February 3

After my family left in January I spent about a week at school doing work that could have been finished in a fraction of the time with the help of a computer (it is this kind of busy work that irritates me the most about my job here, and I usually do a good job of avoiding it) before heading to Maputo (the capital of Mozambique) for our HIV/AIDS mid-service conference. Just a personal (cynical) note: Peace Corps calls the conference the HIV/AIDS mid-service conference because it is funded by PEPFAR which, (understandably given that PEPFAR is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) funds a lot of things that have HIV/AIDS in the title, but also draws a lot of parallels to the sponsor decals on the uniform of a NASCAR driver. Moving on, I was in Maputo for a week, learned how to be a better volunteer, got tested (medically) for all kinds of tropical diseases and parasites, and found out (at the dentist) that I am cavity-free after 15 months in Mozambique. I left Maputo (as a much better Volunteer thanks to my excellent training at the HIV/AIDS mid-service conference sponsored by PEPFAR… don’t I sound like a NASCAR driver?) and came back to Gondola where I immediately started school.

My school, like many in Mozambique, is undergoing a rather rapid expansion. In 2003 Escola Secundaria Geral Macombe (my school) offered classes (starting with grade 8) up to grade ten and had just 1,300 students. Currently, we offer classes up to grade twelve and have more than 5,000 students. For those of you who are not statisticians, that is a big increase. As you can imagine, it is hard to keep a consistent quality of education with such explosive growth – but at least the students are going to school. Such rapid growth has also precipitated the need for more classrooms every couple of years. The result is a lot of poorly constructed classrooms. Many of my classes are held in the aforementioned poorly constructed classrooms but so far this year I have also had the pleasure of teaching in unfinished classrooms. Things that shouldn’t have been disruptions, such as rain, caused me to cancel class (because the roof and windows were unfinished). I have also had the pleasure of teaching while construction workers filled in wall-cracks with cement inside of my classroom during my lesson (I can only hope that the construction workers absorbed some of my rousing lesson on atomic structure).

Other than my classroom problems, what may be the last year of my teaching career is going well. I have about 700 students in eighth and ninth grade (which will make grading fairly time consuming), but in many ways it is nice to be busy.

One of the underlying themes in all almost everyone’s Peace Corps experience (at least everyone who writes about it) is that the second year is far more productive than the first year, and I have already found this to be true. It seems like most of our first year in Gondola (our being David (my roommate) and myself) was spent establishing ourselves (we are just the second and third PCVs to live in Gondola) learning the language, the culture, and how to get things done. We both have a lot on our plates this year (in terms of extra-curricular activities) in addition to our vastly augmented teaching loads.