Jam!

I have been lucky enough to spend my Peace Corps service in a quintal that is home to a small Garden of Eden. The previous owner was Brazilian and planted a variety of fruit trees and vines. We have mangoes, guavas, grapes, ata, papaya, even passionfruit. I arrived at the height of mango season and in the middle of Christmas break. The yard was littered with fruit and I had nothing to do, so I began experimenting with jam-making. The first few batches went so well, it became a bit of an obsession over the last two years. Making jam is a great way to preserve seasonal fruit, is low-tech and low-cost, quick to learn and delicious; therefore, I figured I could share my methods so that others can use them at home, with their REDES groups or anywhere the opportunity arises. Instead of using specific recipes, I have collected up general techniques and adapted them to different kinds of fruits. 

My little house under the shade of mango, ata and guava trees.

The basis of every jam is the same: fruit, sugar and some kind of acid, cooked down into a delicious, spreadable, shelf-stable mush. The rule of thumb for jams that will be kept outside the refrigerator is to use equal parts fruit and sugar; less sugar will not preserve the fruit and the jam will ferment and/or mold much more quickly. Outside of this rule, making jam is not an exact science – you can taste, adjust and experiment as you go. For jam that will be kept in the fridge, you can pretty much use sugar to taste. I will first outline the basic process and then add details for specific fruits.

Jam is different from jelly in that it is made with fruit pulp, not just juice. Boiling chunks of whole fruit with sugar generally leads to a thick, but not jelly-like consistency. To thicken jam more, you can use pectin. This is commercially available in liquid or powder form in the US, but I haven’t seen it here in Moz. Some fruits (or parts of fruits) are naturally high in pectin, including lemon or lime seeds. When I use a limão, I rinse the seeds and keep them in the fridge until the next time I make jam. I tie them up in a little bit of cloth and boil them with the fruit. You can put them directly in the jam and fish them out before you put it in jars, but this is a lot of work.    

This is Nelson picking oranges in Maxixe, but I use the same technique to pick fruit in my yard.

The basic jam-ing process is as follows:

1. Prep your fruit: Clean it, remove the skin, and cut it into chunks.
2. Prep glass jars: Clean them and remove the labels. As you are making the jam, boil the jars to sterilize them. If you don’t sterilize the jars, the jam will go bad no matter the proportion of sugar you use!
3. Put the fruit and sugar in a pan, adding some water for firmer fruits and bring to a boil. Again, if conservation outside the fridge is your goal, start with 1:1 fruit and sugar. If not, start with less sugar and adjust to taste as you cook. I generally keep it on medium-high heat on the stove. Adjust as necessary for carvão. Heavier or non-stick pans are better as the fruit is less likely to stick or burn.
4. Add a bit of lemon juice, or another acidic juice (I love using a mix of passionfruit and limão). This is to taste: start with the juice of one lemon and see how it tastes! Add other flavorings if you want at this point: ginger, cinnamon or other spices.
5. Boil, boil, boil until it thickens, stirring frequently to make sure it isn’t burning on the bottom. If you have a freezer, put a small plate in and use this to test for readiness. When the jam is done, a bit dabbed onto the cold plate won’t run. If you don’t have a freezer, you will have to use your judgment (which gets easier with more practice).  You can test by pouring some slowly from a spoon – it should thicken up enough that it no longer runs in a thin, watery stream. It will get thicker as it cools, so it does not need to be the finished consistency before you take it off the heat.
6. Take your boiled jars out of the water and fill them with hot jam. Clean the edges and place the lids on top, but wait until the jam has cooled a little before you give the final tightening.

Tips for specific fruits:

Mango Jam

Mangoes are pretty simple. You can generally just peel the fruit, cut it off the stone and dice it up. For the small yellow mangoes that can be stringy, I cook the fruit down with some water and strain it before adding sugar and boiling it for real. Mangoes are pretty sweet, so I usually use more lemon juice in mango jam than with some other fruits.

Ideas for variations:
   - Grating in some fresh ginger adds depth of flavor with a mild kick.
   - Passionfruit pulp or juice is a great complementary flavor.
   - Dice a less-ripe mango and add the pieces halfway through the cooking process for a chunkier texture.
   - Thin strips of lime rind will candy as they cook, adding flavor and texture.

Mango-ginger jam made with passionfruit juice.

Guava Jam

Guavas are a lot of work, but the final product is one of my favorites. Start by peeling the fruit and cutting it in chunks. Be careful of bichos! About a third of the guavas from our trees tend to have little worm-y fly larvae in them. You can use your judgment to determine what proportion of each piece of fruit is usable. Unripe guava isn’t as sweet, but is high in pectin, so I generally include at least a few less ripe ones along with the fully mature ones.

After cutting up the fruit, put it in the pan and add enough water to cover the fruit. Boil it until the fruit begins to break apart. I happen to have a potato masher (incredibly useful for so many things in a kitchen without a food processor!), but use whatever you have to stir and mash the fruit as it cooks. Once it is a pretty, pink soup, take the mixture off the stove and strain out the seeds. I use a mesh strainer. Use the back of a spoon or a spatula to press the mixture through, so that you get more than the juice. You want to include the pulp, just not the tooth-cracking seeds. Once you have the seedless pulp, follow the directions above.

I LOVE making guava jam with the juice of a few passionfruits (strained to remove the seeds) in addition to the juice of one or two limões.

Papaya Jam

Papayas are soooo simple. Just peel it remove the seeds and cut it into chunks. Put the chunks in the pan, add water to cover and sugar. It breaks down quickly with heat and stirring – no other tricks necessary!

Papaya blends really well with other fruits and flavors:

-        Add orange juice and grate in a little orange rind.

-        Chopped pineapple and/or mango.

-        Add some cinnamon, ginger and allspice.

Fresh papaya; the jam cooking.

Banana Jam

Banana is also very simple. Just peel, chop and cover with water in the pan. I generally chop it pretty finely as it doesn’t always break down completely. Sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg result in something very close to apple butter. Delicious.

Passionfruit Jam

Passionfruit is one of the most labor-intensive jams, but the result is completely different from other jams and deeeeelicious.

1. Start with maybe 6-8 ripe passionfruit. Wash them well. Cut them in half, putting the pulp aside in a bowl.
2. Put the shells in a pan, cover with water and bring to a boil. Let them boil until the white inside has turned translucent and purple-ish. Pull the shells out of the water and let them cool. Scrape the translucent inside part onto a cutting board and discard the hard purple outer shell. The inner part should have a firm-ish jelly-like texture. Chop this finely and mix in the reserved pulp.
3.  In a pan add the pulp mixture and an equal amount of sugar. You can start with less sugar, but taste as you are cooking as too little sugar produces a bitter jam. Add water until it is soupy and stir-able.
4. Add lemon juice to taste. I also like to add the pulp of a couple more passionfruits.
5. Finish cooking as instructed above.

Passionfruit/maracujá; the jam as it cooks; the finished product.

Grape Jam

Grapes are also work, but the jam vale a pena. The grapes we have at our house are like small concord grapes, so I don’t know the exact process for the thinner-skinned red or green grapes you would find in a grocery store.

1.  Pull the grapes off their stems and wash them well. Pop the inner pulp out of the skin, putting the skins aside for later. Again, this process takes a while, but is easy for the little dark purple ones that grow here. Put on a movie and just get it done.
2. Similar to the process with guavas, put the light green inner pulp in a pan with some water. Boil and stir it until the fruit breaks down and you can strain out the seeds.
3.  Return the seedless pulp to the pan and add the skins, sugar and some lemon juice. I cook this mixture for a while over medium heat before bringing it to a boil in order to be sure that the skins break down some. Once they are nice and soft, I crank the heat up higher and follow the process explained above.

Grapes fresh off the vine; the pulp cooking down before the skins are added.

Lychee Jam

We don’t have lychees at our house, but last year I was given a few kilos by a friend who has trees and gave jam a try. You need a lot of fruit, so it would be pretty pricey if you have to buy lychees, but it was fantastic.

1. Peel the lychees and pop out the pits.
2. Chop the fruit very finely as it didn’t break down very much when cooked (although I really liked the chunky texture).
3. Add the chopped fruit, water to cover, sugar and lemon/lime/limão. I made it with a healthy dose of lime juice (we happened to have legit limes in the market at the time) and really liked the flavor combination. 
4. Follow the process outlined above.

The more jam I have made, the more comfortable I am improvising. I have gotten better at recognizing how flavors and consistencies change as the jam cools. BUT even in my early batches, I have yet to make one that didn’t taste great as long as I stuck to the same basic process. So, don’t be afraid to experiment and trust your own judgment. Have fun! 

If you have made jam and want to share tips or recipes, please add them in the comments!

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

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.