O tempo está a voar! It's been a year!

Today marks exactly one year since I stepped off the plane here in Mozambique. Needless to say, this leads to some reflection about all that I have experienced since arriving and how it has affected me.

One year ago: first views of Maputo from the plane and first day in Hotel Cardoso.

1.     I was raised by a teacher and a principal, a majority of whose friends are also educators, so I have always had a lot of respect for those who dedicate their lives to education; however, working this past year as a teacher has super-charged that respect. Teaching is HARD! Writing a syllabus that covers enough, but not too much; putting together lessons that are challenging, but engaging; earning your students respect while also wanting them to like you; doing what is best for them in the long term without alienating them: every day is an incredible balancing act. Writing tests, grading projects, enforcing deadlines… And I don’t even have to worry about standardized tests or a centralized curriculum!

2.     You don’t have to be fluent in a language to communicate and you don’t have to understand every individual word to understand a person. This is a lesson I first started to learn from being in a relationship with someone who spoke English as a second language, but living in a new language has only reinforced it. My ability to express myself well has always been one of my strengths; whether in speaking or writing, I have always loved the search for the perfect word needed to communicate my thoughts. My father the teacher is also a human dictionary and words have always been a passion for us. The idea of moving somewhere where I would have to start building a vocabulary from the ground up was downright terrifying. But it really hasn’t been that bad. Instead of finding the perfect word, the challenge is now circumlocution: how can I best express myself with my limited choice of words? It turns out this is just as fun. And although it can still be frustrating when I can’t get all the nuances of my thoughts across, it is still possible to get to know people very well when they have the patience to work with you as you learn.

3.     Having fresh fruit growing in your backyard is one of life’s great pleasures.

4.     I have come to appreciate political stability and freedom of the press. I love John Stewart and think he calls out a lot of well-deserving members of the media for not doing their job to hold politicians accountable, but the lack of transparency in the Mozambican government and lack of information provided by the Mozambican media has made me realize how accountable our politicians still are. Over the last six-or-so months, there has been some political instability here and information just isn’t available. Rumors fly and people are left to wonder what is going on or to make up their own versions of events. This situation has also made me come to appreciate how much we are able to take the future for granted in the US.

5.     Sometimes you don’t need to know everything ahead of time or be in control of it all. As I have written before, things around here tend to happen on a much looser schedule. As much as this was an adjustment, I have found that things still tend to work out. And the more I give up my control-freak tendencies, the happier I am. It is just as valuable a skill to be able to go with the flow and adjust as things change as it is to plan things out ahead of time. Similarly, being able to find the right person to take on a responsibility and giving them the support they need to accomplish their tasks is just as important as being able to do many things by yourself.

6.     Making friends with the people you buy things from may get you a better deal occasionally, but will definitely make shopping a more pleasant experience.

7.     When I look over the past year, the times that I have put the work I had planned to do aside in order to have a conversation with a student, go to a cultural event or have lunch with a friend have been some of the most memorable and valuable experiences for me, and I think in many cases, for them. While I am here to teach and to develop secondary projects, I think the times I just get to talk with people are the more important. Peace Corps is about economic development, but it is also about cultural exchange. I am not an engineer who can make a real impact on infrastructure, but I can help get people thinking in a new way. I get to have really fascinating conversations with my students about gender roles, the importance of education, gay rights, responsible consumerism, democracy, freedom of the press… And it is worth turning a schedule in late, straying from lesson plans, delaying replies to emails, etc. to make room for them. The formal activities are a structure to foster these kinds of conversations and, hopefully, to create mechanisms to keep them going once I am gone. Lesson: don’t let your job get in the way of your work.

8.     I am old and that’s okay. No, I am old and I like it. Since I arrived here, I have turned thirty, stopped drinking and I find I spend the little free time I have reading the Economist and knitting hats for babies. Okay, so those last two I have been doing for a while, but I am finding that I no longer need to be out late just because it is Friday night, in fact, I might rather stay in and watch a movie because I have to be up early for English Club. When I turned 30, it gave me a moment to reflect on how much I have grown and changed since college and I realized how awesome getting older is. I find myself to be a much calmer person, able to choose where I want to put my attention and energy, less concerned with what others think of me, able to accept my own strengths and weaknesses. And I feel like I am in a much better place to keep improving as time, hopefully, keeps passing.

9.     I have learned more than I want to about bugs and animals. Including the fact that, when hot enough, chickens will pant. Also, it is possible for dogs to get stuck when doing it.

10. Yoga is the best. I have been living quite happily without sliced bread, but yoga keeps me going every day.

11. You know how everything in the US is fortified with something? Don’t take that for granted. Throughout seven years as a vegetarian in high school and college, I was never anemic. After a few months in Moz, I had to go on iron supplements. Over the years, I have been a proponent of natural foods and a balanced diet, and a detractor of GMO and lots of additives. As a rule, I still prefer food that has fewer ingredients, that hasn’t been filled with hormones and whose genes haven’t been spliced with those of another species. But at the same time, that iron in your flour and iodine in your salt? It’s there for a reason.

12. I have come to appreciate, to a more profound degree, the generosity of the human spirit. First, because of the culture here in Mozambique. Mozambique is the fourth least developed country in the world according to the UN’s Human Development Index. It is ranked 210^th out of 229 in per capita GDP.  People here are poor and their lives can be difficult. But if you approach someone for almost any reason while they are eating, you are almost guaranteed to be greeted with, “Servido!” an offer to help yourself to their meal. The culture here is one in which wealth is shared among family, friends and community. While servido is a clearly generous side of this, some PCVs struggle with the flipside: people pediring constantly. The practice of just asking people for their things is still an expression of the same expectation that what you have should be shared with those who have less, but to us it sometimes just seems like begging. [This will probably be expanded into a whole post at a later date. ]

My specific experience with the amazing kids in my English Club has reinforced this feeling. They have grown up in a tough country, a lot of them facing challenges I can’t begin to imagine overcoming. But they all just want to give back. Some were raised orphans and spend their vacations going back to work with the kids in the orphanage. They are in the process of starting a Rotary Youth group to take on more community service projects. They are spending their Saturday’s writing and practicing an anti-drug, pro-education play to perform for a bunch of secondary school students. Along with these kids, I have had the chance to work with a bunch of women who volunteer their time through REDES, organizing activities for teenage girls, trying to keep them in school and teaching them about safe sex.

But just as much as my experience with people here reinforces my faith in humanity, it is the generosity of my friends and family back home that makes me feel this way. Starting with knee-length skirts donated to keep me appropriate by Mozambican standards; continuing with care packages, cards and letters sent to me here; and more than anything else, the frequent words of support conveyed through these, through emails and Facebook messages, text messages and Skype calls: I have been so supported by you all this whole time. And when I have reached out for contributions – books for kids here, or just yesterday, clothing for a Mozambican student studying in the US – the response has been immediate and generous. I mentioned to my teacher-penpal that students here sometimes can’t afford glasses and she immediately responded with an offer to get her students working collecting glasses to send over. The stories from other PCVs are the same: when they reach out for support to build a basketball court or a preschool, to help a neighbor start a business, whatever it is, their friends and family back home pounce on the opportunity to contribute. And this leaves me with the distinct impression that most people out there really want to help those who are worse off. They want to share their wealth and make the world a better place. They just need to be offered the opportunity.

Since I am living in a site where communication back home is relatively easy, I feel like a lot of you have been on this journey with me and it has been made all the better for that. Thanks to my friends and students here and all of you back home, this has been a wonderful year that has flown by. Thank you so much for your engagement, your support, and your encouragement.

Losing control, in a good way

Last Saturday, the Chimoio English Club at UCM made its theatrical debut. It was the provincial Peace Corps-sponsored English Theater competition for Sofala and because the event was held at UCM in Chimoio, the PCV coordinating asked if our club would like to present something. The members are generally much too advanced to compete against secondary school students, but we thought it would be fun for the English Club to present a play and talk a little about what they do to practice and improve their English. 

English Theater: English Club represents as judges!

As I was getting ready to head to campus Saturday morning, I found myself filled with anxiety. I had no reason to be nervous, I kept telling myself. I didn’t have to do anything. All I had to do was bring a few cups and a jar full of flowers to use as props during the first scene. I didn’t have any lines. I hadn’t even been organizing the practices for the last few weeks – I had handed responsibility for that over to one of the club member a few weeks earlier! And I realized that was exactly why I was anxious: I had no control over the results. Peace Corps can be an anxiety-provoking experience and I am coming to realize that the anxiety generally falls into two categories: things for which I am responsible for and things in which I am emotionally invested, but over which I have no control.

Peace Corps is an interesting experiment on this front. I think that people who are drawn to serving as Volunteers tend to be the idealistic, go-getter, let’s-find-a-problem-and-solve-it type. Which is to say “doers” as opposed to delegators. (Or in my case, when I am honest with myself, a control-freak when it comes to things with my name on it!) Then we are thrown out into a situation where our main job is capacity-building, i.e. helping other people learn how to identify and solve problems. This is a much slower process, and for eager PCV’s who realize that two years isn’t actually very long to “get things done,” it can be maddening. But in the end, the point is not to put our name on projects; it is to leave behind communities, organizations, students and colleagues who are more capable of improving their own lives.

Peace Corps itself forces us to start giving up control: we don’t get to choose our program or country of service, nor our sites. Our environments continue to make it clear we have very little to say in how we plan our time. Thought you could tackle that ever-growing pile of laundry this morning? Surprise! The water is out until further notice. Planned on writing a blog post tonight? That will have to wait! Power is out and your computer battery has no charge. Our schools reinforce that lesson. Thought you would draft a test this afternoon? Not so fast! That morning meeting is going all day today. But don’t worry, we ordered in lunch! Semester schedules don’t get set until the weekend before classes start. Sometimes schedules and rooms for exams aren’t set until the day of. It’s enough to make one end every sentence with, “…se Deus quiser.” But for the most part, things move along relatively smoothly. I have become infinitely more able to go with the flow since I got here.

But the more important type of giving up control is related to accepting that our Peace Corps service isn’t about us, isn’t about just getting things done; it’s about helping others do. Frequently, the process is as important, if not more so, than the results. I already wrote about this some as related to our need to put our egos aside to be effective PCVs, but I feel the need to revisit the subject from a slightly different angle, because it is probably the most important thing I am learning here. I am framing it related to Peace Corps, but these lessons also come from being a teacher, participating in team projects, and working with young people; my context just happens to be Peace Corps.

The place where I first starting reaching – no, internalizing – this understanding of my role as an individual capacity-builder was in my English class last semester. I was teaching English to 21 Communications students. It was English 3, but the students were at all different levels – some nearly fluent and others could barely put a sentence together. Some had failed English 1 and/or 2, but because of the way the university works, they still had to continue to the next level; some were taking both 1 and 3 simultaneously. We only had a few copies of the books, which didn’t actually teach the grammar concepts anyways. I had never taught an English class and didn’t really know what I was doing. We met for 90 minutes twice a week, 30 hours total, and most students had little to no exposure to English outside the classroom. When I assigned homework, people usually just copied off of each other and there was very little I could do to stop them. Cheating is a systemic issue here and I decided not to make the destruction of all forms of cabulando my mission. As long as students weren’t blatantly plagiarizing or cheating during tests, I decided to leave that battle to someone else.

So, what to do in that kind of situation? I quickly realized that I would not be teaching these kids to speak, read or write English. There was no way that in that amount of time, with those kinds of resources I would actually be helping them progress very much, no matter my level of experience or talent as a teacher. The ones who would improve would be the ones who were motivated to learn on their own. Those ones I could support and encourage. So I decided that my emphasis wouldn’t be on all the students learning the grammar I was teaching, but on encouraging all the students to feel like they could learn English if they chose to. 

Beyoncé make English more fun!

The first step was just getting them to start using what they already knew, so I tried to make my lessons as participative as possible. I had realized that a lot of students knew words or grammar concepts, but didn’t really understand when to use which verb tense or how to construct more complex sentences. So I just tried to get them talking. If conversations strayed from the day’s lesson, I let them go as long as people continued speaking in English. I gave as much positive feedback as I could and made sure that everyone knew exactly what material would be on the test so that they could actually pass. When I gave reviews, people came and asked questions. When I handed back the first test and announced that everyone had passed, the room erupted in cheers.

There was a noticeable improvement in the level of engagement after that first test. It ended up being a whole lot more fun than drilling them on grammar or being the homework-Gestapo. I don’t know if any of them are now more motivated to keep learning on their own, but in the end, I think that more felt like English was within their reach.

This semester, I am teaching IT students who generally have a much higher proficiency level –about half the class is basically fluent – although a handful are really struggling. This has been an enormous challenge. How do I keep the high-performers’ attention without leaving the others behind completely? I have been trying to use more readings about technology that will help keep them engaged and having them work in mixed-level groups. I let discussions of more advanced topics continue, but try to translate enough that the lower level people still have some idea of what is going on.

But what really keeps me going is reminding myself that it still isn’t all on me. Once again, I can’t make the kids learn English. In the end, it has to come from them. In this context, letting go of control is incredibly freeing. In fact, yesterday our topic was expressing wishes and intentions and I went so far as to give them a reading from a motivational website on the power of setting intentions. It had no IT-related vocab and didn’t actually use much of the grammar of expressing wishes vs. intentions, but I really feel like leading a group chant of “I am going to pass English this semester!” (first in Portuguese to emphasize the power of the statement for those who are not strong in English, then repeatedly in English) was just as valuable as drilling them on how to construct the sentence properly. We had a good discussion on why setting an intention can help accomplish your goals and ended with the affirmation “I will give up wishing and I will take up making intentions. I am determined to have those things that will enhance the happiness and success of my life.” In a culture big on, “if God wills it” thinking, I think it is just as important to convince my students to be more controlling as it is for me to be less controlling.

With the English Club, since the beginning, I have told the students that I would support their efforts, but that it would be their project. It would be OUR English Club, not MINE. They went out and recruited other members, they picked the meeting time; they drive everything forward. I still kick-off the meetings, but hand more and more of the speaking off to members. I find my role to be a focal point for their collective energy and sometimes a sort of a wrangler who gathers them up and nudges them along in a particular direction. My presence means that they are at an official English Club Event, instead of just hanging out with their friends speaking English. (Although I would count myself as a friend of many of them now!) And as I wrote in my last post, I can serve as a link between the group and outside opportunities.

Roof party! Err, I mean, English Club meeting...

Which is what brought us to the theater performance. The Club had already decided at the end of last semester that theater would be a great way to reach out to the greater-Chimoio community to spread their message of, “We dream in English!” while simultaneously practicing their own language skills. So, the Peace Corps competition provided the perfect opportunity to get going on it. I presented them the opportunity, but made it clear that it would be their project: they would write it, they would cast it, they would act in it, they would rehearse it, etc.

So I helped at each phase: I led a brainstorming session to organize their ideas for what message they wanted to convey and how to structure the action. Then, they appointed a writing committee and wrote the play together. I helped facilitate the auditions, but the parts were chosen democratically; after each person who wanted a part read some lines, they left the room and the whole group voted. The day of auditions, a whole bunch of new people came. A handful of parts went to newcomers, including a coup of sorts when two girls were voted into the leads, which had been written as boys!

This was just one of many occasions where giving the club space to make their own decisions and turning responsibilities over to members led to the best outcomes I could have hoped for. After organizing the first couple of rehearsals, I needed to travel for the REDES handover, so I handed off the general management and responsibility for moving things forward to one of the students. Even though I had been telling them it was their project from the beginning, this made me nervous (because I’m a control freak). But when I got back, they had finished writing the last scene, copied the scripts and met to rehearse three times while I was gone.

I didn’t take over on my return, just stopped by each rehearsal, watched them and gave some feedback, usually along the lines of, “Make sure you face front when you are speaking.” They finished off each practice themselves and scheduled their next meeting. Along with the students who had speaking lines, other members kept coming to practice and would help run lines when someone couldn’t make it. When our Teacher ended up having to drop out due to schedule conflicts, another member was able to step in seamlessly. When one of our leads seemed to be letting her nerves get to her, we had someone start learning her lines, just in case. The others eventually asked me to talk to her, but then we sat down as a group to talk it out. They let her know that we were there to support her and wanted her to stay, but needed her to commit. And she did. 

Two fine thespians; the crew gets the set ready.

About a week before the performance, I realized that we need someone to organize the set and props and asked the group at rehearsal that day who would be our “crew.” At first it seemed like no one would, but once I was able to describe the job better, two guys volunteered eagerly. They got right to work that day, moving desks around the classrooms to set each scene. It was another reminder that lots of times, people want the opportunity to contribute, they just need to know how they can help. It’s something that is easy to miss when you keep all the responsibilities to yourself.

Despite rehearsals going well, the morning of the performance, I was nervous. I started running through my head all the things I hadn’t done: I had reminded the performers that they should try to dress the part, but we hadn’t actually done a dress rehearsal. We had only practiced on the stage once, and that was before we had our crew organizing the set. I was nervous they wouldn’t speak loudly enough. I was nervous they would be late. I shouldn’t have let so much go! I should have been more of a taskmaster!

But, guess what? They were superstars. Everyone was there with enough time to run through twice before the performance. Their costumes were perfect. Our nervous leading lady nailed every line. They improvised lines that got huge laughs.  They weren’t part of the competition, but after they performed, they were so excited, you would have thought they had won Tony’s. And I think they deserved them!

And I am so glad I was able to resist the urge to micro-manage and left it mostly up to them. Afterwards, when other PCVs told me how good the play was, I could be the proud mama-hen and say, “Yeah! And they wrote the whole thing themselves!” The student who was managing rehearsals was grinning ear-to-ear all afternoon after the performance. I told him what a great job he did, and he told me how much he had learned from the experience. That’s real-life people management skills he just developed! It ended up being a much more satisfying experience for me than it would have been if I had micromanaged it all. In the end, the product for me wasn’t the play itself, but was the experience the students had with it. 

Superstars!!

We Dream in English

I wrote a post a while back about the rather circuitous route I have taken to get where I am. The conclusion I drew was that staying open to new experiences and opportunities has led me to a much better place than I could have planned for (with the bonus of enjoying the journey along the way). My Peace Corps experience so far has simply been a continuation of that theme: instead of coming in with an agenda, I have tried to listen to what the people around me need or want and if I can help, I will. [With one notable exception, which has led to the project that was furthest off-target, but that is a subject for another post]. Nine months into my service here, this approach means that I spend most of my time focused on English and that the most enjoyable and rewarding part of my experience here is my English Club. I never would have met this amazing, inspiring (and hilarious) group of young people if I hadn’t stayed open to responding to the wants and needs of my community.

Peace Corp is a balancing act. Sometimes literally.

English was not the original plan. I applied to the Peace Corps wanting to work in small business development. In fact, when I first got here, I found myself resenting that everyone met I assumed I was an English teacher. I have a Math degree! I have an MBA! I worked hard to be qualified to do more than just teach English! I resented that everyone wanted to speak to me in English – sometimes because my Portuguese was not very good, but usually just because they wanted to practice their English. I was determined to immerse myself in Portuguese as much as I could. But then, as I was making the Communications schedule for the first semester, we needed an English teacher, and the English Coordinator asked if I could teach this one section. Now, I am not trained in teaching English, have no experience teaching any kind of language and wasn’t really excited about the idea. But, I am a language nerd. I have always been interested how languages work. [Mom, I will pay you $100 if you can read this next sentence without rolling your eyes]. My dad and I can spend hours discussing the fine points of a single word or phrase. And if English teachers were what the school needed, I figured, why not give it a try.

Once I was teaching English, I understood much better the challenge that students faced trying to learn the language in an environment that offered little-to-no chance to practice what they were learning outside the classroom. As I spent more time talking with my students, I came to appreciate how much learning English meant to some of them and recognized that although it hadn’t been my plan coming in, teaching English was an opportunity to work with them on something that could make a real difference in their lives. Mozambique’s official language is Portuguese, but it is surrounded by countries that speak English: South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Tanzania all have English as an official language and all have more developed economies than Mozambique, meaning that many job opportunities can depend on a student’s level of English. Nevermind the glut of international NGO’s and burgeoning mineral sector driving Mozambique’s own economic growth through foreign aid and investment.

My wonderful first English class.

So, first semester I taught English and Business Management to the same two turmas, or groups of students. It worked out well: one day I was struggling along in Portuguese, but the next we were on my territory in English class. I think it helped make them more comfortable speaking in English class and more understanding of my attempts with Portuguese. And once I got comfortable with it, teaching English was fun! My students were a really funny bunch and really got into acting out charades to learn present continuous or overreacting to lines of dialogue so their classmates could guess the emotion. Some students really didn’t care about learning English; they just wanted to get through the class so they didn’t have to take it again, but others recognized that English could be the key to a number of opportunities and were hungry to learn it.

One of my strongest students fell into this second category. UCM is expensive and many students here come from the upper strata of Chimoio’s population, the sons and daughters of successful business people who went to the better secondary schools around and may have attended English lessons at outside language schools. Not so for this guy. He had grown up an orphan, spending time on the street before he came under the care of an orphanage and later, Brazilian missionaries in a small town a few hours south of Chimoio. He was incredibly smart, and equally determined. He spoke nearly perfect English, even though he had spent his whole life here in Manica Province. This is quite a difficult feat, considering that in Mozambique, just learning to speak Portuguese well can be a challenge for kids growing up outside of the city.

This student approached me after class one day with an idea. He and his best friend had spent the previous eight or so years practicing English together. They both knew that they would never learn with only a couple of hours in the classroom each week, with teachers who did not speak very well themselves and without the opportunity to use what they were learning outside of school. So they spoke with each other. They each read books and discussed them together. They listened to the news on BBC radio and talked about what they heard. Now, my student explained, he and his friend wanted to get a group together; a group of likeminded students who all wanted to improve their English, in order to practice together.

Co-conspirators: the English Club founders.

I was open to the idea, but I told him that it would need to be student-driven. I would be happy to secure a room, to attend meetings and to support them however I could, but it would be their club. He brought his partner in crime, now studying to be an English teacher at the Universidade Pedagógica in Chimoio, to meet me and we started planning. I was also teaching management that semester, so I decided to use this as an opportunity to put the class work into practice with my student.

We sat down and I asked my student what the objectives of the English Club would be, expecting to hear, “Well, to practice English…” But, no, his goals were much loftier: “To break down the barriers between students at different universities who want the same things.” “To make people feel like they are the protagonists in their lives.” I asked, “And to learn English, right?” “Yeah! Of course!” he said, “But we want this to be more than that! There are students at UP and students at UCM who all want to get better at English, but don’t know how to connect. This club will bring them together!” And he explained how many students feel discouraged because English is hard to learn, but also because opportunities can be hard to come by here. He wanted them to know that by working hard, they could learn English, but also that they could realize other dreams. I should have known then that this group would be something special.

We finished writing out our goals and mapped out the first steps to getting the club up and running. We agreed that he and his friend would go to various classes and let students know that the English Club would be meeting Saturday mornings at 9:00 and that all were welcome, regardless of proficiency. I said I would find a video to share about why English is so important for students in a country like Mozambique and that would get them excited. When the day of the first meeting came, about 25 students showed up and we were a little overwhelmed! The co-founding students explained their idea of what the club would be and shared what they called "their crazy dream": to one day study in America. It turned out that most of the students who had come for the first meeting had the same dream.

After a few weeks, the attendees shrank to a smaller group of about eight or nine regulars who were really passionate about the club. Up until the end of the first semester, we met weekly, coming up with little activities to keep people talking – getting-to-know-you activities about how members like to learn English, listening to music and trying to fill in the blanks in the lyrics. I started a Facebook page for the club and we have been sharing interesting articles about learning English, as well as information about meetings. Our motto: We Dream in English!

English Club: the early weeks.

As the semester wrapped up, we revisited our goals and added a few, including community outreach to secondary schools. We also brainstormed activities and analyzed which would help us reach the most goals. We settled on theater as the best method to accomplish the most simultaneously: it would help practice all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening), would attract new members, we could include positive themes about how to live your life, and we could perform it throughout the community to reach more students.

We finished our first semester with a lunch at my house where I cooked “American food” – chili and garlic bread, although it was definitely a Mozambican-ized version of chili, due to the ingredients available – and we played games in English. A couple of other PCVs were in town that weekend and helped with the cooking and, of course, eating. I think the highlight for most of the students was the chance to try blueberries for the first time. One had just read about them, but mentioned that he didn’t think you could find them in Mozambique. My mother had recently sent a bag of dried blueberries to add to my oatmeal, so I brought out a bowlful to share with the students. They were still talking about the blueberries when we started planning our second semester kick-off party six weeks later!

Just as my student had hoped, the English Club has provided an opportunity for students from various schools in Chimoio to come together and practice English on their own terms – no lessons, no homework, we do what the students want to do in a relaxed atmosphere. My role has been to link them up with opportunities (one member referred to me as their “bridge”). Once I realized what a fantastic group of kids I had, I started looking for chances to show them off. The first one came in the form of a visit from the US Embassy in Maputo. We here at UCM have been working with the Public Affairs section of the Embassy to launch an American Corner this fall, basically a library and cultural center, full of English-language materials. The woman I had been communicating with came to see the space along with the director of the cultural center in Maputo. I made sure that they had a chance to sit down and talk with the core group of the English Club, both because I think they will be the first group to really start using the center, and because I wanted the Embassy to know that there is a group of super bright, motivated students here in Chimoio who also speak English very well. (The Embassy folks were appropriately impressed with the students).

The US Embassy visits

Since then, we have had a chance to meet with a Peace Corps director and a group of regional leaders of Rotary International. The students were really taken with the idea of forming a Rotary youth group. The Rotary folks came to our semester launch party and spoke for a good half hour about the importance of community service. Mind you, this is a group of 20ish-year-olds in a developing country. As I mentioned, a couple come from particularly challenging backgrounds and have had to work incredibly hard to get where they are. But they listened eagerly, chiming in with questions or stories about people in their lives they wish they could help. I offered to take any who were interested to the local club’s meeting the following Thursday, expecting two, maybe three to follow through. When Thursday came along, eight met me at UCM to walk over to the meeting!

They sat through the rather dry opening formalities before having an opportunity to introduce themselves and hear more about the work Rotary does in Chimoio. They asked some great questions about the work of the club, the relationship between the club and a potential youth group, and the steps to starting their own group. As we walked out, I gathered them on the sidewalk to discuss what we would do moving forward. They were almost jumping up and down with excitement over the possibilities of starting community service projects! They were brimming with ideas, but also thinking strategically. For example, the club was working on a child malnutrition program, but needed to hire experts to help manage their food and powdered milk donations because they didn’t have the required knowledge to distribute them properly. Two of the English Club members are studying Food Science and thought they might be able to help, but decided not to mention anything until they had a better understanding of the work. They didn’t want to over-promise and under-deliver.

Kicking off our second semester.

Even though teaching can be challenging and I get homesick sometimes, every time I leave an English Club meeting, I feel like doing a little dance. The students just energize me beyond belief. I have started calling one of the co-founders “our Tony Robbins” because he gives such great motivating talks. We are working on our theater piece to present at the Peace Corps English Theater competition next month. The students have written the whole thing themselves and it is good! I think I mentioned how funny the students are. They are taking over managing rehearsals and I think the whole things will go really well. A few students have really started coming out as natural leaders. Once the theater is done, we are going to start planning English lessons for the little children of some UCM professors. Some of the members are also continuing to learn more about Rotary and will probably be starting their own group soon.

Each week, we have a few more students show up and now we have members from UP, UCM, a seminary and a few different secondary schools throughout the city. Our Facebook page picks up new followers each week. The members hang out together outside of meetings and share their books, magazines, websites and strategies for learning English. They talk openly about their dreams of studying abroad and are excited about all the test-preparation materials that will arrive with the opening of the American Corner. The founding pair are well on their way to accomplishing their goals of bringing the English-loving community of Chimoio together, creating new friendships and helping everyone to feel like they control their own destinies. I am just happy I get to tag along for the ride!