Classroom Kung Fu

The week I spent in America seems like a dream. Incongruous in every way, and me sick the entire time, I couldn’t wait to get back. It took a full month in Moz to get healthy again.
My first month has gone well. I am better at planning and giving lessons, and have a much better idea of what I need to do on a global level to be a good teacher. Unfortunately that involves being a little harder at the beginning of the year in terms of discipline. My third grade teacher Mrs. Davis would keep a steady rule on the class by never raising her voice, forcing us to control the noise level in the classroom to hear her. Even her scoldings were delivered in a calm and level tone. Her style was subtle and measured. This is not my style.
When a student talks I tell them to be quiet. If they talk again I TELL THEM TO BE QUIET, in something of a stage voice (full stare, let the silence hang in the air afterwards). If their misbehavior is insolent or openly disrespectful my response is immediate, my punishment public, and final. If a student complains about being there I tell them to leave. If a student cheats I give them a zero. When a student arrives late I ask why, and if I don’t like the answer (example: “I was errr….sick and errr...there were goats and ummm…) they don’t get to come in.
I respect Mrs. Davis’ style. It is perhaps more mature and maybe even more effective than mine. But it isn’t me. I’m not calm and subtle. I have found, however, no problems with behavior of any kind this year. My style isn’t all swords and shouting, but when the time comes for that I don’t hesitate. Good lesson planning is key, engaging the students is absolutely important, respecting them and their requests is necessary for a relationship. But when a student tests the boundaries I show him or her exactly where they are.
Honestly—and don’t tell anyone this—but I kind of enjoy it. No, I don’t enjoy the look of dismay in the cheater that knows they’re caught (maybe a tiny bit), or the look of shame on the good student that just can’t shut up. What I enjoy is the order. Instead of feeling insecure in front of the students I feel like I belong in this role with all of its responsibilities, and yes, its powers. I enjoy being good at it.
Who threw the paper? We are going to stay here until someone comes forward (I seem to grow taller as I walk down the aisle. I stop abruptly). Was it YOU Francisco? (the lights dim) I think it WAS you Francisco (he panics, shakes his head furiously, he looks to the exit. There is no escape). Tell me Francisco (I hold the wad of paper in front of him, my eyes fixed on his), just what should I do with you? (fade to black, blood-curdling scream)

I'm still updating about family vaca. So sue me.

My family vacation took a turn in Johannesburg.

I was in the bathroom of my hotel room looking at my stubble in the mirror. I knew that it wasn’t enough for a beard…but just maybe. Various angles and five straight minutes of staring were starting to convince me that a beard was becoming a possibility, or was maybe just a few years away.

My mom came into the room. She was buzzing around the room picking things up, but we were leaving that day for Kruger Park so no surprise. She did seem a little stressed, or pale, or something like that.
“Hey mom, do you think this is enough for a beard?” I said, pointing at my sparse neck hair.
“Huh?” She replied, breathless.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, probably with the we’re-just-going-to-another-hotel-don’t-freak-out tone in my voice.
“My dad died.”

We made plans to go home. I didn’t expect to go home in my two years, and I wasn’t happy about it. I wanted two years of retreat, to grow or change or develop some enlightened perspective and then come back and give it another shot with my newfound amazingness. Not to be. Mom was initially open to discussion of the topic, but her relief when I suggested I may indeed jump the pond cemented my decision.

In the meantime we did go to Kruger for a couple of days. At first Kruger is amazing, we saw animals as we entered the park, including a giraffe (an impressively monstrous animal), right from our car!

Then Kruger seems a little touristy, like a zoo. I mean you don’t even have to leave your car to see animals? How fat and lazy have we become that we design nature’s greatest beasts to be seen from the comfort of our air conditioned asses? And the accommodations—the “camping”—was considerably nicer than my home. The hotels are expensive and all inclusive. The “Tent cabins” that we stayed in featured spacious, well lit rooms with great warm showers and tiny hotel shampoos. We saw a bull elephant, herds of zebras, wildebeest and impala from the porch. On the first afternoon. The words of caution about the dangerous animals from our guide started to feel like the words of caution from the tourguide at the beginning of disney’s jungle cruise.

Then you realize how outrageous it is that you can see elephants from your porch. We saw elephants, rhinos, hippos, huge herds of various game, enormous lizards, tarantulas (the guide found it, far from the tent cabins), and my bro’s personal favorite, the baboons. Baboons hang out in huge groups (packs? Herds? Gangs? Gaggles?), and unlike the impalas that do the same they are constantly interacting. The impalas just stand next to each other, and besides for the occasional overhyper baby impala leaping around for no reason (which is funny) they mostly just breathe on each other. The baboons play and poke and preen, they seem to laugh and they look back at you quizzically as they scoop up their babies with their humanoid hands. It was once in a lifetime: we even got to see two lions mate (which was cacophonous and lasted maybe five seconds).

Then Kruger gets boring. Another bull elephant? Another super rare something now mostly extinct found only here? Big deal I’ve already seen four of those. Kruger’s wildlife is so plentiful and accessible that you burn out on it. Absolutely worth a visit, but only for a few days.

And before I knew it I was on a plane to Heathrow, where we did get our luggage back despite British Airway’s best efforts to employ the most sparsely witted and aggressive idiots I’ve ever had the pleasure to hate. And in a blink I was on a plane to LAX.

We got off the plane like zombies, screwed up beyond jet lag and limped through customs with the bags we never got to open. Uncle John met us at the door. The airport was more crowded and noisy than I remembered it to be, and smaller too. But nothing smells like Los Angeles.

Northern Inhambane

Meeting my brother in Vilanculos was a trip. He had gotten so much larger, by something like 20 pounds. He looked like a caricature of a 10 year old him, but he’s looked that way to me since forever. We were finally reunited after 15 months. Mom cried.

And our adventure began.

The car’s air conditioning didn’t work (despite guarantees otherwise). It was also leaking oil.

The hotel’s mosquito nets didn’t cover the beds (defeating their purpose). The microwave didn’t work. The toilet didn’t flush. The shower drooled. The bathroom was in general filthy. Their was an accessible rooftop to our hideous little cottage, but it was covered in gutted, rotting fish, which tempered some of the appeal. The restaurant took over an hour to cook our fish, though they did bring it to our house which was nice.

The icing on the cake for me was returning to our house after a day out, and the hotel did not have our keys. At first I was annoyed, but after half an hour of searching the entire compound I started getting frustrated. It was eventually discovered that the woman responsible for cleaning our house had taken the keys home. Upon hearing this my frustration boiled over to anger, at which time the manager--drunk at 2 pm--tried to pick a fight with me.

The next day the woman left our house unlocked all day (defeating the purpose of having locks on the doors), of course had we wanted to lock the door we couldn’t have because she once again took our keys (and the keys to no other room) home with her.

Throughout these endeavors British Airways gave us no information regarding our baggage which they had lost during the storm at Heathrow. We checked with the Maputo airport every day. We called, emailed and submitted lost baggage claims to British Airways, to no response of any kind. My mom and dad gamely lived out of their carry-on for two weeks.

My dad said that the most important thing was that we were together. Everything else was secondary. And when I remember our vacation I remember sitting in that crummy little cottage eating peanut butter and tuna. I want those moments back. I wish I could keep them and reopen them.

We took a trip to the Bazaruto Islands, we snorkeled in the clear blue water, ate lunch on remote beaches. We went with another couple who had met in the Peace Corps and their lovely family. Pods of dolphins raced around our boat. It was everything an amazing island getaway should be.

Afterwards we stayed at the nicest hotel I’ve ever been in on the cliffs overlooking the ocean at Vilanculos. So it wasn’t all bad.

End of the Year

I once read a study of premeds in realtionships taking the MCATs. The study was interesting because long before they were to take the test the stress in the relationship increased, but as the MCAT approached the stress in their relationship decreased. Our professor’s analysis was that the stress decreased because both of the partners realized that it was the MCAT that was stressing them out, whereas months before the couple didn’t realize that it was the MCAT that was causing stress. The stresser wasn’t close enough for them to properly identify it.

In the two months before my family arrived I was crawling up the walls. There were so many things that I hadn’t planned ahead for, or so it seemed to me. Car rentals and hotel reservations are difficult without an internet connection, as if that would even help you in Mozambique. It didn’t help that school was out for summer, and that my computer broke (again yay!) leaving me with precious few distractions. I was travelling with my friends to kill time, and hardly enjoyed myself the entire time. I couldn’t tell if I was excited to see my parents or if I dreaded it.

Days before my house was in disarray, the hotel reservations weren’t finalized and I got sick.

I arrived in Maputo to pick up my parents and Zeus had conspired against us. They were delayed in London, with no idea of when they might escape that cursed isle. But I had fallen into some luck. A family working for the State Department had an open invitation to Peace Corps volunteers to stay in their wonderful, massive, air conditioned, well-stocked home. They offered to let me borrow their car, we watched Back to the Future (I had never seen it) on their TV, they fed me and took care of me. Their teenage daughters are well adjusted, their home is well kept, and they live a happy, adventurous life abroad together--not unlike one I may choose for myself.

Tara (the mother of the house) drove me to the airport. I was talking to my brother while I waited for mom and dad at the gate. Waiting for them to appear at any second I couldn’t stop trying to remember what they looked like. It was on the tip of my mind, but I couldn’t call it into precise detail. When I saw my dad his image filled my mind with a familiarity impossibly old. And my mom cried. And I held it in. I thought initially that I had done it for embarassment, but I think the emotions were too big to be delt any justice in an airport, over just one hug, after so long.

Rain

And time drags on here. Without work I am a fidgety, indolent blob of flesh. School is effectively over, some minor administrative paperwork remains. All I have to do is sign gradesheets. Maybe 30 minutes of real work in a day.

So all I can say is that my life is pretty plain, so I sit around my house and pray for rain.

The hot season is also the planting season, because it is also the wet season. The wet season is erratic in Africa, one year having three times as much rainfall as the next. The rain is vital, the most common profession—or rather way of life—here in Mozambique is subsistence farming. Almost everyone has a machamba (garden/farm) to “supplement their diets” as we say, or sell some extra goods in the market. Even I have a small machamba in my front yard to get the green veggies I so dearly miss. And while I have water at the mission, the vast majority of Mozambicans rely on rainfall.

Small talk these days revolves around how hot it is and the lack of rain. It rained last night, one of the first major rains of the season. It’s a promising sign. And in Mozambique when it rains it pours.

It can start in a matter of seconds. Literally seconds: when the drops start to fall people run for cover, women with buckets full of fish on their heads, men in ties, little kids, everyone. When I first saw this I laughed, what’s the matter with a few raindrops? But moments later it started raining, I mean really raining, and I understood.

It’s severe. The rain falls in sheets, in buckets, in pools. Within moments your shirt is soaked. In two minutes your thick khakis are drenched through, like someone just pushed you into the pool on your birthday. If you’re caught in it you’re screwed.

So you walk around armed with an umbrella, always. The problem is that the rain is wholly unpredictable. Dark rain clouds will hang overhead for days, staring down at you waiting for the one time you run to the market just to pick up toilet paper, you won’t be gone more than ten minutes. You learn this lesson only once—it takes forever for your clothes to dry without direct sunlight—and you are forever after vigilant with your umbrella. But you’ll learn the hard way, arriving at your front door pitiful, relieved and sopping like a wet kitten.

The roof on my house is sheets of zinc. Every huge raindrop that smacks onto my roof echoes down into my house. When the sheets, buckets, pools fall the sound is huge, like machine-gun clad battalions firing outside my windows. You can be sitting next to someone and almost shouting just for them to hear you.

Every joint, every nail and screw-hole is an opportunity for the rain to get in. In the middle of night I awoke with my pillow soaked in the midst of the deafening rain. I arose with a start and moved my bed, only to find that the rain was leaking everywhere. I used every bucket and basin I had to collect the leaks around my house. I draped several garbage bags over my mosquito net to protect myself. My mattress was wet, so I slept on my thermarest atop my bed.

The most spectacular thing about the rainy season isn’t the rain itself. I have never seen, never imagined, lightning like I have seen in Mozambique. It cracks down from the heavens in awesome bolts, dwarfing us tiny humans below. The bolts dart sideways between clouds, and dance across the horizon. The huge spikes of electricity remind you how tall the sky is. More amazing than any fireworks I have seen.

And the thunder. The thunder is unbelievable. The rain pounding my roof is nothing compared to the boom of thunder. The sound is vast, almost painful, and as I sit alone in my house the gigantic blast fills me with an irrational, awed fear. My cat and I sit together, grateful for each other’s company, the hackles raised on our necks, on edge for the next thunder crack.

It stops just as quickly. Without warning the rain slows and stops as if some great god was simply turning off the faucet. The silence rings in your ears, and you can feel your heart beat gratefully but tentatively slowing down. After all, it could start again at any moment.

20 days until my family arrives.

Peanut butter, my lifeblood. When you don't want to cook, when you want something that reminds you of home, full of protein and fat--two nutrients not easily gotten here--peanut butter.

My town does not have peanut butter. It's my only complaint about where I live. My addiction to peanut butter drives me at least once a month to the nearby city (read "large town kind of") of Vilanculos.

The lone mode of transport is the chapa, a large grey van that seats 12 comfortably but is considered full at around 25 people (plus live goats, chickens, babies and luggage--once a live goat was strapped to the roof). It's cheap and completely unpredictable. Sometimes they leave every half hour, sometimes not for a few hours at a time. I've been in chapas that have broken down on the road many times. Once I was in a chapa whose engine was continually overheating, necessitating a stop every two miles or so to cool the engine with water fetched from a river that parallels the road. Another time the chapa came to a complete and normal stop, and the door fell off. Yet another time they couldn't get the door open, and I was stuck in that glorified RC car with 20+ sweating bodies for almost an hour without moving.

But you make it work, and you get better at accepting it. After all, there is no alternative. Mozambican patience is, generally speaking, heroic, and it figures.

Remember that almost anywhere I go in my corner of Mozabique, I cause a stir. This applies especially to chapas. I approach the chapa stop and I am bombarded with "My fren! My fren! Where you go? Where you go my fren?" I try to stay calm and explain where I am going in Portuguese. "Oh!" they say, "you speak Portuguese!" Yes, I do, and that gets me a handfull of respect, enough to ensure that they don't try to rip me off, usually.

The problem is that in chapas they do not speak Portuguese. And the stir continues when I get in. My tiny amount of Shitswa is enough for me to know when they are talking about me, that and the fact that they stare, point and laugh quite openly. Sometimes I try to respond in the little Shitswa I know, sometimes I just address them in Portuguese to break the ice. But as the jokes go on, and am I talked about more and more but personally acknowledged less I find myself paralyzed. "Why is the white man riding with us in the chapa?" "Doesn't the boss have a car?" It's the most alienating experience I have ever had.

I want to tell them not to call me "boss", first of all. But explaining to a complete stranger the racial ramifications of the word boss out of the blue is not an endeavor I would recommend. Your good intentions are hampered by language barriers, massive cultural barriers, and the simple fact that most people don't want to be burdened with that kind of stuff. I sympathize, I don't want to be burdened by it either. But when you are a racially sensitized white American surrounded by black Africans and they are calling you "boss" over and over it's hard not to feel like you are drowning in it.

It will calm down after a few minutes, because I have lived in my community for so long most of the time the chapa driver or someone on the chapa knows me, and that diffuses the situation.

I get off the chapa after 3 hours and I can't feel my feet because the chapa is so small that my knees have to be raised to fit, so only a fraction of my butt touches the seat at any one moment. But I need my damn peanut butter and I'll do whatever it takes at this point. If I thought the chapa was bad, Vilanculos proper is far worse. In the market there are men whose profession is to scam white people. As I approach they see me and pounce. They ask me if I want to change money, they ask me what I want, offering to get it for me at jacked up prices. I tell them I don't want anything, and sometimes they follow me. I ask them to leave me alone and a brave few will continue to follow, asking what I want over and over. When I threaten violence and scream at them that I am not some %$^#@ tourist they will almost always leave, laughing as they go (this is to diffuse the tension, a very common Mozambican maneuver). They may follow at a distance though, on the prowl as I look for the best prices on peanut butter.

Everywhere I go kids shout "Milungo!" at me. People call me "boss" (it sounds like "boys" when they say it. And when you ask them what it means none of them know), one time a man on the other side of the street selling phone credit shouted "sista! sista! sista!" over and over again, perhaps "sister" being the only English word the guys knows. Children ask me for money, adults ask me for money. It’s not everyone or even most people, but it feels like I am being sized up and calculated. My shirt, my bag, my sunglasses and especially my shoes give me away, let alone of course my skin and hair. Some days it feels like every friendly conversation ends with them asking me for money.

I'm on my guard, on edge, the whole time. Ask any of my friends and they'll tell you that when I travel I can be brutal, especially to people who think they can rip me off. My community isn't anything like Vilanculos. It's smaller, quieter, I'm well known, and sure I get harassed now and then but after a short conversation I can usually introduce myself and ensure that that person will never call me "boss" or "milungo" again. But Vilanculos is a hardened tourist town. White people pass through all the time and they are almost all tourists, none speaking Portuguese. I am just another white, a target for some, a novelty for others, or ignored (as I would prefer it).

I get my peanut butter and go home. Being in Vil is exhausting, riding on chapas is exhausting, and it all makes me feel like an outsider with no means of being anything but white, and that feeling is the most exhausting and hopeless feeling a volunteer can get..

Once back in town though I say thank you to the driver. I stop by the market and say hi to my friends there. I joke around with Nina who sells me tomatoes. Luisa who breast feeds her baby as she talks to me in my broken Shitswa. True story:

While buying bananas a little girl looks at me and says "milungo!" And Julia, one of the banana ladies stops her and says, "Hey, that's not a milungo, that's Colin." I thank her like an idiot ("You don't have to thank me!" she says, almost annoyed) and go home with my peanut butter tucked under my arm.

Victory.

Family t-minus one month.

Goal Three

The Peace Corps has three goals. Very basically they are 1) to help the host country, 2) to represent America, and 3) to represent the host country to Americans.

Number one is too vague to quantify. Number 2 is pretty much a guarantee. Number three can be more complicated than it suggests. Keeping a blog, for instance, is a very simple way to give a snapshot of Mozambique, to humanize and characterize Mozambicans, and so forth. But I was speaking to a volunteer about this a few weeks ago, and a snapshot does not capture the ridiculous complexity of a society and a people.

Example:

One of the Italians at my site has a house. In front of this house is a pack of stray dogs that has accumulated over the last few months. In the beginning they seemed dangerous, and after a while they were a nuisance, but after some months my Italian friend came to grow fond of them, and especially fond of the two that spent the most time on her front steps.

One of these dogs was female, and was soon enough pregnant. As the dog grew fatter and less mobile my friend took some extra care of it. When the dog gave birth she started to make plans for the puppies.

Shortly thereafter, one of the neighbors killed the dog with a knife, and all of the puppies died.

My initial reaction was of repulsion and outrage. Killing a dog with a knife? A dog with puppies? It was difficult to think of any justification, and very easy to think of sadistic, cruel evil. I have been a dog owner my whole life, I could never imagine doing anything like that to a dog.

And if we left it at that Mozambique might seem like a cruel place, and Mozambicans a violent people.

But being culturally sensitive liberal stereotypes with our relativistic moralities we are going to try to understand this situation. Firstly: the man who killed the dogs certainly did not have any inkling that these dogs had owners. They were strays; he wasn’t overstepping his authority because no one had claimed any official ownership over them. In fact, the dog had had the puppies in front of his own house in his yard. So suddenly a random dog sat down on his lawn and popped out a bunch of puppies.

Secondly, animals rights are a luxury we have in the US that is simply not recognized here. If people aren’t getting enough to eat, don’t have proper shelter against the cold, or medical care where exactly do dogs enter as a priority? Animals are labor, food, or nuisance, the concept of a pet is not one that exists in the Mozambican countryside (nor does it likely exist anywhere outside of our Western world).

Thirdly, stray dogs can be dangerous. Just a few weeks ago a woman in my town died of rabies, which as I understand it is a downright terrifying way to die. Dogs can bite kids, steal food, attack livestock and carry diseases like rabies, scabies, etc etc. So when the mommy dog has puppies on the lawn its just a few more dangerous roaming animals in the neighborhood.

Lastly, the knife. He killed the mother dog with a knife! How grisly and awful, I though at first. But it’s not like his stabbed the dog repeatedly for the adrenaline rush or sadistic thrill. Slitting an animals throat is how animals are killed here, mostly because it is a fairly quick and therefore relatively merciful way to kill an animal.

The incident evolved in my mind from a violent murder to a practical measure. Packs of stray dogs can be a dangerous nuisance. There are no vets to give rabies shots or to “put the dog to sleep” (I wonder what dogs would think of that euphemism). The man was looking out for his house and his family.

But my friend was still sad afterwards, and angry. I don’t blame her. But I don’t blame him either.

Then I watched every superhero movie I could get my hands on to right my head. Then my computer died and I was very, very sad.

50 days until my family arrives! Way too long to start a realistic countdown!