Dreams of Strawberry Juice (and other stories of delayed gratification)

Last year at Willamette U (go Bearcats!), my bestie Lea and I worked out nearly every day together, training for top times on our varsity crew team. Unbeknownst to most people outside the rowing community, rowing out on the water in an actual boat is something that occurs maybe 25% of the time. But a collegiate team in a high intensity training season spends the majority 75% on a torture device called the “ergometer” or “erg” for short. So, during those long dark winter months spent in the erg room and lifting weights alongside the football team, Lea had developed this theory about fun. And she explained it to me one day while we were busting out a particularly brutal 90 minute piece, clicking and swinging in union, the fan blades whooshing with each burst of power from our legs. “There are three types of fun, Karina” I remember her explaining diligently between gasps. Type I fun she said is all about instant gratification, like eating ice cream – it’s fun because the reward with each bite is instantaneous when the icy sweet goodness hits your tongue. Type II fun is like studying for a quiz and acing it – you have a little pain and work at first but the payoff for obtaining the a short term goal is relatively quick. But Type III fun is the most demanding of them all – the type demanded of varsity athletes (and now PCVs) where the ultimate reward is months, sometimes years, down the line… a horizon that is often hard to envision and the number of steps in-between daunting if not completely unknown. Type III fun is the ultimate scenario of delayed gratification, and thus as we came to believe (as most rowers are secretly masochists though we hide it well) the sweetest type of fun. Lea and I knew that the months of sweating through our spandex and doing workouts so hard we’d vomit into a trash bucket would pull us across the finish line first at Champs and maybe even bring us to NCAAs again.

WU Crew flashback, kickin' some WWU booty of course!!!! Stroke - Jesse, 3-seat - Kate, 2-seat - Lea, Bow- Karina (me!) WIRA Championships, May 2012

And so, despite all the challenges that is bundled under the “living-in-Mozambique” umbrella, I have been having a lot of fun here (of all three types!) ;)  If all the pictures of white sandy beaches, palm trees, and bikini-clad-beer-toting PCVs are even making you start to wonder just when exactly I’m going to get down to business and start doing actual work here as a volunteer, you’re point is somewhat fair and warranted. 

Participating in a treasured PCV Moxambique tradition... Beer Olympics!! GOOOO Dirty South!! :D

Oh you know, just enjoying one of the most beautiful beaches in the world - Tofo Beach!

Yet, in reality, there’s been a lot happening off camera here in Mapinhane. My neighbors, friends, and colleagues are truly the people that make my world go round here and I've been really enjoying the process of figuring out just what makes me happy especially since all my “normal” Happy Index boosters (aka rowing, rowing, rowing, climbing mountains, playing my oboe, rowing, eating ice cream, Portland beer…) are laaaaaa back home in the PacNW.

But that’s the thing: I AM HAPPY HERE!! Really!

I've now passed the stage of operating in “survival” mode every day – a mentality of smiling and doggedly putting one foot in front of the other even when everything about your life seems utterly overwhelming and you regularly just want to stamp your foot and throw tantrums – and have settled comfortably in my hut, token gecko family included. I’ve really begun to see my life explode into a flourish of activity, belonging, and purpose. This is a delightful realization for me – as delightful as biting into a ripe strawberry from your garden and finding that it’s still warm and sweet from the sun. Even though you expect it to be delicious because the months spent nurturing it gave you sufficient time to dream about eating it, you are nonetheless pleasantly astounded by just how sweet the fruits of your labor taste.  When the berry juice finally dribbles down your chin, you ultimately understand – as with any situation of delayed gratification, especially Integration – that the sacrifices, adaptations, sweat, and hard work is well worth the reward of having created a new life with your own hands (and of course, the helpful hands of your neighbors!).

Some not-so-quick highlights/life-updates:

SCHOOL & TEACHING

Whether I’m finishing up my morning sunrise run, hiding under my blankets ignoring my alarm, or ducking the school fence and crossing the yard with my white “bata” running over lesson plans in my head, each and every day begins with the ancient and nearly toothless Senhor Chaukey clanging a long piece of rebar against a hanging oil drum – the rather unceremonious but incredibly effective school bell. In an instant, students emerge onto the main highway from the various village paths, walk through the main school entrance, trot toward our big trees, and form their class lines. The tenth graders (and the eighth graders that can afford it) are crisply uniformed, wearing their slacks and white collared shirts and ties. The eighth graders from poorer families often wear the same outfit that they did the day before – a less raggedy t-shirt perhaps with khakis, which if they’re lucky, is freshly washed (if not, the morning dew laced with B.O. hangs a little heavier in your nose than usual lol). Our students stand together, clustering a little, chatting and bantering. Girls’ shrieks of laughter rebound off the school walls and dissipate into the ever-clear blue skies. Then, on cue, two selected students shuffle to the front of the lines and begin singing the first line of the national hymn before being joined in chorus shortly by their classmates. A little distance away another student begins to slowly raise the flag. Sometimes faltering and often off-pitch with their squeaky and ever-changing pubescent voices, Mapinhane’s secondary students (along with their professors) stand at military-like attention throughout all five verses. Sometimes they mumble and murmur through it as sleepily and indifferently as I remember mumbling the pledge of allegiance back in Junior High. Yet sometimes, they belt it out of their little bodies with such energy, that the excitement is contagious. It’s an anthem that acknowledges slavery, suffering and civil war, but ultimately it’s a song about rebirth and the opportunities that lie in new horizons and bright futures. As goes the chorus:

Mocambique nossa terra gloriosa (Mozambique the glorious land)

Pedra a pedra construindo novo dia (Stone by stone, building a new day)

Milhoes de bracos, uma so forca (Thousands of arms, one force)

O patria amada, vamos vencer (For the love of country, we will overcome)

As the final chord dies out, Senhor Chaukey barely waits a second before making the bell burst out in resurging clangs. Finally, the school day has begun.

8a classe - Turma A, led by one of my favorite students, Hawa :)

I enter my classroom to cheers in unison of “GOOOOD MOOORNIIIINGGGG TEECHA!!!” and I can’t help but grin. I immediately begin my rounds around their desks, waving my index finger and appealing to students to sit their butts down, stop punching their neighbor, and get out their notebooks. Once this is accomplished, I’ll jump right into whatever lesson I have for the day. Sometimes it starts with a game or a puzzle. Oftentimes though, my lessons start with reviewing our last class. Considering that my students only get 2 hours and 15 minutes of English every week, the progress is slow. They learn something on Monday only to forget it by their next 45’ class on Thursday. But, just as my colleagues assured me, despite all odds we did make some progress by the end of the semester.

One of my eighth graders, raising the Mozambican flag
during the national hymn

We've just entered the second trimester here in Mapinhane. I’m teaching the same five classes of eighth graders, each class having almost 60 kids. Teaching has gotten easier, but in no way do I feel like I’m fulfilling my potential yet. But I DO love teaching. It feels natural. I believe I have a good “gut” instinct for teaching. I enjoy finding the magic ingredient that each group of students respond to. But, now I feel I need some more guidance to transform my talent into a real skill, an art even!  Because as I’ve realized, anyone can teach, but to teach well…? THAT is something you could spend your whole career crafting!! Peace Corps gave us some general teacher training during PST, but really my experience with teaching is trial by fire. As one lonely voice which asks rather than commands the attention of sixty, the feeling that I’m on the verge of anarchy is incessant. Unlike one of my colleagues who regularly beats his students in order to get their “respect” and attention (or in my opinion, utter fear… more on this horrible reality in another post), my general teaching philosophy revolves around lovingness, mutual respect, honor, high expectations, and encouragement. Really, I just try to be my best me! As Jim Henson, the creator of The Muppets wrote, kids “don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”

So who am I in the classroom? Well, I’ll tell you who I try to be.

I try to be a teacher that laughs a lot, a teacher who teases and cajoles her students into better behavior. I sit with my students at their desks and answer questions. I try to be a teacher that walks every aisle throughout the entire class period to show my interest in their work and push students to stay engaged. I try to be a teacher who asks her students to become artists and authors because art helps you visualize language, and language can create art. I try to get students to relate to the language they’re learning, to see the relationships between words, between cause and effect, between English and Portuguese. I try to encourage camaraderie and teamwork. Instead of laughing at the kid that gets an answer wrong when they’re the only one to have courage enough to raise their hand, I now expect students to be encouraging instead of cruel afterwards.

And, more than anything I try to encourage academic honesty and discipline. Studying for another class? I will confiscate your notebook for the period without guilt. Writing a kabula or cheat sheet? I’ll take those too, throw them in the trash, and probably have you lead the class’ lesson with me, or if I’m in a bad mood, kick you out the door. Students know I mean business too. Last month, when I caught a student writing a kabula, before I could snatch it, she instantly rolled the paper into a ball, popped it into her mouth, and swallowed it. Despite being the funniest thing I’d seen in months and using it as an opportunity to ask her “Porque voce gosta de comer papel??” (why do you like to eat paper??), it also reminded me that I’m teaching in a country where kids’ first introduction to corruption begins at the primary school level and continues on up through the ranks of the national government.  Cheating isn’t seen as bad – it’s seen as the norm – it’s what you have to do to succeed here. Why be honest when everyone else who’s cheating could beat you out of a job or a chance to go to university because they've bribed somebody or faked their way through? It’s a huge reality here. Yet the irony of course is that if students spent as much time studying and actually learning the material as they did writing their cheat sheets or copying their neighbor, they wouldn't need to cheat at all! This reality is something that constantly has me borderline beating my head against the concrete classroom wall. Especially when even some of my best students, students that don’t need to cheat to do well, continue to think that cheating will benefit them!

So, I’ve begun wondering about how I can evaluate and measure my effectiveness as a teacher. Is basing my worth as a teacher solely on the test scores of my students really a fair option? Especially when students probably aren’t even performing to the true abilities. In this realm, the results of the Provincial exam (which, granted had an overwhelming number of flaws) delivered a crushing defeat. The fact that even with a “passing” bar of 50%, nearly half of my students failed, even when most of my students did fairly well on the test that I wrote/gave them. This reality made me step back and reevaluate my goals and my approach to teaching English here.

Despite my students’ poor test taking abilities however, I don’t feel like a bad teacher. Is it better that students fake their way through an exam they don’t understand and “pass”? Or, is it better that they walk away from English class, maybe failing my class, but having learned important knowledge and skills that they can apply to other areas of their lives? Suddenly, my priorities shifted from emphasizing English as a huge grammar lesson, to approaching English as a means of fostering critical thinking skills and knowledge.

And it seems to be working.

As a teacher, I feel I need to find what makes my students tick. What captures their interest? Their imaginations? How can I package English in a way that seems more accessible and more interesting? I feel like perhaps the best feedback - feedback that tells me I’ve hit student engagement right on - is when my students not only listen attentively and participate in class discussion, but also simultaneously forget to ask the inane questions rooted in boredom, such as “Teacher, should I copy this down?” or "Teacher, I don't have a pen. Do I need one?" (It takes all my will-power to not scream sometimes, WELL DUHHHHH!!! lol) And so, a good teaching day that makes me feel on top of the world is when I have captured the elusive attention of high wired, high energy 13/14/15year olds who would rather be anywhere else than crammed three to a desk with a teacher speaking to them in Portu-glish.

So, in any case, while I spent nearly the whole first trimester trying to prove to my students why they should want to learn English, this second trimester I've decided to show them why they should learn English. The first few weeks I've focused solely on health and nutrition, and have made it a point to teach my students real life skills and knowledge that they need to be safe and healthy here in Mozambique. For one, it makes for a more interesting class conversation, AND when students are having fun or are interested in the topic they forget that they’re learning English grammar. Lessons have covered the food pyramid, the food groups, types of nutrients and the importance of a balanced diet. We've also studied the differences between infectious and non-infectious diseases and identified the causes of such types of diseases. Correspondingly, we've also covered basic prevention practices for four primary diseases in the area – malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, and malnutrition.

Learning about the food pyramid and nutrition! Loved teaching this lesson :)

Okay. Maybe my students still confuse when they should use the present simple and present continuous tense of the verb “to be.” SO. WHAT.

Instead, my students now understand and can share some crucial information about good health practices and how they can protect themselves and their families from some horrible diseases. At one point last week I had 60 eighth graders at a time reciting conditional phrases such as, “IF I use a condom, THEN I can prevent HIV” and that “IF I use a mosquito net, I can prevent malaria.”

I call that a teaching WIN thank you very much, grades be damned :)

SECONDARY PROJECTS

While teaching is my official Peace Corps “assignment,” it’s common for PCVs to also pursue other “secondary” projects. This is an opportunity for volunteers to start sports teams, girls’ empowerment groups, music groups, start tutoring programs… essentially, anything that you perceive as a community need is fair game. However, the key point to this secondary project model is to have a local community member or “counterpart” be your co-facilitator for whatever project you decide to pursue. It’s meant as a way for volunteers to not only connect more deeply with their host-communities, but also make whatever sort of development work PCVs pursue sustainable after they leave.

As for me, my commitment to secondary projects has snowballed in the last two weeks. As of now, I’m coaching a girls’ basketball team, helping organize and run our school science fair, and trying to get a Reading/Tutoring program started between the primary and secondary schools. I applied for a grant through USAID to recieve 100-150 books for children. While it's not much, it's certainly a good place to start and has motivated me to start looking ahead to building a library or Community Learning Center here in Mapinhane. What better way to foster empowerment than through a "culture of literacy"?

This week I also started teaching sixth grade English at the local primary school. While I was a bit nervous to face down another age group of mischievous Mozambican criancas, already I love working with the younger kids. Upon finshing my first full afternoon of teaching, I was escorted out of class to 50 of my students singing, and had freshly picked oranges (a luxury here) shoved into my hands. I'm already looking forward to next week :)

FRIENDS & COMMUNITY

I realize now I've failed to properly introduce you all back home to my new friends and neighbors here. While a more detailed post will come soon, here's some names and faces that make my life here :)

Edilson, the ever-loitering student of mine who wants to marry me. Instead, I ask him to shuck beans or fetch water for me... muah, poor guy!

It has become an endeavor of mine to teach the local criancas how to smile for a picture. Featured here are my favorite amigos, Izidro, Antonio (Tony), Junior, and Matteu. Junior and Matteu get an A+ haha!

Hosting my first dinner partayyyy! Left to right: Cristovao (co-basketball coach), Laurie and Chris (my awesome PCV site mates!)

My colleagues from both Esc. Secundaria 25 de Junho (my school) and the nearby mission. We get together and play soccer against other local villages every weekend. They're pretty dang good too!

So, time to close out for now. Thanks for your patience with this mega-post. I'll try to post more frequently in the future to avoid such story-cramming. :) 

Shine on, y'all!!