August 20

It has been about a month; time to update the blog again. Today I am going to skip the quips that I usually open with and just jump right into it.

The third trimester of teaching has been interesting, in large part because my fellow teachers have not been paid in a few months, which is causing some problems. Apparently some clever people in the Provincial Education Ministry managed to steal/embezzle an enormous amount of money (somewhere in the neighborhood of $120,000) and the result is that the Provincial Education Ministry has stopped paying its teachers. My colleagues have been threatening to strike for quite a while, but the reality is that organized labor movements do not exist in Mozambique (or in Africa, for the most part). What really happens is that teachers go on individual strikes (which just means they don’t show up to teach – this actually happens quite a bit even when teachers are getting paid, but it is definitely worse now). There have been a few days of school in which I am the only teacher that shows up to teach (lucky for me, Peace Corps faithfully deposits my living allowance into my bank account every month) which makes me feel like a scab. In all likelihood this problem will not be resolved before the school year ends and many of my students will not have certain subjects for the remainder of this trimester. Unfortunately, this just perpetuates the huge education problem (perhaps huger than any other) in Mozambique that is improperly prepared students moving up grade levels (imagine trying to teach physics to students who don’t understand algebra, or even worse – teaching students (in any discipline) who don’t understand Portuguese).

The start of August marked the inauguration of a bridge traversing the Zambezi River at Caia. The Zambezi River cuts a half-mile wide swath between Northern and Central Mozambique and the aforementioned bridge means that it is now possible for a wheeled vehicle to drive the length of Mozambique without the necessity of getting on a ferry. It is actually a pretty exciting to see this kind of development (though it was primarily paid for by the European Union). I happened to be at a hotel (attending a conference in Northern Mozambique at the time) and every television I saw was playing the equivalent of Anchorman’s (the Will Ferrell movie) Panda Watch except for the bridge – which made it Ponte (bridge in Portuguese) Watch.

I recently read a book (Dark Star Safari) by former PCV and current author Paul Theroux, in which Theroux details his trials and tribulations on an overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town. For those of you who think African geography is unimportant, Cairo to Cape Town is more or less a north-south traverse of the African Continent. Anyway, I am sure Theroux’s experiences are more relevant and interesting to me (given that I am currently a PCV in Africa), but nonetheless it is a read that I would recommend (if only because many of his views mirror my own, and are expressed in such a way that I feel like I would express them if I were a good writer). To be clear, I understand the presumptuousness of making book recommendations (I do not have delusions about becoming an Oprah-like figure) and it probably will not happen again.