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!

Happiness

My parents visited for the past couple weeks. They brought books to initiate an English resource library, gave guest speaker presentations to our classes, and got to meet our friends and see exactly where we are and what our days are like.
Then right before they left, we went for an amazing safari for a couple of days in Swaziland. Here´s the elephant - 3 feet from the Land Rover, just sniffing us. And here´s the rhino - who we approached by foot to admire and click photos from 6 feet away. We were practically the only guests at the camp and felt privileged to be there to appreciate the hippos who hung out at the waterhole right outside the window of the house. The animals made a hippo/rhino parade for this photo.

And here are the amazing lions that were laying in the road because the grass was wet so the Land Rover just drove up to them and we watched the cubs play under their father´s watchful eye for an hour!It was the best vacation ever!

JOMA and REDES conferences

We´ve had a full month! First, Jesse brought 2 students to the JOMA conference where they focused on communication skills through journalism. This photo shows students interviewing the community on Mozambican Women´s Day. His journalism club at school is a big and dedicated group.

Then I switched places with Jesse and brought 2 women to the REDES conference the following week. It was awesome to see the confidence of the women grow over the week together. One of my favorite memories was everyday when our large group of women sang in strong voices, dancing, sometimes with fists in the air, lyrics like "We want equality and strength!"

Homecoming

This morning I got to visit our fantastic host family in Namaacha for the first time since training. Look how much baby Michael has grown!