I made pancakes this morning. Well, I started off making an omelette. Let me explain.
I make an omelette for myself every morning or so, and automatically went into the routine, breaking the eggs into a bowl - then realized Blake mentioned we should make pancakes this morning. So I just continued from there, in a backwards manner of making pancakes but they still tasted as good.
In any case, I meant to explain how the pancakes get made, and I'm not sure if I've written about this before, but here it goes.
Our stove has one burner that is always on (at least low power) when plugged in. But it's too hot to make pancakes on, and I hate to waste energy. So I put a pot of water on it and then a plate on top of that. When the pancakes are done from the other burner, I place them on the plate and cover them with a pot cover. It works just as well as keeping them warm with an oven, and I don't waste that energy.
The process going on with the other burner is a little more complicated. There are two frying pans, one that is more or less the size of the burner, and another that ismuch larger than the burner. The one that is much larger, makes 3 pancakes at a time, but they're hard to control because they're cooked unevenly, so I use the smaller one.
After pouring the batter to the size of the pan, I balance the batter out, usually less in the middle because the burner is inefficient in the middle and gets all gooey. So I slough off the excess uncooked batter when flipping - getting the uncooked batter to the hotter parts of the pan - and then wait a couple minutes, put down the flipper and show off. Because of the size of the pan, it's perfect for flipping the pancake without any utensils.
I haven't gotten to the point where I can flip it onto the plate, but I'm working on that part.
In class today, there was a huge praying mantis by the chalkboard. As is custom, one of the students started to erase the board for me, and tried to kick the praying mantis. He successed in injuring the animal, but it was still in pretty good shape. Wanting to show respect for another living thing, I got it to jump onto an open book and then took it outside. I got a few strange looks, but nobody really said anything to me. It almost seemed like they weren't sure what to think of this white guy being so concerned with one praying mantis while his country....well...someone openly told me the other day (in English) that they hate Americans, while reading about Bush's latest statements of belligerence. I can't go into what I said back to him, but I wasn't angry.
My mini-HIV/AIDS sessions are really getting quite interesting. Today, I introduced that there are 750 new infections every day in Mozambique, divided that number by the number of provinces (10), made a list of the largest cities in our province, and pointed out our city which is the 2nd largest. I then made the assumption that between 5 and 10 people in our city every day get HIV.
In my 2nd oldest turma, this started a flurry of great, interesting questions, for instance:
"What medicines can be used to prevent HIV infection?"
"Is it true that white people put diseases in the condoms?"
"We can find male condoms here, but I've never seen a female condom. Where can I find one?"
"If a man has sex with a dog, then another man with the same dog, can HIV pass from the first man to the second?"
"Where did AIDS begin?"
"What scientist first identified AIDS?"
"How long will a person with HIV live? With AIDS?"
Needless to say, I didn't know all the answers, especially how to explain them well in Portuguese, but I tried and also used some students to help me answer. We talked for some 15 minutes, cutting my lesson short but well worth it. And unlike usual, the kids weren't complaining that my lesson wasn't starting.
And I think I hit a turning point. Not only did I understand some tough questions, but when it was over, there were some who obviously weren't taking it seriously. Normally, this bothers me tremendously because I want everyone to be socially in tune. But today, I realized I made a tremendous impact on a handful of people, and that outshone by far the kids that just didn't seem to care.
Of course, those kids who don't care are the thorn in my side. But little by little I'm showing them that that won't cut it during my lessons. Today I had a pair of girls stand up and repeat, in tandem, a paragraph I had written on the board as part of my lesson. The others got pretty scared of talking for a while!
Peace
John
