls of sticks and brush and one of the girls very earnestly asked, “but why? This is trash.” There are some cultural aspects of Mozambique that I love and adopted instantly, there are some that grew on me with time and experience, and there are some that I will just never understand, no matter how long I am here.
At about 2pm on Monday the two (only) cell phone providers in the country suspended text messaging in hopes of weakening communication throughout the country to prevent more demonstrations from being organized. When we were first warned by Peace Corps a week ago that demonstrations might begin on September 1st, one thing they told us was which radio stations to listen to, should cell phone service be cut. And at the time I thought it was strange because although the government owns one cell phone company and large shares in the other, it would be a strange move on the protesters part to destroy cell phone service—it certainly wouldn’t help their cause. But now I realize that what Peace Corps was anticipating wasn’t that the protesters would destroy the cell phone network.