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.