Teachers Day wasn’t quite the blowout that it was last year, but I still had fun. It was a small but stalwart group who participated. The other women and I cooked literally all day outside in the teacher’s compound. Remember … Continue reading →
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Suddenly the year is over. Most of my students are gone, on summer vacation. The teachers and students in 7th and 10th grades are busy taking national exams, the teachers busy controling and correcting them. I was sad to say … Continue reading →
Our Peace Corps friend Micah came to visit so David and I had the chance to do a little passear-ing in Estaquinha. There’s a river a few kilometers away that people cross every day to go to school and fish … Continue reading →
Last year I wrote about helping out with the REDES conference, sort of the culminating event in a project for young women, Raparigas em Desenvolvimento, Educação e Saúde (Girls in Development, Education and Health). Peace Corps volunteers and other Mozambican … Continue reading →
Life in Estaquinha has been full and rich and monotonous at the same time. I gave a few of my teaching hours to a colleague so I have a little more time to plan my lessons and chat with friends … Continue reading →
I was fortunate enough to host my parents Tom and Mary Louise in Mozambique at the end of May. They flew into Beira and we traveled the next day to Estaquinha. It was lovely to introduce them to everyone in … Continue reading →
I’ve been really lucky with my health during my time (so far!)–I’ve avoided malaria and didn’t have any problems adjusting to different food and water. But one morning I woke up bothered by what felt like a patch of dry … Continue reading →
It’s been just over a week since I arrived back in Estaquinha. I was really reluctant to head back, dreading it in some ways, which surprised me because I was so happy for the most part last year. Yet I … Continue reading →
Julian is a friend whom I met while studying abroad in Paris. He lives with his parents in Botswana’s capital city, Gabarone, and they generously welcomed Alexandra and I into their home for Christmas. It was really wonderful to eat … Continue reading →
We again encountered a total absence of vehicles on the Malawi side of the border. The friendly border officials invited us to their home for lunch so we humored them while we waited for a car to materialize. When we … Continue reading →
The school year ended anti-climactically. Tests and a period of grading, then national exams for fifth, seventh and tenth graders. I stayed late enough to grade the second round of English exams for tenth grade. We had a lot of … Continue reading →
As a staff, we had been anticipating “our day” for awhile, though most of the actual preparation didn’t happen until the very last minute. We all contributed money for dinner and a party, and bought commerative yellow polo shirts. I helped some of the other women bake on Monday night, and a we had bought [...]
Somehow I forgot these other anecdotes last time…maybe they’ll be somewhat amusing. Nelta’s first empregada, Rita, didn’t work out and left after a month, so we finished the second trimester just us three. After the holidays, a ninth-grade student of mine, Maria, moved in. She’s experienced and lively and she and Luisa get along, so [...]
I know it’s been months since I posted but the more time that passes, the stranger I feel trying to put my daily existence into words for (supposedly) public perusal. A Mozambican friend using my computer the other day came upon an attempt at a blog entry, and it struck me that I was embarrassed, [...]
On June 3rd the Mozambican Torch of Unity passed through Estaquinha. It started in April from the Rovumo River, at the Tanzanian border, and is making its way south to Maputo, passing through every district in the country. It should arrive on the 25th of this month, Mozambican Independence Day. Everyone in town and at [...]
June 1st was Dia das Crianças, or Children’s Day. I’m told this is an international holiday but this was the first I had heard of it. All the students learn about different rights that children have—the right to a name, to go to school, to a family, to be healthy, to be protected from abuse, [...]
When people ask me if I pray, or what church I go to, I say that I am a Methodist, because it is sort of true and it’s a church people recognize. When I am around Estaquinha on the weekends, I like to attend the Catholic mass given by the mission. I prefer to go [...]
Along with teaching English to the students in their first year of the agriculture school, I’m also teaching basic computer skills to the second-year class—at least in theory. The school has a computer lab but as our generator only runs at night and school is takes place during the day, we don’t really have access [...]
In comparison with American English’s brash casualness, Portuguese can feel incredibly formal. The formal “you” and the third person singular are the same, “O Senhor” or “A Senhora” being the default formal terms (for example, “What do you want?” becomes “O que quer a senhora?”) In Estaquinha, I am “Senhora Professora,” as in, “How is [...]
I catch myself standing in front of a classroom of uniformed Mozambican students: what the hell am I doing here? Who the hell am I to be standing up here? What do I know about the subtleties of when we use present simple and present continuous? As my confidence, my comfort increases, these moments of [...]
Lately, I have been feeling like I have two lives. In one, I am a teacher at the secondary school in Estaquinha, living with Luisa and Nelta in a little concrete house. I eat corn mash and rice every day, take a bath over my latrine with buckets of water, speak Portguese most of the [...]
I spent my week off from school, assisting with a conference organized by Peace Corps volunteers for young Mozambican women from around the North and Central regions of the country. The program is called Raparigas em Desenvolimento, Educação e Saudé (REDES), which means Girls in Development, Education and Health. Many Peace Corps volunteers around the [...]
The Mozambican school system operates on trimesters of about thirteen weeks, so we recently completed the first term followed by a week of vacation. As I always felt when I was in school myself, both professors and students were really ready for a break by the time the term ended. Each grade level had to [...]
April 7 is the anniversary of the death of Josina Michel, the wife of the first Mozambican president Samora Michel, and herself a heroine in the Civil War. So on this day, Mozambicans celebrate their women. As on Heroes’ Day, everyone in Estaquinha paraded down to the town administrative building to lay a wreath at [...]
Estaquinha is short on housing for teachers, so I agreed to let another first-year teacher live in my house. Nelta is twenty-one-years-old, from Beira, and teaching fifth grade. Even though it’s been an adjustment to have another person, I like her and we’ve been getting along well. She is friends with some of the other [...]
Estaquinha has a not-undeserved reputation for having a lack caril, which basically means any type of food you eat with rice or corn mash, or, all meat, protein and vegetables. This is one of the reasons I feel fortunate to have Luisa, because she has lived in the area for her entire life and thus [...]
Escola Secundária de São José – Estaquinha
My little house in the teachers’ bairro
It’s hard to believe I’ve been teaching for about a month. Yet even while I still feel incredibly green, it’s starting to feel like my real life, my real job. Though I have what amounts to six different classes of students, I still find myself with a lot of free time, so I know at [...]
February 3rd was Heroes Day in Mozambique, to commemorate the accomplishments of Mozambique’s leaders in politics and during the Civil War. Everyone had the day off school and work, and the citizens of people in Estaquinha gathered in front of the one political building in town: the place of the Chefe de Poste Administrativo. We [...]
Sunday morning at around 6 am, I was sitting wrapped in a capulana and drinking coffee when I heard a knock at my door. Outside on my front porch were Etelvina, the director of the school and the pedagogical director, similarly clad for the early morning. “Sit down,” they said. “We want to talk to [...]
Etelvina has invited me over a few times in the evening to watch movies and music videos. My neighbors and colleagues often set up their TVs and stereos out their porches our little bairro buzzes with everyone’s competing sound systems as soon as the power comes on. Once we watched the American film Blood Diamond [...]
My new empregada Luisa finally moved in with me—I still don’t know if she had been planning to the whole time and or if it was I that finally convinced her, though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she had been apprehensive about living alone with the strange, foreign teacher. Luisa is in tenth [...]
This means “I am learning Ndau”—the local language here in this part of Sofala. All of my colleagues speak and communicate in Portuguese—and most of them have their own mother tongues as well, depending on where they are from—but Ndau is the first language of the majority of my students, and some people I encounter [...]
This is the first thing I taught my three first classes on Thursday. They needed some review with introductions. I decided to use the Portuguese spelling for my name just because that is what they are used to, and the pronunciation is pretty similar. Often when I introduce myself, people say, “Oh, that’s a Portuguese name!”
Anyway, classes [...]
It is hard to believe that I have been in Estaquinha a little over a month, provided with a few trips away. While the hours seem to drag on at times, it also feels like I’m still getting the hang of how to live here, though I imagine in some ways that process will continue [...]
I had my two first days of work and now we have a holiday, so it’s back to long walks and reading all day. I met with a group of my colleagues, including the pedagogical director, who is responsible for all the teachers in the secondary school, and we organized the different students into classes [...]
I will try to describe Estaquinha in more detail. The unpaved road coming east from the town of Muxungue makes a ninety-degree turn where the mission part of Estaquinha is located, and continues on towards Buzi, the district capital, past mud and straw huts and the few small shops that compose the market and community [...]
I am writing from Chimoio, where I have been staying after spending Christmas in Gorongosa with the other volunteers in my region. There are eleven of us living in Manica, Sofala, and Tete, and as we are required to stay in our region for our first three months, it is a pretty important support network. [...]
It has been an extremely full week and I’m not prepared with a new entry, or several, but I find myself on a computer with Internet access so I feel like I should cobble together something. I am in the city of Beira at the headquarters of the mission that runs Estaquinha and three other [...]
Since site placements were announced, training has seemed to fly to a close. Yesterday there was a big party to celebrate the host families. Several mothers, including Benedita, got up at four in the morning to cook lunch for everyone, which included a whole cow purchased especially for the occasion. Each family received a certificate [...]
Site placement announcements were made right before we held a Thanksgiving dinner (albeit a day early, for mysterious bureaucratic reasons). There were all kinds of culinary delights that us Americans have been craving—turkey, macaroni and cheese, deviled eggs, and all kinds of cookies and pies. I learned that I will be teaching English in a [...]
I’ve been with my host family almost two months now. Things have definitely gotten easier as my ability to communicate has improved and everyone seems to have fallen into more of a routine with one another. As I get more comfortable and learn more about how things work, I’m able to take more responsibility for [...]
For the past week and a half, the education trainees have been participating in Model School, which is exactly what it sounds like: local teenagers come to the secondary school every morning, and we give lessons in English, chemistry and biology. It has been by far one of the most useful things we have done, [...]
Almost two weeks ago now, I and another trainee named Lisa went up to Nampula province, ostensibly to visit two volunteer teachers to get an idea of their jobs and site. Kim and Katie teach at a secondary school in Namapa, a town about 5 hours north of Nampula City, on the border of Cabo [...]
I spent my 23rd birthday knee-deep in mud, learning how to use a hoe during a workshop on permaculture gardening. The seminar was set-up as part of training so that we can teach sustainable farming techniques with people in our communities, but I think most of us are excited about the prospect of having and [...]
Sunday was the First Communion ceremony for my host sister Nosta. I think she is about thirteen, but that seems to be around the typical age to take First Communion here. On Friday, she and Benedita went into Maputo to buy a white dress and shoes, and Benedita and her goddaughter spent all day Saturday [...]
Last Friday the host mothers of the students in each language class got together and showed us how to cook different Mozambican dishes. Matapa is basically a sauce made from pounded cassava leaves, peanuts, coconut milk, and other spices. It is eaten over rice or chima, a sort of heavy dough made from corn flour. [...]
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