My New Signature

Zambezia Science Fair participants with our chique new shirts

For the past few weeks, provincial capitals all over Mozambique have be holding Peace Corps organized science fairs. For the province of Zambezia, myself and my counterpart Joao Ferraz from the Delegacao Provincial de Ciencia e Tecnologia organized the three day event. For most of Saturday, 45 secondary school students and teachers from 10 different districts prepared, presented, and celebrated experiments and innovations in the areas of chemistry, physics, and biology. Each of these students were selected as the best from each of their schools, so the competition was fierce. Their presentations covered all levels of difficulty and types of science, from the implications of Newton's 3rd law to the fermentation of alcohol from stale bread to the construction of an chicken incubator. By the end of the fair Saturday, the judges had a very difficult time selecting the top three projects from 1o ciclo (8-10th grade) and 2o ciclo (11-12th grade), and an even harder time selecting the student from each ciclo who would represent our province at the Feira Nacional de Ciencias in Chimoio. In the end, an 11th grade student from Gurue and a 9th grade student from Alto Molocue, Belchoir, won first place in their respective categories. This means that in 3 short weeks i'll be visiting the city of Chimoio with these 2 students, a teacher from Gurue, and my counterpart Joao. Though I don't want to be cocky, I have high hopes for these two students, and look forward to seeing how they match up with the winners from the other provinces.

Zambezia's science fair winners. Belchior is the little one

But before all of this had happened, the Zambezia fair had to be organized, which came down to one word: money. Each year, Peace Corps Science Fair proposes for the entire operating budget of this national event from PEPFAR (The Presidents Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief), which means that each province's Peace Corps representative is responsible for allocating and distributing the funds. As a result I had an uncomfortably large amount of money sitting in my bank account for the past couple months while I worked out the costs of each item with my counterpart Joao. Since plans stay liquid here for much longer than they should, the full value was still sitting in my account when I went to the Barclays in Quelimane the Friday before the fair for the big withdrawal. Arriving there just as the bank opened at 8a, I learned that they were only doing deposits at that moment, but I could begin waiting in line for the withdrawals which would start "very soon". After waiting there for an hour, I called Joao so that he could find someone to hold my place in line for me while I do other, more important  things. As it turns out, the only other thing for me to do was to go to each of the 4 working ATMs in town and withdraw the daily 5,000 mt ($185) limit for immediate costs. Finally around 11:30 I went back to the Barclay's where I was able to hand in my deposit slip and receive my money. Or so I thought.

Practicing my new signature

For years, I have been using a barely legible, sport-star-autograph inspired scribble as my mark for everything from checks to college admissions documents. Never before has it mattered that it varies from document to document, but before coming to Mozambique I realized that if not even I can read my own signature, there is a problem. So when I was in training and had to open up a bank account, I decided to start fresh with a new, legible, signature. Unfortunately, after not using it for 10 months, I had completely forgotten what I had used. So by 2:30p, half an hour before the bank closed, I had still not withdrawn my money. After various conversation with Barclay's in Maputo, Peace Corps Maputo, Barclay's Quelimane, and the Delegacao Provincial de Ciencia e Tecnologia we finally were able to change the official signature on the account and complete the withdrawal of the money for science fair, which started the next day. Phew...

Hopefully this will never happen again, because immediately after I had withdrawn the money, I spent the next hour signing 70 certificates of participation, 20 honor certificates, and countless other science fair related documents.  Needless to say, I got some good practice.

Day Trip to Nampula

At a certain point you just stop tricking yourself into thinking that you understand what’s going on and what you're trying to do.  I reached that point last week.

Euclides, with some strange money he found
in the pants he bought at the market

On Monday, I found out that one of my best possibilities for money for a student center at the school had been recently underfunded and prohibited from doing any sort of construction projects. Then that night I learnt of a best friend’s personal moral crisis that put in doubt any hope of fidelity or friendship in Mozambique. Tuesday through Wednesday brought the regular exhaustion of 30 tri-foreign-language classes (teaching French in Portuguese with English dictionaries) a week, though my thorough script making has helped to keep me sane. Thursday I finally got the jury invites for this weekend’s Alto Molocue Feira de Ciencias printed, stamped, signed, and delivered; something I had started last week. Then that afternoon, I got part way through a hastily planned Frentugeslish lesson when I realized that I did not even slightly understand what I was trying to teach. This caused me to hastily end the class and retreat home to skip my next few classes while I cooked dinner (baked beans and rice). I recovered bringing my 3 night classes up to speed on material we were behind on, but not without struggling to make weekend plans with my Brigadeiro de Escuteiros (Scout Leader) due to undependable cell phone networks.

Night classes. Notice the number of students

All of this combined left me starting my day trip to Nampula with a mixture of stress, disappointment, frustration, mistrust, and loss of direction. Though it started out as an extremely slow and annoying trip (5 hours to cover 125 miles), I ended up enjoying the delay. Having slowly worked my way through Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari over the past few months, I have become more and more engrossed with his no time pressure overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town. Beyond his vivid descriptions of central Africa, and interesting cultural anecdotes, he speaks a lot about his time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi.  This makes his pragmatically truthful comments on modern Africa, and development work in particular, really resonate. It just put into words the convoluted feelings I have been working through. Though the following burger, air conditioning, care package raid, and having my prayers to the boleia gods answered (an express to molocue Toyota hilux pickup truck with air conditioning driven by someone safe and friendly) have relaxed me, it was the following passage that really calmed me:

“That escarpment road is a hundred years old. It has been beautiful, but did you see all the landslides?” she said. “In the past they cleared the landslides manually -  it took a lot of people, but labor is cheap. And doing it by hand kept the storm drains open. For the past few years they’ve been using donor bulldozers to clear the rock slides. They bulldoze them to the side, blocking the drains. So when the rain comes it washes the road away and creates a torrent, and another landslide.”

So the solution of donor bulldozers had made the problem worse and put many manual laborers out of work.

 “The government had been paying five men to maintain the road. Then they stopped paying them. The road has been deteriorating ever since.

“They need twenty-four teachers to run (the school). There are only fourteen at the school. The English chap is leaving, so in a month they will have only thirteen teachers for about six hundred students. Teachers’ salaries are so low, you see

I said, “I’m wondering why a foreign teacher should go to Livingstonia to teach if Malawians are not willing to make the sacrifice.

With the sweetest smile Uma dismissed the question as much too logical.

Its not that I now know what I’m doing here or how to get it done, but I feels better to know that someone else was equally as lost.

Most recent match of Coco vs Chicken. Ended in stalemate