The Second Picture Post - Illustrations of the Tea Field

I live next to The Great Valley (Land Before Time).  Fun fact: order to take this picture, I had to stand in the neighborhood trash pile in the middle of a cornfield.

Our house!

Sunrise over The Great Valley (taken by Amanda)

On the way to the Tea Field (taken by Amanda)

Sunset over The Great Valley (taken by Amanda)

The First Picture Post - Training

The training class as we swore-in to be official volunteers - Moz 19!

Some of the kids (especially the one with the pink sunglasses) who made me sad to leave training and my host family.

Peace Corps staff and volunteers with about half of the training class's boxes to move to our permanent homes. Take note of random black cord we are holding.  Mozambicans grab random objects to hold for pictures 90% of the time.

The mountains are Swaziland!

Two of my favorites of the 68 wonderful people with whom I started  PC Mozambique.  Our training class had dresses/shirts/vests/ties made out of the same material, hence our matching outfits. (see first picture as well)

My first Mozambican students - in practice school, training.  (taken by the always talented Rafael Hernandez)

On Life Logistics

The requested: How I spend my days.  Since coming to Mozambique, I would divide my time into 4 parts: The first 4 days in the chic Cardoso Hotel, PC training with my host family, being “at site” before school preparation really started, and being at site when there is actually work to do.

Hotel Cardoso: A hotel that is entirely too fancy to host 68 dirty, jet-lagged Peace Corps volunteers, yet hosted us anyway.  We lived in a magical land of never ending buffets and never ending conference sessions.

“Pre-Service Training:” A 10-week period that often felt like a glorified study abroad, where I spent mornings and afternoons Monday-Friday learning Portuguese and security/health/education tidbits, weekends learning how to do things without machines (laundry being the prime example), playing with my host siblings (ages 17, 13, 12, 11, 8) and playing with other volunteers. 

The tea field before the work:  As soon as we moved in, we commenced helping the school finish up final grades.  That work quickly ended and our new professor friends went back to their “zonas” to visit family for the holidays.  We spent a lot of time hitchhiking into our nearest city to grocery shop, visiting the Sisters who live here, and walking up and down the road.  Blog post to come about one or two of my more eventful walks up the road.

The tea field during the school year!: Classes “started” last week, but really started this week.  By “started,” I mean on the schedule only – most of the teachers did not show up, and anywhere from 0 to 10 students were in a class.  It was a nice way to ease into teaching, but today I showed up to 6 full classrooms of about 40 students each.  Numbers within the classes will change because students are still registering.  I teach both mornings and afternoons – so I wake up, go to school, come home for lunch, relaxation, and lesson planning, then go back to teach a full afternoon of ninth graders.  In between classes and during my breaks I’ve been able to meet and hang out with other teachers, who seem like a good group of people.  I also wear this really cool white thing that looks like a short-sleeved lab coat. 

The Tea Field

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The grand homecoming meal I had planned for myself has not yet become a reality. This is due to both availability and prices of my dream items.  Chocolate is both relatively expensive and often completely melted in stores, and cheese has been definitively put on my “special occasions” grocery list (also known as the “what we will buy when other volunteers come to visit so we can split really expensive things many different ways” list).  In my town specifically, we can buy light bulbs, eggs, pasta, and random African plants – which perpetuates the aforementioned alimentation issue.  There is a “city” about 15 km away which has more veggie options and milk!  My roommate Amanda and I have been managing a relatively balanced diet given the circumstances and thus, I am happy to report, I have been advancing in the alimentation challenge.

The tea field itself is a one road town that has dorms for the male and female students who come from far away to study at the school.  The school is a mission run by an awesome nun – she runs a tight ship for everyone and so rumor has it that our school is less plagued by some of the common problems here in Mozambique – professors sleeping with students, accepting bribes for grades, or just changing the grades of students because they want to.  We live in the professor’s neighborhood so we have been able to meet our coworkers/neighbors as we have moved in.  They have all been very nice, although a few particularly stand out as Mozambican rock stars:

1.     Herminio, gym teacher and all around school handyman who walked with us to buy 30 eggs for our house one day and has since started showing up on our porch just to hang out. 

2.     Cristina, the wife of a professor who has brought us food, helped us light our charcoal stove, and generally been a fountain of Mozambican/tea field knowledge

3.     Daniel, a student who helps keep our house standing and helps us arrive at the cutting edge of Mozambican youth culture by teaching us how to say “Mohawk” (the hair style) in Portuguese. 

4.     Sancho, math teacher and owner of the chickens from which we get our eggs.  He has also taken it upon himself to be our Mozambican social coordinator, which means we have already seen his band play in the city.

For Christmas, Amanda and I found a wonderful group of expats from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Brazil, and Portugal and feasted with them - we had absolutely fabulous meat and drinks and so Christmas 2012 is deemed a great success.  So far we’re settling in, and starting school matriculation this week, which is looking like it will usher in actual work and the start of the school year.  Happy 2013!