Fan-trekking-tastic Lesotho

We're back from our trip to Lesotho, and not knowing much about the trek beforehand, it was all that I'd hoped and more.  Erica and I met our sitemate Gracey and two other volunteers in Maputo, where we got a bus to Johannesburg, where we rented a car to drive to Lesotho.  We spent a night in Malealea Lodge and set out from there on a three-day pony trek through the mountains of Lesotho.  This took us through some hair-raising passes, but our patient guides and surefooted horses never let us [fall] down.  That being said, it's a good thing we only trekked for three days; by day three, my fear buffer was running low and I don't think my poor little coração could have handled too many more spikes in my blood pressure.  We spent two nights sleeping in a thatched brick hut in a small, local village and hiked one afternoon to a stunning waterfall, where I swam with frog (singular) in the chilly water.  Heading back to the lodge on the last day, we got stuck in the rain, and due to the loss of my rain jacket in my May robbery, I got more cold and wet than would be medically advisable, but my Viking stock did me well and, Look Mom, no hypothermia!  We took our time driving through delightfully developed South Africa on the way home and stopped in Clarens, a quaint touristy town, where we appreciated art and window-shopped.  Erica and I are now back home and getting ready for upcoming sub-Saharan travels with her sister and dad and my sister and mom, so from here on up, it's all downhill. 

No Proselytizing in Pão, Please

Classes are done! Maybe that does not accurately convey my immense excitement and enthusiasm—classes are OVER! Fim! Finito! Done-zo! And that makes me so-oo happy. After classes ended, we had a week to prepare students’ grades, copy them onto the various official documents, and decide who would and would not pass. Within the last two trimesters, the national stipulations for passing students changed not just once, but two times, so within one school year, we have had three different systems for passing students into the next grade. Need I say that this week of grades was more than a little confusing and messy? Well, it was. Because students fail many disciplines, but instead of making their classes easier to pass, most teachers assign grades, balk at the number of failing students, and tweak grades after writing them in ink in all of the grade sheets. This is tedious, stressful, and fraudulent work, and when the national passing criteria changed for the second time after the week of doing grades, most teachers did more artful erasing and re-inking in the official documents to help students pass. But what is to be done? The education system here is broken, in my honest opinion, with regulations that change on a whim and don’t really match up. For example, with the newest stipulations, students don’t pass into the next grade if they fail design, agriculture, and physical education. Yet officially, they can pass with failing grades in math, the sciences, and the humanities. So without talking to other teachers, I would have had only four students in my class of 40 pass into ninth grade. In the end, 15 students passed—a whopping 37.5% of my class. And as a result, because my school is fairly new and repeatedly fails its eighth graders, it has almost 1000 eighth graders, while only 500 students have trickled into ninth grade, and 300 have squeaked by into tenth grade. It almost makes me want to be a teacher in the United States for a year or two, just to be able to compare the education systems. Almost... but after this, I think I will be a little burned out on teaching for a while.

The work in school is not yet done, however. Currently, the tenth graders are taking national exams. These exams are taken very seriously, with all students in Mozambique taking the same tests on the same day at the same time. The tests arrive in sealed packets, which are opened in every classroom at the exact moment when the bell rings. Yet these elaborate anti-cheating measures are nullified when teachers responsible for controlling the exams and responding to questions simply give out answers. All I can say is, ridiculous. Again, this system is broken, and I don’t see anything changing anytime soon without major, major reform. I’m trying not to lay it on too thick, but this is the reality.

On a lighter note, Erica and I are fleeing Mozambique and these wretched exams to go to Lesotho tomorrow for a three-day pony trek. It could not be better timing for us, as we are both sick to death of school. There will be a second round of national exams in a few weeks, but this trip will give our bodies a break from the heat and give us the boost we need to keep going and not be viciously bitter towards our poor colleagues in the weeks to come. Once December hits, we’re in the clear; we’ll have family coming and will do some traveling around Mozambique and South Africa, hitting the beaches and visiting Kruger National Park to see lions and tigers and bears, oh my! (Although I’m not so sure South Africa has bears, but you get the picture.)

Meanwhile, in Chibuto and outside of school, things are good. We’re having a small fence built for the dogs so they won’t chase and eat our neighbors’ chickens while unsupervised during our vacation. We just gave our house an interior makeover, throwing out tons of junk left by previous PCVs and even fashioning a couch out of my old mattress. With the temperature rising daily, there is the purchase of a fan in my near future. It’s been a long but good year, and we’re trying to exercise some control over a few small things in our life to close this year on a positive note and carry us into the next year. With that, I leave you with these pictures: me and Erica on my birthday (note the lovely mural left by a previous PCV) and a sandwich menu that features the most delightfully terrible English translation I’ve encountered in Mozambique. When things get rough, we toast simple.

Winter that Refuses to Fall Gently into Summer

August and September have been topsy-turvy months. August brought the start of the final trimester and a string of canine-related incidents, while September brought the regional Science Fair and the dreaded arrival of summer heat. I’m holding out for October, which brings the end of classes, Halloween, and most importantly, my birthday. But first, here’s a rundown of August and this half of September.

One Saturday afternoon, Erica and I were walking to a nearby shop and suddenly heard a dog yelping as we passed an empty lot. We looked over and saw a group of young boys beating a stray puppy that was hanging upside down from a tree, tied from its back two legs. We immediately began furiously scolding the children, and set out to find a knife to cut down the unfortunate creature. Within a minute of reaching the safe ground, it died. Erica wisely tried using the incident as a teaching moment to tell these boys that even if the puppy was causing problems and stealing food, there are better ways to cull animals. The boys laughed amongst themselves as we walked away. When peoples’ lives are so difficult here, why worry about a dog?

That same day, our own puppy Shingove became listless and lost interest in food. He soon stopped eating altogether and was quickly reduced to a shaking frame of skin and bones. Erica’s family called several times with different tips and information, so with this guidance, we nursed our sick li’l pup back to health, giving him human medicine and food with a dropper and keeping him hydrated. Come Sunday, he was back to our romping, mischievous Shingove that attacks us as we do exercises; Monday morning, a neighbor girl came to our kitchen window to say that a car had hit our dog. Not just hit, completely ran over our dog with a velocity that should be illegal in a small neighborhood. The bizarre mix of foreshadowing and irony was almost too much, and it was certainly too much for a Monday morning.

On top of the dog drama, someone stole our shampoo, face wash, sponge, and razors out of our bathroom. And one slightly-off man started coming to the school to jabber English gibberish at me, while another slightly-off man started coming to the house to jabber Portuguese gibberish at us. Evidently, we are magnets not only for canine disaster, but also for theft and unstable individuals. Cool.

Yet just as I was beginning to slide into a jaded, pessimistic funk, a friend gave us a replacement puppy, and although it didn’t leave much time for the death of Shingove to stop smarting, our new puppy, Havu (Shangana for “monkey”), is adorable and oh-so-affectionate. One would think I’d learn to stop being so attached to cute puppies, but what’s the use? Why fight it?

Science Fair should have happened during the last weekend of August, but due to a few days of unrest for rising fuel and food prices in Maputo and other larger cities, we were forced to push it back a week. (Thankfully, there were no notable demonstrations in Chibuto, so aside from a brief travel ban and fluctuation in bread prices, we were unaffected.) In the date change, we lost the opportunity to have a sound system and one of our guest speakers, but everything else went pretty smoothly. Projects ranged from making electronic doorbells and motorized cars to making coconut oil to making juice… from a package. While that last one was a bit of a stretch, we were happy to have so many participants—50 or so students from around 15 schools in Maputo and Gaza Provinces. This is nothing by American standards, but in Mozambique, nothing is as easy as it seems it should be, and nearly everything that could go wrong often does, so it was a small miracle we pulled it off. Although we were absolutely exhausted afterwards, it was worth it.

As September slides downhill into October, I’m trying to get a few students mobilized to do some health presentations at school, and Erica has projects of her own at her school. We’re planning our final lessons; I’m in the midst of the reproductive system, and it is just amazing to me how students never tire of saying “vagina,” which by the way is Portuguese for (you guessed it) “vagina.” Even after classes end, we’ll have several weeks of grading national exams and the odious task of writing thousands of grades by hand that will extend into December. But since we have family coming in December and a possible venture into Lesotho in November, and since we are volunteers after all, Erica and I will be able to get out of some of it. Because volunteers without volition make for unhappy PCVs.

I hope those of you back home are enjoying the fall colors and brisk air for me. Once it gets hotter here and cooler there, I’ll see what I can do about sending some of our heat your way. There’s more than enough around here.

No Message-in-a-Bottle Necessary

Thank you for all of the letters and packages! Erica and I have decided to share a post office box with other volunteers in Xai-xai, so if you want to send me letters to this address, I might get them a little more quickly:

Alycia Overbo

C/o Corpo da Paz

C.P. 85

Xai-xai, Moçambique

Please continue sending packages to the Maputo address (Avenida do Zimbabwe, No. 345). I have greater faith that packages will arrive there unopened, and also, the Peace Corps pays the fees to receive them, which works out well for me. Erica and I are well-stocked with coffee and granola bars and are happy as clams at high tide. If you’re looking for new care package ideas, different teas are nice, and reading materials like books and magazines are always appreciated, as are movies and music. And I think I previously forgot to mention my deep love for peanut butter M&M’s. But really, anything from home is a treat. Anything that crosses the United States, the Atlantic Ocean, and most of Africa that has my name on it makes me feel pretty special.

Sun and Honey Time

Looking back at the second trimester and trying to enjoy the last free moments of my break before the inevitable lesson planning, this seems like a good time to type up a new blog post and consequently aid my procrastination.

Good news—though there is still no trace of anything lost in my robbery, a violin has come back into my life!  By crazy coincidence, a nearby volunteer had brought a violin in intending to learn how to play it, but since she’s been busy lately, she kindly lent it to me.  With so many aspects of my life being different here in Mozambique, I can’t even describe how nice it is to practice and feel a continuity with something that’s been a major presence throughout most of my life.  All I can say is, it’s nice.

Our modest science fair was a success.  We had our doubts when we arrived and didn’t see another soul for another hour, but that’s just the way things go in Mozambique; eventually, the participants and other facilitators showed up, and everything ran according to schedule (adding an hour, of course).  Only one student actually conducted an experiment—the others did demonstrations that involved fire, chemicals, and melting plastic bottles—but we were just glad they participated and didn’t start the school on fire.  We’re working on organizing the regional fair, and thankfully have the help of an acquaintance working in the Ministry of Science and Technology.  He is very enthusiastic about the project and has been an invaluable help.  It works out well, because although science fair began as a Peace Corps initiative a few years ago, now that we have involvement of an individual in the government, hopefully in the future we can pass it off and it will remain a sustainable, autonomous program.

My trimester wrapped up a little early because I spent a week in Maputo at a Peace Corps conference to help plan learning objectives and sessions for next year’s trainees.  Afterwards, I was back in Chibuto for a few days to prepare my turma’s grades for conselhos, but [oh, darn!] had to miss the actual conselhos for another Peace Corps conference in Inhambane Province.  Erica and I were pretty thrilled about that timing.  We spent three days in sessions discussing project planning with local counterparts, which hopefully will have productive results; my counterpart and I discussed a model agriculture training for teenage orphans in the community and we may actually implement it.  We’ll see…!

When the conference ended last Sunday, Erica and I were ideally located in beautiful, coastal Inhambane for our week-long break from school, so we trekked over to nearby Barra with a few other friends.  We had intended to stay for a night or two and then move on to Tofo and then meander home, but after landing on the beach and later meeting up with a group of fun, hospitable South Africans, we ended up staying for five nights.  We had a great vacation—swimming, buying colorful capulana clothing on the beach (capulanas are the colorful, multi-purpose lengths of cloth that women use as skirts or to tie babies to their backs, etc.), body-surfing (which I am terrible at), and good eating, thanks to the generosity and cooking prowess of our new acquaintances.  But every vacation has to end sometime, so we finally came home on Friday to be reunited with our pets and start preparing for classes this week.  With memories of sea and sand behind and prospects of lesson planning and grades ahead, it’s tough to get back into the swing of things, but if nothing else, it’s nice to come back to a house of happy animals who are glad you’re home.