28/04/11

Yesterday was the first English Club meeting after the holidays, so we were talking about what everyone had done for the holidays and for Easter weekend. One kid, one of my bigger personalities, had everyone rolling on the floor as he told an outlandish story about flying up to Nampula city to visit his white Brazilian girlfriend named Rita and then his adventures on the bus trip back (not true, but in English and extremely entertaining). I had lent the book “Matilda” to my best English speaker right before the holidays and apparently he read diligently the whole week and finished it! (He is the brother of my oldest REDES girl who I am training to become a group facilitator and helping to start her own REDES group in the primary school, so apparently awesomeness runs in their family.) I asked him tell everyone else a little bit about the book, so he started summarizing it down to every last detail. “This girl Matilda spends most of her time at home alone because her parents are always gone. Her dad sells old cars and he is a bad man, and her mom is always gone playing bingo and I don’t know what that is, but she is always doing it.” One of the difficulties of reading stories from America is trying to explain all of the culturally-rooted details that my kids here in fairly rural Mozambique have difficulty wrapping their minds around.
Yesterday during our REDES meeting a song came on and the lyrics were “we ready, we ready.” One of my girls got a huge grin on her face and said to me, “big sister, listen, they’re singing about us: ‘we REDES, we REDES!’”