One morning about a month ago, I was sitting in my room correcting papers and I heard someone run into the building and knock on the door of the health-room where Sr. Claudina, a new sister in Inharrime and a nurse-practitioner, was working. It was a student from the technical school where I teach, “Sister?,” he called, “Director Maria Graça asked me to call you to come quick to the school – a student just fainted and he’s not responding.” I heard this exchange, but didn’t think too much of it – students often get overheated when they’re working with the big machines in the workshops.

When sister returned for lunch, I asked out of curiosity, “Who was the student that was sick? What do you think was wrong with him?” She replied to me, “They said his name was Dércio, it looks like a pretty bad case of cerebral malaria.” At this I started – could it be Dércio, my student that had participated in the Science Fair? No, I imagined, Dércio had stopped me that morning on my way out of class and asked me to come back in the afternoon and help him with a project. I had just talked to him, and he was excited, animated, not sick at all.

I quickly called Director Maria Graça who had also gone with us to Science Fair and knew Dércio well – yes, it’s him she said. He had fainted during computer class and became completely unresponsive. After Sr. Claudina arrived, they had rushed him to the hospital in the school car and he’d been hooked up to a Quinine IV. Malaria is a cyclical disease – people often have terrible headaches and fevers for a few hours, and then begin to feel better, only to feel worse again later. If our guess was correct – Dércio likely had been feeling these cyclical symptoms for days, but had put off going to the hospital to finish his big final project that was due the next day. Now, the malaria had moved from his blood to his brain.

Later in the afternoon, Maria Graça and I went to visit Dércio at the hospital: He’s already 19 and lives alone in a small house in Inharrime during the school year, so he didn’t have any family in town. When we walked into the crowed triage room where he was being kept, I was immediately taken aback – he lay covered in sweat and convulsing on the white bed. I had never seen someone in the midst of a convulsion – how horrible! His body moving in fits up and down – as if he couldn’t get his breath, but moving the whole body.

Later in the day, we heard from a professor who lived near the hospital, and stayed with Dércio until his father arrived, that he had woken up and even was able to eat a bit. But he continued with daily convulsions for more than 2 weeks – and the only treatment is to just keep giving the IV drip of Quinine and hope he got better. The nurse attending him told us she’d had the same disease recently – she went through 44 IV bags of the drug before she finally improved.

After more than 2 weeks of continual convulsions and with the Quinine not seeming to help much, Dércio’s father made a big decision: He told the nurses that he was going to take Dércio out of the hospital and take him out into the country to receive Traditional Medicine treatment.

When I got news of this at school, I wanted to cry. I’m a strong believer in modern medicine to the point that I plan to become a medical doctor beginning next year. The thought of taking one of my favorite students out into the bush to breathe in herbal steam treatments and get rubbed with plant juice was horrifying to me. I thought it the equivalent to letting him die.

I went to the school director and asked why we couldn’t have taken Dércio to Maputo in the school car. He could get better treatment there, but his family didn’t have the money for transport! We can’t do that, my director told me, because then there would be some student every week who would expect us to do that.

What dangerous logic that is to me. I can’t save this person because then everyone will want to be saved. That aside, it’s not every week that a student is close to death from cerebral malaria. If it had been up to me, I would have acted differently. But there was nothing I could do – and, he was already in the bush and his family refused to tell the school how to contact him.

I was saddened, and again shocked to learn that, just days before Dércio had been taken for traditional treatment, the wife of one of the teachers at the technical school, also ill with cerebral malaria, had also been taken by her family to receive traditional treatment. After a week, she passed away, leaving her husband and a small young daughter. The teacher has been wearing black every day since her funeral, and every time I see him I can’t help but think how insignificant my own daily troubles are, and, until today, I always also couldn’t help but imagine the worst for Dércio, too.

And now – a miracle. Today, more than a month after he collapsed during computer class, Dércio came back to school. As I stood in the corridor discussing some grammar questions with an English teacher, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and to my joy (and disbelief!) there stood Dércio with a sheepish grin. “I’m back!” he said and held out his arms for a hug.

“Dércio is resurrected from the dead!” said the other teacher with a laugh and gave him a hug too. I laughed, but the joke was a bit too close to home for my liking. I just kept patting him on the shoulder and telling him how happy I was he had come back. He told us that after a few days of traditional treatment, his family had decided that it was not working and so scraped together the money to get him to Maputo. There, he’d been put in a private, intensive-care unit room in the Central Hospital and finally, after many more days of treatment, got better.

He thanked us for all the support we had given him, “I don’t remember anything after I fainted at school,” he said, “but I heard you came every day and even brought me milk.” I told him what a scare he had given me. As all the teachers and students passed by, each stopped in shock and shook his hand, gave hugs, welcomed him back. And the common theme to all – “Graças a Deus” – thanks be to God.

Theatre Group

On Thursday afternoon, a few of my students – Santos, Elton, Saúl and Emídio – came up to me as they were leaving school, “Teacher Mary, you’re coming with us to our performance tomorrow right?” The boys from my theatre group had been asked to present a short play at a local grade school the next afternoon. They wanted me to come, but I had a lot to do with end-of –the-year grades coming up...they looked so hopeful that I would come, though, that I couldn’t say no.

The next day at 11 am on the dot, the “transport” the boys had hired arrived to pick us up: An open back pick-up truck to take the 11 boys, 1 girl and I to this primary school which was, I was told, “sort of out in the bush.” We all piled in, big theatre curtain and wooden drum in tow. I was a bit leery about the ride in the hot sun and then through the dusty, dirt back roads, but as we drove along, Fernando, one of the boys, started pounding out rhythmic traditional beats on the drum and soon all of them were singing at the top of their lungs as we rumbled along. I looked up at the group of them – 12 skinny kids, all still in shirt-and-tie school uniforms, laughing and singing and dancing around – and I couldn’t help but smile.

My “grupo de teatro” or high school theatre group, is one of the best things I’ve been a part of in Mozambique. What started out as a hodge-podge group of teenagers, thrown together during mandatory school-activity time last year, blossomed over the course of a year into a tight knit group with a knack for improv-acting.

Last October, I led the theatre group during school-activity month and the kids performed a play about school-corruption and the importance of education during the end-of-school festival. They had such a great time with it, that when they all returned to school in January, a couple of the boys came to me and asked to start an official group for the school. (While the group has had 2 or 3 girls participate during the year, it is – for a multitude of reasons – an almost all-boy group, and you will notice that I continually refer to the group as “the boys.”)

We began meeting on Tuesday afternoons, and the kids picked the club president – a tall, lanky kid named Elton, who turned out to be Mr. Organized and kept the group going all year long. I talked to some Peace Corps friends and was able to get our group to be part of a project called JOMA – Jovens para Mudança e Acção (Youth for Change and Action) – that provides funds, organizational materials and the opportunity to attend a training conference, for high school groups focused on Theatre, Journalism, Art or Photography.

In March, Elton, Luís – another boy from the group, Professor Tomás – a music and Portuguese teacher from my school who helps me lead the group – and I all were able to attend the week-long JOMA conference. We joined students and teachers from other Mozambican secondary schools for training sessions on theatre skills with a professional actor, and then the students and teachers split up for other sessions. The boys received leadership training and also had sessions about gender roles and other important issues, while the teachers worked on facilitation skills and the role of teachers in society.

After the conference, Elton and Luís almost entirely took over the leadership of group and led most meetings, teaching their peers the skills that they had learned at the conference. I often facilitated small lessons to start the meetings and taught them simple theatre techniques through games that I remembered from high school theatre or using the theatre manuals JOMA provided us.

The group presented several times in our community: Twice at school functions – once with a play about the importance of encouraging youth to stay in school and another time with the story of Mary, Mother of God, for the May 24^th Feast Day of Mary celebration.

A few weeks ago, I took them to the “Act Against AIDS” theatre competition in the city of Maxixe where they had to present a 10 minute play showing an idea for a piece of legislation the government could propose to help stop the spread of AIDS in Mozambique. Their idea: a sweeping legislation plan to create jobs for the abundant number of female prostitutes on the streets of cities and at the same time create nursing homes for advanced-stage AIDS patients to help them live more comfortably. Their play got 4^th place out of the 20 schools from across Southern Mozambique that participated.

After that, they started preparing a show to participate in a JOMA “Experience Exchange” in which groups can get together to show each other their work, give and accept critiques, and get to know students from another district. We decided to get together with a school from Chogoene, another village a few hours south of us and to produce plays around the topic “corruption in schools,” which could also be presented in our respective communities. My kids prepared a good piece showing a teacher who accepted money to raise grades and then also tried to seduce one of his female students. (Both unfortunately common occurrences in many Mozambican schools) Another teacher at the school realized what was happening, though, and went to the principal to demand justice. Our two groups met yesterday in Xai-Xai , near a beautiful beach. The students presented the plays and then had a good meeting to discuss what each group had done well, and what were things each could improve on in there presentations. I think the kids learned some good new skills, and then they had some time to swim in the ocean and make some new friends.

I will be sad to leave these kids in a few weeks; the boys in the group have become my friends – like 14 little brothers. They’ve taken to calling me “Mana Mary” instead of “Teacher Mary” – a lapse in formality as “Mana” is the word one uses to address family members or older friends and teachers should always be addressed with “Teacher” before their name – and I love it. Yesterday, on the bus coming home from Xai Xai, I went around and asked all the 10^th graders their plans for next year, as they’ll be graduating in a few weeks and must decide if they’ll go on to 11^th and 12^th grade (pre-university studies), a training institute for teachers, nurses, businessmen, etc., or finish their studies and go to work.

I have high hopes for them. I like to imagine that someday I’ll come back to visit and Elton will be mayor of Inharrime and Luís will be a doctor and Carlos will be running the bank. I listened happily to their grand dreams – business training, university, seminary, medical school. I wish I could do more for them, dreams are often hard to realize in this country. I admire their enthusiasm. I wish I knew that I would stay in touch with them, but they don’t have phones, and they’ll leave Inharrime for other places to continue their studies next year. After three weeks from now, I may never see some of them again. Things like that are the hardest part about leaving here in a few weeks.

I wished I had a camera as I was riding down the road in the back of that truck the other day. But since I didn’t, I tried to imprint the images on my mind. The boys all stood up in the back of the truck, their faces imprinted on the clearest-of-clear blue sky as I looked up from my seat low on the wheel-cover. I noted it all clearly: Their navy blue school pants, tearing at the seams after a year of daily wear, their dark, shining faces with bright white-teeth flashing in smiles all around, jaunty teenage-boy stances – until the truck went over a bump and they all lunged to grab onto the sides. After a few traditional songs, someone yelled “Laura!” and the drum beat changed – I couldn’t hold back hearty laughter as the boys broke out at full force singing the school hymn, a church song about a 12-year-old girl, “Laura Vicuña, model for all youth, you’ll stay in our mind for always, you’ll carry us always forward!”

Science Fair

Several months ago, I started organizing a science fair for the Catholic high school and technical school, where I teach. This was a novel idea at the schools – no one had ever seen or participated in such a thing! It took some explaining, but eventually I got both school administrations to approve the project. I started working with small groups of students: getting material together, planning and executing experiments, and teaching them to do “scientific write-ups.”

Some people thought this was a stupid thing to try to do: “These kids have never had an opportunity to do experiments – you can try, but they won’t succeed,” the assistant principal of the high school told me when I first presented the idea. Others loved it: “These kids have never had an opportunity to do experiments – what a mind-opening venture for them!” said the librarian at the technical school. In the end, the second group came out right.

What sticks in my mind most from the event and all the planning that went into it are the students who got involved:

Jacinto, the first student who came to me wanting to be involved, arrived one afternoon in the technical school library, clad in ripped up “non-school” clothes, and super-excited to show off an experiment he had discovered. He brought with him a plate, a glass cup, and some matches and went out to the school pump and filled the cup with water. He put the water on the plate, ran back outside to get a leaf, and then stuck a match into a piece of folded leaf, put the leaf with the upright match in the water, and lit the match. He then put the glass cup over the top of the match, covering the flame. The flame quickly went out – and all the water that was in the plate got sucked up into the cup! Jacinto looked up with a grin, “Yeah, this is my experiment.” “And why does this happen?” I asked him. He was perplexed for a moment. Then he ran out the door, shouting over his shoulder, “Hold on, I’ll go ask Father Pierre, the physics teacher!”

Santos, also one of my best theatre-group students, excitedly brought in a car battery that he lugged all the way from his family’s house out in the bush far from school. He hooked the battery up to a radio, then cut one of the wires and dunked both ends of the wire into a cup of salt water. That radio still played! He also noticed that if he left the wires in the water with the radio playing for a while, a strange yellow substance formed in the water. “What is that?” he asked me in sincere wonder. He talked to lots of professors and read chemistry books until he figured out the chemical reaction that was occurring and what the substance must have been.

Judite, a super-shy 8th grade girl, couldn’t think of an experiment, and didn’t like any of the ideas I kept giving her. Two days before the fair, I found one she liked – “Let’s test what happens to a person’s heartbeat when they exercise.” All the students feverishly working in the library to put last minute touches on their projects stopped, took their heartbeat for one minute, then ran a lap around the school, and took their heartbeat again. Then, I showed her how to put the results in a table for her poster – “Did you like this experiment, then?” I asked her after it had gotten dark and she was still sitting at a desk in the library working on her write-up. The huge smile that burst across her face was answer enough.

The stories go on – I worked one-on-one with more than 30 students to prepare their projects. Some kids started right away in May and spent months developing just the right way to react baking soda with vinegar or float eggs in salt water; others came to me the day before the fair wanting to participate!

I did a lot of “behind the scenes” organizing to try to make the event a “big deal” in town. With the help of Maria, a Portuguese volunteer librarian at the technical school, I wrote formal letters to our district authorities and arranged to have the fair in the “Sessions Hall” – the Hall where all local government things happen and probably the nicest space in the village. After prodding from a student from the public high school, I sent some information to that school’s principal and went and gave an explanation to their teachers on how to participate. With a few students from there and a group from each of my schools, a total of 38 students presented projects on July 5th.

On the day of the fair – completely to my surprise – the Administradora (similar to the mayor of the county) and the District Director of Education showed up to give opening speeches at the event and decided to go around see each and every project. Some students became nervous to present in front of them and the school directors who also went around, but other busted with pride to explain their experiments: Luis couldn't hide a grin when the Administrador called all of the other students over to see his project: an example of how the lungs function using a plastic bottle and a balloon, and a special explanation on how the lungs function differently and are destroyed by smoking.

The Salesian Sisters donated prizes from their large stock of donated school supplies, and I got some special thick paper to print nice certificates. During the fair, we even had a “Science Trivia” contest to involve all the attendees in a bit of scientific fun.

And what were the winning projects for Science Fair Inharrime 2008?

• 1st place went to Elipsoide, an 8th grader who created a power strip made with a type of thick mud as an insulator instead of plastic.
• 2nd place to Sídonia, a 2nd year Construction student at the technical school, who tested the activation of yeast by putting yeast in glass soda bottles – one bottle with water and salt, and the other bottle with water and sugar. She put a balloon on top of both bottles and the balloon on the bottle with sugar filled up, but the one of the bottle with salt did not.
• 3rd place went to Márcia, a 9th grader who created a type of “hot pack” out of coconut shells to keep food hot long after cooking, and -
  
• 4th place went to 10th grader Santos and his conduction of electricity in salt water – we all especially loved this experiment because it provided animated music to keep the fair moving all day long!

Nosso Constantino

Sister Lucília came running into the living room, where Cris and I were seated, carrying what appeared to be a bundle of dirty cloth. She set it down on the sofa chair next to me and opened it up to reveal a TINY little baby -- only slightly bigger than my hand. "He was born 5 days ago and his mother can't give him milk," Lucília said, "Let's clean him up."

He was completely naked and his little arms and legs were glued tightly to the sides of his body. "Constantino" -- a fitting name for the teeney prince set before us.

I ran down to our storage room and got the smallest baby clothes I could find and some clean blankets while Cris went to find a bottle and some baby milk powder. I came back to find that the "newborn" size baby jumpers drowned his small frame, but at least made him cleaner and warmer.

As I was dressing him, he laboredly opened his eyes -- perhaps for the first time, we imagined. I simply couldn't take my eyes off this little miracle before me. I put tiny, yet huge, grey socks on his minuscule feet and wrapped him in a white fleece blanket. Cris returned with the bottle and laughed at the new sight of him, "Well, look at this, we've made a western baby out of him!"

After dressing him and rocking him a bit, we took him back out to his mother who also murmured delightfully at his new outfit. We brought a bottle and milk and tried to ask her about how he had been eating to this point. The mother's Portuguese was limited and neither Cris nor I speak the local African language Chopi -- the mother pulled a limp breast out of her shirt, "It doesn't give milk," she explained, "I don't understand why!"

"So what have you been feeding him?" I asked her. But she didn't understand. "Has another woman been able to give him milk?" Sister Lucília asked with gestures. The mother shook her finger and looked down embarrassedly, "No, he has not eaten since he was born. I didn't know what to do. That's why I came here."

The three of us looked as each other in sad understanding. Sister Lucília asked the mother in a soft tone, "Do you have AIDS? You know, the very bad disease?" The mother nodded her head in affirmative. We all looked down at Constantino. "It's possible that he doesn't have it," I offered, "Since she couldn't give him milk."

We taught the mother how to make milk, but I worried how much she really understood us about how much to put in and how to boil the water, but then be sure to let it cool. I knew she would do her best, but she also wouldn't be able to read the Portuguese instructions on the can to remind herself of the process at home.

As I watched the young mother tie the tiny boy on her back and walk slowly out into the warm afternoon sun, I felt a pull on my heart. Let me take him home with me! He could be a great man -- with that name, Constantino, and those bright new eyes! He has a chance now... We've given him a new start...


I never saw the baby boy again. A few weeks later, his mother stopped by the house to tell Sister Lucília that Constantino had died. She didn't give a detailed explanation. When I wrote to Cris, now back in Spain, with this news, she alone could share the lost vision of Constatino the Great, "We always knew he had it hard, didn't we?" Yes, we did. I had a spark of hope. He found us, he spent 30 minutes in the arms of people with resources to change his life, but it just wasn't enough.

I was recentenly asked to write a piece for the ''From Abroad'' section of the Round Table, the newsletter for Karen House, the Catholic Worker house in St. Louis where I spent many a Saturday morning in college. I wrote the following piece and will post it here too as an update on recent happenings in Inharrime.


Last week, I played “Jeopardy” with my 8th graders to review for their 1st trimester Chemistry exam. None of the students had ever heard of the game, but they loved it, getting extremely competitive over questions like “What is a substance?” and “What is a method used to separate a mixture of sand and water?” After a series of serious questions one group inevitably would choose “C for 200,” for which the question was “Sing the refrain of a song by Lizha James [a well-known Mozambican singer].” In most of my classes, the room broke out into laughter and a few girls would stand up and sing some lines of “Nu Wa Nima” or “Já Não Me Tens Valor.” But in Section 8 the game was close: The group that got this question looked at each other very seriously and Guedes, a tall, lanky boy, rose up slowly, body already swiveling in James’ trademark Macarena-like dance and broke out into song “Ni tamuku makwi niluwe walisi mahosa hosa…” Then, the whole class broke out laughing.

I thoroughly enjoy teaching in Mozambique. My methods of doing things tend to be different than my students are used to, but rather than detracting from their learning, I think new approaches stretch their minds. Perhaps my students found the idea of playing Jeopardy in the classroom silly, but they had a good time and it was a great review lesson to help them remember all of the complicated chemistry information I taught them over the first 8 weeks of school.

The difference in the education system and pedagogical methods between Mozambican and American schools often staggers me. Even at Secondary School Laura Vicuña, a school run by Catholic Sisters where I have been volunteering for the past 8 months, there is a huge lack of resources and educational tools. Of my 300+ students in 8th grade chemistry, only 3 own textbooks. And those three all have the oldest version, printed at least ten years ago. All of the information that the kids learn about chemistry is what comes out of my mouth during class.

A common method for transmitting information in the classroom, as I’ve seen by observing some Mozambican teachers, is to dictate information. Seeing this was sort of incredible to me: The teacher sits at the front of the classroom with notebook open in front of her and reads a lesson, for instance about basic properties of chemical substances or the commutative property in mathematics, and the students copy every word the teacher says. They write furiously, heads down, switching from blue to red pen to highlight key words. The students’ notebooks, then, with these precisely taken notes, serve as their textbooks.

I have adopted some Mozambican school traditions – such as wearing a white lab coat in the classroom – but I have not dictated anything more than homework assignments at the end of class. I write out all my lessons in chalk on the blackboard, and the students have gotten used to my different style.

A school without books also has no science equipment or other tools for hands-on learning. I performed a science experiment a few weeks back by doing a demonstration of “separation of mixtures” with water, chalk, some cups and a coffee filter I brought from my house. The kids were super excited to see something practical in the classroom – so much of their learning is purely and completely theoretical. The teachers also thought it was cool: The other chemistry teacher asked to borrow my cups to do the same in her classes, and a Portuguese teacher stopped me as I left the classroom to test his memory on types of mixtures from his own high school days.

Portuguese, the national language of Mozambique and the language used to teach in schools, is not the first language for the vast majority of Mozambicans. Many students arrive in primary school only speaking Chopi or Shangaana or Chisena – maternal African languages – and only begin to learn Portuguese in first grade, often with many difficulties. For a variety of complicated reasons, many students pass through primary school whether they can read, write, and figure or not. Many of the young girls who live at the Laura Vicuña Orphanage, which is part of the compound where I live and work, come to us with a certificate stating they have passed 4th, 5th, or even 8th grade – but often they can’t read and don’t recognize their letters or numbers. In extreme of these cases, some of my students fail their 8th grade chemistry tests not because they do not understand the material, but because they can’t read the questions written in Portuguese!
On a national level, Mozambique lacks teachers. At most schools, teachers tend to be young and overworked (some carrying as many as 40 or 50 hours of in-classroom time per week). In order to improve the current situation, the Mozambican government has lowered the required level of education necessary to teach secondary school. Many teachers enter the workforce having 10th or 12th grade education plus a year of teacher formation.

Teachers and administrators understand the deficiencies in their students’ education and want to improve their schools. There’s much talk of ‘development,’ and a strong emphasis on teaching with the latest methods available. When the country came out of a long civil war 15 years ago, the government wanted to improve education – and top administrators have often looked outside their own country for help. The foreign Non-Governmental Organizations that help direct school-development often require a high ‘passing rate’ in the Mozambican schools to prove the ‘effectiveness’ of their programs. “Foreigners came in and wrote our new curriculums for us,” our physics teacher said to me one day, “and they say that 80% of our students have to pass. But what if they don’t deserve to pass?” The government re-writes the national curriculum every few years taking out things that don’t seem to work and trying out new ideas. But, developing an entire country’s education system is slow work.

Working here as a foreigner, the vast differences in our education systems sometimes make me forget where I come from and type of schools I went to. When I took high school chemistry, we all received packets of worksheets, a glossy periodic table, and a chemistry textbook, and we did experiments in a laboratory. I must continually remind myself not to become complacent in my acceptance of how things are here. I try to give simple experiments as I can and work with the knowledge that I was so lucky to have had the opportunity to obtain.

After the class in which I gave my students the demonstration on mixtures, I gave an unusual homework assignment: I told them to do their own experiment at home. Mix water and salt, then put some of the mixture on a piece of paper, set the paper in the sun, and see what happens. Not many of the students did the assignment – it fell pretty far from normal review questions in their notebook – but the few that did were so proud: “Look teacher, I got salt!” A few students, nervous that no salt appeared on their paper, sprinkled on some extra table salt and tried to pass it off as their results – a perfect opportunity for me to discuss honesty in science experiments.

My main goal in my short time here is to offer some fresh ideas. I lead music and theatre extra-curricular groups at the school for the same reason: I want to present some new opportunities to the students. Not all my ideas are well-accepted. But, I’m not here to create big changes – enough foreigners have meddled with life here and done harm. I just work to provide a different perspective on life for my students and colleagues and a chance to try some activities they might not otherwise have the chance to experience. Students turning in their first-ever chemistry experiment and dancing in the classroom are my invaluable reward.

I gave my first lessons this past week – Introduction to Chemistry. For the 2008 school year, I will be teaching Chemistry here in Inharrime. For the first lesson in each class, I introduced myself and asked my students to do the same, gave some rules for my class, and then embarked on a short explanation of what Chemistry is. ''The science that studies substances and their transformations.''

I wrote the textbook definition on the board for all of my classes, and then questioned who knew what a substance was. No one. These are 8^th graders and beside the fact that they have never studied Chemistry before, for many of them this is their first time out of their rural home zones and at a big school. Add that to the foreign teacher speaking to them in accented Portuguese and most of them were too nervous to say a word.

Instead of continuing to lecture to them, I told them that Chemistry is also an experimental science. I pull out a glass drinking cup and a bottle of water. ‘’This is probably the most important ‘substance’ in the world,” I said, “Does anyone recognize it?” A few timid voices… “Água?” Water. “Exactly!” We discussed briefly why water is so important – “If you all didn’t drink water, would you still live?” Now I finally got a big response –“No!”

Then, I pulled out a little clear plastic bag filled with washing detergent. I got a bigger response when I asked what this substance was – “Omo.” We discussed whether these substances were solids, liquids, or gases, and what would happen if we mixed them together. Then, I performed our first experiment. As I poured the simple detergent into water (something probably all of the students have done a thousand times), they all stretched out of their seats curious to see what happened at the front of the room.

I spent the weeks after Christmas at a sort of slow-motion, leisurely pace. I met with my friend Sister Monica, a wiry, middle-aged Brazilian nun, and we worked on re-writing the English curriculum for the Domingos Sávio Professional School where Monica is an English teacher and I volunteer in many capacities. We spent about a week writing activities and short texts, discussing the ins and outs of English verbs and expressions, and stopping every few hours for a cup of tea and cookies with an older sister in Monica’s convent.

When Matt returned from the U.S., I went to meet him in Maputo and was overwhelmed with happiness at all the gifts my family sent from the U.S. – a green tupperware full of Aunt Jean’s Candy Cane Christmas cookies, photos of Matt with my family and friends, a DVD copy of Kate and Tommy’s Wedding, books, hole-less jeans, even some Betty Jane chocolate-covered caramels. The 12 hour bus ride to Nhamatanda the next day passed rapidly as I read the University News and Universitas to catch up on SLU news and started a new book my Aunt Mary had set me.

In Nhamatanda, Matt and I found a house left empty for a month that had been conquered by the rainy season and we spent the week cleaning up from the small flood – and doing old New York Times crossword puzzles that Matt’s grandparents had saved for us.

Upon returning to Inharrime, I started working at Laura Vicuña Secondary School. I helped with student registration, making class lists and forming a rough class schedule. In the calm before all our little girls returned from their family-visits, Sister Verdiana and I prepared the house for the new year – two new Salesian Sisters will be transferred here in the next month, and 6 lively new little girls will also arrive by the end of January. We got the girls dorm in order and moved our own things to new rooms to accommodate for the new sisters.

For my birthday, Matt surprised me by stopping by Inharrime for the day. We took a leisurely walk to the village and returned in time for the birthday dinner that Sister Verdiana and Father Pierre prepared for me at the priests’ residence: Mozambican pizza (my favorite), Chicken, rice, potato salad, and even a cake! Brother Antonio ended the evening by making everyone participate in a traditional birthday game – everyone had to light a match and give me a birthday message lasting as long as the flame on their match.