22/03/11

I finally gave up on waiting to receive my other teaching hours and went ahead and scheduled the second English Club that would meet in the mornings, for students who have classes in the afternoon. Today was our first meeting and 18 students showed up! So many that we had to bring over another bench and a couple chairs. And one of my English colleagues came too, in addition to Ronnie and me. It was wonderful! I was asking the students what they had done over the weekend and one boy told us how he had visited his friends in the bush and gone alligator hunting with a bow and arrow with them. And all the Mozambicans thought this was as strange and hilarious as I did. I asked him what exactly you do with an alligator once you catch it. he admitted he didn’t know and had never caught one, but his friends eat the meat. I asked, if they were hunting with a bow and arrow, how exactly did you kill the alligator? He laughed, he hadn’t made it that far but assumed that his friends knew.
I brought up this story in the afternoon English Club which started a conversation about hunting. One student told me about a method of hunting here where people here mix the sap from two different kinds of trees and boil it, making a natural homemade glue. They put this glue on sticks and then put these sticks in trees, so when birds land on them they can’t fly away. I love that in English Club I learn more about Mozambican culture than I have before, all while my students practicing speaking English.
We read a text about looking after the environment in class, so I asked the students what global warming is. I was pleasantly surprised that at least a few students in each class knew both what it was and how it was caused.