Monday, May 10, 2010

Abertura do Ano

Buster’s Barbeque. That is what I think of when people start talking about school sponsored events to celebrate the start of the academic year. The only thing is that I have absolutely no memory of Buster’s Barbeque. Frankly I don’t think I even went once during my time at Lincoln High School, but I remember the sign-up form and the posters… it was probably some kind of PTA fundraiser linked to a football game, but those details are vague. My parents are absolutely phenomenal parents, they just aren’t the all-American, homecoming football game, Buster Barbeque type. At the U of Oregon start of the year events, there was usually a guest speaker, maybe food, again the memory is hazy and I only went once… I have stronger memories of the non-institutionally-associated celebrations, and I doubt few college graduates have good memories of those sloppy, but fun, gatherings.
Fast forward: me. Here. now. I have had the privilege of going to two, extremely different, start of the academic year celebrations, one at the secondary school and the other one at the university.
At the secondary school we had a tree planting ceremony (I know this sounds like some hippie thing from Oregon, but I’m not confusing things). Mostly everyone showed up on time, and waited around for a couple of hours for things to get set up: the chairs for the attending students and parents had to be moved to place, the plastic flower decoration, which was usually some kind of pencil holder from a director’s desk, had to be artfully positioned the speakers’ table, the district representative had to arrive (he was on Mozambiquian time… two hour difference with real time). By the time things were ready it was blazing hot and everyone was huddled in the shady spots under buildings or shrubbery around the school grounds. A student was selected to ceremoniously dig/plant a small sappling, and the school officials helped water it to show the strong bond within the community. We sang the national anthem (look it up online, the lyrics are good but the longest anthem ever, I think the main verse is repeated some eight times). When all was ready for the speakers’ time, the sun was high and the chairs were no longer in the shade… so things were adjusted and parents’ seating was moved perpendicular to the ornamented speaker’s table and students stood inside the building across the way, watching from the windows.
Okay so the set up was awkward, but what was more awkward were the main topics of the keynote speaker: (1) corruption. All involved parties: parents, students, and professors, were specifically asked to stop playing their respective role in the rampant corruption at the school. Parents were asked to not come by the school with live goats and chickens (… and I was later told by Dio pigs) to give to teachers, students are not to do manual labor and/or sexual favors (apparently a popular option) for teachers, and teachers are not to solicit sexual favors or livestock from students. Yep, I was going to have to hold back from my 8th graders…this kind of corruption is disgusting and sickening. (2) Dress code. Students can no longer show up to class with tagline shirts purchased from the mercado (these are clothes that Goodwill ships to Africa, meaning the shirts that you give to Goodwill, that can’t get sold at the regular Goodwill or, after, the BINs). The problem is that none of the students know what the shirts say because their english ain’t so good. The speaker’s examples of taglines include “My name is John” “I love you” “New York” …. But I could think of some (spicier) examples. Though I always notice the bizzarro shirts that make it out of the states to Mozambique, I had never heard a Mozambiquan talk about it. Granted I know people don’t know what they are wearing, I still get surprised when I see “guess what’s making me happy down here [with an arrow]” “Someone I know went to Hawaii and got me this shirt” around town, or in the classroom with the words are showing through the pressed white button up school uniform shirt.
I often imagine various scenarios with events from Mozambique transposed onto life back home. Like what if a suburban forest heights mom pulled a live goat out of her mini-van to take to her child’s trig teacher at Lincoln High, and what that teacher would say upon receiving the goat. Or a parent teacher conference with the student wearing an ironed t-shirt with “i have problems” on it. Or, over hamburgers at Buster’s Barbeque, teachers being told they could not do naughty things with their 14 year old students while parents stood around rolling their eyes thinking “hmm… that will be the day….”.
The university Abertura do Ano was… tame and much better and not too much of an interesting story (what will I blog about… man). This was one of the few times I’ve been to a mass, the bishop came, bible passages were read, people got on their knees and prayers were said. All of the professors were in their black graduation robes and hats, except for me… it was a like a game of “Where’s the Unqualified Volunteer Who’s on Faculty?”. Over the center table there was a photo of an African Mary holding a black Baby Jesus with a caption reading “our mother”. A phenomenal speaker came and talked about human rights issues and how to protect the oppressed. She talked about the US, and it was the first time I’ve hear a non-American give a reasonable account of US issues, usually things are unreasonably (and falsely) positive, or excessively (and unfairly) negative. We had chamussas, rissois, cake and champagne.
And at the university level here, just like the university level back home, the non-formal event was more memorable (and sloppy… if not sloppier than at home). The only difference here is the event was sanctioned by the school. After teaching my class one evening a co-worker asked if I was going to the “baptism” that coming Saturday morning. Sure, which church, whose baby, what time? He just laughed, no not a baby baptism, come to the main campus and you’ll see how the new students are welcomed by the old students.
Second/third year students had spent the last month fermenting raw eggs, milk, corn husk, and I’m-don’t-want-to-know what else in an old oil barrel… this is the “holy water” for a university baptism. Tests are arranged so all of the first year students have their last mid-term the same time on a Saturday morning at the main campus, and as they exit out they are initiated into the student body. The first year students had to walk on their knees in the mud to a pick-up truck with the spoilt food filled barrel; a rather animated, chanting mob of older students taunted…. Because of my language issues in understanding what the heck was going on in mob settings either the older students were chanting “I am bishop” or they were telling the first year students to say “I am little-insect”…..bishop and little-insect sound similar in Portuguese hence the uncertainty. Anyways…. once they reached the barrel they were smashed with raw eggs and doused with the chunky, foul smelling “holy water”. When I came to the campus, the gates were locked tight to prevent potential escapees; cars were pulled up around the perimeter as extra blockade. As the barrel emptied, the solution was augmented with muddy puddle water. Students who tried to flee had it much worse than those who embraced the ceremony. The parking lot was full of spilt “holy water”… it was absolutely disgusting. And disturbingly amusing to watch.
We do a lot of weird initiation hazing events in the states (for sports, for greek life, for secret societies, etc. etc.) I wonder how it would be different if it was all done out in the open, not behind closed doors.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

I have arrived…take two

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.