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