15/08/11

On Friday afternoon I ran into a couple of my (former) students. “Teacher, you are here! Why didn’t you come to class?” I was puzzled, I had been told by my director and pedagogical director that I shouldn’t continue teaching because the new teacher would be teaching my lessons. Turns out nobody had appeared to teach the lessons. I was frustrated because I could have continued teaching until the new teacher actually came, since I had already planned those lessons when I thought I would be giving them. But I had been told to stop teaching. I talked to Mary, my predecessor, and found out that the same thing happened to her when she was here. That made me feel a little better because, although I am excited for the opportunity I am being given, I was feeling depressed about not teaching anymore. Rather, that my school might have thought I shouldn’t be teaching anymore. I turned in a possible schedule to my pedagogical director on Thursday in hopes that he would tell me what he liked or didn’t like about it, and then I could revise. But when I stopped by his office last week he hadn’t had time to look at it yet. This morning I dropped in and asked how he was doing. He responded “more or less…because I lost my glasses so I can’t see anything or do any work until I get new ones.”
My REDES groups have three Inter-group Exchanges coming up in the next 2 months. Yikes. That’s a lot of work for me. But it will worth it for the girls, I just have to keep reminding myself that. In all three we hope to paint murals depicting the contributions of women in Mozambican history/society, so I have been busy creating designs. Ann and I submitted a letter to the administration this morning but they wouldn’t accept it because it was addressed to the administration with attention to the administrator, rather than being directly addressed to the administrator, because we needed to include a request in the subject line, rather than just a description, because we had the date written at the top and the bottom of the page, rather than just at the bottom, and because we had the administrator’s name written on the left-hand side, rather than on the right. I edited the letter, so hopefully they will accept this one. Naomi, another PCV went to Xai-Xai today to buy paint supplies for the Inter-group Exchange we have coming up on the 27th. Yesterday I wrote her a REDES check so that she wouldn’t have to front the cash for the supplies. But today the Barclays Bank in Xai-Xai isn’t making deposits. Someday, everything in America will seem so simple.