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A trip to Swaziland

Mozambique recently drastically raised the price of a one-year visa. Peace Corps has been trying to negotiate some sort of exemption for Volunteers, but the negotiations are taking a long time. I conveniently happened to be back in Namaacha helping with the training of the newly arrived trainees when my visa expired. And Namaacha conveniently happens to be a border town with Swaziland. So Peace Corps took all of us Volunteers that were helping at training that week for a quick trip to Swaz to get 30-day visas so that we could travel back to site without running into problems. Some fun facts about my trip to Swaz:
-Date of my exit stamp from Moz: 05/11/1999
-Date of my entrance stamp on my return to Moz: 05/11/1010
-Freebies available at the border control building: maps and condoms (both male and female)
-Number of visas that my picture appears on: 2 (mine and someone else’s, they got confused)


Back to Namaacha

Namaacha is the name of the city in which training (PST) takes place. Every week during training Peace Corps invites some current volunteers to come help and meet the trainees. I remember when I first arrived in Namaacha last year it seemed so undeveloped and poor, compared to the US. Now, after living in Nacaroa for almost a year I was amazed by how developed and rich Namaacha seemed. They have paved roads, with sidewalks. Last year I noticed the potholes and unevenness, but this year I noticed the blacktop and curbs. Some people have cars. Last year I noticed how old and noisy they were, this year I notice how many there are. There are a lot of house made from cement and blocks. They have a library, which seemed so tiny last year, but now I’m just impressed that it exists. They have preschools. They have restaurants and cafes. I can’t imagine what I would have thought of Nacaroa if I hadn’t been eased in to Mozambique with Namaacha.

I had a lot of fun helping with training and hanging out with the other Volunteers who were helping the same week. This coming week the trainees will find out their site placements, so I’m pretty excited to find out who will be coming near me. The closest site to me will be getting two new Volunteers.

I also got to see my host family from last year again. I brought them some pictures that I’d taken last year and gotten printed for them. I had really good luck with the timing of my arrival: My oldest brother, Samito, had been working at a hotel in Namaacha last year, but earlier this year he started working for the border control a little ways away. He stays there and works for 2 weeks, and then has 1 week off, and luckily I came on his week off. The second brother, Zinho, works at a really rural school about 30km away. He usually stays there during the week, and comes to Namaacha on the weekends only, but this week there was a conference in Namaacha, so he was around all week. My youngest brother, Jeque, apparently got some bad friends and failed school last year, so they decided that he should go live with his older sister and study at the school where she teaches. Conveniently, I got there the week after school ended, so he had just returned to Namaacha. And my little nephew, Erlander, who is really adorable and loves to talk, left to go spend the holidays with his father the week after I left, so I got to see everyone! My Mama was really excited that I was back, she wanted me to stay and sleep there and eat every meal with them, and take my baths at their house, etc.


Work

The school year has finished, so now is the time for national exams for the 10th graders. All last week we had to proctor the exams, which was incredibly boring. I didn’t know how long 90 minutes could feel like until I had to stand in a hot room and do absolutely nothing for that amount of time. And next week will be spent correcting the exams. And then after that there are retests for the students who fail, and then correcting the retests.

In my “homeroom,” there were 78 students. Of these, 50 have passed. 9 dropped out/transferred during the course of the year, 8 I suspended for failing/missing class almost everyday, and 11 failed and can repeat 11th grade next year if they want. The ones that I suspended can’t repeat 11th grade next year, they national regulations are that they are suspended for 2 years, and after that they can repeat 11th grade if they want. Which sounds harsh, but seriously, I took roll 37 times this past trimester, and these students were absent more than 30 times, with similar percents in their other classes. The classes are already huge, and students get turned away once the classes fill up, so I don’t really feel too bad. They posted the results yesterday, so we’ll see how many show up at my house to complain.

Overall, I although I have really, thoroughly enjoyed my first year here, I honestly can’t say that I find the work very rewarding, and I don’t really feel like I’m making much of a difference. Many students hardly learned any English in previous years, they miss school all the time, and very few are motivated to learn. And I can’t blame them. Most of them know they’re going to be farmers or housewives, and no one will pay more to buy tomatoes from the farmer who knows some English, and washing clothes by hand isn’t any easier for someone who knows some English.

There’s one Volunteer near me who works at a mission trade school. Her school has machinery, a good library, classes of 30 students, and all sorts of resources. When I first found all this out about her school I thought Peace Corps should have chosen a less developed/ less privileged school that could have benefitted more from having a Volunteer. But now I think Peace Corps should invest its Volunteers in more schools like this. The students at that school have hopes of going to college, of having good jobs, of actually using the English that she teaches them in their futures. Those students are actually benefitting a lot from having a volunteer, whereas very few of my students are.


Random Tidbits

There’s this one song in Mauca that comes on a lot here. I obviously can’t understand what it’s saying, but I like the beat and the lyrics seem lively and relaxing. One time it came on when I was with some of my students. I told them I really liked it. “Do you understand it?” they asked. I told them I didn’t so they translated the chorus: “Don’t beat your wife while your kids are watching.”

I recently received a care package that my aunt sent me. One of the most exciting things in it was a rat trap. Since my house has luckily been rat free for a while, I told Sambo to take it and use it in his house, which is full of rats. The first night he killed a rat. The second night, the rat managed to take the food without setting off the trap. I figured he must not have set it properly, so the third night I had him show me how he set and baited it. It looked good to me. But somehow that rat managed to take the food, set off the trap, and not get caught! So the fourth night he tied the food to the trap, and managed to kill another rat.

I was showing some pictures I’d brought from the US to the students in my English Theater group a while ago. There was one student who always knew which one was me in a group of people, but the others could never tell which white person was me. There was one picture with me and a bunch of my mom’s relatives. “Which one am I?” I asked them. They debated it, and finally all agreed that my cousin Angela was me. For those of you who aren’t my relatives, my cousin Angela has very blond hair, and looks nothing like me.