Steph showed up late in the day Saturday to help.

Ann loves a good hoe

Leveling

Before.

10/07/10

This weekend Ann and I created our permagarden (permanent garden)! You may remember two days of permagarden training during my pre-service training that left me incredibly excited and motivated—now we finally put all those ideas into action! We started bright and early Saturday morning and had to start completely from scratch, first clearing the area and then leveling the ground. We then put a fence around the area to keep out the chickens and Ann’s dog. We greatly underestimated how much fencing we would need, so we had to finish enclosing the area with woven palm leaves, but it worked out. Finally we began the digging! We dug a swell (trench) and berm (little levy) to control heavy rains and keep them from washing out our garden. We then double-dug (permagardening! It allows for maximal root growth) three planting beds. We eventually got all three beds planted and watered Sunday afternoon, so now we just cross our fingers and wait for things to grow! And we are really sore.

08/07/10

Walking around looking at students’ tests as they’re taking them, sometimes I just want to shake them, “you so blatantly didn't study that you don’t even realize you are supposed to write a number for that answer and you just wrote a word!”
One of my colleagues took a cheat sheet away from a student who tried to claim it was just their scratch paper they had been using during the test. “That’s funny” she said “because this sheet cheat was written in black ink, but you're taking the test in blue ink, how did you manage that?”

07/07/10

I was really nervous about how my note to my colleague would be received—I wasn’t sure whether he would welcome the criticism or be offended, especially since I am not an English teacher. This morning (I can’t believe he have been grading, or at least going through, the exams already! Some of my colleagues still have yet to return the first test of the trimester) he came up to me and told me he had gotten my note. He explained that the test was in such poor shape because it had been intended to be revised before distribution, but due to time this never happened. He said he really appreciated my offer to help and wanted to run things by me often, and I got the impression that he may have wanted to this in the past but didn’t want to bother me. He is also going to university for a bachelor’s degree right now and asked if I could help with problems he was having. He then gave me a hard time for not being an English teacher and asked why not. So I am very relieved and happy with his response and looking forward to future exchanges.
One of the girls in 10th grade is easily 6-7 months pregnant, I wonder how she has managed to go unnoticed this long (pregnant girls have to transfer to night classes which my school doesn’t offer, so it means they have to transfer to Emma’s school).
During exams in any given class of 45 students there will be only about 37 rulers/erasers/calculators/etc, thus the students are always passing things back and forth and reaching over and grabbing things off each other’s desks.

06/07/10

Today I caught a kid with a cheat under his desk so I took it away from him. Then 5 minutes later the kid sitting next to him tried to cheat in exactly the same fashion. Seriously? I just walked over to him and didn’t even have to say anything, he opened his desk and handed the cheat sheet over. Then about 30 minutes later the SAME kid tried to cheat the exam same way. I just walked over and said “Really? Again?” “No?” he said, hesitating, and then after a moment began to open his desk again. I said, “Listen just shut your desk and take the test. Please.” I can’t tell if he wasn’t very bright, or if he thinks I’m an idiot.
One boy signed something to his friend during a test and his friend responded by shaking his head. But as he was shaking his head he realized I was watching, so he tried to play it off as if he hadn’t been responding but simply moving. This resulted in him basically imitating a bobble-head for about 30 seconds. I almost laughed out loud.
Today the kids were taking English exams and reading the tests always annoys me a little because they have mistakes. The mistakes don’t harm the integrity of the exam and I am technically not on the English faculty, but it still annoys me—hello you have a native English speaker at your disposal, use it! But one of the exams today was a complete mess which really upset me. There were 7 glaring errors that actually inhibited a good English speaker from successfully taking the test, but on top of that I went through and proofread an extra copy and found 24 grammatical and spelling errors. I felt like I couldn’t let something like this slide, so on the top of the test I had corrected, I wrote this note “in the future please feel free to ask me for help in writing or proofreading exams or anything else. Professora Anata” and slipped the test in the middle of the others I turned in. I hope and think it wasn’t out of line because I didn’t call my colleague out publicly, but also showed that the number of mistakes made was frankly unacceptable and I was offering to help in the future.

05/07/10

This week is final exam week for the second semester. The students don’t have any classes this week, but they take two exams each day (8th and 10th grade in the mornings, 9th and 11th in the afternoons). The teachers are randomly assigned to different classes to proctor the exams and with four exams to proctor each day I think many times that I may die a slow death by boredom. I don’t like being randomly assigned to different classes because the kids aren’t my students, aren’t adequately afraid of me, and I often hear “mulungu” (foreigner) as I’m walking to their classroom. This just annoys me because it is incredibly disrespectful, but also sure I understood at first, but I have been teaching here for 7 months now, hasn’t it gotten old yet?
Before the first exams one of my students who is apparently epileptic had a seizure. I have never seen someone like that and it was bone-chilling when they carried him past me covered in sweat, drooling and eyes glazed over.
At lunch my director asked me how the exams were going, “are the kids cheating?” Really, that’s like asking if the kids are breathing. From what I have seen there haven’t been too many cheat sheets or strategically open notebooks, but the kids basically take the exams together, always looking at each other’s papers and trading answers. There are probably only a couple students in each class who don’t share their answers or look at another person’s during an exam. My director said to me “I think the kids must get excited when they have you proctoring their exam because they think since your eyes are little” (Yes. Because I am Asian) “you can’t see as well and they can get away with more.”

Friends of Inharrime

I wanted to introduce “Friends of Inharrime,” a non-profit organization started by Mary that supports the mission and orphanage where I live and work here in Inharrime, Mozambique. Friends of Inharrime grew out of friends and family in the US wanted to help out in Mozambique, namely in the places where Mary and Matt (her boyfriend who was a PCV in Sofala province, Mozambique) were volunteering.
The sisters of the mission run a nutritional-support program that supports 600 kids in the local community by providing them with regular access to nutrition, as well as educating their care-givers about proper nutrition and sanitation practices. The mission is self-supporting through their on-site bakery and large farm and it is from these funds that the sisters support these children in the community, but sadly the number of children in need far outnumbers the money available. Friends of Inharrime allows people in US to support extra food, medical and education costs for a child in the Inharrime area for $120 per year. People can also make donations to support the formula-milk project for orphans who are unable to nurse, the school lunch program that provides students with a piece of bread each day, and any other projects that may arise, as Mary is in constant and close contact with the sisters and is very aware of the mission and Inharrime community’s real needs.
Mary and associates were able to partner with a local bank in Iowa to receive reduced-cost money transfers for the donations to get to Inharrime, and no money is taken out for overhead costs, so 100% of the money that people donate does directly to the people in the Inharrime community who need it most. I would ask anyone who is interested to please visit the Friends of Inharrime website listed below and permanently in my “about me” box to the right. Thank you!

www.FriendsOfInharrime.org

04/07/10

This weekend a ton of us PCVs (24 actually) gathered in the tiny village of Cambine to celebrate America’s Independence Day. I got a ride up with a minister from Maputo who was incredibly friendly and told me about how he was orphaned at only 5 months and initially only completed 10th grade, but he eventually was able to return to school and graduate and now he has two children in university (a huge feat here in Mozambique) and one child studying at a professional school. He was driving up to visit some churches in the north of the province so he dropped me off right at the road to Cambine. Cambine is about 15 miles inland from the national highway on a dirt road, so getting in can be difficult (you never know when the next car will pass) but the ride is gorgeous. I think that Cambine is what people (I) pictured when I was told I would be doing the Peace Corps in Africa. When we arrived in Cambine I was literally awestruck. Not only is it tucked away in gently rolling green hills, but it was apparently settled by the Methodist church which built the town out of sandstone colored stone. It almost felt like we were in rural 19th century England. The church was in pristine condition and though some of the other buildings were a bit run-down, the village was breath-taking. In the middle is the remains of the foundation of a building—the building where Eduardo Mondlane (president of the FRELIMO party which started and eventually run Mozambique’s fight for independence) lived while he was studying in Cambine. We wandered down to the market to check it out and realized that it was an exaggeration when we were warned that there was nothing. A few tomatoes, onions, and oranges were the only fresh produce in the market; the other options were cracker packets, pasta, chicken stock, and some assorted canned goods. The women in the market were incredibly friendly, wanting to know who we were visiting, where we were from, and if they could celebrate with us too.
Over the course of Friday and Saturday volunteers arrived in Cambine from everywhere from Gaza province to Manica province. We made (keep in mind every single thing was homemade, from scratch…we don’t have any other options here) tortilla chips, two different salsas, hamburgers and hotdogs (those were a splurge, but you can’t have 4th of July without them!), fresh-squeezed lemonade, onion rings, chili, assorted salads, some rice drink, apple pie, banana bread, brownies, and fried mandioca. And of course we were all wide awake by 6:30am each morning, making homemade biscuits, fried eggs, and french toast. As always it was wonderful to see everyone, to catch up new stories, and to eat great food.

The view from the back of the truck on the way to Yvette and John's

30/06/10

Tonight we had an absolutely wonderful REDES (girls in development, education, and health)! We meet twice a week and alternate between using the computers and having discussions. Needless to say, the girls are far more interested in and engaged during the computer sessions, as opposed to discussing life issues. Tonight we were supposed to use the computers but they weren’t working. I am not 100% but I believe there was a power surge last week that completely fried some if not all of the computers. So we are waiting on something to fix them and hopefully protect that from happening again. So we had a discussion about marriage that started out painfully. Thankfully two of the girls were incredibly animated and talkative, relaxing the environment, making others laugh, encouraging a few other girls to chime in, and leading to a wonderful discussion and meeting that we had to cut short due to time.
In America half the reason for getting married or divorced is for financial reasons. But in a world without prenuptials or being on your spouse’s healthcare plan, it’s no wonder why many people don’t bother making their marriage of end of marriage official (in the eyes of the law). Many Mozambicans have traditional marriage ceremonies without officially registering as married, and many have what we call common-law marriages. Also in a culture where multi concurrent partners is fairly normal and accepted, why bother getting divorced? Once a man (adult) who works at the mission sought me out because he had heard my parents are divorced. His parents had split up and he wanted me to explain to him why they would do that.