Finally - Site Placement!

Last Wednesday was a very exciting day. Six and a half weeks after arriving here, spent learning about our host country, talking to current volunteers about their extremely varied experiences, and finally visiting volunteers at sites spread throughout Mozambique, we learned where we will be spending our next two years.

Jackie's host sister looks out towards our future.

 The Peace Corps puts a heavy emphasis on flexibility and adaptability. Beginning with the application process, continuing through to site placement in-country, and even in building your relationship with your school, it is expected that you will be open to serving where and how help is needed. While applicants can express their preferences as to the region where they want to serve, PC lets you know that your invitation will come for the role that feel is the best fit for your skill set. Since Mozambique is Portuguese-speaking, many trainees here are Spanish speakers who had been hoping to be placed in Latin America. But everyone who accepted the invitation to come here has bought into the PC mantra that it is best to be flexible if you are here to serve.

The same model holds for site placement. When we arrived here, we had no idea where in Mozambique we would actually be teaching. And Mozambique varies a lot. This made packing to come here plenty challenging - there are cool, rainy mountain sites and sweltering hot sites in the northern mato, The conditions in the schools vary just as much, with class sizes that can range from 40 to 120. Teachers may be working without enough desks, without electricity, even without blackboards. Some sites are nears cities with easily accessible grocery stores selling breakfast cereal and cheese, or the nearest market may be 10K away and in some seasons may sell little more than bread, tomatoes and onions.

But the placement is done after we have spent some time in country in order to give us a chance to reflect on what we think are the essentials we will need to be happy, productive volunteers. Again, we were given the opportunity to express our preferences, but asked to be flexible. Most current volunteers told us the same thing: whatever we thought when we first learned about our site, we would most likely grow to love it once we got there. I was surprised that after visiting sites and getting used to the frequent power outages here, I found myself telling the Assistant Peace Corps Director (APCD) I interviewed with that I could live without electricity. In reality, access to fresh fruits and vegetables would be more important.

Lunch break at the Instituto de Formação de Professores

The experience of other volunteers has also taught us that despite the fact that we were brought here as English, Math, Chemistry and Biology teachers, we will need to be flexible about what we are willing to teach. Schools who are working with the Peace Corps  put in requests for a particular discipline, but needs change so quickly here that many volunteers arrive at their schools to discover that the school already found a local Chemistry teacher and but lost two Biology teachers and now the volunteer who has not taken a Bio class since freshman year of college finds themselves teaching it five times a week. One volunteer spent all of training preparing to be a Math teacher, only to spend his first year teaching French full time. Unfortunately, there is so much need in the Mozambican system that we will end up filling roles for which we are surprised to find we are the best option available.

When site placement day came along, we all were experiencing a strange kind of excitement/nervousness/generalized-anxiety. We were all dying to know where we would be going, but also knew that seeing the name of a town on a piece of paper wouldn't actually give us very much information. We would know which other trainees would be near us, and who we might not see again until our mid-service conference. (Mozambique is as long as two Californias and, due to the conditions of roads and transportation infrastructure, traveling from one region to another can be prohibitively difficult without a lot of free time). We also would get letters from the volunteers we would be replacing, but many trainees will be opening new sites and wouldn't even be getting that. So we wanted to know but weren't sure what we would be learning. Wednesday afternoon, we all filed out the basketball court, where the PC staff had drawn a map of Mozambique so we could gather with the others moving to the same province once we learned where we had been placed.

I had an added little bit of anxiety due to my interview with the APCD last Monday. Over the course of my conversation with him, I had mentioned the broad variety of experience I had, both in school and at work. I had been hoping to be put at a site where I could find a way to use my business degree and non-profit experience, at least in secondary projects. He asked if I might be interested in a "less traditional Peace Corps position," namely teaching at a university in a city, instead of at a secondary school in a smaller town. As time passed after the interview, I realized that I had really gotten my hopes up. Although I was really looking forward to the experience of living in a smaller community and the challenge that would come with it, the opportunity to work at a university here was just to good to pass up.

And that is what I will be doing for the next two years! In just over two weeks, I will be moving to Chimoio, the capital of Manica Province, to teach at the Universidade Católica de Moçambique. I spoke with the volunteer who I will replace and it sounds like a dream job. Really more than I ever could have hoped for when coming here. Once I arrive there, I will have the opportunity to work with the school to determine what courses I will be teaching. I will most likely be teaching at least one English class, which I am actually excited for, but the school also has an MBA program, or I may still be teaching math. There are a number of programs there that sound fascinating, including Gestão do Desenvolvimento (Management of Development), that includes courses in Governance, Regional & Local Economic Development, and Sociology & Economics of Development. There is a program in Engenharia Alimentar (Food Engineering is the closest I can get) that basically deals with food production systems, more on the side of technological processes and equipment for processing food. For a country like Mozambique, where agriculture is huge, but mostly on the smallholder/subsistence farming level, this is so important. Giving Mozambicans the education necessary to create systems for processing food that would allow the country to capture so much more value from the crops they grow is crucial.

The future of Mozambique

As I mentioned in my last blog post, the education system in Mozambique is hurting. The infrastructure is cripplingly underdeveloped. There is a tragic lack of skilled professionals here. Mozambique is also home to what may turn out to be the largest coal mine in the world and the recent discovery of huge natural gas fields off the northern coast has drawn significant international attention. As I see it, the best way to ensure that Mozambique can best take advantage of its natural resources and the wealth that may flow from them is education. Education will give Mozambicans the knowledge necessary to help build/design/create/control their own future. While I was already excited to be working at the secondary school level, at the university level I will be working with the students most able to have an impact quickly.


This will be different from the experience that we have been preparing for in training - small town or village, hauling water from the pump, controlling a class of 100 students in my broken Portuguese - but will be full of all kinds of other challenges and, hopefully, rewards. While I may not be able to travel as much, Chimoio is centrally located and the previous volunteer said that she got plenty of visitors. It is also only 6 hours from one of the most beautiful beaches in the country. It is near Gorongosa National Park, home to lions and elephants and a former PCV who runs educational programs. There is great hiking nearby, including a site full of ancient cave paintings.

And did I mention that I will have two spare bedrooms and the exchange rate highly favors the dollar?

This country is really beautiful!