Lately I have been reading through Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West, a series of essays about South and Central Asia’s adventures with Western modernity. I am struck most by Mishra’s consciousness of the way in which many—most, probably—of the regions people find themselves in a world in which they seem to have no place and over which they can have very little control. An Indian, he is careful to note that India’s regular elections and relative political stability are an admirable achievement in a part of the world in which constitutional government is notoriously shaky. But beyond that, the book leaves one wondering what kind of democracy it is that prevails in India. Chronic corruption and lack of opportunity for many of India’s 1 billion people are a constant theme. Mishra is a compelling and sympathetic narrator but one cannot help but sense throughout its pages that behind the book is a great sigh of relief. He is in a position to survey the human misery he sees around him. Mr. Mishra’s own relation to the West—he is an established author and critic, a citizen of the English speaking world’s community of letters, a Western thing if there ever was one—does not seem particularly complicated. He is comfortable in the life he has found for himself. It allows him, so to speak, to breathe. The same cannot be said for almost everyone who appears in the book. From Indian politicians to out of work students to villagers caught up in power struggles or everyday Tibetans trying to make a living in the midst of a forcefully imposed global capitalism, Mishra’s part of the world emerges as one in which the will and the sense of self-reliance and possibility it instills for those of us with the luxury of indulging it may as well be nonexistent. If democratic politics is a means through which the masses can make their will known, India—the world’s largest democracy, as it loves to be known—is hardly democratic. Its regular elections are, in Mishra’s view, something of a charade. Politicians still thrive on caste and social status. Murder and bribery are seen as little more than necessary steps towards one’s goals. Those who manage to vote do so for politicians whose crimes as politicians pale in comparison to the crimes they often committed in private life. In many places throughout the world, scandal is a sure recipe for one’s exit from politics. In the India of Misrha’s book, it is often a prerequisite for entry. It is difficult to be prosecuted, after all, if you can control those who are doing the prosecuting. In the midst of a system controlled by men who seem interested only in controlling it for themselves live hundreds of millions of people for whom the course of their lives often seems dictated before birth. Many come to be educated—India has a fairly accessible university system—but then find themselves, in the absence of the connections appropriate for arranging a government job, with nothing to do. Anger and resentment grow. It is not difficult to see why many in the region so despise the West—in their push to become modern they find themselves in the grips of a modernity that has no place for them.

It is all a part, one senses, of a country’s becoming-modern. This fraught process as it works itself out in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Tibet is the subject of Temptations of the West, and everywhere it takes place the question is always one of how to be modern—a term which may as well be synonymous with “Western” as it is generally used—while at the same time being what one is. It is also a question of how to create a modernity that actually works the way modern political systems are supposed to. That is to say, what is fundamentally at stake in the process is the creation of a world in which life is viable, in which people can make something of themselves, in which political structures give people a voice and a sense of being invested in their own development. It is a question of real democracy, not simply of elections. A dire warning lies in the pages of this book for those who would suggest that democracy coincides entirely with elections and that elections are synonymous with agency and hope. For the vast majority of Westerners whose jobs cannot be outsourced and whose economies are competitive on a global scale, the globalization that now drives the planet inexorably towards modernity is a good thing. In many cases it simply enriches already rich, free, and democratic societies. But viewed through the lens of Mishra’s book the notion that what is good for us is good for everybody, the idea that global economic liberalization leads inevitably to the liberalization of society, does not appeal as rosy as its advocates would make it seem. There is no doubt a sense in which the glaring contradiction between the promise of modernity and the reality it so often brings is perhaps the greatest source of anger on the part of those for whom is promises seem perpetually deferred. It is true that there is more money in India and elsewhere than there has been in years past. Middle classes are growing. Poverty in the past fifty years has dropped dramatically. And if a decline in poverty and an increase in general standards of living is something of a golden index of development—for many it seems to be—then globalization has treated the much of the non-Western world, save Africa, quite well.

But there is no necessary connection between a rise in macroeconomic development and a rise in both the living standards and the political agency that make the world we in the West are so insistently selling those around us of value. One of the most salient elements of Mishra’s book is the sense pervading each of its chapters that despite formal gains, despite increases in all the important indicators of social and economic development, that for many life is just as absent of possibility as it has been for centuries. What good is Western modernity, its pages seem to ask, if it does not make good on its most basic of promises? How is a system of governance and of economic organization that takes much and gives little, leaving the poor it promises to save and to shelter with no more options than they had before?

If the question is indeed lingering throughout the book it is, of course, only a rhetorical one. Mishra is well aware that the world at large has little chance of altering the path charted for it by the West and its agents in the United Nations and World Bank. He himself, an upper-cast, educated, English speaking Hindu for whom globalization has worked quite well, has no particular desire to reject the West at all. “Globalization had…opened up the West; there was more space there for people like me, people who would have had to struggle harder for a similar space in their native countries,” he writes, acknowledging the obvious ways in which Western life has worked out for him. “As a colonial,” he goes on, “I was a child, however distinctly, of the West.” The life that was opened up by globalization was a life opened up for him because he, the writer, the educated man, the fluent speaker of English, was already of it well before he arrived.

What to do, then, about all of those people who cannot find their modern niche because they, unlike Mishra, are not modern, not Western, not colonial children? The book begins and ends with the question. In some way its essays, composed as they are of careful observations, brief historical interludes and accounts of occasional encounters with exemplary figures, are meant to do nothing more than show that the trappings of modernity—skyscrapers, elections, monetary wealth and ostensibly democratic constitutions—do not coincide with modernity, and that in many places around the world this non-coincidence is one of the most urgent problems of our time. Indeed we are witnessing in the daily headlines from Iraq the consequences of assuming precisely what Mishra suggests we should not in any way assume. It is a timely book, then, for anyone concerned with the state of the world, because in its pages one gets a glimpse, finally, of the world as it actually is for those at its margins.

It's been a while since I've posted anything. Summer in Cape Verde, it turns out, is just like every other season in Cape Verd: not especially exciting.

Some news and notes:

I do not recommend the boat in between Sao Nicolau and Santiago. It's a long, hot, rough, uncomfortable ride. It was not my first choice in getting here (I am, at the moment, on Santiago, something I will get to shortly) but due to the mass exodus of immigrants from Sao Nicolau that occurs at the end of every summer, I really didn't have a choice. I knew I was in a bit of trouble when I arrived at the dock in Tarrafal with just my frame pack and school backpack to find legions of Cape Verdeans who liked like they were going camping. As it turns out, except for the "cadeira especial"--kind of like a business class airline seat--which I did not know to buy, there are no sleeping accomodations on either the Tarrafal or the Sal Rei, the two ferries that STM Lines occasionally runs on the overnight route. Hence the plethora of sleeping bags, blankets, pillows and foam mattresses. So, as the lights went out and the music gave way to the sound of Cape Verdeans vomiting into seasickness bags (for an island nation there seems to be an astonishing lack of seafaring stomachs) I settled down onto a nice, bare spot of floor underneath a table in the galley. I'd say I woke up about every forty five minutes for roughly the next eight hours.

***

I am, as I said, on Santiago. I was asked to come here for some sort of "training" session the purpose of which I am still trying to ascertain several days after the fact. There was some sort of specialist here from the Office of Special Services in Washington. She talked briefly about what she and her office did. Then there were many long and poorly organized discussions among volunteers and staff about many different topics. That was followed by lunch and an afternoon session involving six current volunteers to rework the nuts and bolts of several volunteer committees that are supposed, in theory, to involve all of the thirty or so current PCVs. In the end, an expensive day for Peace Corps Cape Verde and one in which, except for the beginnings of what will hopefully be some sort of centralized information sharing website for volunteers here, not a whole lot was accomplished.

Which is why I'm very glad I was invited to help out with the training of new volunteers. Not wanting to endure a boat ride and a few weeks of nothing in Praia before my departure for Morocco (which is yet another detail I will get to shortly) I told a few of the staff that I would be more than willing to help out with model school, the practicum experience organized by the training staff for the new education volunteers. In desperate need of people, they said yes despite having said no at the end of the application process. Watching the new trainees has been an interesting experience. Their training has been markedly different from ours. When I arrived last year, Peace Corps Cape Verde was one of the last posts in the world to use what's called the "Center-based training" model, in which volunteers live together in one village with their host families and meet every day for language instruction, technical training and an education everything else Peace Corps decides we need to know before we can be ready to strike out on our own. It's effective enough in getting the details across, and it allowed for us, as TEFL volunteers, to have four full weeks of classroom experience before we moved to site. But it doesn't do an excellent job of giving trainees an idea of what life will be like once they move to site. Everything is very structured; trainees are constantly together; language and cultural instruction tend to take place in classrooms and away from the places and situations in which language and cultural training are most useful.

Our last country director, sensing that the sky-high (relatively speaking) early termination rate among volunteers here might be related to the way in which they were being prepared, or not being prepared, for life at site, decided to change things. This year training is not in Sao Domingos, as it had been for the past five years, but in Santa Catarina, about an hour and a half to the north. Volunteers are divided into project sectors and scattered with their host families in the villages surrounding the city of Assomada. Each group has someone called a "Language and Cultural Facilitator," basically a bilingual (for the most part) guardian/teacher/supervisor/coach/ Cape Verdean best friend that guides them through the ins and outs of life in Cape Verde. When they are not with their LCF's the trainees are with their technical trainers, learning how to do the jobs they are supposed to do when they move to site.

Although the training model is hardly in its final form--the pure "community based training" ideal is that trainees simply go straight from their staging point in the US to where they will live and work for the next two years--it seems to have worked pretty well. They have been forced to think hard about whether or not they want to be here. Their language skills, from what I have seen, are better than mine were at the same point. The education volunteers certainly showed their lack of experience during the first model school but they can hardly be blamed for being less prepared than we were at the same point in our training when by that point we had four weeks of teaching as opposed to their two. Still, they look comfortable, confident, and ready to do what is necessary to improve once they have their own classes on their hands.

***

I am, as I mentioned above, about to head off to Morocco. It was not our first choice for a vacation spot. That honor went to Mali, a favorite among volunteers here and, according to numerous guide books, "the jewel of West Africa." But the schedules of a few traveling companions and the logistics (getting anywhere in West Africa in a reasonable amount of time is pretty much impossible) of traveling there made it almost impossible. Next, Jon and I thought, would be Ghana, but flying from Sao Nicolau to Praia to Dakar to Llagos (!) to Accra, or Sao Nicolau to Praia to Dakar to Lome and then taking a bus to Accra, proved too time consuming and too full of opportunities for our luggage to become scattered across the greater part of the African continent. Then, finally, a friend suggested Morocco. As Royal Air Maroc is a partner of Air Senegal International, we were able to get reasonable flights from Praia to Dakar (I could do without going through this airport, which is kind of like the Bermuda triangle of luggage, but one is rarely confronted with perfect situations) to Casablanca that actually operate on a reasonable time schedule as well. We leave Wednesday afternoon and arrive some time Thursday morning. Jon and I will spend a few days exploring the Atlantic coast, and possibly some of the Mediterranean coast as well, before heading back south to meet Alex, another volunteer from Cape Verde. From there we go to Meknes, Fez and Marrekesh, and then to the mountains and desert to the south of the latter for a few days of outdoorsiness before heading back to Casablanca and then, at long last, Cape Verde.

I will be sure to post pictures and some writing about the trip when I can.

If you’ve ever been forced to read much in the way of Jane Austen or anyone remotely associated with the period in which she wrote, you may have noticed that most Victorian fiction is intensely interested in the business of coupling. In the work of Austen, Thackeray and the like, what critics sometimes call “the conjugal bond” is the obvious object of everyone’s attention. Single life is acceptable for a time, but only for a time; in order to cement one’s status as a legitimate social subject, one must marry, and marry well. But often as glaring as the drive of most of the characters towards marriage and all of its related social institutions are the presence of those men (and sometimes women) who do not seem the least bit interested in coupling. Not seeking wives, not concerned, at least in an outward sense, with achieving social legitimacy, they live their all too single lives under the pressure of a society that cannot, according to its own rules, look on them as anything but strange. By not taking up the conventions of the 19th century dating game, their sexuality is immediately called into question—they become outsiders, weirdos, homos, queers. In Cape Verde, I sometimes feel like one of those guys. This is, if you haven’t noticed, a coupling crazed society. Everyone has someone, or is in the process of getting someone. The question of sex seems to be the not-so-subtle subtext of almost every conversation between men and women in this country. One would, of course, be correct to argue that in this Cape Verde is really no different than anywhere else: every culture, broadly speaking, presupposes a certain culture of sexuality. Americans may want a partner (or partners) just as badly as Cape Verdeans, but in American culture there is still room for men and women to be friends in the absence of an overt attempt at getting laid. Sure, sometimes it gets complicated, and everyone has sat around wondering whether or not they should make a move on someone they worry might think of them as more like a sibling than a potential significant other. Here in Cape Verde, where male attempts at proving their masculinity have all but crowded any space for a relationship that might be called “platonic,” that is not a problem. Subtlety is not a part of the Cape Verdean mating dance. Anyone who has witnessed Cape Verdeans gyrate to zouk knows this. (Once I jokingly told a student that zouk was just like sex; she corrected me by saying “It’s not just like sex, teacher. It’s almost like sex.” Sorry). After a year here it seems that most Cape Verdeans go about their business on the dating scene the way Caesar went about conquering Gaul or the way Nebraska football used to go about brutalizing its opponents. It’s not complicated; it’s not about savvy game planning the way today’s college game is or the way modern counterinsurgency warfare is supposed to be. Everyone knew what Tommie Frazier was going to do with the ball the same way all those poor proto-Frenchmen knew more or less what Caesar was going to do with his legions. Their brilliance was not in confusing their opponents so much as it was in doing what everyone knew they were going to do so well, and with such force, that resistance was futile. Cape Verdeans, for the most part, work in the same way. They know they’re hot, just like Tom Osbourne, so to speak, knew he was hot, and just like Caesar, with his spoils and loyal men and immense popularity, knew he was hot. And when you’re hot, when everything about the game you’re playing is stacked in your favor, there’s no need for Norm Chow’s offense or George Patton’s tactical genius. You can simply stroll up to a potential piquena and say something absurd like “You are the most beautiful girl in the world” “I need you desperately” “I will love you forever” or some such obvious nonsense and, if you do it enough times, be successful. I do not think Cape Verdean women are in any way stupid. They know this is bullshit. They know, on some level, that love is not something you find staring at someone’s cadeira in a club or magically uncover while grinding your groin against someone else’s to the sultry beat of the latest Gil Semedo tune. But that’s the game. As in a fine Victorian novel, sex is what makes you somebody, and everybody wants to be somebody. Which takes us back to why, sometimes, I feel like something of an oddball here in Cape Verde. I never really imagined that I, a straight white guy from an upper-middle class family, would ever be made to answer for anything about myself, especially if that something were my sexuality. “Do you have girlfriends yet?” Cape Verdean guys like to ask me, as if my regularly having sex with at least one woman was made a foregone conclusion by the simple fact that I am breathing. They look shocked and confused when I tell them no. “What’s wrong? Are you shy? We can arrange someone for you! Get out there and go for it!” they answer, eager, I suppose, to save me from the fringes of society. It’s a friendly gesture, but I tell them no, that it’s quite alright, that I am not in such desperate need that the simple presence of a woman should be more important than who that woman might be. Theirs is not really a game I care to play. I tend not to regard phrases like “I love you” in all that utilitarian a fashion; I’m not one to walk up to a woman and tell her I think her ass is pretty, at least not by way of introduction; I am a bad dancer if that dancing is not preceded by several shots of grogue, and even then I worry that my improvement is only ever apparent; although there have been notable exceptions, I’m generally not one to storm into a relationship like Caesar at Alesia or Nebraska at the Orange Bowl. It may mean enduring odd looks from the occasional Cape Verdean man, but when you’re otherwise exceedingly normal, feeling like an outsider helps you to understand a little bit better the experience of those considered strange by our own culture. And that is always a positive thing.

If you missed it, the New York Times had an interesting article about immigration and Cape Verde last Sunday. Read it here.

They are not a particularly good time. For the first two trimesters, however, they are bearable. Doing the necessary work takes only an hour, and things, in general, go pretty smoothly. The end of the year, however, is a different story. The meetings expand from one hour in length to two and sometimes even more. Evaluation is, for some reason, more complicated, a problem made all the more difficult by the fact that no single person ever seems to know exactly what is going on. Each class is given an allotted time and, at that time, all of the teachers responsible for that class show up with a sheet of their grades in hand. The teacher in charge of the administrative duties for that particular class presides over the meeting, calling out the names of each student and discipline and then copying down the grades that other teachers shout out in a book called the “Livro do Turma.” Another teacher, serving as the secretary, enters grades into a computer at the same time. It sounds simple enough, but as one quickly learns in Cape Verde, the simple is never as simple as it seems. Much like students, teachers have a tendency to talk over one another, not pay attention, answer their cell phones and proceed to have actual conversations or simply get up and leave at random times throughout the meeting, forcing everyone else to wait for them to return. The relatively simple task of data entry often gets incredibly complicated too. More often than not the secretary has to stop the meeting multiple times in order to correct his or her mistakes, something that frequently does not preclude there being errors in the completed grade sheet at the end of the meeting. The part called “confirmation,” where each teacher goes over to the computer and reads of his or her grades yet again, is supposed to correct this. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. But it always takes longer than one would think. Even with mistakes I don’t think it has ever taken me longer than two or three minutes to make sure my grades were entered correctly. Other teachers manage to make this last ten or even fifteen minutes. The result is that, at the end of the meeting, there is usually a twenty to forty minute period of waiting around to sign the official grade sheet, which is supposed to certify our students’ scores as valid. Usually we sign at least two times, as writing everyone’s name correctly next to the signature box causes endless problems. Grade meetings at the end of the year are made more time-consuming for teachers of eighth, tenth and twelfth grades because each of those years marks the end of one of three cycles of which high school in Cape Verde consists. We report three grades—one for the trimester, another for the year, and one for the cycle—and as the report for each student is completed the teacher in charge is supposed to determine whether or not the student will move on to the next year, or in the case of twelfth graders, whether or not a particular student will graduate. This is not, apparently, an easy thing to do, as criteria seem to vary year to year. As far as I can understand, students in the second cycle (all of what follows applies only for tenth graders at the end of the second cycle; this changes somewhat for students at other points in their studies, which is why a lot of time in grade meetings is spent arguing over whether not a particular student has passed or not) can fail up to two courses with the only consequence being that failure limits the concentration they can choose for the third cycle. A tenth grader who fails physics and chemistry, for example, may go on to the eleventh grade but they may not choose science as their concentration. They can, however, do what is called “prova do recurso,” a two week summer session that culminates in a second final exam: if they pass that exam, they are allowed to pass the cycle in whatever course the exam is taken and any relevant restrictions on their choices of concentration for the third cycle will be lifted. They cannot, however, do this in a subject in which they had lower than a seven out of twenty at the end of the year; score less than a six, and you simply fail outright. Students who fail three courses are obliged to attend prova do recurso in all subjects they have failed, although I am not sure what happens if a student manages to fail three courses with grades lower than seven. If they manage to achieve passing grades on at least one of the three tests they are allowed to move on. Students who fail four or more courses (as of today, the mark is set at five, although there are some real winners in the classes yet to come) fail the year outright and are forced to repeat the grade over again, as long as they have not already done so. Students in the first cycle are allowed to repeat as often as they wish (which explains the presence of the odd fifteen, sixteen or seventeen year old student towering over his or her colleagues in the seventh and eighth grades) but after that they are only given two chances. Fail twice and they are, mercifully for everyone involved, told to leave and not come back. The bureaucracy of it all is thoroughly annoying, but it does make for some funny moments. At one point one of the computer teachers did a favor for the psychology teacher, Samuel, who is also a Catholic priest. Somewhat frustrated by the whole experience, when she said that he should return the favor by saying a mass for her, he said he would be glad to do her funeral. Before I figured everything out I asked, just out of curiosity, what happened to students who failed important courses like math and physics with scores less than seven. Are those courses simply forgotten? Do they just move on to the next year of math, failing grade in hand, ready to fail again? The teacher in charge of the meeting looked at me, a little confused, put her head down and said “I really have no idea. This is all very complicated” as if her inability to answer was somehow shameful. I got to watch my colleagues bicker at one another like little kids over the amount of time and effort our second meeting today was consuming, something that reminded me so much of standing in a tenth grade classroom that I might have laughed had I not been exhausted from sitting in the same damn chair almost continuously for four hours yelling out grades. This year the tenth grade did not perform well at all, but many students who failed the year managed to pass the cycle on the basis of their marks from the ninth grade, something that clearly annoyed teachers who were anxious to show some of our more troublesome students the door. Heads shook all around when Fabio, the scourge of the tenth grade, failed most of his courses for this year but managed to slip into the eleventh grade on the strength of his performance the year before. Numerous other students managed to do the same, which does not bode well for the future of a third cycle that is usually devoid of the immaturity and ineptitude commonly associated with the second. News of the three failures that did occur was met with fist pumps and looks that seemed to say “We finally got one!” from more than a few people in the room. I am not sure I would ever actually celebrate the failure of those whose educations we are supposed to be responsible for, but I do find the way our grading system conspires to let otherwise unprepared and wholly undeserving students slip into the next cycle by the smallest possible margins nothing short of stupid. Good grades in the ninth grade are not a great measure of one’s readiness to go on to the eleventh grade; grades in the tenth, in some cases, might not be either, but the tenth grade does come before the eleventh, and failure in the tenth hardly hints at success in the next. It seems that we are passing in fairly large numbers groups of students who have no idea what they are doing and are not likely to find it in the intervening months. My students keep on asking me if I am going to be their teacher next year. A whole lot of them failed this year but made it to the next on the basis of what they managed the year before. The thought of having to teach a bunch of students who have not achieved basic competency in their second and fourth years of English material from the third and fifth is not a particularly appealing one. If it comes to that, spending the whole year “reviewing” the year before may not be an altogether bad option.

I took Jon's camera to school the other day. Pictures are here.

School is, thankfully, at an end. The tests are corrected and final grades calculated. A whopping 64% of my students failed their final exams, something I find both infuriating and puzzling for a number of reasons. First, the test was substantially easier than anything I had given them this year because I wrote it with a teacher from our satellite school in Tarrafal who evidently thinks of testing differently than I do. Second, I essentially gave them the test ahead of time and spent a solid week in class explaining exactly what to do on the different parts of the test. And third, every one of the students in Tarrafal, who are regarded by the whole faculty there and here as horribly behaved and mostly inept, managed, according to their teacher, to pass both the test and the class. Every single one of them. No one failed. Not a single student (I find this highly suspicious). All of this only reinforces the feeling I have that when I speak no one actually listens to me. It’s not a great thing, of course, but talking to other teachers about how students do in their classes makes me feel better about it. I recently overhead one of the history teachers ranting about a twelfth grader who, on his final exam, managed to write a whole page while only accumulating a single point. One of the twelfth grade geography teachers had nearly all of the students in one particular class fail the first two trimesters of the year. Another twelfth grader managed only one out of a possible twenty points on his national math exam. The tenth grade math and physics teachers are constantly moaning about how poorly their students do. Jon, however, is responsible (only in the sense that the student involved is his) for the most staggering entry in the annals of failure at Escola Secundaria Dr. Balthazar Lopes da Silva. One of his ninth graders, a girl who is actually 18 because she spent an astonishing three years in the eighth grade, managed a quarter point on her last English test, a quarter point won for properly translating “Olá” as “Hello.” I saw her at the beach recently and told that I heard she wasn’t doing well in English. She said that she wasn’t, but that in any case she didn’t really care because school was stupid and all teachers (myself included, of course) were annoying. She went on to say that all she really wanted to do in life was sleep, watch TV, go to parties and wander around town with her friends, and that she would fight with anyone who tried to push her to do otherwise. If she passes this year (she, like many kids, is not sure) she will probably be my student in the fall. As you can imagine, I am looking forward to it.

Officially, class ends today, but for all intents and purposes we finished last week. Unlike some other schools in the country that hold final exams at the end of the year, here on São Nicolau we prefer to do them a week and a half before school ends, thus leaving eight or nine days in which no one does anything at all. I thought up a game or two to entertain my students for most of last week but by Monday of this week any notions I had of actually having class were nothing but foolishness. Only three or four teachers showed up for the first class yesterday morning. Whoever is in charge of making sure that the bell rings at regular intervals evidently decided that having class was such a ridiculous idea that they turned the bell off. For the most part students passed the day writing in each other’s notebooks and signing each others’ shirts, a practice that seems strange given that most of them are not so wealthy as to just throw out clothing and most of their uniforms seemed to have been bought new at the beginning of the year. The girls think it is funny to ask me to sign their shirt and then insist that I do it squarely on their breasts, something that would make me feel like a rock star if it didn’t make me feel creepy. I tell them I will sign the back of their shoulders or nothing at all, and usually they relent. Such is the last week of school.

Needless to say, I did not expect much of today. After an unexpectedly long night of hanging out at one of the local bars I dragged myself out of bed at 7am, ate breakfast, grabbed a copy of my students’ grades and headed to school to meet my first class. At 7:30 the only people at school were me, the maid and about twenty kids who, by the end of the first hour, had gone home. I wandered around the neighborhood looking for students to whom I could give grades for about twenty minutes, went back to the teacher’s room to sign my name in all the class books to show that I had, in fact, bothered to show up, and then went back to bed. Not a bad day of work, I suppose. Now comes the summer. Our friends tell us that it is nothing but party after party after party, something I am certainly looking forward to. This weekend the Festa do São João is in a little town just down the road from us; the week afterwards is the Festa do São Pedro, an occasion which is said to be second only to Carnaval, then followed by the inaugural summer beach party, something that continues on a weekly basis until someone decides that summer is over. It should be a good time. All of this is not to say, of course, that I will be doing nothing but partying for the next few months. I am teaching an adult English class at a local community center that should, if the director has been diligent in arranging students, start next week. In July, Jon and I will start teaching English a few mornings a week to tour guides and other staff members at the national park at Monte Gorde, a beautiful place about thirty minutes by car from Vila. I also hope to start a cultural exchange program between kids from Ribeira Brava and kids from the Boys and Girls Club in Cedar Rapids, although the details of that remain to be worked out. And I will, of course, be taking some sort of vacation in September, although exactly what that will be remains to be seen. After considerable effort by Jon and two other friends to arrange a two week trip to Mali, the whole thing fell through. Time is proving to be a problem. There are many benefits to serving on a remote tropical island but its remoteness is making it difficult to get anywhere quickly. It takes at least a day and a half to get out of the country from São Nicolau. The only place to which one can fly in West Africa from Cape Verde is Senegal, but despite Dakar’s reputation as a regional transportation “hub,” it is frustratingly difficult to get anywhere else in the region from there with any regularity. Unlike in America, where flights to anywhere one might want to go tend to leave more than once a day, in this part of the world one would be lucky to find a flight more than once a week. Praia to Dakar leaves only once weekly. Flights within West Africa, even between national capitals, are a few times a week at best. After Mali we decided that Ghana seemed like a desirable place, but as best as we can tell it would take at least four days to get there from here—no one seems to fly between Dakar and Accra, meaning that we would have to land in Togo and get a bus from the capital city to Accra, a bus that, if memory serves correctly, leaves only a few times a week—meaning fully half of a two week trip would be spent in transit. If we cannot arrange a Ghana trip that includes a reasonable amount of time in Ghana our next best option seems to be Morocco. We might be able to get there in two or three days as opposed to four or five (TACV flies to the Canaries; from there we can get relatively cheap flights to Casablanca via Madrid). Tally, a British UN development worker who lives down the street from us, once spent a few weeks wandering around Morocco with friends and said it was more than worth visiting. The plan, to the extent that we have one, would be to fly to Casablanca, rent a car for two weeks and spend our time driving around the countryside and into the Atlas mountains, hopefully meeting up with a few Peace Corps volunteers stationed there along the way. Although advertised prices for guest houses and hotels in Morocco tend to be steep, Tally insists that, by learning enough Arabic to say “God is great” or “May the peace of God be with you” and staying off the beaten path we should be able to find cheap accommodation almost anywhere, even if it is just someone’s barn. It’s not quite a camel trek into the Sahara, but a Moroccan road trip would be quite the experience nonetheless. The only other option we have explored with any seriousness is São Tomé and Principe, a country that, like Cape Verde, is a tiny former Portuguese colony in the middle of the ocean. TACV has regular flights to and from São Tomé, accommodation is said to be cheap and, unlike Mali, where no one speaks a language either of us know, they speak Portuguese. Hopefully something works out.

People in Cape Verde jokingly refer to São Nicolau as the “Island of a thousand festas.” While a thousand is an exaggeration, the title is not altogether inaccurate. People here are always celebrating something, be it birthdays, births, deaths, weddings, anniversaries of these things, the feast days of saints, and anything else that can reasonably be observed with lots of eating, drinking and dancing. A volunteer who was with us for a few weeks in April remarked that all we really ever do is party. It’s not exactly true—we do quite a bit of work—but there has been, ever since Carnaval, a whole lot going on on this otherwise sleepy little island. Almost every other week has seen the feast day of a saint or another day important to the Church and thus important to someone here. Most of the parties are the same, but that is not to say they are not entertaining. Depending on the popularity of the festa, people come from all over the island, shop owners set up tiny little bars in the street and bars usually set up some kind of dance floor, even if it is just the roof of the building in which they happen to be situated or an otherwise abandoned, unused structure nearby. On weekends the party usually starts late Saturday afternoon with lots of grilling and drinking, which quickly gives way to drinking and dancing that lasts till five or six on Sunday morning. The extremely devoted then go to Church and begin cooking, which leads to a Sunday of eating and, for Jon and I, a day filled with enormous amounts of free food. Though one can simply wander up to any house on the day of a festival and reasonably expect to be served molho—a hearty dish made of goat meat, potato, corn, garlic, onions and anything else the family happens to have around the house—and grogue or wine, we usually get a healthy amount of invitations from students. Being teachers, when we arrive we are treated with a level of respect that is, quite frankly, a little strange for two twenty-something Americans. People, even other guests, compete to give us their chairs, families open the best available bottle of wine just for us and the women rush to feed us molho as quickly as possible. Although this can occasionally be uncomfortable—more often than not it seems that the students who are most insistent that we visit them are from some of the poorer families on the island—Cape Verdean hospitality is not something to be denied. One father, lacking a proper corkscrew, chose to open the bottle of wine he found for us with the end of a knife and managed to shower both himself and us with a fair amount of the contents of the bottle. He then looked as though he was about to cry, apologized profusely and said, finally, “I am sad” before lowering his head and walking dejectedly from the room. It didn’t seem appropriate to explain that, both of us having recently finished college, being showered with alcohol was not exactly a new experience. His wife then insisted that we give her son our clothing (both of us were wearing white shirts) to her son at school the next day so she could wash it. We explained that that was completely unnecessary, finished eating, tried to tell the father, who seemed to think he had completely disgraced himself, that everything was fine, and went on to the next house. It is difficult to understate the sheer quantity of food people insist we consume at these things. The pots they use to make molho or cachupa would not be out of place in a huge, institutional kitchen. Although people always point out that, at festas, one should only eat a little food at each home, the owners of said homes never waste a minute putting more food on one’s plate, nor are they reticent to refill one’s cup with grogue, something that would be vastly more problematic were it not for the truckload of food being consumed at the same time (at a baptism party held across the street from where they make what is said to be the best grogue in Cape Verde, our host poured each of us at least seven or eight shots of grogue as we ate; only the six or seven plates of molho I managed to eat at the same time maintained my ability to walk home). I do not remember a party at which I did not eat until my stomach hurt. It’s kind of like having a guaranteed Thanksgiving meal once every two or three weeks. As I write I am still getting over the Festa do Santo Antão, held in a nearby fishing village called Preguiça (in Creole, the word means “Lazy”). In the beginning the night appeared as though it were under control. Neither Jon nor I have many students there. We finished our fifth and sixth plates of cachupa (corn, various kinds of beans, chickpeas and meat in sauce) at the house of one of my tenth graders (I am thankful her mother did not inquire as to her grades; it would have been uncomfortable saying, as she served me, that Stephanie had indeed managed to fail the whole year) and were getting ready to leave when the mother of one of my other students walked in. She is a nice woman, but not in the way a lot of Cape Verdean women her age are nice women. One would not call her warm. I only know her because her son is a jerk and had to stop by her house once or twice to let her know it. She talks a mile a minute and is in no way tolerant of my slightly less than perfect Creole. Consequently she doesn’t say much to me, instead letting her daughter, who is also one of my students, do the translating. But that didn’t stop her from taking all the food on the table I had not yet eaten, sticking it in front of me and insisting that I eat it, or from inviting us to yet another house whose owners we did not know. In short, we went from pleasantly full to disgustingly so. When I woke up this morning I still felt full. I could probably go another day without really feeling all that hungry. Such is life in Cape Verde.

It's the end of the year. Final exams have been miserable. Apparently taking an entire week of classes to explain step by step what students will have to do on the test is not sufficient to prevent more than half of them from failing. At least it's not an isolated problem. I recently overheard a history teacher complaining that a student of his managed to write an entire page in response to an exam question and say nothing worthwhile. I watched students squirm and moan in frustration while taking their physics and math tests. And I've had the alarming experience of asking, in jest, my tenth graders if they were going to pass the tenth grade only to have them respond, in all seriousness, "I have no idea."

But it does seem, in some cases, that they've learned something. A group of twelfth graders, irate at having failed their final exams, stormed out of class in spite of my instructions to sit down and be quiet. As I always do when students do silly things like this, I gave them faltas. The next day they stayed after class to talk to me. I was expecting the usual, which goes something like this: "We're sorry, we were wrong, now erase our faltas." Instead I got simply "We're sorry. We were wrong. We want to say that we are sorry." I was so shocked I erased their faltas anyway. On Monday I met, for the last time, with the only two students from my other twelfth grade class who bothered to come to school. One of them, Lendy, is a very good student but someone who can be incredibly immature and disrespectful when she doesn't get what she wants. Knowing that she was not satisfied with her final grade and having been criticized rather harshly by her in the past, I was a little annoyed when she started saying somethign to the effect of "Sometimes we didn't understand..." What looked like criticism was, in fact, a compliment. She acknowledged the difficulties, which were shared by everyone, but then went on to say that she enjoyed my class and actually learned quite a bit. And finally, today, I returned my tenth graders' final exams. Most of them failed, but for once they were willing to say that it was, in fact, their fault. "Teacher, I did bad," a girl who failed the whole year told me, "but it's all my fault. I never study." A few others echoed the sentiment.

It's not exactly wild success, but not exactly failure either.

A while ago I mentioned something about the ridiculous names Cape Verdeans manage to give their kids. In addition to the characters of Greek mythology, pop culture figures are a favorite. I have at least four Elton Djon's. But nothing is better than the names of two eight graders I encountered while proctoring a test the other day: Milly Vanilly and Hurley Davidson.

No commentary needed. I'll write more soon.

We are reaching the end of the academic year. Like most students , most of my twelfth graders have what Americans call “senioritis.” They are tired of working, tired of studying, tired of being called upon to do things in general. Some are even getting nasty about it. A student chose to inform me earlier today that I am, in fact, a bad teacher. Evidently I do not explain things, I write hard tests, I am “atrevida” (snobby or stuck up) and in general I arrange things in hopes that they will fail. All of this is from a girl who once cheated on a test, berated me in front of the class for giving her a zero, told everyone who would listen to her that I was lying about the whole thing and even threatened to take the matter to the Ministry of Education to get her grade corrected. Although I was tempted to suggest that, being in general a bad student and an only occasionally nice person, she had no real right to criticize me, I said nothing. In addition to having a low aptitude for English, this is also someone with an unfortunately low aptitude for life. It’s not something to get worked up about. ***On a related note, I have also been told a lot of late that I am not a giving man. Students here have an obnoxious habit of asking me for just about anything they can think of on the theory that my being white and American means I am literally rolling in money. Most frequently they ask for food or change with which to buy food. I always tell them no, at which most they like to tell me, their voices full of distaste “bo ka ta gosta di da,” literally “You do not like to give.” I have tried and tried and tried to explain that I am a volunteer, that I am not paid by the Cape Verdean government (teaching here is considered an excellent job; hence part of their insistence that I have enough to buy them food almost every single day) and that, in any case, I just finished college in May and haven’t had the time to amass to vast fortune to which all Americans are allegedly heir. They are generally unmoved, so today I tried something different. “Two years of my life isn’t enough?” I asked two kids who commented on my unwillingness to turn over my mid-morning snack. They responded with more confusion than understanding. Back to the drawing board. *** Students here have an annoying habit of parroting just about everything they see or hear American hip-hop artists do or say. While most people on Sao Nicolau haven't gotten around to selling drugs and shooting people, they do love to throw around the term “nigger” with astonishing frequency. As I was giving a test today one of my students who had already finished stood outside the door, sunglasses on and headphones in (the new thing in Cape Verde is listening to music everywhere one goes; it seems to work something like theme music, which gives aspiring ego-maniacs all over the islands the impression that they are in some sort of bad rap video and that, consequently, everyone’s attention is firmly fixed on them) screaming “That’s West Coast, nigga!” repeatedly into the classroom. I do not know what he meant—the test contained no references to anything that might be considered “West Coast” in any sense of the term with which I am familiar—or if he meant anything at all. I marched to the door and gave him one of those looks that is meant to say “What the hell are you doing, you moron?” without stooping to the level of actually saying it, and he promptly gave me the same kind of look in return. A few odd seconds passed before he asked me if the noise he was making was the problem. I told him that it was, and he sauntered away in what Tom Wolfe would call a “pimp roll,” doing the best he could to convey with body language his intense distaste at the fact that I had ruined what must have been, in his head, an incredibly cool moment. *** One my favorite things to do when throwing kids out of class is to direct them to the local primary school, which is, conveniently, next door. You’re behaving like a child, I tell them (this usually follows the stealing of pens, the throwing of spitballs, an excessive amount of noise or an obstinate refusal to do any work), so get out of my classroom, which is for young adults, and go somewhere where your behavior might actually be acceptable. The responses usually range from a dismissive scoff to outright indignation. These are, for the most part, fifteen to twenty or twenty one (yes, twenty one and still behaving badly in high school) year old guys for whom being called a child is the highest form of disrespect. In general, of course, I don’t actually think they’re children; all I want is for them to think about how they are carrying themselves. But something happened in one of my twelfth grade classes the other day that has me asking whether or not there might actually be some big babies lurking inside the young people I work with every day. A student remarked that my English class is “only for talking,” by which she meant that all she and her classmates ever did was come to class and screw around. I told her that she and her colleagues were, for all intents and purposes, young adults, and I was going to treat them like it. As long as chatter is not interfering with the efforts of those who actually care to learn, I am not going to punish it, nor am I going to expend vast amounts of energy trying to persuade some intransigent twenty year old kid to do his homework. She also commented on the difficulty of my tests. I explained to this particular student and a few of her friends that there was, in fact, some logic behind it. Students, I reasoned, want good grades. If tests are difficult, students will know that they have to pay attention and participate in class in order to do well on them (generally speaking, everyone who pays attention does pretty well). If they do not, as many in her class do not, they will do poorly, as most of them do. When I informed her that, if English was difficult, it was because no one paid me much attention, she responded with an argument that, while utterly stupid on its own terms, completely undermined the assumptions informing my own. “Yes,” she said, “we don’t behave very well, but it’s because you don’t make us behave any better.” She and her colleagues, in other words, know full well that they behave poorly, and seem willing to admit that their behavior is affecting their grades, but still try to maintain that I am the one responsible for those grades (all of this began by way of me defending myself from the charge that, because their grades, in some cases, are lower than in years past, I am a bad teacher) insofar as I am the one who has failed to force them to behave in such a manner that would allow them to do better in my class. It is, like I said, completely absurd, but it also the argument of a group of kids who are completely unwilling to hold themselves responsible for anything, even something as fundamental as their own behavior. It undermines the case I was making –as well as the whole rationale for the way I’ve treated these kids all year—because both that case and that rationale rested on the (thoroughly naïve) assumption that I was dealing with a group of people who had an understanding of themselves as responsible for their own actions. Now that I know that I am, in fact, responsible for their actions, I will be sure, when faced with twelfth graders again, to treat them like little children (who are almost by definition incapable of being responsible for themselves) until they show me they are capable of being treated otherwise. (As a footnote, the assumption that kids might actually want to do well in school was proven wrong by the conversation I had with a few of my twelfth graders today. We were reviewing for a test and I found them, typically, doing absolutely nothing. I asked if they wanted to pass, and they informed me, somewhat matter-of-factly, that they did not need to. Twelfth grade is the end of the third of the three academic cycles (the first one starts in seventh grade) that make up high school in Cape Verde. Because, in the end, whether or not kids graduate is determined by the cycle grade, which is calculated over the course of two years, and not individual trimester or yearly grades, senior year, and in particular, the last trimester of the senior year, is not very important if kids managed a strong junior year and have no particular aspirations beyond high school. One student who had done the math told me that, having earned a sixteen last year (out of a twenty point scale), all he needed to finish with a ten (the minimum passing grade; in Cape Verde being right half the time is considered an acceptable thing) was a six. The others needed only an eight. No wonder this last trimester has been so bad: it is, for a lot of them, utterly meaningless. They can finish high school by failing damn near every class and still graduate.)

I should know by now not to be astounded with my students. They are capable of almost anything. But still I find it shocking the extent to which passing all of their classes is an almost insurmountable task for all but the brightest and most dedicated of them. The school posted grades the other day. Because privacy is not at all an issue here, the grades of each student as well as the number and type of faltas they have accumulated are simply listed on a table along with those of the rest of their classmates. Jon and I are both suspicious that directors of turma (the teachers responsible for administrative oversight of individual classes) do not count all of the faltas we mark against their students, so I went to check. Except for a few exceptions, including one student who seems to have been allotted a falta disciplinar I never gave but he probably deserved (on some level I am tempted to leave it as it is), all was in order. But having a considerable amount of time on my hands, I decided to look through the grades my kids earned in the rest of their classes. If English is as difficult as they tell me I cannot imagine the complaints they must lodge against their other teachers. Nearly everyone—all but maybe ten or fifteen of them—failed at least one subject. One student, Rudy, somehow managed to fail an astonishing seven of eight classes in this, his second and certainly last trip through tenth grade. Another one of my kids, Pericles, who informed me matter-of-factly during his oral quiz that he never studies for anything and tries to cheat at just about everything because he just doesn’t like school, racked up five or six, including a failing grade in Cultura Caboverdiana, a class in which they seem to do nothing compile and copy onto poorly done posters what other people have written about Cape Verdean culture. Others were less disastrous but still surprising: students with seventeen’s and eighteen’s in my class (out of a twenty point scale) managed to earn as little as five or six points in classes like physics or chemistry. Some just scraped by in English and did very well in math or history. The only class in which everyone managed to do well was gym, a discipline in which their tendencies towards running around and throwing things are actually sanctioned by adults.

All of this might be a bit more easily understood if the eight courses they are forced to take each trimester were actually difficult. But they are not. They do so little homework that if I assign something (as I usually do) on a day in which two or three other teachers have assigned work as well, or if I ask them to do something (as, again, I usually do) anywhere in the vicinity of a test (of which they are prevented by school policy from doing more than once in a five hour day) they usually protest as though I had just demanded the impossible. And never prone to protesting just once, they frequently don’t do the work and then say something to the effect of “Teacher, you’re unjust!” when I bother them about it. On occasion I feel strange criticizing them for laziness given that the very idea as I tend to employ it is a hyper-capitalist American one, but they are not simply underachieving in comparison to our (possibly) over-competitive American standards: they don’t do much according to their own. Most of their significant work seems to be group work, but even then they are not often asked to do much in the way of actual writing. A few weeks ago I found two of my brightest tenth graders finishing a Cultura Caboverdeana assignment in my class. As they had already finished the activity we were doing I left them alone and looked over what they had done. It didn’t take long to realize that the work they had written out on looseleaf paper was clearly the same as that on the printed pages that were sitting nearby. “Keyla,” I said, “you copied all of this.” Feeling unjustly accused of something, she responded “No I didn’t, teacher. Marcio copied on page, I copied another page and Luizete copied the last page.”

I stood corrected, in a certain sense at least. The thought of original academic work was clearly not on her or anyone else’s mind, least of all that of her teacher’s. I asked something to the effect of whether that was really all they were expected to do. She said yes. This is not the only time this has happened. They never seem to read more than a few paragraphs in anything, nor do they write much, even in subjects that lend themselves rather nicely to the written exposition of ideas. The problem is so bad that our English department coordinator has taken it upon herself to teach her eleventh and twelfth graders the concept of the five paragraph essay and strongly suggested that we do the same with our kids. Twelfth grade may be a bit late to intervene, but I suppose late is better than never. All of this serves to emphasize a point I have made before and almost every teacher, high school or college, made at our In-Service Training/All Volunteers Conference on Santiago last week: the Cape Verdean school system does nothing to promote the critical faculties of the students it is responsible for educating. No wonder, then, that students who manage stellar grades in one course manage to fail so miserably in others. They are surviving on what innate ability they have, certainly not the academic skills they have never been taught. I am not trying to suggest that a more constructivist, more progressive approach to education would turn everyone into both eloquent writers of Portuguese and masters of theoretical physics, but teaching kids how to learn, teaching them how to think through problems might make being right half the time (all kids need to do to pass is maintain a 50% average in each class) a little bit easier.

I'm not really sure how to post pictures to this blog, so you can view Carnaval photos here.

Maybe it's because of the heat. There were three fights at school today. In my second period class someone made a callous remark about someone elses mother. The offended student jumped out of his chair and ran across the room to confront her detractor, thus violating the "if you leave your seat without my permission I will throw you out of class" rule I have been forced to impose on my tenth graders in order to keep them from acting like poorly trained circus animals. Accordingly, I threw him out of class, told the other student never to say anything like that again, and continued the lesson. At the end of class the one who remained managed to get no further than midway through the door before the student whose mother he insulted grabbed him around the throat. They scuffled briefly, their friends separated them, and I gave them both faltas de disciplina. Not a big deal.

The second came at the end of fourth hour. As I waited for the last student to finish copying the homework assignment (at a whopping eight sentences long, it elicited indignant protests from a room full of twelfth graders who insisted that their lives are too busy to deal with such things) I heard shouting and saw nearly every student in the eleventh and twelfth grade rush out of the courtyard and towards the street. Sensing a fight, and being a volunteer, not particularly wanting to get involved, I walked an alternate route back to the teacher's room, only find out along the way that it was not two boys, but two girls, both of whom were still screaming at each other in the street. Most of the student body was eagerly watching the affair, and as I worked for my own view one of my students, Anilda, ran up to me and excitedly screamed "Mr. Smith! Guerra! Guerra! Guerra!" It may have been the most enjoyable part of her day. Evidently none of the paid teachers felt much like intervening either, and so they waited until the girls calmed themselves down to march them off to the directors office. Shortly thereafter I witnessed both of them sobbing in his office.

And then came fifth hour. It is never particularly enjoyable. As you might expect from students who think eight (eight!) grammar exercises is a downright unreasonable assignment, students regardless of age do nothing but whine about being tired, sick and hungry the whole hour. Five hours of school in which students do nothing but make noise and chase each other around is, after all, incredibly taxing. My students almost always ask for the period off (panka, they call it in Kriolu) and even though I've developed a reputation for (gasp!) always showing up on time and teaching all of my classes (something Cape Verdean teachers are not often willing to do) they never fail to be shocked and horrified when they realize I am, in fact, going to teach the last period of the day. Class was fine until I saw Valdir, to whom I had to give a falta disciplinar last week, hit another student in the head with a wadded up ball of paper. As I always do when students throw things in class, I sent him out. Shortly thereafter I witnessed a similarly wadded up piece of paper fly in through the window and, predictably, when I went to the window there was none other than Valdir, grinning mischievously at his target. He looked rather panicked to see me there, and he should have: I told him that I was giving him another falta disciplinar (the second, lest we forget, within the space of a week), news to which he responded by coming back into class despite my instructions not to, sitting down and refusing to leave.

This was not a bright move on his part. He knew he was in trouble, and eventually started crying about it. Not to let an opportunity to malign his sometimes-friend, Sander, sitting behind Valdir, started mocking him. Valdir responded angrily and I sent Sander out. Things went quietly until the end of class when, just like in second period, as soon as they reached the door they began fighting. This time, however, their classmates were not so keen to stop them, so the responsibility was unavoidably mine. They are both small, however, so it wasn't much of a problem--it took a minute or two to pry them apart--and soon I had them both in the directors office.

Not exactly a typical day at Escola Secundaria Balthasar Lopes da Silva, but not exactly out of the ordinary either. The kids here are always just a little bit out of control, and not just around Jon and I. It does not often seem that there are consequences for much of anything. Some sort of disciplinary counself was recently convened for a few eighth graders who brought knives to school, but short of actually threatening someone's life the faculty and administration seem a bit too willing to tolerate disrespect and general idiocy so long as it doesn't infringe too markedly on their ability to teach. It's not surprising, then, that a day like today might happen: chaos isn't something that can always be controlled.

-There are few smells more pleasing than that of grilled chicken mingling with cool ocean air, especially if the grill on which it was cooked happens to be made out of an old tire rim.

-Bad students are not necessarily bad people, and a miserable lack of performance on their part is not necessarily a reason to dislike one's job. Not everyone is brilliant, nor does everyone have the support structure--at home, at school, in the community--to learn as much as they might otherwise. As a teacher one has to push and push and push to get them to get as much out of themselves as they possibly can. But at the end of the day the rewards of teaching have as much, if not more, to do with the relationships one forms along the way--seeing kids succeed is a great thing, but so is knowing that, in one way or another, those kids value your presence in their lives.

-Relationships between students and teachers here are so different than those in America that two of my students saw it fit to ask me if I got laid during Carnaval. Never would I, or anyone I knew in high school, have ever asked a teacher that.

-As I suggested in the previous post, getting dressed up in a silly costume and dancing in the street for a while is actually a good time.

-Criolas, as one student recently told me, are very dangerous.

-All you really have to do to make friends with Cape Verdean men is talk for five minutes over grogue. As one recently told me, after that, you're brothers.

-Listening to Celine Dion's Greatest Hits in a bar filled with drunk men is not considered weird in this country.

-Listening to Michael Bolton's Greatest Hits in a bar filled with drunk men is not considered weird in this country.

-Going away is as common to life in this country as singing mourna and loving soccer. Almost none of my students live with both of their parents. Everyone has loved ones, be they aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers or fathers, spread out across four continents. There's even a word for the sad, sweet longing it gives rise to--saudade--that, as its used in Kriolu, has no real equivalent in English. It's felt in every aspect of Cape Verdean culture, and after the departure of Fernando and Monica--he to Philadelphia, she to Brazil--I know a little bit of what it's like.

It may well have been the best party I've ever been to. After much anticipation, and much insistence from students that Carnaval would be nothing short of amazing, Jon and I showed up at our neighbors house to gather with our group--Copa Cabana, the "Red Nation," as the front of floats indicates--and unveil our costumes. The theme, as I understand it, had something to do with a myth about two offspring of Adam and Eve, one of whom became the Goddess of the Sun and the other the God of the Underworld. There was, appropriately, a lavishly-dressed sun goddess riding atop a float with a giant, half-eaten apple and some very large and intimidating serpents, and a King of Hell--played by our friend Calu--riding atop another float. Each had their own pair of princesses who wore similarly themed but less extravagant costumes, and a whole host of demons, angels, and variously dressed other characters the identities of which I am not quite sure. Although our costumes seemed to have more to do with hell than heaven--we wore a black and silver Gladiator-esque helmets with large feathery plumes, a sequined vest and a pair of ridiculous bell-bottoms that were probably a foot in diameter--we marched in the midst of a group of scantily-clad winged angels. The King of Hell went first, preceded by thirty or forty female devils (they were not wearing much), and followed by the truck and trailer carrying the band. After that came us, about twenty five in number, followed by a bunch of nymph-esque creatures, most of whom were our students, wearing tiny, tiny gold shorts and bras. The sun goddess and her two princesses came last.

It is difficult to capture in words or in pictures the spectacle that all of this, moving together through the narrow streets of Vila, managed to produce. Although being in the parade was incredibly fun, it did prevent us from seeing much of anything from a distance. The first night, the parade did not start until almost four in the morning, and although the route only covered a half a mile (if that) we did not reach the town square, where we met the other principal group, Estrela Azul, until six in the morning. When the dancing stopped--in some ways, the parade is only the beginning of the festivities; people tend to congregate and dance in the praça for hours--the sun was up. That, however, does not mean that the party stopped. Cold and tired, everyone retired to the various after-parties to eat breakfast (and drink beer, lots of beer) and dance until mid-morning. Later that afternoon, the whole process started again.

The second day, as a result of the greater numbers of people in the streets, was a little more impressive than the first, but the last day was extraordinary. It seemed to involve thousands of people. People were running through the streets pouring grogue and ponche down parade-goers throats; I witnessed ninth-grade girls chugging whiskey out of plastic bottles; concerned about our own private supply of booze, Jon, being a wise man, decided to duct tape bottles of what we have come to call "Ponche di Merka"--grogue, water and powdered drink mix--to his legs, thus making use of the storage space allowed by the considerable girth of our lower pant legs; everywhere people were throwing confetti and glitter (seeing people the next day, still covered in glitter, was not an uncommon thing); we even saw the President of the Camara, roughly equivalent in responsibility and stature to an American governor, dancing around in the street, drinking grogue and wearing a neon wig. When we reached the praça one group had already arrived an another was entering on the other side. People were everywhere, as far down any street as we could see. What resulted was nothing a moving tapestry of devils, demons, angels, nymphs, and numerous other characters from the other groups. The sea of color, moving back and forth to the theme music played by the bands, was nothing short of amazing: a few hundred people dressed in black, red, silver, blue, orange, yellow, gold, and white all dancing together amidst those who had come to watch. Whereas the first two night, things ended in the center of town fairly quickly, the last night people stayed for more than an hour, the bands taking turns playing their respective theme music and everyone dancing along.

And then, of course, there was the after-party, although nothing could match what transpired in the street. It was amazing. If someone had told me before coming here that I would dress up in a silly costume and spend numerous hours dancing through the streets, I would not have believed them. And if they had added that I would love it, I would have believed it even less. I've never been all that shy, but I've never been outgoing to that extent either. But the love the people of Sao Nicolau have for Carnaval, and in particular for what it celebrates--the culture of the island, which one Copa song eloquently describes as "nos ilha do sonhos," our island of dreams--is intoxicating. And participating in that culture has been, to this point, the best thing I have done as a volunteer here. We feel, and I think that we are, a great deal more a part of the community here than we were before. It is an excellent thing. I will try to add a bit more to this, and to post pictures as they become available.

Needless to say, it has been quite a while since I have posted anything. My power adapter for my computer stopped working so I haven't been able to spend as much time writing as I would like. A new one is on its way, but given the way mail moves between America and Cape Verde it could be quite a while. A few notes:

-Reading this blog may give one the impression that teaching is a miserable job. That is not true. The first trimester was difficult, but in recent months I have improved greatly as a teacher and it now seems that some of my students--I emphasize some, because there are still quite a few who are not interested in learning much of anything--are making great improvements. I've also gotten much better at separating life at school from life beyond school, something that was difficult when there wasn't much else to do. On the whole, I'm really enjoying teaching, and I'm constantly surprised by the extent to which I enjoy spending time with my students. As students they may not be all that great (that is putting it mildly), but as people they are a lot of fun. One can learn a lot from talking to them.

-Carnaval begins tomorrow. Although it is not widely celebrated in Cape Verde, I happen to live on one of the two islands where it has become quite the spectacle. Here on Sao Nicolau (as on Sao Vicente), the parades will start sometime early Sunday morning and give way to parties that go well past sunrise. People then go home and rest and do it twice more on Sunday, rest on Monday, and then one last time on Tuesday. For the last two weeks, the two predominant Carnaval groups on our town having been organizing (I use the term loosely), practicing music and preparing costumes. On Sao Nicolau, where the festival has become a full-fledged celebration of the island's culture, people approach Carnaval in roughly the same way little kids approach Christmas in America. My students sing the music in class. Middle-aged men and old women debate which group has better songs. People argue over which costumes will be more extravagant. Kids stop studying or doing homework. One girl, when alerted to the fact that she had not completed a considerable portion of her test, just shrugged her shoulders, said she didn't care and shouted "Strela! Strela! Strela!" the name of the group with which she is associated. To summarize, in February on Sao Nicolau, Carnaval is life.

Jon and I will be participating in that life, by the way. In accordance with the principle that our happiness is directly correlated to our willingness to make complete fools of ourselves, we have decided to "brinca," as they say, which means that when the Copa Cabana theme music starts floating through the streets of Vila early Sunday morning, somewhere in the crowd of wildly dancing, absurdly dressed Cape Verdeans will be two extremely awkward white guys doing their best to fit in. Though I have tried the costume on (it seems to consist of a vest, some shorts and a silly hat) I could not tell you what it looks like. As I understand it, the grand unveiling is right before the start of the parade, at a hitherto undisclosed location. When you arrive for your fitting the woman in charge of making them promptly blindfolds you and leads you into a room where she then instructs you to remove your pants. The instructions came as quite the surprise to Jon and I, and we eagerly look forward to misleading next year's volunteers about what the fitting involves.

-Valentine's Day

Having heard stories about the excesses of Carnaval (and by "excesses" I mean lots of sex in the street) and observed my students on Valentine's Day, I am absolutely sure that the period beginning roughly eight months after Carnaval and ending around ten months after Carnaval must be the most baby-filled of any on Sao Nicolau. My students informed me that Valentine's Day was "for sex," showed me cards decorated with porn, pointed out the pictures of people doing it on their cell phones and, in the case of Jairson, who likes to say (and, unfortunately, to do) stupid things, that they would be having sex without condoms. I'm not sure I believe him. I really hope he was lying. But being the Peace Corps volunteer (and a generally responsible human being) I reminded them all that sex without condoms was a really bad idea unless you wanted to children, an idea to which they all seemed, more or less, to agree. One would like, perhaps, to do something more forceful in such a situation--although I really have no idea what that might be--but at the end of the day, all of these kids know what is at stake in the decisions they make. I just hope they make the right ones.

In case you were wondering, I did get a few love letters on Valentine's Day, but they were, alas, from students, and despite the insistence by many Cape Verdeans, including a former teacher turned Cape Verdean MP, that its perfectly acceptable to have sex with those who are eighteen, no relationships will be developing. One situation might even call for some kind of intervention--she wrote two pages of bad Portuguese prose in my honor and said that she would publicly declare her love soon--although the thought of it makes me uncomfortable. We'll see what happens.

That's all for now. This afternoon the children's Carnaval parade will be starting, so I should go have a look. I'll post more when I can.

Watching preparations for Christmas here has been interesting. For a country that is almost entirely Catholic things are almost surprisingly subdued, although in some sense that should not be surprising. The American pundits who believe in something called “The War on Christmas” always seem to forget that Christmas in America is what it is not because everyone loves Jesus but because of a hyper-commercialism that uses the day to sell things. If we are moving from the “Christmas Season” to the “Holiday Season” it is not because someone somewhere is waging a war against Western civilization but because the keepers of one of the fundamental institutions of that civilization in its contemporary form—advertising—has decided that “Happy Holidays” brings more people into shopping malls than “Merry Christmas.” Although those same people attack popular culture for turning Christmas into a spectacle of consumption it turns out that Christmas, even in its allegedly purer form, has always been as such because of that culture.

Here, where the culture of consumption remains only an aspiration, there is nothing to turn Christmas into a spectacle. A few lights and streamers have been put out around town, the neighborhood kids decorated the broken-down dump truck in the vacant lot across the street, someone put a nativity scene placed in the schoolyard (there is no formal separation of church and state) and a toy store or two has opened up in previously empty space downtown. We have a tiny tree my mother sent in the mail and a cheap, trashy paper and plastic one with flashing lights I bought at a Chinese loja a few days ago. My students seem reasonably excited but nowhere near as enthusiastic as Americans of the same age. For most of them the chief attraction of Christmas is seeing family that has, because of the economic realities of life in Cape Verde, have been spread around the islands and even beyond. A healthy majority seem not to live with two parents; a lot of them do not have parents who are married. Perpetual separation has rendered the “traditional family” almost nonexistent despite the influence of the Church which, while not as strong as it used to be, is still present. A few are going to Holland, one to stay, which is probably better for her but quite the loss for me, given that she was the best student in an otherwise miserable class. Another fairly bright one is leaving for high school in Portugal in hopes of finding better opportunities for college. One or two even claimed to be going to America, although I am not entirely sure they were telling the truth. It occupies such a strong place in their collective imaginations that they seem to like simply talking about the possibility, as if doing so made the fantasy of America—wealth, prosperity, ease—that much closer.

I am not sure how to feel about the fact that, while Christmas is not a spectacle here, a whole lot of people seem to wish that it was. Life in Cape Verde is far removed from life in America but there is enough influence, brought back by family, spread through a media that grows more influential as satellite television and the internet become more and more a part of people’s lives, that its presence is not altogether unfelt. One student explained to me his interest in learning English by saying that “I like your life,” meaning the life he had come to know principally through American music and movies. People said the same thing to me in South Africa. Kids there who had nothing knew as much about American pop culture as I did. They were always upset when I told that I was from Iowa, not Los Angeles, and most people there, as is the case here, are incredulous when I suggest that life is not exactly as it appears on MTV. America is money, beautiful people, ease and excess, as much a brand as a place, something the marketers of our popular culture exploit with ease both at home and around the world.

As a nation situated at the top of the developing world, a place with too little to be counted rich but too much to be counted among the worlds poorest, the workings of that culture seem particularly evident here. Cape Verdean society is bisected by a fantastic generational divide. An enormous percentage of the country is under thirty years of age, meaning that most of the generation currently coming of age here never knew life under Portuguese colonial rule, and that those who did are becoming fewer and fewer all the time. Though they were the generation of Amilcar Cabral and his revolutionary zeal, the elders of this society still tend to be substantially more conservative than the youth of today. Growing up in a democratic society with a free market, even if it is a tiny, sluggish, under-developed market, is much different that growing up under totalitarianism. Political freedom has translated itself into a fair amount of social freedom. And the forces that always find their way into such spaces are certainly having their effects here. The selling of the cheap, tawdry version of American hip-hop culture is rampant. As I wrote previously, a lot of Cape Verdean youth insist that hip-hop is their culture (there is even a rap group based in Tarrafal with a song to this effect) to such an extent that throw around terms like “motherfucker,” “fuck you” and, most problematically, “nigger” as if they do really have some substantive relationship to their experience. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that hip hop is not a part of Cape Verdean culture—it is fairly obvious that it is—but from what I have seen it is more like a costume, something kids have bought and put on rather than producing themselves, the effect of a lot of ripped 50 cent CDs, a few pairs of Timberlands shipped from abroad and a plethora of Tupac and Sean Paul t-shirts kids like to wear under their uniforms. Girls, too, get in on the fun by fantasizing about the pretty white girls they see in the Portuguese version of “People” and having something like a competition to see who can make clothing out of the smallest possible amount of fabric. I can’t imagine that it takes more than a few issues for the unfortunate Western conceptions of what is pretty to become thoroughly engrained in their minds. I’ve even heard a few female students, “People” readers all, complain about being fat and unattractive. Although it is decidedly untrue, I do not think there is a problem-free way of indicating that, so I have limited myself to chastising them for reading such garbage in the first place.

I suppose what I find upsetting about all this is the way in which the selling of culture becomes and alternative for the cultivation of it, the way in which the spectacles we create for ourselves tend to distract us from the fairly obvious problems of those spectacles. A philosopher I know of describes the process as one by which human beings are separated from their own capacity for language and therefore from the uniquely human capacity for political existence. It is not, of course, that we stop speaking, but that we stop speaking in a meaningful way, that we come into a way of being that calls our own being as it has hitherto been into question. Hyper-commercialism thus brings about a kind of apolitical stasis in which all political possibility, all hopes of doing something about the problems in our world, become nullified and instead replaced with a self-reinforcing circle of excess. It is not hard for me, at least, to see this going on in America today. Nor is it difficult to see it in the future here.

In saying this, however, I do not want to suggest that I have found here anything like a purer form of existence, a more authentic way of being, or a life less encumbered by American excess, as if that was something only to be found outside our borders. It is pointless, and often dangerous, to romanticize the cultural life of those other than us, and equally fruitless to think that something like purity or simplicity is impossible in the business of our daily life. The alienation I mentioned above is the result of a wholehearted embrace of the desires manufactured for us by the peddlers of popular culture. Reclaiming it, and thus reclaiming ourselves and our politics, is a movement of thought, a rejection not necessarily of desire or of material things altogether but of the compulsion of that desire. In this there is a certain relationship between such a movement, which seeks to recover politics for itself, and that demanded by those, be they religious or laypeople, who seek in the midst of our culture a simpler way of relating to God in the world and thereby recovering the self for itself. They both consist in the rejection of the various idols that our culture has erected even though in practice their beliefs may be widely divergent. In both cases it should be remembered that while momentary retreat might be fruitful at times, such an orientation cannot be seen to exist only in that retreat. If it does it loses its value and its promise. One cannot recover politics and then shelter it away, the same way that one cannot possibly maintain a meaningful relationship with God if it consists only in the silence afforded by a repudiation of the world. Both faith and politics have meaning—and attain it most fully—insofar as they are enacted within the spaces that tend towards their own nullification.

Not content with simply cheating, one of the aforementioned students chose to berate me in class for a good minute when I returned her test. After I sent her out of class, she made sure to clean up her work a little bit before going to her director of turma to argue, essentially, that I was lying about the whole thing. Fortunately, neither he nor anyone else believed what she had to say. It is also fortunate that the trimester is, for all intents and purposes, over. After cheating, lying about it, screaming at me and then attempting to discredit me in the eyes of other faculty and administrators, these two kids are on my shit list. If classes resumed on Monday I do not think I would have a very easy time treating them fairly. Hopefully some time away from the island changes that.

My twelfth graders took their tests today. Among them were one student who grew up in Portugal and learned to speak fairly good English there, and another fairly poor student who failed English last year and is well on her way to doing so again (the an inane organizational structure of Cape Verdean schools allows students who fail certain classes to continue on in those same subjects). As she handed in her test at the end of class she looked at me somewhat sheepishly and asked if all of her answers were wrong. I told her that I doubted she got everything wrong and then went to give another test to a Seventh Day Adventist who, because he does not attend Saturday classes, had to take his today. While he worked I took out her test and graded it. For someone who didn’t even come close to passing on the first test she did remarkably well. Not one to comment much on tests—I have a lot of them to grade this week, in addition to a few other things—I even scribbled a compliment or two next to a few sections. I was, if only briefly, proud of the way she managed to turn things around. But the contrast between a few different parts of her test seemed odd. Two were sparkling and entirely correct. The essay section—it really only asks for two short paragraphs in response to a few questions—was barely intelligible. As I looked at it over and over again I noticed faint writing in pencil underneath all of her correct answers, and as I examined it more carefully it became clear that it was definitely not hers. It belonged, predictably, to the young man sitting behind her. The parts of her test done correctly were nearly identical to his, with just a few errors inserted here and there to make me think, perhaps, that the similarities might be accidental. They had, evidently, switched tests when I was not looking. He wrote part of her test in pencil which she then erased and wrote over in pen. Fairly ingenious, I suppose, but they need to work on their technique. I showed the tests to another teacher who said something to the effect of “Yeah, they like to do that. Don’t let them use pencil.” Needless to say, I won’t. The young man in question, by the way, is the same kid who stupidly showed me the cabula he used to cheat on the psychology test he had taken the class before mine. He furiously argued with me on that occasion but today, when I found them waiting outside the school for their rides home, he said almost nothing at all. She tried to convince me that they had both done their own work but, as I told her, his handwriting is literally all over her test, even if it is a bit faint. I think he resented my scolding them in public—“We’ll talk about this Monday when there aren’t people around,” he said as I walked away—but as far as I’m concerned the more students who realize how seriously I take cheating the better. They both have zeroes for the second test and, therefore, failing grades for the first trimester. I may even try giving them both faltas disciplinar, although I am not sure how successful I will be given that teachers here tend not to be supportive of the practice in general and I don’t really know if they ever give them in cases of cheating. Knowing that I filled out the necessary paperwork will, at least, let my own students know I am serious when I say that I take great offense at their dishonesty and perhaps give other faculty occasion to think about how they deal with what is a pathetically rampant problem. As much as they complain about students here, I really do think the environment of a school is determined in large part by the attitudes of teachers and administrators and in that the fact that a lot of our students are chronically dishonest little miscreants suggests a failure on the part of the faculty to deal with these things in an effective manner. There really isn’t anything much more disrespectful to teachers, fellow students, school rules or to the idea of education in general than cheating, but I’m not sure a lot of my colleagues think of cheating in those terms. I’m really not sure how they think of it. “They do it a lot,” they say, the same way they say “They are really poorly behaved” “They don’t do their work,” or “They don’t respect anyone.” It always has an air of resignation to it. And in that the faculty of a school becomes as much a part of the problem as the students. If you expect miserable things out of kids it makes sense that, for the most part, you will get miserable things. Even if the kids are bad, the facilities bad, and the institutions that support education bad, one gains nothing by repeating that fact over and over again. That is only likely to make things worse. Assuming responsibility for the way our students conduct themselves may not be easy, it may not be fun, and in the end it will not transform all of our students into little angels, but it will certainly help. In any situation there is a lot one cannot control, but the way to get the best out of it is not to be found in continually remind oneself of that fact; it is in not worrying about what one cannot control and focusing on what one can. People who like to talk about problems in education love to talk about how we never manage to spend enough on it. Poor facilities are, of course, a problem, but I’ve never really agreed with the principle that a dingy classroom will necessarily produce proportionally degraded minds. You don’t need to spend $20,000 a student to educate kids well. You need to exert time, effort and determination. And that, for various reasons, is a resource a lot of people seem to lack all over the world. *** On a completely unrelated note, I have stopped showering, though that is not to say that I have stopped bathing. It’s a bit chilly these days—and by “chilly” I mean it tends to dip to 55 or 60 at night—and our water, which is in a big steel and concrete tank on our roof, gets pretty cold overnight. Showering in the morning before school has become an unpleasant experience. A fine, efficient alternative is the bucket bath, which involves, as the name may suggest, a bucket and some water. Every day when I wake up I go to the stove, strike a match and heat a small pot until boiling. Pour it into an otherwise chilly bucket and you’ve got what almost none of us have had since arriving in this country: something like a hot shower. It is not, of course, perfect. In order to avoid getting really, really, really cold every fifteen seconds or so it is necessary to continually dump water over your head, something that is all but impossible when actually washing. Still, it is better than standing under an unrelenting stream of 50 degree water for a few minutes and it saves a lot of water, something important on this island and in our neighborhood in particular. We live in the highest portion of Vila, and the city’s water distribution system is so poorly designed that when water does come to those below us—sometimes it does not—there is frequently not enough pressure left in the system to reach all the way up the hill. Around the same time each month the neighborhood women and girls can be seen carrying 20 kg drums of water on their heads up a pretty considerable hill. Not finding that appealing, Jon and I, the bourgeois snobs that we are, have found another option: buying it from Senor Black, the local construction magnate who deals water on the side. It’s usually dirty and always expensive, but it comes in a truck, which is much better, and much less embarrassing, than atop my head.

I tend to enjoy most of my students as people. As students, however, I am coming to thoroughly dislike most of them. On this island, at least, they are lazy, obnoxious, disrespectful and immature. I assign work and they do not do it. I give activities and they inform me that they’d really rather not participate. I ask them questions and without even contemplating an actual response they tell me in Kriolu that they don’t know the answer (even if it’s a question like “What do you like to do on the weekends?), that they can’t speak English, or both. Regardless of their age they are always fighting over pencils, pens, notebooks, the occasional shoe and any number of other slights my Kriolu skills are not yet adequately at picking out of the fray. They have so many different reasons for why I should let them out of class—the bathroom, making copies, the pharmacist, group work, illness, a visit to the doctor, hunger, thirst, etc—that I dismiss all such requests almost out of hand. “Teacher, I’m hungry” they tell me. “So am I,” I usually respond. “I’m sick. I need to go to the bathroom,” they say. “I don’t particularly care,” I tell them, in English if I’m in a good mood, in Kriolu if I am not. On some level I hope they are not sick and that they are not about to do something unfortunate in my class, but the frauds are so common and the genuine cases so rare it’s really not something to worry about. Today I spent most of my last class fending off requests from students to collect tests from their Portuguese teacher who, apparently, said that he would be giving them out during my class. Although I made it very clear that if Senor Martin wants to do something involving my students during my class he damn well better talk to me first, they were not swayed. Over and over and over again they asked, so frequently that I kept them to the bell even though I had finished my lesson plan five minutes earlier. Things are particularly bad now that they are taking tests. Apparently an hour of mental exertion in the midst of an otherwise lazy five hour school day in which they do their best to do nothing at all is simply too much to even continue feigning effort. I do not like having classes after I know my students have had tests. They usually ask for “panka”—a free period, something they get a lot of from their Cape Verdean teachers—as soon as the day begins and continue asking and asking and asking every time I see them, right up to the beginning of class. “We’re tired,” they tell me. “We can’t have class.” I usually tell them I am sorry and then attempt to begin class. It is, generally, only an attempt, because students will stand up and walk across the room, carry on conversations right in front of me, interrupt me with more pointless attempts at getting out of class or do any number of other things that prevents us from getting anything done. I usually find a few of the more obnoxious students to send out in an attempt at quieting things down but this often causes as many disruptions as it prevents. Their friends usually cheer their removal. And the students being sent out always insist on making a show of it, slowly getting their things together and strutting around for their friends as I walk uncomfortably close behind in an effort at forcing them out of the room without actually touching them. Some try to convince me to stay. Others simply tell me no, as if I did not actually know what I was talking about, or as if they actually had the authority to overrule me. The school’s disciplinary structure is, quite frankly, idiotic, and does nothing to help teachers in these situations. Twenty percent of each students grade is left up to teachers to decide (there are many of my students who will be getting only a tiny fraction of that) but that is not enough to hold most student’s attention for very long. We can send them out of class and mark them absent, but that, again, is only so persuasive, and some students seem to actually enjoy the experience. They genuinely fear, for whatever reason, faltas disciplinar, a fairly serious mark the accumulation of which can get them thrown out of school, but it is so serious and involves paperwork and the involvement of other teachers to such an extent that many are reticent to give them out or to support other teachers in their efforts to do the same. I gave out my first the other day to a student who showed up late, strolled into class without asking permission, told me “No” when I told him to go back outside and ask if he could come in, told me “No” again when I told him to leave and not return, and then shoved his desk into the back of another student when I threatened him with the falta I wound up giving him anyway. The form, quite frankly, is laughable: acceptable reasons for giving such disciplinary marks include disruption of class, failure to respect teachers, failure to respect other students, and failure to follow the direct instructions of teachers. I don’t know about the experience of other teachers, but given such criteria, Jon and I could give out a dozen or so in a day and still consider ourselves lenient. What we could really use is a lesser mark the accumulation of which would result in a falta disciplinar. I raised the issue in a meeting with the head of our English department but it does not seem that anything is going to come of it. I have heard from talking to other volunteers and Peace Corps staff that our high school is among the worst in the country. The boards are either too high or too low, the lighting is bad, there are a few rooms without electricity, there are desks in each room that are broken or falling apart, walls are covered in graffiti and there is a lack of space and resources for students and teachers. I suppose it is not surprising that the attitudes of a lot of the kids would seem to fit the environment. What is more distressing is the attitudes of other teachers. One day, seeing a bunch of my students outside during their last period, I asked why they were free. Their teacher was tired, they told me, and she had gone home. This seems to happen a lot. Each class has a book that teachers sign each day as they come and go. It is not uncommon for students to have days when a majority of their teachers do not show up. I have yet to ask anyone why this is, and I’m not sure I would get a straight answer if I did. It is difficult to know what to do in a situation where the adults who are supposed to be examples for these kids fail to be that example—no doubt leading to a lot of the disciplinary problems we have—especially in a situation where one is an outsider. I, at the very least, show up to all of my classes on time and with real lesson plans and never give my kids free time unless its easily justifiable. But that is not the kind of thing other teachers would notice. Still there are bright spots. I never harbored any illusions about this being always easy or always enjoyable. Teaching anywhere is, I’m sure, a grind. But there are always students that manage to make you feel good about your job. A few days ago, at the city festival, I was approach by a student whom I had met briefly at school but never really talked to. Hoping to understand his Kriolu, I was surprised to hear him speak fairly clear English. He’d had Peace Corps teachers in the past, he said, and had been disappointed to find out that I was not going to be his teacher this year. He told me about Mr. Jackson (a former volunteer who seems to have been incredibly popular here) and about the year he spent at school in Mindelo. “I used to speak better English,” he insisted. “But my teacher in Mindelo was irresponsible. She never came to class.” “You go to this school?” I was almost tempted to ask. But there are a fair amount of students like him and they are more than enough to make it worthwhile. Talking with Jon and other teachers here it is clear how important perspective is in enduring the endless slights of our students. I am not, by nature, a mean person, and I find myself willing to tolerate a lot because, in the end, all the teachers here, Cape Verdean or not, tolerate a lot, and no amount of yelling at some kid who doesn’t particularly care that I’m yelling at him (I learned rather quickly that kids here are unfazed by any verbal assault I am, to this point at least, capable of unleashing) will make that change. But I’m also willing to deal with the situation because at the end of the day I am not the one bearing the bulk of the responsibility for my student’s education. They carry that weight. I am, of course, trying to teach them that they are the one’s responsible, that I expect a lot out of them (they are not unintelligent) and that they should expect a lot out of themselves, but there is only so far one can going in doing that. My second round of test this trimester have been difficult, and purposefully so. I am not happy with much of anything that the majority of them have done so far. They don’t listen to me, they don’t do their homework, they don’t study and they don’t approach class with anything like a sense of urgency. There is nothing on any of my tests that they should not, if they are conducting themselves properly, be able to handle, but a lot of them are failing nonetheless. And a lot of them have been angry about it, which is, I suppose, better than them not being angry about it. But when I asked one particularly furious group of students what they could do to improve for the next test a riot nearly ensued. The notion that they are ultimately responsible for their own success or failure is apparently not something with which they are acquainted. “We want an easier test” they said. A few even insisted that “We are Cape Verdean” and were therefore unable to do what I asked of them. That is, of course, absolutely untrue. The few students who passed the test were the only one’s who were able to come up with anything. Their suggestions included such novel ideas as studying, putting effort into homework, respecting me and each other and paying attention in class. Judging by their collective behavior the next day, almost no one took those ideas to heart. Needless to say, I did not feel very bad when, after everything was calculated, half of them wound up failing this trimester. It is difficult to decide what, if anything, to do to help the situation. The kids who do what I ask are learning something and their scores are improving. There is obviously a lot I have to improve on myself, and things I can do to make class a bit more appealing to some of my students. But at the end of the day these kids have to learn to be responsible for themselves and that is something a lot of them (most kids everywhere, if my memory of high school serves me correctly) do not want to do. It's probably ridiculous to expect all of them to respond. They've told us from the first day of training that successes here are often little things, and I've certainly seen a few of those, not the least of which was one of the neighborhood kids doing significantly better on her second test, which was much more difficult than the first, and therefore managing to pass a trimester she looked initially like she was going to fail. She was ecstatic, and that is all one can really ask for.

***

As a postscript, the student to whom I gave the falta disciplinar the other day learned nothing from the experience. Yesterday as I was writing on the board before class he tapped me on the shoulder and insisted that another student named Valdir had just kicked him. Valdir is sixteen years old, maybe five feet tall and fairly nice. Fabio (the offending student) is eighteen, 6'2'' and a complete asshole. I do not believe that Valdir actually kicked him, and I told him that. When he realized that I was not going to do anything about whatever he perceived his situation to be, he, right in front of me, took two steps and kicked at Valdir, narrowly missing him. And when I told him to leave (in hindsight I should have reacted far more harshly; I'm sure he will give me many opportunities in the future) he, yet again, told me no. Only after another student asked him if he really wanted another falta disciplinar did he leave. I guess some people will never learn.

My legs hurt. Yesterday I ran in a 12k road race held as part of Vila's municipal festival. Although many of my students insisted in the preceding days that I would win, I did nothing of the sort. As soon as the whistle blew at the start I figured it was a hopeless endeavor. Most of the other runners sprinted off at a pace so ridiculously fast I decided after a few seconds that it was useless to try to keep up. Of those who completed the run—there were a handful of people who dropped out for one reason or another—I finished second to last, just ahead of one of my students. According to my rough calculations I managed around a 7:20 minute mile for the whole of the course, something that is, in my history as a runner, quite an achievement, but still not impressive enough for my students and various others I encountered afterwards to inform me that I do, in fact, run very slowly. Maybe I'll try again next year.

It happens a lot here. Although my students insist that they do not attempt to cheat in English class—not worth it, they say; the cheat sheets aren’t usually that helpful anyway—they seem to make an effort in just about every other subject they have. Their ingenuity and intellect when it comes to cheating is notorious among the volunteers and Cape Verdean teachers who trained us. You will have no idea what’s going on, they say. They are inconspicuous, ingenious, and resolute. Cheat sheets are crammed in shirt cuffs, up skirts, taped to the back of shoes, scribbled on desks, walls, tucked inside the caps of pens and containers of white out, on pieces of alleged scrap paper, and so on and so on. To listen to them talk is to get a picture of a cat and mouse game more appropriate to counterintelligence operations than educational testing.

I have not had much of a problem thus far. The other day I indicated as much to a colleague who responded by insisting that my students, the little miscreants that they are, are really just so good at what they do that I haven’t found them out yet. The first round of testing revealed only one or two instances of students rather obviously glaring at other people’s tests—and automatic deduction the first time, an automatic zero the second time, I told them—no cheat sheets (“cabulas,” as they are called here) and a failure rate sufficiently high as to convince me that, if students are cheating it is not helping them in any appreciable way. In any case, it’s not as if my tests are easy to cheat on. I make them do as much writing as I reasonably can, and while that makes it a bit more difficult to grade, it also makes the benefit of any illicit notes absolutely minimal. Even if a student were to smuggle in a piece of paper with a handful of translations on it they would have to know how to use those words in a proper sentence, a skill most of them have yet to master.

So I suppose I believe them, for the most part, when they say that an English test is not something worth cheating on. I also believe them when they say that just about everything else is worth cheating on. While I have never found a cheat sheet designed for one of my own tests I have seen plenty for use in other subjects. More than a few of my students have been so stupid as to think that while I don’t condone cheating on my own tests I have no problem hearing about cheating on other teacher’s tests. I’ve confiscated more than a few half-completed cabulas from students trying to use my class to “prepare” for their tests, something that always inspires righteous indignation. “That’s my property,” they say. “Teacher, that’s mine. You can’t take what’s mine.” One student was so dumb as to proudly show me the cabula he’d just used to cheat on his psychology test. “I am very intelligent,” he said as he demonstrated how he’d held one piece of light looseleaf over a heavier type of paper and copied note after note after note, leaving barely legible marks in the surface of the heavier stock. “That’s really cool,” I said. Then, as he smiled back at me, I snatched the paper, told him that he was not, in fact, very intelligent, and spent so much of the next ten minutes trying to persuade him that absolutely nothing he could say to me was going to change the outcome of this particular course of events that I had to throw him out of class. The incident cost him what little respect I had left—he spent the better part of the first part of the trimester insisting that he was too poor to buy an English notebook; when I asked around about his family I found out that not only is his father a wealthy man but that the student in question was raised in Portugal and moved here only a year ago, thus making his “I’m a poor Cape Verdean” story absolute, complete bullshit—and will probably cost him a passing grade in the first trimester of the class.

Cheating at times seems as deeply rooted in the culture of these students as is soccer during breaks and ponche on Saturday nights. In my experience of high school cheating was almost entirely the domain of the bottom rung of students. Here they all seem to do it, even the ones who seem to be good. Today I found a student I thought very highly of making what looked a lot like a cabula for a philosophy test she had later in the day. When I demanded to see that little piece of paper with the tiny writing that she so urgently hid from me upon realizing that I saw it, she refused, flew into a rage and started yelling at me about her right to her own property. My options, unfortunately, were somewhat limited: I didn’t want to search her possessions; throwing her out of class would have expressed my considerable anger at being lectured by an eighteen year-old girl but it would not have prevented her from cheating, and I didn’t want to alert her philosophy teacher without knowing for sure that she was in fact preparing to cheat. Amidst a flurry of “Throw her out!” and “Give her a falta!” from the rest of the students I told her that, this time, I would give her the benefit of the doubt even though I really had very little doubt about what was going on. To this point my relationship with her has been among the best I’ve had with any of my students. I hope, on some level, that an appeal to that relationship might have made her think twice about lying to my face, although I’m not sure it did. At the end of class she made her anger with me very clear (“Ami n fika xatiado ma bo”), I told never to talk to me like that again, and we went our separate ways.

I find it ironic that the test she was getting ready for was on freedom and moral responsibility. It is not at all surprising that high school students in any country would fail to evaluate their actions in light of the principles they learn in something like a philosophy or theology class—for most of the kids I went to high school with, the principles we learned in courses like “Ethics and Morals” were treated more as objects of mockery than as serious guidance—but as a teacher concerned in one way or another with the development of the people I teach, it is still upsetting. There is a tendency to treat our younger years as somehow exempt from the principles that are supposed to guide our adult life—responsibility is always something that comes later. But what most people fail to realize is that we only become adults by practicing those principles that we continually declare irrelevant to large swathes of our lives. No wonder so many supposed adults” never manage to grow up.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my kitchen, cutting up onions and tomatoes for yet another pot of rice when an interview with a US Army officer stationed in Iraq crackled over my world-band radio. He seemed irritated as he spoke to a BBC correspondent who asked him to consider, for a moment, the possibility that Iraqi families might resent the frequency with which US soldiers enter their homes to conduct random searches. He tried to compare the situation to that of police officers conducting searches in the Untied States. Of course, he admitted, he would be upset if a police officer tried to unlawfully enter his home. But under the properly legal circumstances he would do the duty of a good citizen and allow the officers in. And because US forces, the analogy seems to go, have the legal authority to enter homes, and because entering those homes to search for weapons and insurgents serves the good of Iraq, it only makes sense that any good Iraqi would tolerate, if not openly welcome, the presence of foreigners with guns in his or her home. Anyone who would suggest otherwise, his tone seemed to say, is a fool or, worse, a terrorist sympathizer.

I do not know if I would have reacted so strongly had I heard the same conversation in the United States. In one’s own environment, one’s own culture, it is easy—far too easy—to treat one’s own experience as everyone’s experience and thus to assume lazily that the meaning we take from a particular situation is necessarily the meaning every rational person will take from the same situation. From here that is impossible. That officer’s words seem utterly absurd, and they seem to typify everything that is wrong with the way America conducts itself in the world today.

It may seem that this is just a tirade against the Bush Administration, and in some sense it may be that. But I do not wish to limit it to that. Those who run our government may well exhibit most forcefully and most problematically the problem I am talking about, but they are not the only ones. I do not think they would be in power if they were. The problem is a cultural one. One could perhaps call it a problem of sympathy. Or a problem of imagination. Or, perhaps most properly, a problem of difference, of the way in which we understand difference and why differences exist the way they do.

Although America always celebrates itself as a bastion of pluralism and democracy in a world otherwise shattered by tyranny and oppression, many of its people do not seem to me to be very good at understanding anyone other than themselves. That is perhaps not the scathing criticism it seems to be. I am not attacking individuals. We do not come from a culture that is given to much in the way of self-criticism or cosmopolitanism. Our tradition is a tremendously self-congratulatory one. We love to sing our own praises. And while national pride is a fine thing, jingoistic nationalism is not, and that is what currently flies under the banner of “patriotism” almost everywhere the term is used.

Much of this is no doubt the result of the trauma of 9/11 and the often self-inflicted fears that have come to define our political life in its aftermath. But while it might be understandable it is not excusable in a context which begs the exact opposite. It is still not fashionable to ask hard questions about the way in which America conducts itself in the world, in part because many of those who have tried to do it have been either overly simplistic or just completely stupid in their insistence that “America got what it deserved” or that 9/11 was just the “chickens coming home to roost.” But hard questions are exactly what the situation demands.

9/11, in some sense, should have marked the beginning of the end of patriotism. I do not, of course, mean “patriotism” in its innocuous sense of “love of country.” It should have marked the end of jingoism, the end of American exceptionalism, the end of the notion that what is good for America is necessarily good for the rest of the world and the end of the a priori assumption of American moral superiority. Not that, jingoism aside, those are all necessarily false notions; I am not passing judgment on them here. I am only saying that what should have shattered for good our first-worldness, our notion of absolute uprightness, invincibility and security has instead provoked the relentless reassertion of the same. As Americans in a globalizing world we have the privilege (if it can be called that) of driving much of that globalization and reaping many of its rewards without experiencing anything other than the occasional economic side-effects. The world seems much the same to us, which is to say that the world seems very American to us. Liberals and homosexuals might hammer away at good old American values from either coast but for the most part those values continue unchanged. There might be something positive in that. But this continuity, this cultural calm, is in stark contrast to the cultural and political shockwaves that reverberate as a result of almost everything America does in the world. We have the privilege (again, if it can be called that), as a result of our relative isolation, to reap tremendous change without experiencing much of it ourselves.

I have no idea why 9/11 occurred. I do not think there is an answer to that question, if by an “answer” one means an explanation that can be explained in a few lines. I would not side with those who would say that we were attacked because of our support for Israel, because of our presence in the Persian Gulf, because we betrayed the Mujhahedeen in Afghanistan in the eighties or because we preside over a vicious global empire that oppresses people at every turn. That seems to me to be overly simplistic. The word “because” is a problem. We will never be able to isolate three or four things that led to that day and thus explanations of cause will always be useless. I think American policy certainly contributed to the circumstances that made 9/11 possible, but that is a far cry from saying that the United States government brought that day upon its own people. That, I think, is all that can be concretely said.

But that does not mean that more questions should not be asked or that those questions are necessarily of limited value. When I wrote above that “9/11 should have been the beginning of the end of patriotism” I meant that 9/11 should have provoked a concern for our place in the world that has been, to this point, what right wing pundits like to call “un-American.” Before 9/11 it often did not seem necessary to pay much attention to what went on around us. The consequences of our actions were hidden neatly behind the web of security—physical, political, and cultural—our way of life seems now almost untenable without. And whether or not Mohammed Atta and his cohorts acted as they did because of something America did is not particularly relevant here. 9/11 raises that possibility. It suggests that our lives are thoroughly implicated in the lives of others. It suggests that peace and justice in the world is necessarily more than the product of the pursuit of American self-interest, something the notion of American exceptionalism seems designed to allow at every turn.

9/11, the threat of terrorism, the “War on Terror” (a stupid name for a misguided policy)—these are thing with which we now live everyday. People frequently ask us about those things here. Cape Verdeans throw around the name Bin Laden as almost as a joke. They speak of 9/11 with a nonchalance that is, in the beginning, striking for an American. One’ initial impulse is to insist on the incredible seriousness of that day, on the horror of its images, on the shock that it caused to our national psyche. But on thinking about it more I think there is something valuable in demystifying those attacks. It was, for us on 9/11, a horrific thing. But we are nothing but naïve and narcissistic if we think that death on that scale is unheard of in this world. It was horrific. It was unique in our experience. But it was not unique in human experience. The list of massacres and genocides that make 9/11 look like a trifle is staggering. It shattered our normalcy but it was, in fact, the irruption of a more general normalcy in the secure fantasy that was life in America for so many years.

I remember watching Fox News (for entertainment value only, I swear) on the morning of July 7th when news broke about the London subway attacks of that day. It was, memorably, timed to coincide with the G8 summit that week, the central issue of which was poverty in Africa. One of the hosts of Fox’s morning show was insensate, but not only at those who perpetrated the attacks. That poverty, and not terrorism, was on the top of the G8 agenda, he insisted, showed how incredibly out of touch most of those leaders were with the real problems of the world. Terrorism is the most pressing issue of our day, he insisted, the global poor be damned.

Never mind that almost 20,000 people die every day from the effects of poverty, and never mind that there is frequently a strong connection between religious radicalism and political and economic desolation. That anchor’s response to July 7th—a response that, for all intents and purposes, values the lives of those in the West marginally threatened by terrorism above the millions of lives in Africa and Asia threatened by neglect—is, unfortunately, not unique in American life. It is perhaps even the rule rather than the exception. It lurks every time someone repeats the absurd fiction that “We are fighting the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here” in order to justify our continued presence in Iraq, where fighting, according to a recent John Hopkins University study, has killed over 600,000 people.

It is the symptom of a lack of sympathy, imagination, of an utter inability to comprehend and deal meaningful with the difference that makes our world what it is. If 9/11 should be the end of thoughtless patriotism it should also mark in our history the beginning of the development of a more global American citizenship, the precondition of which is the ability to think human experience outside of the narrow and comfortable confines of our own experience.

That is not always an easy thing to do, nor is it a comfortable thing to do. Although I have been made aware of numerous objections to the book from which it comes, Paul Gilroy’s understanding of cosmopolitanism as necessarily involving “the principled and methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history” still resonates with me. Perhaps it is only because I live in that estrangement every day. My language, my history, and my identity as an American are not particularly relevant to day to day life in Cape Verde. As Peace Corps volunteers we are not supposed to simply do our jobs and retreat to the relative comfort and seclusion of our houses to interact only with other volunteers. The experience would be of only limited value if we did. We do not live in “community,” in the sense in which a lot of people educated at Jesuit universities understand the term. But we live in the communities in which we serve. And I think that is much better. That is not, however, to say that it is without difficulties. It certainly makes the experience harder than it would be if we lived together in a compound somewhere. Loneliness, isolation and physical, emotional and mental exhaustion are a part of everyone’s experience here, especially in the beginning. One cannot afford to be timid or thin-skinned. But the same conditions that make loneliness and isolation staples of life in the Peace Corps also make possible one of the essential benefits of living outside of one’s own culture: almost complete alienation from that culture and almost total immersion in another.

I was asked by a professor of mine before leaving BC how one might view the Peace Corps from the perspective of postcolonial theory. At this point I do not have a full answer to that question. Peace Corps missions are so varied and the contexts in which volunteers work so widely divergent that it is difficult to make sweeping statements about the organization in all of its forms around the world. There is obviously a sense in which it fulfills a part of the development goals of the United States government and insofar as that is true it is open to some fairly devastating attacks from opponents of globalization, the more erudite of whom are often people with a thoroughly postcolonial take on the world. But the broad institutional mission of the Peace Corps does not seem to me to have a whole lot to do with the daily lives of volunteers, and that is the level on which the organization actually does its work. We are remarkably free to conduct our business and initiate projects on our own with no oversight or approval needed from staff in Praia. I think that that freedom, coupled with the experience of life lived among those whom we are serving makes for some interesting and fruitful possibilities that other larger, more rigidly structured aid organizations afford themselves. Much of the business of serving the poor around the world is as much the business of understanding a particular culture as it is building skills and infrastructure. That understanding is impossible if those who are supposed to build it are living at a considerable remove from the cultural context of those they are trying to help. Someone who is actively engaged with those they serve on a cultural as well as political level is in a much stronger, and more sensitive, position than someone who is not. And in this I think the Peace Corps might be liberated somewhat from those who might otherwise tar it as yet another tool of neo-liberal American imperialism. Our lives are a constant education about the people with whom we live. It is, in other words, an education in sympathy.

This education is where all of these reflections come together. It is difficult to live in this way and return an absolutist about much of anything. One sees firsthand the texture of a culture beyond the West, the way in which it takes its shape and its form. It gives one an incredible appreciation of the depth of understanding that is necessary in dealing with people who are different from us and instills a strong suspicion in the possibility of successful interventions in the problems of others around the world. I do not mean to foreclose on that possibility entirely. I do wish that we in America and the West who are so desirous to see our own liberal democracies spread across the world would temper that desire with a little bit of pause. We have lived so long in our much celebrated liberal societies that we forget that at one time liberalism was nothing more than an idea in the minds of a few thinkers, most of whom were regarded as radicals or subversives in the societies in which they lived. Liberalism is not a simple fact of human existence. Nor is democratic government. Regardless of their apparent utility, they are cultural values that have arisen in the West over the course of a few hundred long and often violent years. We should not suggest that because we claim to love freedom that everyone hears in the mouths of representatives of Western government the same thing when that word is uttered. One of the biggest mistakes one can make in approaching the rest of the world is asserting a dogmatic belief in a universal humanity. That is precisely what President Bush does when he insists on the transformative power of democracy and the longing all people seem to have for a specifically American understanding of freedom. Representative government can grow anywhere, but the point is that it has to grow. One cannot set up the framework of a liberal society atop a country that was artificially constructed by the British eighty or ninety years ago out of a series of often mutually antagonistic tribal and kinship groups and expect a liberal society to take hold overnight. Cultural change cannot be imposed. It can be nurtured, but only with the cooperation and desire of those in question and only with a full understanding of that culture on the part of those who wish to do the changing. To do anything else is to invite moral and political disaster.

An acknowledgement that meaning is not absolute, that language and culture are inextricably intertwined, and that ideas shape our experience in a fundamental way is an absolutely necessary part of any effort at bettering our world today. So is a willingness to engage in the kind of self-alienation Gilroy talks about when he describes the cosmopolitanism inherent in postcolonial experience. We should study languages. While we should not, in our schools and universities, abandon altogether the teaching of the Western tradition, I see no reason to give an education in such matter any more importance than an education in anything else. I do not find much of it particularly compelling. Nor do I think a tireless commitment to our humanistic tradition serves any purpose other than to reinscribe the rigid categories of difference that it has worked to erect all along. If we are to think beyond ourselves we must be educated beyond ourselves. It is not a state we should look towards but a practice, a way of comporting ourselves towards the world around us that constantly questions the foundations of our own experience in a way that opens up the experience of others. Only then will we ever be able to look into the faces of the numerous others by whom we are surrounded and find in those something other than complete foreignness.

November 1st. It’s All Souls Day, also celebrated here as Harvest Day, and it is a national holiday. On Sao Nicolau the festivities center around Faja, a little town in the center of the island’s farming area. While most of the island is dry almost all year round, and some areas, to the east in particular, are outright desert, Faja and the surrounding areas are high enough in the mountains to be lush and green all year round. People there grown sugar cane, beans, and most importantly for Harvest Day, corn. On Halloween people came from all over for the Miss Vale do Faja Pageant, a yearly beauty contest featuring ten or twelve girls from the surrounding areas. The advertised start was eight o’clock (I think); it did not start until after ten and dragged on and on and on for almost three hours. In the Faja polyvalente (the term here for the local community events center; almost every village has one) the girls showed off their evening wear and “sporty” outfits (they actually called it that), dancing ability and, most importantly for the assembled masses, their ability to fit into the smallest possible bikini. It was not, needless to say, anything like the swimsuit portion of the Miss America pageant, wherein the selected attire is fairly conservative by the standards of the swimsuit industry. Most of the girls wore thongs. And I think it was at this portion of the competition that I realized one competitor, named Ronice, looked from a distance remarkably similar to the Ronice from one of my tenth grade English classes. I was sitting a bit too far away to make out her face. I was not sitting too far away to notice that she pulled of the thong quite well. I eventually realized it was her when, walking through the party afterwards, that I encountered Ronice from turma 10D with her hair done up in decidedly beauty pageant style. Mildly awkward.

I am not sure who won. I’m not sure many of the people who were there know either. It was, as I said, very long. While the girls were changing there were various other performances, including an early-90s inspired solo dance routine (quite impressive, in fact) by one of Jon’s students and a rap group from Tarrafal that so overstayed their welcome they were booed off the stage. I’m not sure I would say they were bad, but they hardly represent what is interesting about what you might call Cape Verde’s hip-hop culture. They didn’t do much more than parrot what they hear of the usually bad American hip-hop (read: 50 cent) that makes it all the way here, which is something that seems to afflict a fair amount of the rap artists that Cape Verde produces. The problem seems always to be that they are, more or less, Cape Verdean artists pretending to be American artists to such an extent that they randomly insert terms like “motherfucker” and, even more annoying and problematic, “nigger” into their otherwise Kriolu lyrics. A few of the songs on an album by someone called Boys-AC, given to me by my host brother in Sao Domingos, are interesting in the sense that they manage to meld obviously American influences with the music of Cape Verde (the result is very cool) but such examples, even there, are the exception rather than the rule. In any case, as soon as they started announcing the winners everyone started to spill out into the street and heading down towards the two clubs down the street. John and I went along with Brent to the first one we found (incidentally, run by the family of one of my students; I’m never sure how to feel about buying alcohol from someone I see in class everyday) and hung out for a while, dancing occasionally and practicing our Kriolu. At one point we ran into our neighbor, Amadeu, who upon seeing Jon said nothing more than “Jon, ponche!” proceeded to buy us drinks, inform us of the absolute necessity of finding some “piquenas” (girlfriends) and insist, contrary to our experience thus far, that Sao Nicolau has legions of young, pretty, single and childless women longing for American boyfriends. We also met John and Vanny, two guys we met on a passeio (hike) a few weeks ago who proceeded to buy us more ponche and then to profess to us their enduring love of heavy metal and, in particular, Iron Maiden. It was odd, if for no other reason than I have never heard or seen anything of Iron Maiden or heavy metal in general on this island and I have no idea how two young Cape Verdeans who have never been out of the country would come to know so much about 80s rock. Oh well.

We did not leave until four in the morning. We rode back in a Hilux, which is both the name of a particular brand of Toyota truck and, due to its popularity in Cape Verde, the name for any pickup truck with a few bench seats in the back. After about for our five hours of sleep, we woke up, realized that we had no water, got dressed and caught a hiace back to Faja for the day’s festivities. We were, it turns out, a little early, but fortunately one of the administrators from the high school lives right in the center of town and invited us in. She and her husband offered us all the beer, whiskey and grogue one could possibly want after the night we had before. After a while there we visited aunt of one of Jocelyn’s students at what turned out to be the local convent. From there we journeyed up to Lompelado, a zona a few kilometers up the valley where we spent most of the day. The local bar had music, plenty of beer and, you guessed it, ponche, and outside some of the local women were cooking up the largest amount of cachupa (a delicious concoction of corn, beans, meat, vegetables, and occasionally rice) I have ever seen. It was fantastic, and free, which made it taste even better. And there was, of course, corn as well, although I should say that it was not particularly good. I asked my students today whether or not they have sweet corn in Cape Verde and the answer seems to be that they do not. Everything they eat here is feed corn which, while being tolerable to pigs and cows, is rough on the uninitiated stomach. (My question precipitated something of an argument between me and my students as to whether or not Iowa corn could possibly be better than corn in Cape Verde but as I did not have any sweet corn on me, the argument quickly reached an impasse) While we were in Lompelado there we witnessed an old crazy man in jelly sandals and clothes dancing as only an old crazy man can. He tried as hard as he could to find a partner but no one seemed interested. There was also another man, evidently helping out the cooks, dressed in some sort of fish net shirt, shorts, army boots and an apron that was clearly designed with women in mind. Later he added a sheet, which he draped over himself in the manner of a toga, to top off the ensemble.

After eating we worked our way back down to Faja, where we were given more free food at Fernanda’s (the aforementioned administrator), back up to Lompelado, for reasons I cannot quite remember, and then once more bak to Faja for the party. I did not, unfortunately, have the energy to endure for very long, and in any case it was not quite as much fun as the previous night. We spent a fair amount of time making conversation with a few hopelessly drunk men who told us how pretty and rich America was and who would not be swayed by our insistence that, while America is a fine place, there are a lot poor people and plenty of places that are nowhere as pretty, as calm or as safe as Sao Nicolau. I decided I should leave when, sure that it must be eleven or twelve at night, I asked Jon about the time and found out that it was, in fact, only eight. We wandered down the street, bought some schpit (no idea how to spell it; they’re delicious little pork skewers), hoped for a spurt of energy that did not come, and finally found a hiace home. It was, in all, a fine couple of days.