Out Exploring: Site Visits

Time has been passing quickly since I arrived, but the last two weeks just flew. Last week, all of the trainees here in Namaacha scattered throughout the country for site visits. After six weeks of sitting through countless sessions of tech training, safety and security lessons, cross-cultural exchanges, and health and wellness discussions, it was wonderful to get out of the classrooms and visit a real, live volunteer at a real school and see what happens when we are on our own. 

Amy and I suffering through PST

I traveled with a future science teacher - a marine biologist by training - to Manjangue, a small town in the province of Gaza, just north of Maputo, the province we have called home for training. While we didn't get to see a completely different area, we had a much easier time traveling  - only a couple of hours in a chapa (the omnipresent minivan taxi that gets packed as full as possible, sometimes to a point that defies at least a couple of laws of physics). Others were traveling for 2 or 3 days to remote sites in the northern part of the country. And the experience of being at site, away from the hand-holding of our homestay families and training managers, was completely different anyways.

We visited a teacher who arrived as part of Moz 15 (I am a Moz 19er) and was just about ready to finish her service, so she had a full two years of experience and wisdom to impart to us. She had opened her site, meaning she was the first PC volunteer to teach there, and she faced some interesting challenges in establishing her working relationship with the secondary school.

Like many volunteers here, she had work hard to develop a classroom culture free of cheating, and an attendance policy that rewarded students for attending class on-time. The Mozambican system is frequently rigged in such a way that it is difficult to convince schools, let alone individual students, that the long term benefits of forbidding cheating outweigh the short term advantages. I am sure this is a subject I will be writing about plenty more in the future, as the forces at work are powerful and complex. Regarding attendance, the logistics of getting a student population that often lives scattered throughout a very large, sparsely populated region in and out of a school on time is sometimes just too much.

But in addition to these common challenges, she faced some unique to volunteers opening sites. Many teachers here, including our host, live right on school property, meaning that cultural differences extend far beyond the classroom. It is common in many parts of Mozambican culture to have visitors drop by at any time of day. Families themselves can be rather fluid, with nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins, or grandkids coming through to stay for short or extended periods of time based on various needs. Neighbors stop in to borrow food or tools, and stay to share a little fofoca (gossip). Hours are spent on porches or under the shade of a tree, just passing the time. Apparently, this practice extends to colleagues for many teachers who live at or near their schools. For an American accustomed to more privacy, establishing boundaries without offending coworkers was a challenging line to walk.

Goats really are everywhere here.

The Mozambican school year has already ended, but her tenth-grade students were taking their national exams, needed to pass through to eleventh grade. We had the chance to meet a group of her more motivated, extremely bright girls when they stopped by her house after their history test. They were excited and unbelievably entertained to meet two more women science teachers. Our host later explained that it is still a pretty well-established fact that math is a subject for men around there and they almost didn't believe that I was a math teacher. Many of the Mozambicans I have met have a really charming habit of laughing uproariously when they like something or are surprised by something. They let out an "eeeeeeeeeeee" that you can't help but grin at. These girls were practically rolling on the ground when I said I teach math. Another friend walked up shortly after and they made her guess what we taught. Then they all just started laughing again. It made me really happy to be here as a lady math teacher.

Sonia cooks the best prawns, chicken and crab matapa in Mozambique.

 Other highlights of the trip included: the best prawns in Mozambique at a tiny, menu-less restaurant in the beach town of Bilene. Swimming in the Indian Ocean for the first time. Learning the proper way to chop garlic from a French ex-pat diveshop owner and having his homemade coffee ice cream over fresh toaster-oven brownies. Getting a guided tour of the sea life in Bilene's lagoon from my marine-bio travel buddy. Getting up at 4:00 am to watch election results and being treated to oatmeal and breakfast burritos on tortillas cooked in a PC dutch oven (pan on rocks inside another pan; used on an electric burner or charcoal stove by volunteers without ovens). Finding a traditional medicine man's stall, complete with monkey pelts and unidentified bone bits, tucked in the corner of a market.

They tasted even better than they look

All in all, the visit made me really excited to get out and start working. It also drove home exactly how much everything will change in a few weeks when training is over. While we knew from the start that we would be scattering all over the country after ten weeks, after experiencing how difficult travel can be here, the reality that some of us won't see each other until the midservice conference next year is really sinking in. But at the same time, once we arrive at site, we will have a chance to integrate into a whole new Mozambican community. While we will surely face challenges, once we leave the structure of PST and begin to establish ourselves as teachers, neighbors and community members, we will have the opportunity to build brand new relationships and, hopefully, friendships.