Monday, May 27, 2013

Road Trip! Machanga for a challenging workshop, sweetened by dancing with kiddos.

It has been a little while since I have updated, mostly because as the semester comes to a close, I have been busier than ever. As a teacher, I have been wrapping up classes; grading assignments; and writing, proctoring and grading tests. As a departmental coordinator, test time means making sure all the other teachers submit their tests when they should, then pick them up to grade them; this coming week it will mean collecting and verifying all the pautas (grade charts) that will determine which students are eligible to sit for their final exams next week. We have also started planning classes and professors for next semester (which starts in August) and my university has decided to make a push for more research which will launch with our first annual research symposium for two days this week. The focus on research also means a third hour-plus-long meeting for coordinators each week. I am starting to look at making some changes to my coordinating responsibilities for next semester to leave me more time for my teaching while still being involved in things like English Club – which has the potential to be of real value to the students involved, the REDES income-generation project I am about to write more about, and good old-fashioned getting to know my community. 
My turma diurna during our last English class
When I have had some free time, I have been slowly building up a little garden of herbs, peas and soy beans – some things that I can’t find in the market here. I have added a couple more items to my capulana dress collection and have found that the modistas here in Chimoio make some high-quality clothing. Chique capulana clothes have the added benefit of being great conversation starters. And since I was diagnosed with anemia last month, I have been spending more time cooking real food.
But the highlight of my recent activities came this past weekend when I traveled south for the first test-run of the palestra/mini-class on entrepreneurship that I have been helping my friend and fellow volunteer develop. While we had mixed results for the palestra itself, the visit overall was just what I needed. Since school has kept me so busy this semester, I haven’t had much opportunity to visit other volunteers’ sites. I adore Chimoio and my students and colleagues here, but the experience I have here is very atypical for a Peace Corps Volunteer and the people I spend most of my time with live lives different from your average Mozambican. If I left Mozambique now, I really wouldn’t be able to speak to how 95% of the country lives.
So, I was really excited to have the chance to spend a few days at a more rural site, particularly because my friend thre who is halfway through his second year has really put an effort into connecting with a broad swath of people in his community. Over the course of three days, I was able to experience many of the things that so far have been hard to come by in Chimoio: sitting and eating with a family at their home, meeting the doctors in a local hospital, partying with crianças, watching a traditional medicine man’s dance and, since I forgot my running shoes, I even got in a barefoot run by moonlight. Add to that some quality time with my awesome hosts (including some impromptu yoga with the two tallest men in PC Mozambique) and a surprise visit by one of my favorite girls from my training group, and it easily would have been worth twice as long in a chapa as the 9 hours it took each way. AND I got some wonderful pictures to share here!

Maybe my favorite. She insisted on having her picture taken, but this is the only face she would give me!
My friends Mac and Jesse live in Machanga, a small town about an hour and a half down a dirt road from the N1, the main north-south highway in Mozambique. There is one chapa that runs from Beira to Machanga and if you don’t get on this, the only way in and out without a private vehicle is by taking a canoe-ferry across the river south to Nova Mambone in neighboring Inhambane province and to travel from there back to the N1. Luckily, I was able to get the chapa both ways. Some would say that it is actually better to travel through Inhambane and hitch a ride in a private vehicle – this can be faster (without dozens of stops to pick up and drop off cargo and money that the chapa transports along with the passengers) and is usually more comfortable (one person per seat, fewer chickens nestled up against your hip and I had for seven hours this morning), but traveling by myself, I preferred getting the chapa to hitching. Plus, it’s an experience I don’t get too often and I usually end up with at least a few pictures of adorable children.
My chapa buddies on the trip to Machanga.
Machanga is a small town on the Rio Save, full of dirt roads cutting through fields of sorghum. There is a small center with and handful of shops selling a small variety of industrial food and home products, along with a moderately-stocked market featuring little more than the staples of tomatoes, couve, dried fish, onions and garlic. Some of the buildings still show signs of damage from the civil war that ended twenty years ago. The people are friendly and nearly everyone knows the two absurdly tall muzungus who teach at the secondary school. Mac and Jesse live on school property, along with many of the other teachers. The houses are concrete and small, each with a porch opening onto a shared yard area. They have electricity, an easily accessible well and an attached bathroom with a pit-toilet. Other than the neighbor playing Lil’ Wayne and Elton John on alternating repeat and the constant sound of children playing in the yard, Machanga is blessedly quiet. 
Palms and sorghum stalks by day; sunset in Machanga; moonlit clouds by night.
Mac has taken to eating most nights of the week with a family that lives in a power- and water-less hut about a twenty-minute walk from his house out into the bush surrounding the town. One day while walking by the hut around lunchtime, Joana, one of the women living there servido’ed Mac and his visiting friend (Mozambicans have a very hospitable habit of offering whatever they are eating by proffering the plate or pan and telling you “servido” or “you are served”) and they accepted and asked if they could come back for dinner. Since then, he has started bringing a load of basic groceries each week, then joining them for dinner four or five times. 
Joana and her family.
We ate with them the first and last nights of my visit and it was really nice sitting around the open fire over which they cook and just chatting and laughing with them. Only a few in the family speak any Portuguese, but Mac has developed a handful of running jokes with them using the fifty-or-so Ndow words he knows. The first night, we lucked into a plate of xima served with two carrils, one of little shrimp and the other of small river fish. The second night, since our friend Karina was visiting and we were three mouths, we brought a few packages of pasta, some potatoes and carrots. It was lucky we did, because the men of the family had not returned from town that night and the women, left without money or food, were about to go to bed with nothing to eat. We cooked up the pasta with salt and ate it with our hands from a shared plate. 

Friday morning, I joined Mac at the community hospital, where he recently started to volunteer when they have work for him. They didn’t have anything for us to do that morning, but one of the médicos gave me a tour of the facilities and we talked with a few patients there. The majority of patients we saw there were pregnant women, young mothers with thin, sad-eyed children and HIV patients. Everything was impeccably clean. The pharmacy was well-stocked, the equipment looked well maintained and there was even a TV mounted in the outdoor waiting area. The doctors, nurses and lab techs I met all seemed energetic and engaged. Despite the conditions of the patients there, I left encouraged by the apparent quality of care at this facility, after some stories I have heard about care provided to those without financial resources in Mozambique.
A worried mother whose daughter has worms; Dr. Mac practices taking pressure; a young patient.

We spent the rest of Friday relaxing and finishing plans for Saturday morning’s mini-workshop, the impetus for this trip. Mac has been developing the beginnings of a program on entrepreneurship to use with his REDES group. REDES (Raparigas en Desenvolvimento, Educação e Saúde) is a network of groups of secondary school girls dedicated to education about HIV/AIDS prevention, avoidance of unplanned pregnancies and general empowerment of women and girls in Mozambique. The project is PEPFAR funded and implemented by PCVs who work with Mozambican counterparts to build a group that can eventually be run by the Mozambican leader, but still with the support of PEPFAR funds and the network of other groups.
Mac had wanted to start a project aimed at generating income that could be used to pay school fees for girls in his community who couldn’t afford them. Since entrepreneurship and women’s issues are two of my favorite subjects, I volunteered to help Mac develop the materials. Then, PEPFAR funding was slashed and the REDES leaders saw the project as a great way to begin funding some of the activities that PEPFAR would no longer support. Teaching women business skills and providing them with the means to have independent income is also one of the best ways to achieve all the goals of the REDES program. Now half of the annual, two-day, country-wide workshop will consist of the program we develop. It has been fun to work on, but challenging to try to write a booklet that can be used by facilitators throughout the country, with backgrounds and abilities that will vary enormously and with audiences of girls with little to no knowledge of how a business runs. So, this Saturday was the first test of the material we have developed so far, and we came out with mixed, but very useful results.
Mac is in the process of asking his student leaders to take greater leadership roles, but the transition has not always been going smoothly. We encountered some glitches due to poor/non-existent communication between the leaders and the rest of the group that set a rather difficult tone to start the morning on Saturday. This was compounded by even bigger problems with the other group who hosted us for the test run. In the end, since this was a test for a program that will be used by people in many different circumstances, maybe it is better that we were in less-than-ideal conditions.
After our challenging morning with the REDES girls, which left us feeling a bit drained and frustrated, we stumbled across the perfect antidote: a joint 2 year-old/6 year-old birthday party, complete with food, dancing, cakes, party hats and loads of adorable children who just wanted to be picked up and swung around. It’s amazing what a couple of hours of grinning, laughing, dancing children can do for the psyche.


We left feeling reinvigorated, just in time for the arrival of a walking ray of sunshine in the form of our friends Karina. After a quick, sugar-infused visit/photoshoot with Mac’s 11 year-old neighbor and friends, we headed to dinner at Joana’s.
Karina, João and friend. So much sugar in those cups, might as well have been tequila.
On our way home from dinner, we heard drums in the distance. We had heard the same drums the night before, but had decided not to investigate because we needed our beauty sleep for Saturday morning’s workshop. Mac thought the drumming was coming from the house of some of Machanga’s curandeiros, or traditional medicine men. The night was brightly lit by the full moon and as we made our way through the fields of towering sorghum, with the sounds of drums and chanting growing louder with each step, I suddenly felt a little like I had stepped out of my own life and into a story about the Peace Corps. 
Women singing and playing instruments, others dancing.

We finally arrived at the curandeiros’ hut and were greeted by the bare backside of a sweating man straddling a set of three large drums. He was flanked by a few other drummers seated on esteiras (reed mats) and a woman seated among them, legs extended and whole body trembling. Based on his experience with other ceremonies, Mac conjectured that she was sick and having bad spirits expelled. We stayed another twenty minutes of so, watching as groups of women wrapped in capulanas and wearing white headbands danced in circles, at times holding up small axes and other tools (weapons?). Karina and Mac both joined in for a dance, but I decided I had more to contribute as the photographer. Because of the full moon, I was able to get some blurry but intriguing shots with a slower shutter speed.
The experience was fascinating and the music was wonderful, but I sure would have loved to have had someone there to explain what was going on. But sometimes I feel the same way in staff meetings at school… Such is cultural exchange. 
I got on the chapa at 3:30 the next morning, ready to head back to Chimoio and my daily life of meetings, internet problems, plentiful produce and paved roads. It was great to experience a little but of what some of my friends are doing with their communities, but it also motivated me to want to get to know my own better.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

My Work and the People Who Make It Awesome

You wouldn’t know it from my blog, but I spend the vast majority of my time here at school. I haven’t written much about my work here, but it isn’t because my job isn’t interesting. My first semester is coming to a close and, other than some long meetings that stretch into lunchtime, not a moment has been boring. Challenging, yes, at times nearly overwhelming. But also fun, and frequently inspiring. This is mostly because of my colleagues, and of course because of my students. 
Come of my colegas and director at Dia da Mulher Moçambicana
First, my colleagues. Actually, first the recap for those of you not taking notes. I am working at the Catholic University of Mozambique, one of three PCVs there. I have been acting as the coordinator of the Communications for Development program, which usually just means sitting through some extra meetings, making sure that the teachers are signing their timesheets and making various schedules for classes and exams. Occasionally it means getting up and making speeches in Portuguese about what our program is doing. Gulp. I have a right-hand man who graduated from the same program at one of the other campuses and is there to help me with all the issues related to course content and research. I have also been teaching an English class and Gestão de Empresas (Business Management) in Portuguese. Gulp, again. 
My right-hand man
Second, my colleagues. Actually, second, my university. The founding of Catholic University in Mozambique was one of the crucial factors that led to the signing of the peace accord twenty years ago, ending fifteen years of brutal civil war. At the time, the only university in the country was Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, located in Maputo, the capital city that was (and still is to a large extent) home to much of the country’s wealth. The opposition forces demanded as part of any peace agreement, a commitment to the creation of institutes of higher education in the northern and central regions, that would be available to the poorer populations, helping to address the massive inequality of wealth and opportunity. The Catholic Church, which held been assisting with the talks, took on the project. I personally think that equal access to higher ed is a pretty awesome demand at a peace negotiation.
My campus in Chimoio, the Faculdade de Engenharia, was founded in 2005. The flagship program is Engenharia Alimentar, or food engineering, which mostly deals with food processing and preservation. We now offer eleven undergraduate degrees and three masters programs, including an MBA taught mostly in English. UCM also runs a distance-learning program, which has a center at my campus. Distance learning here does not mean online classes. No, these are basically correspondence courses run with a packet of workbooks delivered by truck to each student once a year. Many of the distance courses are aimed at training teachers in specific disciplines. 
UCM Chimoio
Now, my colleagues. My director is an agronomist, educated at West Texas A&M, he returned to Mozambique and has led agricultural extension projects, directed a small business incubator, founded the food engineering program at UCM and continues to raise pigs. A music lover, he keeps his guitar in his office and serenades us at most school celebrations. He has a consistently positive attitude and seems genuinely invested in the development of his students, teachers and country. He is not the only person at the school who was educated abroad and returned to Mozambique to contribute to its development. A fellow English teacher was born here, but raised in Zimbabwe and educated in the UK. As he said, he left a very good position in Zimbabwe and despite the fact that he could have worked in Europe or the US, he returned to Mozambique because his country needs trained professionals. His dream is to open a high-quality boarding school near Chimoio that offers an education in English that would qualify graduates to go to college anywhere in the world. Another professor in the Food Engineering department left a position in the US to build the program here. He is also driving an effort to improve research efforts at the university.
Take 1, 2, 3 at Dia Internacional dos Trabalhadores (Worker's Day)
Many of my colleagues are on the younger side. Mozambique’s education system has begun to make great improvements, but during the war years, there were not very many college graduates, limiting the pool of candidates above a certain age. Many of these young professors are working long hours teaching their classes, taking on all sorts of extra projects to improve the quality of the programs offered, all while starting families and frequently pursuing graduate degrees at the same time. It definitely makes me want to put my maximum effort into what I am doing here.
But the thing that really puts a spring in my step here is working with my students. I teach both English and Management to two turmas, or groups of students, one in the day program and the other at night. They couldn’t be more different, but I adore them both for very different reasons.
My fourteen daytime students are what you would expect in an American classroom – most are around 20 years old; many come from middle class families here in the city. The girls are chique de matar – well dressed, with their shoes matching their earrings, and the occasional French manicure. They are all in the Communications for Development program, but with a variety of career and life goals.
One of my favorite moments with this group came in our very first Management class. I prepared an information sheet for them to fill out. Coming in, I had never met a Mozambican university student and I had no idea what kind of work experience they were bringing in, or what they were hoping to do with their education. Management is the kind of broad subject that can be adjusted quite a bit to fit the audience, so I asked them to tell me what kind of work they had done (little to none for most of my day students) and what their professional goals were. A handful said they wanted to go on to get a masters degree, but many responded with, “I want to get a good job.” I had fifteen minutes to kill at the end of class, so I threw out the question, “What exactly is a good job?” Best question ever.
What followed was a twenty-minute debate, only slightly encouraged by me and mostly fomented among the students, on what is most important, to make money or to do work that you love. Having only heard stories from secondary-school teachers here about how frustrating it is to motivate students who don’t see the importance of education because they don’t see a future for themselves other than working a small farm and trying to get by, I was blown away by the conversation. After a lively discussion, the consensus seemed to be that the best situation is to find a job that pays enough to provide a comfortable life, but within a field that you find interesting and in a role that provides room for growth. I was just trying to imagine how the debate would have gone among a randomly selected sample of fourteen UMass students. I think it would have been a step or two less sophisticated.
My night students had very different answers to almost every question on the survey. One question was “Why did you choose to study Communications for Development?” For my day students, the answers mostly fell on the side of Communications: lots want to go into Public Relations or Marketing. My night students, on the other hand, focused more on the Development side. I only have seven students in my evening turma, many of who have been working in the journalism/communications/media production industry for years. Much of their work has been with community organizations and the majority of them stated that they wanted to use the information and skills they would learn in this program to help in the development of Mozambique, because the country needs trained professionals. So far, I have found that many people in the up-and-coming middle class here are acutely aware of what their country needs and are motivated to work for its betterment, at least in the university community. Even the younger students who dream of studying abroad: most have stated that they want to go to graduate school in another country and then come back and work to develop Mozambique. 
My student mic-ing a speaker at Dia da Mulher. I need to take more pictures of students!
The experience that my night students bring into the Management class has led to some fascinating discussions. When they filled out my background survey, most of them filled at least half a page with their work experience. One is a filmmaker; another works for Chimoio’s community television station and I see him at almost every city event, holding a microphone or camera in front of speakers and presenters. A third works for an organization that produces a variety of public-interest media. I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to record the English narration for a video they made on the economic potential of Manica Province. After I read their survey answers, I was relatively intimidated by the idea of being the one in the front of the classroom, trying to teach them anything, but I used that as motivation to make sure I was providing them with information that would actually be applicable to their work. I also try to encourage as much discussion as possible in our classes, so they can learn from each other as much as from me.
The best discussion so far came two weeks ago after two students presented their work on how to carry out a Community Needs Assessment. I had assigned group presentations on conducting environmental analyses as part of the strategic planning process. Since it is a business management class, I asked most groups to research traditional business-related analyses: Porter’s Five Forces, the BCG Matrix and the GE/McKinsey Portfolio Analysis. But since it is a development-related program and many people are or will be working with NGOs and community-based organizations, I asked one group in each class to look at a less competition-based model, namely the techniques used in a community needs assessment.
The group that presented during the day did a wonderful job and really drove home why a community needs assessment is so important for development projects. But because my evening students have worked on countless development projects, the half-hour-long presentation turned into a lively 90-minute discussion of their experiences with projects that failed because of a lack of community involvement in the planning process, which techniques work best and which can be misused. It was wonderful. I only wish I had a recording of all the stories: I swear it could be used to train people in managing community projects. I have to share one story that I am also going to have to pass on to the Peace Corps trainers to use when they are presenting the Community Needs Assessment; it is just to perfect and exemplifies why my students are the ones adding the real value to our course.
The point of a community needs assessment is that development projects often fail when someone comes into a community thinking that they already know what it needs better than the community members themselves. They do not take the time to understand the daily, weekly and yearly routines; the complex relationships between people and activities; the real needs and motivations of the people they are nominally trying to help. They see a problem and jump to a conclusion about the solutions, without the community’s input on their priorities. To illustrate this, my student told the story of a Mozambican community located on the banks of the Zambezi River:
This community had a lethal problem: every few months, a woman was getting eaten by a crocodile when she went to get water from the river. A development organization working in the area heard of the problem and immediately knew the solution. Clearly, the best way to prevent the deaths would be to eliminate the need for the women of the community to walk down to the river and haul back jugs of water. The organization dug a series of wells within the community and installed pumps, providing a secure source of water far from the danger of the river and significantly reducing the effort needed to procure water. Satisfied that they had addressed the problem, the organization went back to its other work.
A few months later, another woman fell victim to a crocodile as she fetched water from the river. Baffled, the organization returned to find out why the water pumps weren’t being used and women continued to expend unnecessary effort, hauling water from the river and putting themselves in harm’s way when there was now an easier, safer alternative. The women of the community responded that while the wells seemed like a good idea, what they really needed was a community health center. While the organization’s conclusion that the women would be safe when they didn’t need to go to the river was correct, they failed to understand that the trip was about more than just water. Girls in this community were getting married very young. When a girl suddenly found herself living with a man who had all sorts of expectations that she didn’t understand, she used the trip to the river – far from the sight and hearing of her husband – to ask an older woman for advice. The pumps, located safely within the confines of her community, didn’t provide the privacy necessary to have sensitive conversations, so the women continued to fetch water from the river. With a community health center, the young women would have a safe, private place to ask their questions and would no longer need to haul water from the river.
Seriously, what can I offer to these students? I guess the space and structure to teach each other. That is also the tactic that I have taken while helping two day students start an English Club that is now meeting on the weekends. One of my students approached me with the idea and as soon as I said I would be willing to help run meetings, he and his friend rounded up a couple of dozen interested students from UCM and another university in Chimoio. I let them know that I would help structure the meetings, but that we would use the ideas that the members had for activities that would be interesting for them. So I can basically stand aside and let them make the meetings what they want them to be. Really all they want is a place to speak English outside of the classroom and an opportunity to socialize with other kids who have a common interest. 
UCM representing at Dia Internacional dos Trabalhadores
So when I am having a hard time, feeling homesick, overwhelmed or frustrated, I think of those moments. When I have a roomful of students enthusiastically talking about listening to the BBC together to improve their English and open up opportunities. Or when one of my evening students grabs onto a management idea and explains how it applies to the work they have been doing. I can only hope that they are getting a fraction as much out of the experience as I am.