Catch up!

Ok, this blog drought has gone on long enough! I usually write when I have a chance to sit down and reflect, to expand on a theme and produce something more than, “Here is what I did yesterday!” But, as my second year in Chimoio has gotten going, it hasn’t generally been providing me the time necessary for this luxurious practice. Simply put, I have been busy. Really busy. With really awesome things.  So, this will mostly be a, “Here is what I did for the last couple months!” post, without many conclusions drawn, but with some pictures.

Since my last post, I went back to Massachusetts for the holidays. It was a great to see family and friends, meet new babies, enjoy some snow, and eat more ice cream and Christmas cookies than most people would think possible. It also was a chance to take a breath and reflect some on year one in Mozambique. Hopefully, I will get some of those thoughts down here eventually. 

We're not in Chimoio anymore

I arrived back in Maputo the day before my birthday and stayed with a friend in who took me out for a delicious Thai birthday lunch. I landed in Chimoio that evening and was surprised by a few friends with a delicious chocolate cake – a fantastic start to what so far has been a fantastic year. 

I had moved into a new - much smaller - house right before heading out for the holidays. I came back to realize that shutting all the windows in my tiny dependência before I left was a bad idea. After a week of battling the mold that had invaded my kitchen and bedroom, I headed back down to Maputo for a week of Moz 19’s Midservice Conference.  

Happy birthday to me!

Peace Corps had us poked and prodded by doctors and dentists, making sure that we had finished out our first year of service without any serious damage. When we weren’t being inspected, we had time catch up with our fellow PCVs from around the country, many of whom I never get to see because of distance, travel restrictions and packed schedules.

After the conference ended, I stayed an extra day for our annual in-person Volunteer Advisor Council meeting. I like to describe VAC as Peace Corps Student Council; each training class selects three representatives to facilitate communication between PCVs and staff. Since last fall, I have been serving with a fellow 19er as the leadership team and it’s been fun. It’s an opportunity to use some of my previous work experience more directly. This in-person meeting was extra special because it was the first with our new Country Director. 

People I miss! Including three generations of Mãe Maria's host children.

When I got home from Midservice, January was almost over, the school year was about to start, and it was off to the races. This year, I am still teaching at UCM: English and Gestão de Empresas (business management), both of which I taught last year. I was looking forward to re-teaching classes and spending less time on lesson plans. At the last minute, I decided to overhaul my plan for the business course. After a year of teaching management and marketing to students who have never learned supply and demand, I made the executive decision that microeconomics would be more useful. This deserves a whole post of its own, which will hopefully come in the near future.

Along with teaching, I have a couple of big secondary projects that have been keeping me busy. The first is REDES (Rapariga em Desenvolvimento, Educação e Saúde) a network of after-school groups throughout the country focused on’ empowerment of girls, HIV prevention, and reproductive health. In its current form, it is a special Peace Corps project, funded by PEPFAR and with PCVs as the central leadership (for example, I am the financial coordinator). However, there are Mozambican women who have been running REDES groups for years and have much more institutional knowledge than the PCVs that come and go every couple of years. We made the decision last fall that REDES needs to be registered as a formal Mozambican organization, in order to end its financial dependence of PEPFAR special funds and to create more sustainable local leadership. Since getting back, I have been working with a group of PCVs and local facilitators to get this process started. We submitted the first papers to reserve the name REDES last Friday, and we have tickets booked for a meeting in Maputo in two weeks to write the association’s constitution and submit it to the Ministério da Justiça. The women who will be the founding members of the REDES board are wonderful and I love working with them on this. I will update after our meeting.

Ladies and gents of REDES

But the most exciting parts of my year so far have been the opening of the Cantinho American Thurgood Marshall and what it has done for our English Club. We started a conversation about opening an American Corner at UCM after a visit from the US Ambassador last February. I had never heard of the program, but found out that American Corners/Spaces exist in many countries where there are US Embassies. In their most basic form they are small Embasy-sponsored libraries, but with the potential to by much more. Following an implausibly rapid timeline, our director had the contract signed within months; Embassy officials visited to plan the space in August; we had the first materials in October and the official inauguration was on March 25 (a year to the day from my first phone conversation with Public Affairs to plan the budget request for Washington).

I had visited the American Corner in Beira and seen the shelves of books dedicated to preparation for TOEFL, SAT, GRE and college applications. They had laptops and magazines and a space to show movies. It is located at the Universidade Pedagógica, but when I visited, a UCM professor was running an English Club and TOEFL class. I came back to Chimoio eager for something similar for our community – a space dedicated to English language learning and inter-institutional cooperation. During the process of opening the Cantinho, I got to meet the staff of the American Cultural Center in Maputo and saw how much they did with their center. It is used by literary clubs, job seekers, English learners and groups supporting woman entrepreneurs. This got me even more excited for our potential space.

Right around the same time that the Cantinho became a possibility, the English Club was getting started. For the first few months we didn't really have a home, so we would meet in the UCM lobby each Saturday morning and look for a free room. If people came late, which many would always do, they would just have to wander the halls until they found us. The idea of having a home sounded wonderful.

The team from the US Embassy that did most of the work to make the Cantinho happen, an American woman from Public Affairs and a Mozambican man who runs part of the Cultural Center in Maputo, first came to visit us in early August last year to see the space and work out the details of how thing would run. When they were scheduling the trip, I asked if the English Club could have a few minutes to meet with them. I knew that the members of the club would be the "early adopters" when the Cantinho opened and would be valuable ambassadors for the project. I also like to take advantage of any opportunity to them in front of anyone of influence, since I know they will impress them.

The Embassy folks were appropriately impressed and asked that the English Club prepare a presentation for the opening ceremony. It turns out that the US Ambassador had been a big supporter of the project from the Embassy side and he planned to come to Chimoio to cut the ribbon himself. So, we started planning a variety show of sorts to present to the who's-who of Chimoio and Ambassador Griffiths. The date was moved enough times that we started thinking it would never actually happen, but on March 25, the English Club presented 30 minutes of entertainment: a dance to kick things off with energy, a poem about the life and legacy of Thurgood Marshall, a play about the importance of the American Corner, and song to close it out. 

Opening the Cantinho Americano Thurgood Marshall

The Ambassador was also duly impressed, as were the other Embassy staffers who came and the corps of teachers and administrators at UCM. As was I. I ended the day feeling so incredibly lucky for the opportunity to work with such a group of talented, intelligent, entertaining people. The Chimoio-area Peace Corps Volunteers went out for dinner with Ambassador Griffiths and the others from the Embassy and they all talked about how impressive the English Club was. The Ambassador also talked about some upcoming job opportunities and how he hoped we could help encourage more people from Chimoio to apply for jobs with the Embassy. I had started out wanting to promote my friends in the English Club and ended up realizing that the American Corner has the potential to be a place that promotes Chimoio as a whole. We are continuing conversations about increasing cooperation between the Cultural Center in Maputo and the Cantinho here.

Although the official opening wasn't until the end of March, the book arrived in the Cantinho in October and we started using the space in November. The first use was for English Club on Saturdays. Having a home immediately increased regular attendance. The space also allowed us to finally start a project that had been in the works since July: English lessons for children. One of my colleagues had asked that I help teach her daughter and neighbors English. Having no experience teaching children and feeling a little shaky on the Portuguese needed for that, I had a stroke of inspiration. Why should I be the one giving the lessons when there was an English Club full of nearly-fluent speakers who were bound to be much better at keeping children interested than I would be? A group of them were up for it and when the Cantinho was ready, we kicked off classes on Sunday afternoons. 

Sunday English lessons at the Cantinho

The Sunday lessons were an immediate hit. Each week, one English Club member would be the teacher, but others would come to observe, help with bathroom breaks for the students, and read grammar books while the other was teaching. At the end of class, we would pick the teacher for the next week who would be responsible for preparing the lesson. The rotating teachers spread out the burden of planning and kept things more interesting for the students who had a different person with a different style teaching each week. It also allowed all the participating teachers to learn from each other and kept more people engaged in the project.

Since the moving into the Cantinho, English Club attendance had been improving, but we were still struggling to get new members to keep coming back, particularly girls. We had clearly stated goals but still needed a better defined structure for our meetings. We kept getting involved in projects like English Theater, so many of our meetings were used for planning. It was hard to keep people who weren't part of these longer-term projects engaged.

Before our holiday break last year, the more dedicated members (our ad hoc group of leaders) had a strategy session to plan how we would could improve in 2014. The model of rotating teachers had been working so well for the classes that we decided to adopt it for English Club itself. Things like planning for the opening ceremony of the Cantinho would be kept out of our Saturday morning meetings and a different pair of members would be in charge of the meeting's activities each week.

When the new year kicked off, the Cantinho was open all week and people were asking about the English Club. We started our first official meeting with two of our newer members presenting a news article and leading a discussion about corruption. In week two, we talked about sexual harassment; week three we played a game a discussed human rights. Our core group was still coming, but each week we would also have a variety of new faces. We would usually choose two of these newcomers to plan for the following meeting; an unanticipated benefit of the rotating leadership was this great strategy to get people to return. They immediately felt involved in the project. Another benefit for me became obvious when I learned that the group in charge of week four had chosen abortion as a discussion topic. I would NEVER have felt comfortable choosing this topic myself, but it was a fascinating - and very civilized - conversation.

Week five we talked about problems in English learning in Mozambique and it was a moment where I felt like I was watching a dream that previously existed only as a few sentences scribbled in a composition book suddenly become a reality. When our two cofounders had first come to me about starting the English Club, we had listed their goals. As I wrote in a previous post, they didn't just want to practice English, they wanted to bring together groups of people with common interests - or as they said, to break down the walls between institutions. They wanted to make people feel like they were the protagonists in their own lives (their words, not mine) by giving them the support they needed to realize their dreams.

They had a vision: a group where people could come to practice English, no matter their level and for whatever their reason. They knew that one of the hardest parts of learning a foreign language is finding a way to practice; English Club would be an immersive English-speaking environment outside the classroom. But not just any environment, it would be the kind of supportive environment where people would feel comfortable trying and making mistakes. But they also wanted to create a community of people who were invested in improving their futures; English only playing a part of this. 

English Club gets a visit from Peace Corps Washington

During last week’s meeting, I sat back and watched as our moderator led a discussion among a group of about twenty members, some who had been part of the club from the beginning, others who were there for the first time. Everyone had a chance to speak. When someone began to dominate, either the moderator or another member would very politely ask them to let someone who hadn’t yet spoken contribute. When a member whose English was not as strong wanted to speak, the other members were patient and helpful, giving the person as much time as they needed to get their thoughts out and supplying words that escaped them.

I looked around the table and saw people from different schools and different parts of the city. Some had been friends for years and others had come to be friends through English Club. They were all there on a Saturday morning to speak English, to talk about a topic that mattered to them, and to connect with others who shared their passion. It was exactly what the founders had envisioned. I had lunch the next day with one of the cofounders and our spiritual leader and couldn’t help but gush a little at what he had created. I can’t think of anything I am more proud to have been part of.