"Bom dia, Teacher Karina!"

Life is all about good mojo. AND sparking it when you need some.

Here I am, typing away at Kilimanjaro Café in Vilankulos, finally relaxar-ing (the verb literally meaning "to relax") under the big Echacia tree after walking/rubbing out a dozen bottle cap-sized rings on my buttcheeks. No, really –  having  hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck carrying about 30 cases of empty beer bottles, I had the privilege of sitting on an open case for over an hour along the potholed national highway.  If laying down on a bed of nails was a feat achieved by only Great Indian Mystics and magicians alike, I’d have to say that successfully displacing your butt over 12 beer bottles at least deserves an honorable mention in the Guiness Book of World records. Just sayin’ ;)

Wish I could have looked this serene...bahaha

In any case, today I’ve got some good mojo. And I’m savoring it. I got up early, saw the sunrise on my morning run, had a great breakfast of leftover curry, and am finding myself in the lap of luxury today, using internet and sipping on a vanilla icecream/Orange Fanta float at my favorite cafe. Absolute heaven.  As a Peace Corps volunteer, it’s all about the mojo. Your mojo will make or break your day, and spin your outlook on any situation you encounter. Most days here in Moz, you wake up, have an agenda for the day, and generally feel good if you achieve even a quarter of the things on your “to-do” list before the sun goes down.  Because, as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mozambique, you are destined to wait along with everyone else for the gods of  Productivity and Efficiency to smile upon you – and when they do, you know just how blessed you really are. Even the most basic – and I mean, basic – day-to-day activities require some luck and constant foresight. Oh, do you want to take a bath?  Hope you planned ahead and have enough water stored in your kitchen.  Oh, are you thirsty? Hope you boiled your water, let it cool, and then let it run through the filter for two hours. Hungry? Hope you started cooking your meal before sunset. Why? Because once its dark, you’ll have to dodge lurking scorpions and spiders, all while swatting all the moths and cockroaches out of your food. And frankly, you probably won’t get all the bugs out anyways...

All dry wit aside though, I think what has come to astound me most about my new life here in Mozambique is just how much work it takes to just live. Even living as simply and minimalistically as I do, when I’m not teaching at school, I’m constantly doing manual labor to get by every day– fetching water from the pump, cleaning my hut and kitchen to prevent bug/lizard infestations, weeding my large garden, or going to the market to get food. The list goes on. It’s given me such good perspective however on what I really actually need to live comfortably and (for the most part) healthfully. Moreover, it’s during most of these daily but necessary challenges that I’ve come to connect most intimately with the people in my village because I am attempting to live how they do, and as such I need them to teach me how to live.

With this openness to a new way of living, I have learned many things. For example, how to make coconut milk from scratch and roast freshly picked cashews from my neighbor’s cashew tree (both being incredibly tedious work). It means befriending and visiting ALL of my neighbors regularly, including the “neighbors” that live a good 1-2 km away. It means embracing the curiosity of criancas that follow me around, and thus learning of new paths around the village and into the bush.  It means having an “open door” policy quite literally, and welcoming anyone who decides to visit me even if it’s inconvenient. It means putting up with my school Director’s absence and carrying on with the school year without a curriculum and thus learning how to write and plan my own from scratch.

Speaking of teaching!

I wrapped up my second week of teaching yesterday, and it’s safe to say that I LOVE my job. I’m teaching eighth grade English, and have five full turmas (or classes) totaling about 250 students. That means in each class I have approximately fifty 13/14/15+ year olds – talk about a tri-lingual hormonal meltdown waiting to happen, haha! But really though, these kids are great. They happen to think my jokes and facial expressions are funny, they haven’t gotten too jaded yet by school politics, and they tend to reciprocate my enthusiasm with good energy and a desire to participate. Heaven forbid I ever have a sullen classroom! I don’t think I could handle it! J In any case, I get the biggest high after four hours of work. Yes, it can absolutely be stressful – especially when kids start to lose fascination and curiosity that comes with having a new teacher and thus begin testing her limits. I’ve already started picking out the “personalities” I predict I’ll have to reckon with, and have already had to deal with bathroom rushes where suddenly five students all need to “estou a pedir mijar” (ie. “take a piss”) all at the same time. I usually respond with a “qualquer” (whatever) and a dismissive wave because honestly, even if five kids want to goof off or skip class, I still have 45 other students that want to be there, and want to learn. 

I’ve thought a lot about how I want to approach teaching this year, especially as a new teacher and a recent student. My outlook is view the students as “tabula rosas” (blank slates), starting completely from scratch. For example, I’ve spent the first two weeks solely working on present simple and present continuous tense (or for those less grammatically inclined “I go…” vs. “I am going…”). Supposedly, my students have already had two years of English, but you’d never know it. Sentences like “my nam studys ingleesh” still pop up with alarming frequency.  And so, I’ll start them from the basics and work them up. After all, they’re only in eighth grade and so this is the time to solidify the basics before they get swept on to higher level English in which they can only fake their way through to a certain point.  In other words, I’m going to do my darndest to not leave anyone behind, and work to support the more skilled students with more individual supplemental work and tutoring.

As I mentioned briefly earlier, I’m also creating this years curriculum week-by-week without the help of the Mozambican government. Usually, the Moz government issues a national curriculum that all schools have to abide by but we’ve had no such luck.  And really, I’ve actually started to enjoy catering my curriculum to the need I see in the classroom. I have total liberty to teach whatever I want, however I want. And that is a very unique opportunity indeed. 

Let's just hope the students are game for the ride :)