MOZHANGBIQUE LIFE: First Trimester ✅

Hi friends, I am sitting in a cold air conditioned hotel room writing this much-delayed post. Like most Peace Corps volunteers sometime in their service, I have come down with some type of virus/flu/rash which has luckily landed me with some extra hotel room time in the capitol city while PCMO monitors my symptoms. This has given me some time to sit down and gather my thoughts on my last few months of service, here are some highlights:

ON TEACHING

After completing my first trimester of teaching, I first and foremost must say a HUGE thank you to all of my former teachers, and give huge props to all the current teachers out there. I've always known that teaching is not an easy job, but after experiencing it myself, I have a newfound respect for teachers who can put up with students' crazy antics on a day to day basis. Teaching math in Mozambique has been an extremely challenging job. Math is a difficult subject, so students lie, copy, and cheat their way through class so they do not have to learn the difficult material. I started the year teaching only 9th grade math - and started my students with a review of the basic multiplication times table. The students had so much new material to learn for the year but such a weak basis for matematics and critical thinking skills. My teaching schedule was undetermined and not even finalized teaching until over a month into the school year. At one point the school received a new math teacher and made a new schedule in which I had to give up the 3 turmas (classroom of students) that I had been teaching in order to go and teach different turmas. As a volunteer, I do not have to work a minimum number of hours, but Mozambican teachers must teach at least 24 hours to receive their salary. With the schedule moves, I was forced to leave certain turmas where I had already grown comfortable with students and students had become accustomed to my broken Portuguese, to start over with brand new students like it was day one. This was not my favorite experience... But I certainly learned a lot!

A few students from my 9th grade math class,
causally posing with their
"cemetery for broken desks and chairs"

I settled with 2 turmas of 9^th grade math, taught extra lessons during 8^th and 10^th grade “Estudio obligatorio”, or obligatory study hall periods, and spent most of my extra time tutoring students in math in our little tiny library during my spare time. I used a more hands-on teaching approach that made me popular with most of the students - we played math games on the chalkboard, did flash-card multiplication practice, and practiced methods of problem solving as frequently as possible during class. I wish I could say I changed their worlds and every single one of them and they all became brilliant students… but class sizes are too big, students miss school frequently for countless reasons, and life conditions of their lives simply exist that work against their success. At the end of the first trimester, all students in Mozambique sit through 5 days of provincial government issued final exams. In one of my turmas of 9^th grade students, only 2 out of 64 students passed this exam (passing = 10/20 points). Am I a bad teacher? Possibly. Do these students need to study more? Definitely. Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me next trimester.

ON BEING ALONE BUT NEVER REALLY ALONE

As I’ve mentioned before, I live alone in a small concrete house, in a row of teacher housing on the school grounds of my site mate’s school. People often ask me, “Aren’t you afraid of living alone? Don’t you get lonely being by yourself?” The concept of “alone time” is uncommon in Mozambique. Living in such a centralized public space, it is expected of me to have my door open when I am home... which invites curious neighbors, bored neighborhood crianças, and needy students from all around to stop by for unannounced visits.

A typical Saturday afternoon on my living room floor

At first I loved the visits – to chat, learn, and spend time with the people of my community. My neighbors love to gossip, the children who visit love to sit with my coloring books and color, and students from both my school and the school where I’m living like to stop by to ask curious questions about my life. But soon word got around that the foreign professa had coloring books with colored pencils, real popcorn, and offered extra math tutoring to students of any grade level right on her front porch. The visits became non-stop. The most common visits were from crianças – I would never describe myself as “someone who likes kids”, but like many Peace Corps volunteers, I have found that my most consistent and persistent house guests have been these little humans under the age of 10. On weekends, they show up at my door shortly after sunrise “Com Licensa, Tia Peggggg, estás a dormir?” (Excuse me, Aunt Peggy, are you sleeping?) – Which of course I am not at this point. So they stand outside on my porch (not so patiently screaming) until I let them in. It's tiring to have these little guys constantly visiting, but the happiness on their faces is infectious, and they are so proud when they completed a drawing that they ask to hang it up on my wall. I now have an entire wall dedicated to the artwork of these criancas.

A few of my favorite little running buddies

Over the last 5 months, my community has slowly gotten used to my presence. When I go for runs in the morning, the same early risers on the road that used to stare at me like a zoo animal will now smile and greet me with “Bom Dia”; small children who at first crossed the road to be far away from me now join me for short distances of my run on their daily walk to school. The few local cobradors, or money collectors on buses, no longer ask me if I am lost and now know which stop I need to get off at. I have also had strangers stop on the street stop and back up their car to ask if I am the new teacher at the secondary school. This can be a little creepy and unsettling, but I have found most people to be just genuinely curious and want to just stop and talk to the foreign girl walking down the street.

Sometimes this creepiness has its benefits. After living the 2 hottest months of the year without energia, or electricity, because the school said they would “get around” to finding someone to fix my electrical box, I stopped and chatted with 2 men in the neighborhood. They claimed to be electricians, one even said he had a degree in electrical engineering. I was skeptical, and a general rule of thumb I do not give strange men on the street my phone number, and definitely do not invite them into my house, but at this rate I was desperate to buy a fan to provide some relief from the non-ending heat. So I invited these men to my house to come check out my faulty electrical box and called my site mate over to hang out to witness the process. Miraculously, 15 minutes later, I HAD ENERGIA! I am still not sure what these men did to rig up the old wires to work, I was just thankful to see the lightbulb in my living room lit for the first time ever.

So while I may live alone, I rarely have moments to myself. If I ever need help with anything at all, there is always someone here to lend a helping hand. Strangers I meet on the street help me out with my greatest housing dilemmas, Neighbors will help out when they see that I am struggling, and students visiting my house will help me clean when they see that I haven't gotten around to it (many not so subtly suggest that I hire a maid to help me clean since my house is rarely up to Mozambican cleanliness standards).

ON BEING FAR AWAY FROM HOME

Friends who made "Stick Peggys" to ensure I could be there for all the
"big moments" even when I couldn't physically be there

As I write this post, many of my closest friends home in the United States are together at a bridal shower. I video chatted with a few of them at the beginning of the event and found myself bursting into tears at the sight and sound of all of their voices. If I was in the United States right now, I would be at said bridal shower, pulling my own share of bridesmaid duties while drinking wine and eating cupcakes. Instead I am alone in a hotel room eating cold leftovers and hoping that whatever virus gave me a full body rash goes away soon so that PCMO might let me leave my hotel and send me back to my humid hot concrete house with a gaggle of criancas at the door. The reality of these contrasts can be depressing at times, but I always knew that being away from home for 2 years meant missing a lot of "big moments" in the lives of my family and friends back home.

To make up for these kinds missed moments back home, I have made new friends and created new families amongst fellow PCVs, to celebrate big life moments with here. Check out a few below!