Odds and ends in Mozambique

Teaching:

Life here is well.  There hasn't been a lot going on, but I have started teaching at the university.  It has been interesting teaching in Mozambique.  Things are much more relaxed and showing up to class on time is more of a suggestion, not a rule.  Teachers, teaching is another one of those suggestions.  I am hoping that when we get our new students in March, I will have more of a say in the way things are run here.  The current students will actually take their final exams and then they will graduate and start teaching students English in Mozambique.

I also had a riveting two day four hour experience of testing students to enter into the Teaching institution here.  I wanted to shoot myself!  I had to stand in the back, and watch people take a test for two hours one day and then two hours the next day.  After that we did an English placement interview with the students.  Some people spoke very good English, others not so well.  Some were just down right painful to listen to.

 

The Beach:

So I took my 8 year old host brother and 16 year old host brother to the beach on the second of January.  They live just an hour away from the beach, and yet they had never seen it before.  We went to Ponte D'oura.  It is a huge tourist location near South Africa.  We pitched a tent and camped really close to the beach.  They had also never done real camping before. 

We played on the beach for three or four days cooked American food and had a good time.

I wish that it wasn't such a tourist trap, because things cost a lot more money there, but it was still nice and it was fun spending time with the two of them.

 

 

 

 

The garden:

Okay, so I had this great idea of making a Garden.  The only problem is that I don't know how to make one, or what any of the plants look like as they are growing.  So we plant corn, Green peppers, carrots, onions and lettuce.  We wait and we we wait.  The corn starts to grow, no problem.  The other stuff, we had no idea as to what to look for, so a lot of things were growing, but we didn't know if they were weeds or if they were vegetables.  So we let them grow for a long time.  I finally asked my host mom to come and look at my garden.  She just laughed and told me that nothing was growing, that all I had successfully grown was weeds.  Woopi!  Big accomplishment!

So this week we tore up the garden, minus the corn and are trying again. If anyone has any suggestions, please comment!

New Years: Okay, this was an interesting night. It started out by me killing two goats. We tied their feet, hung them by the tree and then I cut their heads off. Now, for you vegetarians, there is nothing wrong with this, I had to eat, so it had to be done. As I cut the head, Lulu, my eight year old host brother, held a pan and caught the blood. I didn’t think much about this, I thought they didn’t want blood to go everywhere and then they would bury it later so that critters don’t get into it. Had I known what was about to happen, I would accidently Kicked Lulu to the ground or at least knock the pan from his hands. As it turned out we cut up the intestines of the goat and boiled it with the goat’s blood and then ate it. Now, in normal circumstances I would have refused, but apparently it is a big honor to be given the privilege of killing the goat and then eating the insides with the blood. So I respectfully ate it, one bite at a time. Needless to say, I had very little of the meat and a lot of goats blood and intestines. I was even fed that meal for breakfast and lunch. Now here’s the funny part! The men in this culture never cook, except for the blood and guts meal. They also have their own cooking pot that they call, ‘the men’s pot.’ This pot is so beat up, it looks like it had been through two wars. Now, there is probably a reason why the women do the cooking. I mean think about it, if you’re going to mix goat guts with blood and you think that taste good, I would just assume you stay out of the kitchen. So this New Years me and five other guys sat around a campfire and cooked goat guts and blood. Sound like fun! When midnight rolled around, everyone came out to the streets and started shooting off fireworks. I’m all for the fireworks, but when kids start shooting them at each other, we have a huge problem. After the fireworks, we partied all night, and I mean all night. I did not get any sleep.

Christmas in Mozambique: It was hard to wake up in the morning and realize that today was Christmas. I started out the day, fetching water for my breakfast and my bath. It was a cool 80 degrees, with a breeze that made it feel like 75. My roommate and I ate breakfast and then baked cookies to bring over to our host families houses, where we would spend most of Christmas with. It was interesting returning to the home where I lived for the first few months in Mozambique. I didn’t move that far away, so I had been back several times to visit. But, this time I was greeted differently, almost like I had been gone for a year and was just now returning. It was kind of interesting, but nice at the same time. The children in the household and the children in the neighborhood were as happy as any child that I had seen on any other Christmas that I had experienced. I had this realization, that the children were happy to be in the presence of their family and neighbors and were happy to have a huge meal in front of them. Not because they are starving, like some people want to think of African children as being, but because it was a special meal, kind of like thanksgiving for us in the US. They didn’t wake up with a Christmas tree, which had sparkling lights glistening under the angel. They didn’t wake up knowing that the jolly old man had delivered all their presents that they asked for. They didn’t wake up knowing that their whole day would be defined by what was in those boxes. They didn’t have the expectation that parents or Santa would give them toys to play with. They didn’t have the buildup of a month, watching new presents being put under the tree and then counting them over and over, making sure your siblings didn’t have more. They woke up that morning with the expectation that their door would be opened for all the neighbors to mingle back and forth as they pleased and that they would have a large meal, where they could eat as much as they wanted. They knew that they would get up, dress in their nicest clothes and spend the whole afternoon eating, talking and partying into the night. Children knew that today, they could stay up till one, dancing on the front porch of their neighbors house. They knew that when they were tired of dancing there, they could walk across the street and dance some more at the other neighbors home. I thought about buying presents for my host family, and I decided not to. I think that was a good decision. My culture is to open up presents, their culture is to spend the day with friends and family and eat. So instead, I made cookies, what a great Christmas present. I ate dinner at my host families’ home, and then went to the next door neighbors and ate there. I ate 7 dinners and danced with the neighborhoods of Nammacha, until 1 in the morning. Every door was wide open and every house had music blasting from the windows. Again, I thought about my culture. How often did I talk to my neighbors? Did I ever talk to them on Christmas? I don’t think so! To open your door and give thanks to your village or your city, to say let’s go dance, let’s go eat, that’s a pretty awesome thing to do. In short, it was pretty cool to experience a different Christmas and I look forward to next years.