War started today.
Here I thought it wouldn't affect life, but I have been talking about it all day. Of course I don't know all the right vocabulary, but I'm working on learning "hate", "soldier", "evil" and "dictator". I'm not allowed to say in this journal what context those refer to, but needless to say, I'm learning these words quickly.
I was in the tailor's "office" - a mud hut with bare electricity-carrying wires, a pedal-powered sewing machine and the barest of materials like thread, scissors and grease for the sewing machine - listening to the battery-powered radio blaring Mozambican Portuguese which I could only partially understand, and the tailor asked me about what I thought concerning the war.
I went to the central, partially indoor market where Dona Maria faithfully provides us with gifts of bananas every time we go to her stand, and told her about what had happened today. She reacted very solemnly, giving way her calm exterior in favor of rarely-seen fear. I continued to explain while trying to figure this reaction out. Most people here don't feel personally affected because it's so far away and they've had much more destructive wars here just a decade ago. I realized she has a son in America and felt that he was in danger. I reassured her that the war was happening in Iraq, to little alleviation of her emotions. I told her that people in America are quite safe, but I wasn't quite sure of that myself - maybe that translated.
Then I went to school. My first turma asked me at the beginning of class what was going on with the war. So I started to tell them, but they just laughed. This got me pretty angry, mainly because I don't understand why it's funny but moreso because they simply can't take me seriously at all and have very little respect (or at least show very little).
So I said that I wasn't going to say any more about it because of their behavior, but then it occurred to me how ridiculously insensitive they were being, not even treating me as a simple normal human being. So I mentioned how many of their friends died in the wars here, and made the point that they could understand how I feel about my friends and the people of Iraq - but still laughter prevailed.
So I sat down in silence. After a couple minutes, they asked me to start the lesson, and I said I didn't want to. I realized at that point that I had enough breathing room with this turma to not give the lesson and still finish the curriculum this trimester. So I sat, very sad and frustrated, for the remainder of the 45 minutes. The students, silently, stared at me and then some started to work for other classes. By the time the bell rang, the silence was stifling. I told them they had their interval (between classes) and they slowly got up.
During the second part of the dupla (two lessons for the same class), I gave a review of how to study for tests and of some of the information I gave. They were so somber it was actually difficult to teach. But it was obvious they learned their lesson and almost 40 minutes of silence is a pretty big deal. The truth is, there was just no other form of discipline I could think of that would work.
After that intensity, I took a break - I could have taught another class early, but didn't feel like it. Afterwards, when I came back, I arrived at my next dupla early. And my favorite group, not coincidentally.
I didn't even get to sit down before they were pegging me with tons of questions. "Do you pray?" "Do you go to church?" "How many wives do you have?" About a dozen students were crowded around me tightly so as not to miss a word, hanging on my responses and laughing hard as the cultural barriers were revealed to be as plain as the (very large) nose on my face. I was having a wonderful time, too, as they were trying to practice their English...trying. But they love to learn and love to be corrected as they're always correcting my Portuguese.
This set a wonderful tone for class, and I gave a very productive and fun lesson. All the kids were (at some point) interested, which is really quite rare. But there's no way I can do that with every turma.
Afterwards, I had a nice long conversation about war with the chefe of that last turma, rudely interrupted by my final class of the day.
And at my Changana lesson tonight, we had a small discussion about our views of war, before starting.
All in all, people are not completely aware that this war isn't happening in America as well - war here means domestic war, so explaining that the people in the US aren't at risk is hard.
Peace
John
