Sunday afternoon dance party. I swear, the kids here are born already knowing how to dance.

27/04/10

May first is Labor Day in Mozambique. Noting the irony that it falls on a Saturday this year, I asked if we would get either Friday or Monday as a holiday. It was explained to me that because it fell on a Saturday then no, we don’t get a holiday from work, but if it had fallen on a Sunday then we could have.
One of the nice things about teaching five math classes is that I get five chances to get my lesson right (this, of course, is also the downside). Today was the introduction to our new theme, equations, and although the kids have seen them before in 7th grade math, I like to start from step zero because that’s where some of my kids are. I was trying to show them how equations exist in everyday life, we just need to translate them into the language of math. For example, the phrase “I had 7 oranges but dropped some and now I only have 2. How many did I drop?” can be written in math 7-x=2. I try to keep in mind that when I do fun and different stuff like this, it is completely brand new to my students and they probably think I am a little crazy. So the first lesson I just really did not do a good job explaining this concept to the kids, and when I asked them to all write five phrases, first in Portuguese and then in the language of math, they either couldn’t do it or used my exact phrase with different numbers. But the second time around with that lesson I had people writing phrases about having to distribute 10 oranges between 5 people and (to the class’ amusement) having started with 20 cigars but having already smoked 14. Progress is progress.
One day Ann was walking the 2+ mile walk from her house out the mission where I live. A car of white South Africans pulled over, rolled down their window and said, why are you walking? She explained that she lives here and she was going to visit a friend who lives about two miles out of town. They accepted this, rolled their window back up, and drove off. Thanks for the ride.

26/04/10

First day of the second trimester today, nice to get back into the swing of things.
My two friends just had their house robbed for the third time, so they now have to move houses. After the first two times they were given the option to leave but they very bravely and admirably decided that they had been at their site for well over a year and were now a part of their community, so they didn’t want to have to recreate that in a new place with only a few months left in their service. But enough is enough, so now we are just all hoping that they will be able to stay at the same school at least, especially since they only have two trimesters left here and having to switch schools now would be a nightmare.
There are many used clothing markets in Mozambique, and Africa, filled with all the clothes you donated to Goodwill 10 years ago. Literally, all the clothes come from Europe and America, with all the brands you recognize. The Africans refer to these used-clothing markets as the “dead mulungu” (mulungu is the word for foreigner) markets. When asked why, it was explained that it was assumed that all the clothes in the markets where from dead mulungus, because why else would someone give away perfectly good clothing?

The Inharrime crew, Ann with her girls and me with mine.

The girls from Laura Vicuña who came with me to the conference.

Beach trash-pick-up, one of the afternoon conference sessions.

25/04/10

Thanks to all of my colleagues showing up to work on time and everyone working hard, we were able to finish grades yesterday. We had a meeting Thursday, but my director very graciously allowed me to miss it to go to the REDES (Girls in Development, Education, and Health) conference instead. By leaving early Thursday morning I was able to make it down to Xai-Xai in time to start the day, so I able to be at two full days of the conference.
The conference, what I saw of it, was wonderful. The girls from Moz 13 who spent months planning and coordinating all the logistics and the conference was incredibly well-run, they left big shoes for us in Moz 14 to fill. It is difficult to verbalize the feeling inside when you see 50 young girls learning new things, enjoying learning new things, excitedly participating in activities, and feeling incredibly empowered and enabled. Especially in a country like Mozambique where women are often treated like second-class citizens. From what I could tell, the girls at the conference had incredible week, from the all things they learned and did, to the new friends they made.

22/04/10

Last night I was playing the guitar. Two girls were helping me sing the chorus, one was accompanying me on the unplugged piano, two girls where ballroom dancing, and two girls where dancing as if it were a Shakira video.

21/04/10

As I understand it, one of the girls from the orphanage who is in the 8th grade won mvp for the football (soccer) tournament that took place over break.
As far as I can tell, honey can’t be found in stores here (at least outside of Maputo). Luckily for me, honey is produced somewhere near Inharrime and sold on the side of the road in various containers. So last week I bought honey in an old gin bottle and finally settled down to use some today. Four dead bees came out first. When I asked if this was normal I was told “of course! That means it was really fresh!”
Today during a faculty meeting one colleague asked for advice because he was encountering a speech defect in a student that he had never seen before. His student pronounces his “F”s as “P”s, thus his continent becomes Aprica, etc. My of my other colleagues quickly quipped “that’s too bad, instead of having [faith] he has [feet].”

20/04/10

This week, I suppose since we are working through our break, all the faculty have been fed snacks and lunch courtesy of the mission. After lunch in the orphanage dining hall we headed back down to the secondary school, but rather than returning to the classrooms where we had been working, everyone loitered outside. I asked what we were waiting for. My colleague seemed surprised, “well we just ate, we need to digest! You can’t do anything right after you eat!” I laughed, “but it’s not like we are doing anything physically strenuous, we are just using our brains, I don’t think that will upset our digestion process.” They just shook their heads at me.
On Sunday Irmã Albertina and I were helping one of the girls going to the REDES conference get ready. As she was getting dressed she began to step into her skirt but Irmã Albertina rebuked her, “that’s a skirt, not pants!” The girl looked a little shamed, as if she should have known better and put the skirt on over her head. I asked, “you can’t step into a skirt like this?” “Oh no, you only put pants on like that. Skirts and dresses go on over your head. You mean you step into your skirts in America?” She was appalled. I told her I had no idea how most Americans got dressed, but I had always stepped into my skirts.

19/04/10

This morning I went out running by myself and returned with 7 running companions, a group of 4th grade boys on their way to the primary school at the mission to do yard work. Nobody runs here, they just stare and laugh at the foreigners when they go running.
Today all the teachers had to come to work to do grades. Our school has about 1600 students, and the teachers who are here this week are doing extra work to compensate for one of our colleagues who just had a baby, one who is really ill, and the rest who work at both our school and the other school in town and will be only at the other school this week since it is much larger than ours. This is the grading process for each homeroom class. The grades for all (in the case of 8th grade) 11 disciplines has been written out for the 45 kids on individual sheets of papers, in the homeroom book, and on two “pautas” (the impractically large ~2x3’ pieces of paper). The faculty split into groups of 5 people and one person reads from one of these the grades in each discipline while the other three people follow along on the other places that have grades to make sure they all correspond. Once this is done, everyone goes back through all of the grades, one person reading aloud again, this time writing over everything in blue pen. After this, the pencil is erased. Then, based on the students grades and missed classes their behavior is rated very good, good, or sufficient (there is one below that but I am not sure what it’s called). And then for each student it is written whether they passed or not (a student is allowed to fail only one “sciences” discipline and one “letters” discipline, but they can’t be the two core subjects, math or Portuguese. So if a student gets below a 10 in either math or Portuguese they automatically fail. I didn’t know this. It makes me wonder why some of my students don’t try a litter harder in math). After this, statistics on how many males, females, and overall students passed in each class are taken. And then on to the next homeroom. Our school has 38 homerooms, today my group did 3.

17/04/10

And so begins the process of grading for the first trimester. Although most schools have at least one computer nowadays, all schools still use the traditional system of writing out all the grades in the homeroom book and on ~2x3’ sheets of paper called “pautas.” The process is incredibly tedious and time-consuming because there are so many students and every single grade is written out about 4 different times in pencil, and then afterward rewritten in blue pen.
In Mozambique the grading scale is 0-20 and 9.5-20 is passing and 0-9.4 is a negative score. At our school (and I believe this is common) the lowest grade a student can get for the first trimester is a 7. My director explained today that this is to hopefully encourage the students that if they just tried a little bit harder they would be able to pass, and then for the second two trimesters it’s up to them to make the grade. I am not sure I agree with this reasoning, but it does make sense.
My bike is a piece of shit. I wasn’t expecting to find a Specialized or anything over here, but the one I have is really pretty shitty. The back wheel wobbles and thus rubs once during every rotation, the shifting is questionable, and there is another rubbing somewhere I haven’t been able to identify. The problem is that there aren’t bike stores or anything here, my friend who has a friend who sells bikes just called me anytime one would show up in town. Today I was riding back to the mission from town when a group of four 10 year olds ran at my bike, I think trying to scare me into crashing. When this didn’t work, one ran up behind me and jumped on the back rack, breaking it and bringing me to a stop. I got off and ran after him telling him that if he came near me again I would beat him. I was a little shaken up by this, I didn’t quite know how to feel about it because nothing like that had every happened to me in Inharrime before. Most people know who I am, and most of the kids I see are respectful and my students always seem genuinely pleased to see me. But perhaps this didn’t happen because I was a foreigner, but just an easy target. I was female and alone and plus I looked really weird, I was wearing a helmet. I don’t think anyone here knows what they are, people kept politely telling me they liked my hat.

16/04/10

Today was the last day of classes of the first trimester, so in each of my classes I introduced the kids to Sudoku. I drew one on the board and then explained the rules and we solved a bunch of squares together. They seemed to really get into it and enjoy it and with some coaching they were able to solve a few. The thing that is difficult about Sudoku and the point I don’t think I was very effective in getting across to them is that you can’t put a number just because it could be there, you can only put a number when you are absolutely certain it cannot go anywhere else. I gave them two puzzles and told them they could solve them over break if they wanted, for extra credit in the second trimester. So we’ll see.

15/04/10

Today in my double blocks we did a faction numbers “game.” Really not that fun, a lot of math, but I called it a game in an effort to entice the kids. I assigned each letter of the alphabet a fraction value and first names used addition and last names used multiplication. Working in groups of 4 or 5, they had to determine the value of each person in their group’s first name and last name, and tell me who in their group had the first name with the greatest value and the last name with the lowest value. So not really all that “fun” or much of a “game,” but I suppose it’s all about delivery and I think the kids enjoyed doing something completely different from normal school. Plus they got to work in groups, I played music, and they got to boast about whose name had the highest value.
Natalia tested positive for malaria today but luckily she seems to have a very weak case of it.