You gotta know when to fold 'em, and when to stick around for another hand.

Wow. So... it's been a while... I feel like during my time here in Mozambique I am constantly explaining lapses in communication with, "I have been sooo busy lately!" But the problem is, it's true. And since my second year kicked off, I have been getting busier each week. I definitely over-committed and paid the price. Lesson learned. I now know my limits much better. Luckily, over the last couple of months, I have been wrapping up a couple of projects, or at least in my official capacities, and the workload has been tapering off. I had some down time between semesters and while the pace was slower, I was able to do some catching up on tasks that were slipping by during the semester. 

To give a quick update: things here are good! This past semester was full of activities at the Cantinho Americano: the English Club continues to grow in its membership and evolve in its activities; our children's English classes now have almost thirty kids attending regularly and have been taught by a dozen different young teachers. We also had our first sarau cultural, a day of friendly competitions in music, dance, poetry and modeling. It was a great success and brought in participation from numerous people new to the Cantinho. We are already planning another in October that will hopefully pull in more community cooperation in the organization of the event.

Esta and the prizes for the Sarau Cultural

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, last semester I taught a somewhat experimental version of Gestão de Empresas as Economics/Management to my Communications students. It was a great success in that I learned a lot that I will be able to apply in teaching the course again this semester. I also taught English to first year Economics & Management students and will continue with them this semester. Unlike last year, we gave a diagnostic test to the students at the beginning of the semester and split them into two groups based on ability. I got to teach the higher group and enjoyed it immensely. While we did cover grammar topics, we spent more time on interactive activities, such as skits, debates, my student even prepared and taught lessons to the lower group. 

A year and a half into my service in Chimoio, I feel pretty settled. In Peace Corps, we talk a lot about community "integration" - getting to know people, learning the language(s), understanding the culture and customs, etc. I remember becoming really uncomfortable with this word during our "reconnect" conference after four or so months in our communities. I thought to myself, "By integration, don't they just mean making friends??" At this point, I don't feel "integrated," I feel like I live here. I have my routines, good relationships with colleagues, a bunch of students to say "hi" to on the street. I have a growing network of professional contacts. And above all else, I have friends.  

See? Friends!

So, considering all the factors listed above, I decided to continue for a third year here. As I wrote in my application for an extension, when seen from the perspective of what you are leaving, two years seems like a long time. But, when seen from the perspective of what you can do, it is just enough time to get started. Take for example, the Gestão course I have been teaching. 

When I arrived last year, I agreed to be the stand-in course coordinator for Comunicação para o Desenvolvimento, taking the place of the PCV who had served before me, and to teach business management to second-year students in the course. I had one colleague in the Communications department, a young teacher who had himself graduated from UCM the year before. Having just arrived in Mozambique and not being familiar with how a college class is run, I asked him for any material he could provide to help me prepare to teach. After a fair amount of cajoling, he got me in touch with another teacher at a different campus who sent along her syllabus from when she taught the class. It was helpful, but was designed for an intensive modular class and used books that we didn't have in the library.

Having been told that whatever books weren't available would be purchased, I handed a list over to the pedagogical director, who asked for a list of all of the books that the Communications department would need so that they could all be purchased at the same time. We gave him the list right away and waited. Nothing happened for weeks. I was traveling to Maputo, so I got in touch with some friends there who helped track them down at stores, but, long story short, I never got the books. I pirated a few crucial pages from Google books, grabbed a couple of other generic management books from the library, and found supporting articles online. 

I had to make some changes to the format of the class, since I would be teaching over the course of a twelve-week semester, instead of a two week module, but since I had no experience here on which to base any changes in the curriculum, I decided to maintain the content more or less as I received it. This included things such as the history of management, long discussions of the types and roles of managers, and systems theory among other topics.

That first semester, I taught two turmas: a group of day students recently graduated from secondary school, and a group of older night students, mostly working professionals. I wrote about them some last year. I started the class by asking them to fill out an info sheet including their past experience, current work, and future goals. It turned out that a number of students were either already working in or interested in working development, so I decided that although it was business management in title, I would add more content relating to community and development work. Tudo bem.

Celebrating International Workers Day with colleagues

At the end of the class, I was able to draw a few conclusions. First, it is really difficult teaching management to students without work experience. Second, it doesn't make a lot of sense teaching things like the history of management to students who aren't studying Management; time is better spent on practical topics. I think the most useful areas we covered were tools related to strategic planning and community needs assessments.

My second semester, I taught Princípios de Marketing to first year Communications students. I wasn't too excited for this discipline at first - I don't think many people join the Peace Corps hoping to teaching the 4P's to students who are the first in their families with the opportunity for higher education. But then I started thinking of it as a chance to teach students how to take in marketing and to be more savvy consumers. Right now, Mozambique is an economy just coming onto the radar of multinational companies and many are entering with guns blazing. It's disconcerting to see huge companies arrive with sophisticated marketing campaigns and knowing that most consumers don't really have the experience to evaluate well the messages coming at them full force. 

After my first year of teaching Management and Marketing, I visited home for a month at the holidays. It was a great opportunity to relax, see family and friends and eat my mom's home cooking, but it was also extremely helpful as a chance to reevaluate my own cultural perspective after spending a year in a very different environment. One of the biggest shocks on arriving in the US is how busy and complicated everything is. One of the clichéd reactions of Westerners visiting developing countries is, "Wow! People here live so simply and yet they are happy!" The truth as I see it, though, is that westerners have just added so many unnecessary complications to every decision, usually in the name of "bigger! better! faster!" competitive consumerism fueled by the marketing of companies hellbent on limitless growth. Innovation is great. The number of options you have to evaluate just to buy laundry detergent in the US is kind of silly. 

[Side note: I was recently taught the perfect phrase to express this in Tewe, Chimoio's local language. With westerners came Coca-Cola and other carbonated soft drinks, thus: "Azungu anoshandja! Bhata txissuri canda mugarafa!" or  "White people are always meddling with everything! They even put a fart in a bottle!"]

Coming home, I was floored by the extent to which capitalism not only fuels our economy, but permeates everything. It has come to define our culture: competition, individual achievement, a sense of entitlement stemming from the idea that success comes from personal effort and is therefore linked to worthiness. We have come to accept advertising and marketing in every part of our day-to-day, barely noticing that we are inundated by images and messages carefully crafted by people trying to convince us that something in our lives is lacking, but luckily they have the solution. That something about ourselves is imperfect - our weight, our skin, our hairline, our odor, our clothing, our sexual stamina - but, thank god!, they have what will fix us. Companies need us to keep buying things, so everything is new and improved all the time and we should never feel whole or satisfied. Our culture has become one of constant competitive innovation and the invention of problems to promote the sale of solutions. End rant.

On Ilha de Moçambique

After this month of overstimulation, I returned to Mozambique and prepared to teach Management again. I was beginning to understand more deeply some of the crucial differences between the cultures that have broad implications in terms of teaching management. Because really, management is a very social science that depends entirely on culture. Mozambique's traditional culture is very focused on community and networks of extended family. American territorialism, focus on boundaries and individual achievement is pretty foreign. Additionally, although Mozambique is currently a democracy with a mostly market-based economy, the current ruling party has been in power since independence in 1975, at which point they established a socialist government. Of course people here can be competitive and materialistic, too, but competition and individualism are not always the primary motivators that western management theory usually assumes. 

So, I decided to ditch half the management curriculum and began the semester with an introduction to Microeconomics. Before talking about core competencies, competitive advantages, SWOT analyses and benchmarking, I decided it would be more useful to introduce marginal cost and marginal benefit, opportunity cost, the production possibilities frontier, and supply and demand. But before talking about any of these ideas, the first classes were about paradigms, cultural lenses, how economists approach problems, and the importance of reading economic analyses with a critical eye. 

The Economics textbook available in our library was full of statements like, "Taxes on productive activities mean less production. A distribution more egalitarian means less to share," without any commentary on the fact that this is the point of view from someone with a specific set of beliefs and values, while other economists take other stances. In talking about government policies on redistribution, he gives an analogy on how to divide a cake that a group works together to bake, making the statement, "If the cake is divided equally, independently of contribution, some excellent cooks will prefer to put in less effort and the cake will be smaller." After explaining that a basic belief common to economists is that you can predict how people will make choices based on incentives, I took this as an opportunity to discuss what assumptions the author was making about what motivated people's choices.

My idea for the course was ambitious, and with no experience teaching economics and only 18 months of Portuguese under my belt, the first go-round had its ups and downs. But it was much better than only teaching management and left me with plenty of ideas on how to do better with a second opportunity. Thus, I was happy to learn that the Communications program had changed and I would be teaching the same class this semester to first-year students. Two weeks into the semester and the course has been going really well this time around. Finally, in my fourth semester here, I feel like a competent teacher. It's one of many situations that make me happy I will be here for another year. 

I was lucky enough to have my parents come visit for two weeks.

Reaching a  point where I feel like I am contributing something was a long process. I had to get to a point in learning Portuguese where I am just surviving, but can have real, substantive conversations and get to know my colleagues and students. Beyond the language itself, I had to get to know different styles of communication - people, especially students, can be much less direct than I am used to. I had to learn how the school system here works. I had to get to know the culture here and then really reflect on my own culture to understand the differences. Finally, I had to reflect on myself and what I have to offer. Now, as my initial term of service draws to a close, I feel like I am beginning to understand my role here and what I can do.

So, as I look ahead to my third year, I have lots of things I want to be working on. I want to continue to improve my teaching. We have already started to improve how we run things at English Club: documenting attendance, tracking topics, recording data on our little Sunday students. The students I taught during my first semester are about to graduate and I will be supervising at least one of them in his internship. I have also started working with a colleague on a project about personal finance that in itself is a reason to stay. We started by doing a survey of teachers and workers here about their habits regarding household budgeting, savings, borrowing, credit cards and purchases. We already presented the findings at UCM's Jornada Cientifica this past week and now are going to use this information to put together a series of workshops about how to manage money. The plan is to start with staff and faculty, but to eventually design a course for students here and write up a manual that can be used by other institutions.

I am also hoping that with more time here, I will get back to blogging more.

Teacher Raiva giving English lessons at the Cantinho Americano