Long story short, Peace Corps decided to pull me from my Zambezia site because of that little security incident and because of absolutely zero support from the school. In retrospect I can now see what a headache everything was getting to be. Just a little sampling of what was going on between me and the school: they never called after hearing about the break-in to see if I was okay (and this is not a cultural difference problem… ), they did call once … to see when our personal belongings were going to be out of the house so the new director could move in. They never tried to help find a house and were unable to tell PC where we were living (we could have been living in a cardboard box under a mango tree and they would have never known or cared). A week before PC pulled us, I showed up to teach classes only to be told by students (?!) that I was no longer their teacher, half of my classes had been reassigned to a physics professor (when he and I talked about it, he asked for my all class prep materials because he didn’t know anything about biology), school administration apparently thought they didn’t need to communicate directly with me about this and later denied the whole situation when the PC chefe showed up. School administration was surprised and stressed about our departure “… but we love our peace corps volunteers, they do so many important projects and are such hard workers…. How can you leave us …. ” Suddenly, when they were faced with the monetary cost of finding replacement teachers, they were the most devoted administration in PC Moz history.
Peace Corps came to site, made a decision, and we had less than 24 hours to pack our belongings, say our goodbyes, and move to Manica Province. We drove through one of the biggest rainstorms; rain filled some of the boxes on top of the car and leaked down through the plastic tarp into the car. The roads between the village and Quelimane (where we overnighted) are some of the worst in the country, 100% deep rivets and pot holes, and as they turned into muddy rivers all I could think was: I love you SUV. The roads shouldn’t be that bad there, some government somewhere has funded a complete infrastructure rehabilitation project but the money has been sucked into someone’s play fund and the road remains… horrible. To make it worse (and you see this around Moz), people (with an average age of 12 years old) living along the side of the road have taken to digging up soil next to the road to patch the holes in the middle of the road--- it’s a niche to make money, they patch the road and the drivers owe them for the labor. As you drive by they lean on their hoes, clap their hands their hands together and and hold them out. The only hitch is that by carving out earth next to the road they are only creating more erosion, so besides the holes and rivets in the middle of the road the sides of the road are also cracked down and melting away into cassava and pineapple fields.
After a couple days driving, Peace Corps dropped me off at my brand new site, and guess what: I’m teaching biology at a university! Yep, Doutora Alexandra, that’s me because I also got a couple extra academic degrees in this transfer. Now I wish I could say this promotion was due to my incredibly inspirational teaching skills, but this is sadly not the case. The university schedule is a bit different, classes hadn’t started yet and I didn’t have to jump mid-term into anything, which would have been the case if I had gone to a secondary school.
I’ll be honest: teaching biology at the university was (still is) scary. I feel more accountable for what I teach, big difference from that secondary school up north where I could have showed up to class and taught basket weaving and nobody would have known the difference.
Getting assigned to teach at the university is some Karmatic fate after four years of being a complete bitch to all of those foreign GTFs I had at the University of Oregon. When I was a student I had zero patience when I showed up to class and the GTF lectured in sounds that are not even close to the English language and wrote things on the board that looked more like drunk Pictionary. … so I’m *that* GTF now, except I’m called Doctor and feel a little bit like a fraud. When I lecture I sometimes wonder what it sounds like to the students, in Portuguese I primarily can only speak present tense, my vocabulary is probably about 150 words, and I have directly transported my Spanish grammar/sentence structure into Portuguese (they are not the same). But they did really well on their first test, so either things are better than what it seems or there was a heck of a lot of cheating… Either way the students are enthusiastic and positive to work with. Despite being adults, I still get giggles when I talk about sperm and fertilization.
The university is in a city and my lifestyle has completely changed. This really brings to home the fact that every Peace Corps experience is uniquely different, even in the same country. Actually I am almost not in Peace Corps anymore: My house has tiled floors, a shower, running water, and electricity, I am no longer only eating okra, tomatoes, and wild chicken eggs because the markets here are fully of stunningly beautiful produce, the nearest place to buy food is a supermarket (just like one in the states: frozen processed food, ice cream, skim milk, diet soda, and everything… not that I eat most of it but the point is that I could if I wanted to), a driver comes to pick me up to take me to and from work, I have a real sized oven and refrigerator…. Etc. etc. Things can still be hard but in a different way than before at my first site.
Overall, I’m glad I stuck through the hard things and am excited to see how this whole teaching at a university thing goes. I get to be a part of a really interesting department (Nutritional Engineer) that could really help communities eat locally and am lucky to work with such wonderful, intelligent people. And on those rough days, when everything is going wrong and cultural differences seem impossible to overcome, when the guard is drunk and passed out in his underwear in the front yard, when the house floods and the faucets fall apart because they are super-low grade Chinese-ware, when my neighbor’s guest absent mindedly takes my house keys to Beira unbeknownst to me, when living alone is as lonely as it sounds, when the Portuguese just isn’t coming out right and I wonder how the heck I’m going to pull this lecture off, I just take a big breath . . . life is good, overall.
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