More Thieving Varmints!

We went to Blantyre this weekend for some general shopping goodness with our friend, and we had a really good time. We found lots of pretty sweet stuff that we really can't find in Mozambique, like cereal and coconut marshmallows. We ended up staying in a hostel in a dorm-style room for the night, as it only costs about $5 American. When you only make between $250 and $300 American a month, hostels just make the best financial sense.

When it got dark, we stayed in the hostel's bar area and played a bit of pool. We had locked our stuff in the lockers in our room because when I say "dorm-style" room, what I mean is that the door doesn't lock, and there are 3 bunk beds in the room, so we could have been sharing the room with up to three random strangers. We were gone for 45 minutes to an hour, but when we got back to the room, our friend's locker had clearly been broken into, but the thief had tried to put the locker hinge back together to make it look like nothing had happened. Our friend had about $250 worth of money stolen from his bag, which is a lot over here. It is what we make per month as volunteers, so it's kind of a big deal to be out that much money.

We also noticed that some stuff in the room had moved (a towel moved from a hanger to one of the beds, a toothbrush that was on one of the beds was now gone, etc.), so our first thought was, "Oh, it must have been the guy staying in the room with us, since we weren't gone for long and he was clearly in the room when we weren't here."

We reported it to the owner of the hostel, who immediately jumped to the conclusion of, "Yes, it was definitely him. He stayed here before when there was another theft." He advised us to report it to the police. It is interesting to note that in the same bag that the money was stolen from, our friend also had a laptop, but that was strangely left in the bag. In addition, our stuff (mine and Lisa's) was untouched, despite the fact that Lisa accidentally left her camera on the bed, and not in the locker. It was strange that the money was all gone, but the expensive electronics were still safe. However, since the room was clearly not a very secure place, I agreed to stay in the room while Lisa and our friend went to the police station to file a report so that we wouldn't lose more of our stuff. I waited in the room for about an hour, maybe a little more, before they came back with the detective to see what they would make of it. In that time, I never left the room. When the detective left, he told us they couldn't really do anything, but maybe we could get the guy if he came back to sleep. The owner of the hostel wanted to set up some kind of sting operation wherein Lisa, our friend, and I would try to sleep in the room and wait for a man that may have robbed us so we could sneak out and call the police when he went to sleep. We weren't really comfortable with that, so we asked to switch rooms, which they did agree to. We moved all of our stuff to the next dorm-style room down the hall. Our friend had the idea that we should go make pillow people in the beds that we had in our original room, so if the thief came back, he wouldn't suspect that something was amiss when we weren't there. After we had finished, we were getting ready to go to bed in the other room when Lisa decided she wanted to get some pictures of the room so she could blog about the experience, so she went down the hall to get some pictures while our friend and I were getting changed into pajamas.

Suddenly, I hear Lisa scream "AAAAAAAH! THERE'S A MAN! A MAN UNDER THE BED! OHMYGOD OHMYGOD! HE'S IN HERE!"

I thought that the thief had grabbed Lisa, so I ran down the hall to stop that nonsense. I passed Lisa in the hall, so I knew she was okay, but there was clearly someone in the room, who was probably the thief. I continued to the doorway, where a Malawian man who was very clearly trying to escape confronted me. When I got in his way, he shoved me into the door frame, but I was considerably larger than he was, so I grabbed him and shoved him into a bunk bed, grabbed the door, shut it, and held him in there as he tried to pull the door open. There was only one door going in this room, so it was his only escape. I held him in there for a few minutes until the police came and arrested him.

What had happened was that Lisa was taking a picture of the broken latch on the locker for the blog, which was right by one of the bunk beds, when she heard breathing. She looked under the bed, saw some legs, but was a little confused, so she lifted the mattress and saw this man staring right at her. It was then apparent that since we discovered the theft an hour and a half to two hours before, I had been in the room watching our stuff. The thief had come into the room, broken into the locker, stole the money, and then heard us coming, so he tried to make it look like there wasn't a robbery and scooted under the bed to wait for an opportunity to escape.

However, I never left the room, so he was stuck. Then Lisa got close enough to his hiding spot to hear his breathing.

Needless to say, none of us slept well that night. Sadly, the police took the money that was stolen as "evidence", so our friend still lost his month's pay.

That was enough excitement for us for a while. 

Thieving Varmint

We have finally passed our 5-month mark in Mozambique. Some days, it seems like the longest 5 months in my life, and other days I can’t believe how fast it’s gone.  Lisa and I agree that we are much happier when we have so much to do that we don’t notice time passing. This past week, we were both at one of the upper classrooms of our school facilitating a REDES (an extracurricular group for girls) meeting. As usual, we were missing most of the girls because everyone seems to run about an hour late here. A small crowd of 9^th grade boys had gathered in our classroom (white people are oh-so-interesting to stare at), so I decided to try and share a visual riddle with them:

This riddle has only two rules:

1) Connect all 9 points using only 4 straight lines.

2) Your writing implement cannot leave the surface of the paper once you begin drawing your first line.

This has been my go-to riddle when I have some chalk and a bunch of students staring at me. I like it because it is easy to explain, and it occupies the students for at least 15 minutes as they try to come up with the solution. So all I need to do is draw 9 dots on the chalkboard, explain the rules, and then step back to watch them attempt to solve the puzzle over and over again. It inevitably leads to a herd of teenagers huddled around the chalkboard, staring and whispering to themselves as they puzzle it out. While they were working on that, Lisa and I talked to the one girl who was there on time for the REDES meeting. We talked about what projects we were going to do and why she wanted to be the president of the group. We walked around outside the classroom, hoping that the presence of azungu (white people) would draw in the other girls to the meeting. 

After about 20 minutes of wasting time, I tried to check the time on my phone to see if I needed to leave to give a class. To my dismay, I couldn’t find my phone, even though I was sure that I had brought it with me to the meeting. After searching around for about 5 minutes, I began to think that I may have been robbed. I shared this with Lisa and some of the other students. I held up Lisa’s phone (which is identical to mine) and asked if anyone had seen another phone of the same type. Nobody had, and I was a little upset with the thought that someone had stolen it. I tried calling it repeatedly from Lisa’s phone, but whoever had my phone was declining my calls. I became more and more sure that someone had taken it. Discouraged, I walked down to the lower set of classrooms and told our Pedagogical Director (our immediate superior at our school) that I think I was robbed of my phone. He seemed rather upset by this news, and he told me that he would see what he could do. I had to leave and go teach, but my mood was brought down a little.

The next morning, I went to the school early to go talk to the students before school started to ask for their help in finding my phone. When I got to the school, our Pedagogical Director (his name is Guilherme) asked me to sit down with him to talk. He said that he was troubled by the news that I had been robbed, so after I told him that, he gathered up the other teachers and started a collection to buy me a new phone. At this point, I felt compelled to stop him and thank him.

“That’s really nice, you didn’t have to do that. I can buy another phone,” I said.

“Wait, let me finish,” Guilherme continued, “Professors Leme and Peter were out looking for you phone last night. They came across a student on the street that said he thought he saw the phone in the hand of another student. They went to the house of the suspected student and confronted him in front of his family. After questioning him, he admitted to taking the phone. He gave it back.”

At this point, Guilherme unlocked his desk drawer and pulled out my phone. I was overjoyed.

“Thank you so much! I can’t believe you found it!” I exclaimed.

“There is one thing, though,” he said, “The thief thought we would be able to find his location if he left your SIM card in the phone, so he took it out of the phone and threw it into the river. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay, SIM cards are cheap. I can replace it.”

“I want you to know that this was the chefe de turma of one of the 9^th grade classes. We are taking his crime very seriously. He has been expelled, and we showed him to everyone in 9^th and 10^th grade, and let them know that he is a thief and he cannot be trusted. We don’t want anyone thinking that they can steal from any of the teachers,” he finished.

So, the end result of this story is that I got my phone back, but I don’t have a phone number to call with. That will be easily remedied. I can buy a new SIM for the equivalent of 50 cents American. Plus, I learned that my teaching colleagues are more than willing to help me if I have any kind of problem.  I’d say that’s a win.

Professor Marcos

This past weekend, we learned some very sad news. One of our favorite professors here in Zobue passed away early Sunday morning. He was a great man. He was the first professor to come greet us when we arrived in Zobue. He always had a huge smile, and  he was extremely friendly towards everyone. He has also been with the Secondary school for over 15 years. He is a big part of our town, and I am sure we will see many, many people mourning him at his burial today.  I am sad that we didn’t get to know him better. I know the other volunteers who served in Zobue liked him very much.

Mozambican Math Classes

It’s been about a month since school started, and I feel like I am finally getting into the swing of things. When we first got to our new home, we didn’t know anyone, we didn’t have a job to do, and we had a month before school started. That didn’t leave much to do. Most of our time was spent doing all the housework we could find to do. I don’t know if the floors could have been much cleaner, and our laundry was never neglected. We did have a Christmas celebration, which got us traveling, and then our trip to Maputo for the memorial service, but I think the start of the school year really anchored us in our community.

When school started, my classes were hectic. I was used to teaching the way I did at Penn State, which was presenting a huge amount of information during a 50-minute period, and then having them practice said information during a 50-minute lab period. I also didn’t know what level the students were at in their mathematical education. They were in 8^th grade, and in primary school (which goes until grade 7), they were supposed to have learned all about addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I figured that spending a week reviewing these basic functions would be enough for the majority of my students, and I could help the other students if they were motivated to come to me for help. I quickly learned that this method would not work. I didn’t realize how some students get passed through primary school with almost no knowledge because their parents know somebody in the school system. One day, I was going over addition, and I had written a basic equation on the board. What is 4 + 2? I asked a girl what the answer was, and she stood up to answer. She looked like a deer in headlights. It was clear that she didn’t know the answer and just wanted me to leave her alone. However, I’m here to teach math, not let students sit in a classroom while I talk for 45 minutes, so I decided to try to work through it with her.

I pointed to the 4 and said, “What number is this?”

At this point, her face lit up. She knew this one, and if she answered it, then maybe, just maybe, I’d leave her alone and she could sit down and ride out the rest of the lesson in relative obscurity.

“Two!” she proudly exclaimed.

At this point, I just shook my head and said, “No, that’s the number four. You can sit down.”

I just couldn’t believe that this girl had gone through grade 7 without knowing what the number four looked like. Perhaps she did know it, but since Portuguese is not her primary language either, she got it wrong. Maybe she was just so nervous to have everyone looking at her that she choked and said the wrong answer. However, looking at the scores from the first test that I gave would suggest otherwise.

I have since changed my teaching methods rather drastically. For the first two weeks of class, I basically wrote a script for the 45-minute sessions that I would have with my classes. I figured that I would present the information, give a few examples, and send them on their way with some homework. My lesson plans were 4 to 5 pages long, and included what I was going to say word-for-word. I gave my tests in the third week of school, and when I graded the test, I found that my very best class of students had an average of about a 57%. Granted, a passing grade here is a 50%, so many of the students were quite pleased with their grades. However, I learned that some kids still didn’t know how to answer 1 + 2. This was one of my first questions on the test, and still about 25% of them got it wrong.

Since then, I have restricted myself to only writing lesson plans that are one page long. I have about 20 minutes of practice time per lecture in which the students work on problems alone or in small groups, with me walking around to give them help when they get stuck. When students get stuck here, they just stop working and sit quietly, so I actually have to walk around and prod them into the right answers. I think this method is working better. Last week, I gave a review assignment, which I let them work together on. I made the assignment a little bit difficult, since they were allowed to talk with each other, and they had 45 minutes to complete 18 problems. While most of them didn’t do extremely well, I was able to see where the majority of the class was getting stuck, so I can go back and review.

I should also mention that while I have been moving very slowly through the material in the past two weeks, I am still about two weeks ahead of the other math classes because I was actually here to give lessons at the school for the first two weeks. Many of the other teachers did not arrive until at least two weeks after the official start of the school year. I asked a neighbor, who is in eighth grade, but not in my math class, what he was learning in math. His reply was, “Umm… I don’t really know. Math is hard.”

While it can seem like most of my students don’t know anything at all when it comes to math, some of them have really impressed me. Given the education that they receive in primary school, some students were totally “getting it” when I was going through 4- and 5-page lesson plans. I’m beginning to know the good students by name, which is great because I can call on them to bail the class out of a lull. Some of them should definitely become math teachers here (that’s pretty much the only math-related job they have in Mozambique, except in some of the bigger cities). I asked one of my students last week what 57 x 3 is. After about 5 seconds of thought, he correctly shouted, “171!” after which he turned to the rest of the class and said “Eu sou matematica!”

That’s right, my friend, you are mathematics.

Christmas

Lisa and I have just returned from our first trip outside of our home in Zobue since we arrived. We left our humble abode at about 7 in the morning on December 22^nd, heading to Catandica, which is where two other volunteers (Mary Zylich and Joanna Farley) live. The trip was fun, but definitely different from the sort of travel that we had become accustomed to in the states. For starters, we don't have a vehicle of our own, so we need to hitch a ride on either a private vehicle or a chapa, which is the cramped-smelly-uncomfortable approximation of public transportation. We decided that we could try to save some money and perhaps ride in a vehicle with seat belts, so we headed to the border with Malawi in order to see if we could catch some early-morning traveling tourists with tons of room in their car. After about an hour of waiting, we had nothing to show for it but a pleasant conversation with a South African woman, who explained that they didn't have enough seats for her family, much less two sweaty Americans with hiking backpacks that easily outweighed several neighborhood children. We admitted defeat and tried to get on the closest chapa and head into Tete City, about two hours away. Unfortunately, our driver thought that the best way to pack the chapa full of people was to circle Zobue, honking and attempting to run down women and children. He seemed surprised when, after half an hour of harassing pedestrians, we decided to get off and look for another ride. In fact, he was so determined to not let us off (we were, after all, two of the precious few people on his chapa), that he refused to stop and let us off until a local man informed him that holding two Americans hostage in a vehicle is not a good way to welcome them to Mozambique. So we were back on the road, two hours after we first got to it, still looking for a ride to a city that is only two hours away. We were still looking at a 5-6 hour ride to Catandica after we got to Tete. Needless to say, we were a little annoyed. So when a local drunk man walked up to us on the street and started making it clear that he was out of his mind, Lisa assertively told him that he needed to get lost. The conversation went a little like this:

Mayor of Crazyville (in English): Zimbabwe, FRELIMO, dollars, Swahili, RENAMO, Obama?

Me and Lisa (also in English): Um... what?

MC: Two smokes? No smoking. Obama, Tanzania.

Us: You aren't making any sense. (Then, in Portuguese) How are you?

MC (still in English): No, no. FRELIMO. (Bends down and pats my calfs). No smoking.

Us (reverting back to English in confusion): Sorry, dude. You are not making any sense.

MC (stepping to within six inches of me and shaping his fingers to look like a gun): Yeah, yeah... Obama. (placing his finger-gun on my chest and pushing me)

Lisa (in Portuguese, because whatever this man speaks, it clearly isn't English): You need to leave.

After that, this dude just sort of wanders off, still looking at us and making weird sounds. For some semblance of clarity, FRELIMO and RENAMO are the two leading political parties here in Mozambique. It all makes sense now, right?

Anyway, less than five minutes later, we managed to flag down a chapa going to Tete, which stopped every 5 minutes to pick up someone new. We finally arrived in Tete around 11:30, and met up with another volunteer named Amanda Moore. She has been in Mozambique for a year already, so she knew better than we did what we should do in order to get down to our final destination. She was heading down towards Chimoio, which is only 2 hours or so south of Catandica. We started walking towards the road that heads out of Tete, trying to hitch a ride the whole way. Finally, at about 1pm, a trucker named Allen tells us that he is heading to Chimoio, and he would be happy to drop us off there for 200 Meticais (about 7 or 8 US Dollars) per person. Since a chapa would be about 350Mt, and would undoubtedly be less comfortable than this trucker's bed (the only location open for sitting), we happily agreed, excited to arrive at our final destination. Allen told us that it should only take about 3.5 hours to Catandica, but he needed to get a paper stamped to show to the traffic police to let them know that he was delivering legal goods in his truck. How long could it take, right? Finally, at 2:50 pm (that's almost another 2 hours of waiting, for those keeping score at home), Allen was able to get his paper stamped. Apparently, the stamper went to lunch, which is a serious affair in Mozambique. The ride was nice, as we only had to share the twin-sized trucker bed with four Mozambicans and Amanda. We arrived in Catandica at about 6:30, and we were in Joanna and Mary's house at 7, thus bringing a twelve hour day of travel to a close. Mind you, we only we only actually traveled for about 6 hours, with the rest being spent trying to get a ride or waiting for a Mozambican to finish his lunch. Can't complain, though. Lisa and I did travel about 265 miles (425 kilometers) for about $10 each. Definitely cheaper than Greyhound, but definitely took a whole lot longer.

We spent the next 6 nights and 5 days with our fellow volunteers playing games, making food, going for walks, and just generally hanging out. It was good for us to relax with peers and speak English for a while, especially after the accident. We were planning on returning to our house on December 27^th, but we learned that the Peace Corps was going to hold a memorial service for the girls who passed away. Therefore, we left Catandica for Chimoio on the 27^th, rather than our house. We spent the next two days remembering Lena and Alden for the great people they were.

This morning, December 30^th, we got up at 3:45 am to catch the 5 am bus from Chimoio to Tete City. We made it all the way to Tete by about 10 am, which is pretty darn fast travel for Mozambique. We stopped for some falafel for lunch, then we hopped a chapa back to Zobue. We were back in our house by 2:30 pm. It feels so good to be home.