Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Even without classes, Jesse and I stayed busy this November, both in and out of school. Some highlights:

Jesse visited Russell, another Peace Corps volunteer who lives in a very rural site. They went on great hikes and saw this googly-eyed lizard!

I got to spend a week in Namaacha where I met the talented new group of Peace Corps volunteers. I felt competent to be participating as a “teacher” because just a year ago Jesse and I were in the same place for our initial 10-week training. Our host family is doing well and says hi. They know that their photos are floating around America!

We got together with Peace Corps friends to celebrate Thanksgiving, with approximations of all the standards, including stuffed chickens!

Trick-or-Treat!

Happy Halloween! Classes ended on the 31st. We invited students to trick-or-treat at our house and they were great! Here are some photos of their costumes.
The other big news is that we kind of have an English Resource Room now. Here’s a photo of all the wonderful books that finally have a home.
Thank you to everyone who voted and who worked on Barack Obama’s campaign! Everyone I pass gives me a pat on the back and personal congratulations for Obama's victory. Yay Amercia!
The rest of November will be full of different school activities for us like exams, discussing grades and preparing for graduation. We’re thinking of everyone! Thank you for your love and support!

JOMA and REDES to the beach!

Last Saturday, Jesse and I had a great time bringing members from our extracurricular groups to the beach. We had good discussions, the journalists interviewed the REDES girls, and then everyone had fun with beach activities!

It´s hot!

After many complications, Jesse’s journalism group published their first edition of the journal for the semester. A compilation of work done so far, it’s over 20 pages long!! The photo shows a few of the students who are particularly involved journalists – the woman in the picture is the student editor.

Jesse and a few other Peace Corps volunteers organized a regional meeting for us to get together last weekend and share our ideas. Here’s a photo of us there in case you forgot what we look like.

The next picture is not Mozambique, but Jesse and I are very excited because we received a report about Bangladesh Connections. The picture shows the nutrition initiative – our school scholarship recipients now also receive breakfast! I updated our Bangladesh Connections blog. If you’re interested, the address is http://bangladeshconnections.vox.com. The Bangladesh Connections website is http://bangladeshconnections.atspace.org.

Ultimate Frisbee, Timbila Festival and More!!

Jesse's Ultimate Frisbee team is good and preparing to challenge the team of another Peace Corps volunteer. We're still interested in connecting with more Ultimate Frisbees. Besides supplying the team for games and practices, we want to give team members a disc at the end of the year so that they can spread the game to through the rural areas of Mozambique where they'll be going to teach.

My REDES group interviewed the founder/coordinator of a community-based organization that works in the neighborhood of our school, Kuvumbana. They learned about the projects and services of this NGO and about how an organization works. Kuvumbana mostly works to support people living with AIDS and orphans.

My students were thrilled to recieve their penpal letters. (Thanks, Phil and Mandy!! ... Marcia is on the far right of the photo in white. Vasta is second from the left in brown.) We're thinking that the skills development of our REDES this semester can be computer literacy. We're going to learn how to type, and I'm showing the girls how to set up and use email. That will facilitate more exchanges - let me know if you'd be interested in corresponding.

We got to go to the Timbila Festival last Saturday. The timbila is an important instrument in Mozambican culture. It's made of wood over various sized balls to make the scale (hard, hollowed shells of a local fruit called massala). The music is perfect for Mozambican dancing, and it was fun to experience this celebration of music!

The festival was in the town of Quissico. There's a beautiful lagoon there, so of course we enjoyed a great hike. We were told (later) that people shouldn't go in the water because they might get eaten by crocodiles.

Second Semester

The highlight of our week was entertaining Elisa and Gito, our host mother and brother who shared their home with us during our initial training in Namaacha. They traveled to Xai Xai to visit us at our house. The photo shows our great chicken dinner with them and Veronica and Noah (another special family who live here in Xai Xai). It felt good to be able to serve them after they´ve taken such good care of us!

We´ve been keeping busy with classes and extracurricular activities. This picture is of one of my classes showing off the projects they made.

Around the house, we´ve been spending time on our yard and gardens. The style is to have a freshly swept or raked yard, with nothing growing in it. You can see in the photo that the neighbor baby, Vitrovio, likes to help Jesse.

Resource Development

Hello. I hope everyone is doing well. I have a favor to ask of anyone who is interested in helping us. I have found something that people back home can help me with - it is fairly easy but I am excited about the potential! I am in charge of coming up with resources for the Reading course at the Institute and I am busy pulling reading passages from wherever I can find them, mostly the internet. I thought that an added special touch that I could provide that is unique to me being from another country is having some folks from home write out some essays that my students can read in class. If you have the time, interest, and energy please think about writing one or more 1,000 to 2,000 word essays. It can be about a variety of topics. I have written out a list below of topics that I will be teaching about, but the essays can include other topics that you have a special interest in. If you think there might be an interest maybe you can get some friends involved too. I think this would also be a great thing for high school English teachers to assign for homework! Because we do not have many resources immediately provided to us, I am looking for creative ways to get our students reading material and I thought this might be a nice personal touch that the students here will actually enjoy and have a deep interest in. Students love reading things from individuals from the states and will feel special that time was taken to write something especially for them. You will of course get credit when your essay is submitted along with all of the other resources to the Ministry of Education to share with teachers across the country!
Here are the topics:
Importance of learning/teaching English
Arts and Crafts
Customs and Traditions
Human Rights
Gender Issues
Poverty Alleviation
Agriculture and Fishing
Tourism and Wildlife
Environment
Geographical Features
Holidays
Politics
Business and Commerce
Economics
Science and Technology
Literature
Language Acquisition

Also, any reflections about hometowns or life in the U.S. are more than welcome! My students read at about the 6th grade level but like to be challenged. Please email me the essays (jesse.routte@gmail.com) and as this is an ongoing project of resource development, you can continue to send new essays whenever you have the free time to write. I appreciate your help!

Vacation!

Highlights of our trip ...

Racing up and down sand dunes on Tofo, spotting flipping dolphins from the top
Spying monkeys lunching on bananas and hiding in the bamboo at Dan's site

Ponta Linga Linga - Sailing and then wading through mangrove forest, then palm trees and deserted beach to reed huts and hammocks where we spent the night

Painting Greg's house with motor oil to deter the termites' rampant tunnelingPlaying Frisbee with the kids who crossed the Save River to see us
Listeing to stories about Portuguese pirates while having morning tea overlooking the beach at Vilankulo

Reading at the port in Beira, waiting for a boat while fishermen bussled about with nets and motors
The view from the boat as we arrived at Cameron and Tommy's site

Find the monkeys!

Spotting monkeys along our long and beautiful hike through palm trees, grasses, and huge bayobab trees to a rocky beach near Barada

We did all of our traveling by bus. One time the bus broke down for 5 hours. After repairs that included changing a tire and welding things, we were off again only to break down again 15 minutes later. As they fixed this problem, a man walked up and down the aisle throwing rock salt to get rid of the evil spirit. It worked because the bus only broke down one more time after that and we made it to Quelimane!

Our stop furthest north was Ilha de Mozambique.
Jesse waded out to a fort covered the island a couple kilometers off of the island we stayed on. He found the most amazing starfish I've ever seen!

Activity

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Mrs. Strayer at Thomas Jefferson Middle School and my parents and everyone else who donated books. Over 400 books, cassettes, magazines, and other resources are catalogued and tagged. Things often take a long time here, and in that line we´re still working on negociating a fitting space for this marvelous collection so that we can have a grand opening. But already we´ve let students use some books. It´s awesome to see how some students devour the books. Books here are expensive, so our students haven´t had the same experience as me and Jesse who grew up surrounded by books (and we still love and devour them, especially the great ones in this collection!). Jesse and I will let you know when we find a good room for the books and then we´ll request even more when visitors come. If you´re in college, please tell your classmates to save their education methodology textbooks and other books as they´re difficult to come by here.

We have successfully completed our first semester of teaching in Mozambique! Soon we´ll have a couple weeks of winter vacation before the second semester begins at the end of July. (By the way, our winter here is in the upper 60s. It´s perfect.) I feel like we´ve done a lot this semester.

Jesse´s journalism group posted the first official edition of their newspaper last week. Students swarmed the bulletin board to read it as it was put up. Five articles addressed the critical issue of the school needing to feed the students well. Other articles educated about health issues, community events, and there was even a culture/arts section with poems and humor.

My REDES group developed a core of interested women who are enthusiatic to continue next semester. We´ve bonded with baking banana bread, a dance party, etc and talked about issues like women´s bodies and reproductive health. They´re aware of information to share with their students. It was eye-opening for me to see how important it is to educate and talk openly about potentially taboo issues because girls really don´t know things if they´ve never been told.

Jesse has begun an English Theatre group. They are developing a script on the theme of HIV/AIDS, and will prepare to compete in the Peace Corps organized competition in September.

We´ve hooked a bunch of students on Frisbee. We had a listening class activity about the rules of Ultimate Frisbee and Jesse is meeting students regularly to practice and form an Ultimate Frisbee team. Frisbee is such a great game because it just takes a little bit of practice and anyone can join in no matter what their athletic background. So it´s a good sport where girls are on the same playing field as the guys. We want to try to give frisbees to the students on the Ultimate Frisbee team at the end of the year so that they can share the game with the communities where they´ll be teachers next year.

In other news, we got a second kitten who we named Mhaka which means Trouble in the local language. He´s cute when he´s not clawing up my leg and stealing food.
We´re continuing to enjoy cooking for ourselves and others. One day a man selling crabs walked through our backyard so Jesse got to buy some for an impromptu dinner party. But first the cats and the puppy we were pet-sitting tried to make friends with them.

Several weekends we´ve gotten to visit other Peace Corps volunteers at their sites. It´s inspiring to see what their doing and also to share experiences. For example, I´m not the only one frustrated with one particular administrator. Here is a photo with our friend Paul at his rural site.
Though classes are over, the school director is holding the students on campus to work in the gardens and clean. Yesterday we learned how to play a strategy game similar to Mancala from some of our students who had dug little holes in the sand and were taking a little break from their labor. (You can notice the piles of burning trash that they´re working on in the background of the photo.)
Jesse and I will hopefully have the opportunity to use the break to see a lot of the country by traveling North up the coast. So our next blog entry will probably be about the beauty and diversity of this big country. Thank you again for your interest and support and prayers. We´re thinking of you!