#13 Don’t just celebrate a holiday the day of, but also celebrate it the day before and after*

Mozambicans sure are party animals of the world. Not only do they love to party on their holidays, but they love to celebrate their holidays the day before and after just for good measure. As much as it sounds like a great idea to make every single-day holiday into a raging three-day affair, it’s actually quite unproductive. Take school for an example. The day before a holiday, everything shuts down at 12pm. It’s their idea of respectfully observing the holiday. Hardly anyone in the afternoon before goes to school and the same for the day after. It’s seen as a day of rest to recover from all the partying the day before. On the following day school attendance is a bit better, but still difficult to actually teach a decent lesson since 75% of the class is missing. * The only exception to this rule is Teacher’s Day. Oh, of course you must be thinking that because teachers deep down inside want to educate their students, that this must be the only holiday where it doesn’t turn into a three-day event. What other better way to celebrate our hard work by doing what we love the most, teaching. Wrong. They go bigger. A one-day holiday because at least 5. Unlike the swept under the rug, Teachers Appreciation Day, back in the states, here in Mozambique it’s a big, big deal. All it is though is an excuse to drink. Drink on Teacher’s Day. Drink on the day before, drink the day after, and why not, drink the whole week before it. WE NEED the whole week off, because we do work very hard the 2, 3 or 4 days a week we actually do go.

#12 Write extremely difficult exams, but then pass everyone

One of the worst parts about exams here is that they are extremely difficult. They contain poorly worded questions, confusing formats and they are not culturally relevant. In addition it’s not surprising to come across several typos and just poor grammar usage. This applies for tests of every kind; from a simple test/quiz to providential exams to the national exams. It’s scary just how much of a joke it is here when a teacher wants to properly evaluate the students knowledge of a topic, its almost as if they want all the students to fail. The reason I am doubtful about their intentions to fail students is only because they just end up passing them anyways. The saddest thing then is that the students actually think they know the material when they see they passed the class or any test. A student that passes English will think he knows how to speak English when he in reality he knows a total of 2 phrases (Hello, how are you? I’m fine.)

#11b Students are required to receive politicians anytime they visit.

One week, the governor of our providence wanted to visit out district and town. His visit was scheduled for Monday so when we got to school we discovered the day was canceled because it was a requirement for all students to receive him in town. School was then canceled and then he didn’t even come. The day after, the same thing happens but he shows up four hours late. School of course was canceled again and by the time he arrived everyone had left the reception because they had other things to start doing. Wednesday and Thursday were normal, but Friday he was coming back through to have a town meeting sort of thing. So of course that day was canceled too. Now what kind of politician requires students and teachers to abandon their classes just to see him make a speech about the movement and progress of our town? How does this reflect on the importance of education in their country? Three of the five days we had in that week were lost for nothing and no one does anything to question it.

#11 Teacher Meetings Must Happen During School

One day I am teaching in class and the school director comes by. “We have a meeting now.” “What? Now? I just started this lesson.” He leaves and I am left with the students rolling their eyes and closing their notebooks. “What’s going on?” “You have a meeting” “Oh, ok… then ill be right back, don’t go anywhere” Students laugh and I leave. The nice part is that they don’t happen often, but when they do happen it is always during the middle of school when we should be having lessons. Never before school, not after school, and god forbid not on weekends or holidays. Now I understand that a sacrifice of an hour or two every month is reasonable to open a dialog between the professors and the directors, but what usually happens is that some boss shows up and just shouts about how crappy our school is. The students arrive too late. The students leave too early. Where are all the teachers? Where are your lesson plans? Students bring cell phones in the class! THIS SCHOOL SYSTEM IS A JOKE! They pick apart everything that is wrong. They blame the directors. The directors blame the teachers. The teachers blame the students. The students blame the directors and administrators for interrupting their school day to have meetings with their teachers. So what do the students end up doing? They go home because they know they just lost that day of school. Then when the meeting adjourns, we walk out and go home as well. The administrator that was just yelling at us too isn’t even fazed when he leaves and sees no one at school. The importance of education here is not as respected as it is in other parts of the world. It’s unfortunate because school to people here is only important because someone from a different part of the world said so. No one is really aware of the actual benefits from an education. Nothing organic is really catching on, there is no real development due to too much corruption, and schools are just empty buildings that they are told to fill with “students” and a “teacher”. What it means to be a “student” or a “teacher” is taking a while to grasp. So what is the future of this westernized approach to education in Africa or Mozambique? I really don’t know, but from where I am at, I don’t see a successful future. Sure there are cases that prove it to work, but this current system is depriving way too many people of the education we deserve as human beings. And unless there are some radical changes in either the pedagogy of Mozambican schools or the mindset and approach of community members addressing their education system, we will continue to serve no one and persist to set back the future generations.

#10 Oh you are sick today? You must have Malaria

Every time and anytime someone says they are sick they follow that up with “its malaria”. So you must be thinking… But isn’t malaria a life threatening disease and not a cause for a sore throat or a headache. How did you just walk over an hour to school when you should not be able to rise from a bed?… Yup, that’s what I was thinking too every time I had a student ask to leave class with the malaria excuse. Yes I know Malaria is something I should not be joking about, but it gets kind of ridiculous here when a headache or upset stomach is considered malaria. Malaria maybe is the word for “sick” or “ill”. Maybe “estou com malaria” or “tenho malaria” = “I am sick”. It does work out nicely though to have in your back pocket when you do not feel well and don’t want to go to school or just lay down alone. “I have malaria, I need to rest” goes a long way and people back off and let you be.

#9 Boil Your Leaves

One of my favorite things to eat here is boiled leaves. If there is one thing my neighbors have mastered, it is how to correctly boil some leaves and make it pretty darn delicious. This traditional Mozambican dish called “matapa” is made from boiling leafs and then adding peanut flour, onion, salt, tomatoes, and sometimes coconut milk. It sounds simple and not so appetizing at first, but you’d be amazed how far some peanut flour and coconut milk can take a meal. There are different variations of course with the variety of leafs found in Mozambique. The most typical (and my favorite) is with the cassava leaf. Others include leafs of cauliflower, pumpkin, and several types of beans. Even a local, Northern Mozambican specie of the Acacia tree family offers a lovely tasting leaf to use in a matapa. And as much as I like it, I also like to joke about it as well, because really its just a soup with leafs served with rice. The only leafs I have not seen boiled are lettuce and cabbage, but cabbage comes close when you fry it here. Everything else though you will never need to ask how to prepare it, just boil it, drain it, and add the rest of the ingredients. I really can’t wait to make this back home twenty years from now. This has got to be one of the most fascinating foods to me here because why did I never think to eat a leaf? Why did I always assume to compost them?

#9b Never add Tomatoes in a Matapa made from Cassava

#9c Always Drain and Rinse the leaf from the Acacia Tree

#9d A Grated Green Papaya is Perfect to add to Matapas for Special Occasions

#8a If Plastic Bags Could be Used as Money, We’d be the Sultans of Africa

The trash problem in Mozambique is a tad different from ours back home in the good ol’ US of A. For one, there is very little trash here. And two, if there is trash, it is most likely to be a simple plastic bag. Let us talk a little more about the plastic bag situation here. Once a purchase is made at any kind of store, hut, or a lemonade-type stand outside of a house the client has the right to a plastic bag no matter how much you spend. It could be 6 cents for a pile of tomatoes or one small roll, but you will get a plastic bag. It could be a 3-cent piece of fried dough and you will still get a plastic bag when the actual price equivalent of the bag is the same of the piece of fried dough you just bought. So what ends up happening over time is this large accumulation of plastic bags in your house or as you will see in RULE 8b, plastic bags littering the streets and neighborhoods. And what makes this worse is that these people giving you your merchandise never went to a training program on how to efficiently pack a bag. It could be a roll of toilet paper in one bag and a juice box in another. They’d be fired the first five minutes on the job of any American supermarket. But in the end, it’s not so bad. Rarely do we buy packaged goods whose packages aren’t burnable. The only times really are when we buy a bag of pasta or a frozen chicken. Everything else like beans, vegetables, rice, and bread and just placed in a plastic bag and given to you. Even things like frozen fish and seafood, goat, and pork don’t have pre-existing packages. Just choose your fish or your cut and put it in a plastic bag. Presto!

#8b Nothing Like a Good Sweep to Start the Day

Its interesting here that at the crack of dawn, a family member will arise from the house and start sweeping their property to clean up the trash and liven the place up a bit. Its actually a nice way to pass time, sweeping. Its very therapeutic and relaxing, kinda like raking/designing a Japanese rock garden. Even though the brooms here are just a bunch of twigs, people get some really like looking wavy-patterns and there is nothing like a well maintained dirt patch in front of your house. Its almost like mowing a lawn in a way so that alternate rows appear to be different shades of green based on the angle the blades are sloped and light is reflected. Walking or running across a well swept area is like skiing across a recently groomed blue diamond or tearing up some fresh powder on any untouched part of the mountain. BUT twenty minute later everyone wakes up and this nicely maintained yard becomes a trash zone. The thing that fascinates me is how picky they are about how their dirt looks for the first hour of daylight, but anything after that, anything goes. In general there are trash pits and spots designated to dispose of litter, but those are mainly just guidelines. The idea is that littering is only a temporary act because it will just get swept up the next day by someone else, which is true in a way, but unfortunately only in some areas.

#7 Bosses Must Drink Small Beers

Being a person with power here (aka “a boss”) can be very difficult. It’s a very backward life. The best way to be a boss here is to lose all logical decision making and act as irrational as possible. Rule Number 7 is about their choice of beverage. This is rule starts with possibly the greatest marketing scheme ever invented by a beverage company and it works perfectly into the “irrational” thought process by nearly every chefe. Practically every bar here has three types of beers of which comes in two different size bottles. The larger bottle is used by the client and then returned to the bar so it can be brought back to the beverage company (which is actually a great system of recycling). It prevents people drinking on the streets, in cars, and bar fights that start with the hooligans smashing the bottles on the bar because the bars demand the bottles back. The smaller bottle though, does not need to be returned to the bar. Once you get a small beer, you can go anywhere you want. But the catch is that the smaller bottle costs more than the larger bottle. The chefes and people here say that the quality is better, which is again the greatest marketing scheme ever created, and that is why they cost more. But what it comes down to is power and presenting that power in front of your inferiors. If you have money, you need to show you have money. That is how you get respect here unfortunately. SO what happens is that people actually buy the smaller bottles instead of the larger bottles even though they cost more AND they are staying at the bar. Sadly there are cases where these smaller bottles end up being perfect for traveling… and how to chefes travel here? In cars. Cars that they were given through the organization or governmental agency they work for. And this just adds to the risk of traveling here in general. But are all chefes here horrible people and drunk drivers, no. Not at all. But there is a trend. The one nice thing about drinking with these kinds of people is that another way to present money/wealth/power is to buy others beers which is how I get a lot of beers paid for and it ends up being a good time. Just the whole time I’m rolling my eyes as my boss talks about the “nonexistent” higher quality of his small beer he just paid extra for.

#6 Do not eat squid with spicy chilies lime juice or you will die.

Neighbor: What are you cooking? Derek: Squid. Neighbor: We have a rule. You cannot put chili peppers in the sauce or you will die. Eric: But we already did. A lot of them. Why is that a rule? Neighbor: Oh. I don’t know. But you can ask the other neighbor, he will confirm it. Derek: Ok, if you find us dead tomorrow you will know why. Next Day: Eric: So squid and chili peppers are bad to mix? Other neighbor: No. Why? Eric: So I won’t die? Other neighbor: You die if you mix squid with limes. You don’t serve squid with limes. Eric: Oh ok. Good thing we didn’t use limes. Other neighbor: Yeah. These are actual conversations in our daily lives. Also we almost died.

#5 When it Comes to Eating Rats, Always go with the Free Range

So people eat rats here and it’s a pretty common to see someone walking around our neighborhood with a bucket of grilled rats. For about 8 small, skewered, grilled rats it costs 30 cents and is considered a novelty here, especially by our neighbors. I have had the special opportunity to try them and they aren’t actually all that bad. The preferred method of preparing them is taking the already grilled rats, cut them in half, clean them out, and fry them with some oil, salt and onion. And if you are really into fine rat-dining, you can spice them up with a little bit of lime juice. But the thing you need to be careful of is NOT to eat rats from the house, only the “matu” or the wild. But that seems weird right? To actually eat rats but to also be concerned with where they came from? THEY ARE RATS! How could they get worse?! But apparently when we ask about this rule, their response is that they smell weird. And I don’t even think they could ever tell the difference, they just say that and really do question it. This took me a while for it to make sense, but then the rats in our house proceeded to eat a hole in our glue sticks and take them away when the glue leaked out, which just goes to show that maybe there is some truth to foul-smelling-house-rats-that-eat-glue-and-plastic. And who would want to eat them? This is the 40 piece bucket option in our neighborhood. No mashed potatoes or coleslaw though which is the downside.

#4 Standing in line in an ATM is only for idiots

The concept of waiting your turn in a line here is slowly catching on. Very slowly. Very very slowly. I’m not sure how long the actual concept of a line has been around for, but I am sure it started a super long time ago with the dinosaurs and waiting their turns at the water hole. Yeah, reptiles are more organized than some of these people. It’s a very basic concept, yet no one gets it. Instead what happens is that everyone crowds around the machine and slowly inches forward in hope to get in front of the next person. But it gets worse. Then there are people that will bring multiple cards from all their friends and family and take 4 or 5 times as much time as they would with only one card. But it gets worse. Then there are the people that stand in the shade away from the masses and then walk up when they think their spot should be in the front because they have been watching the people that would be behind them. And it gets worse. I swear the women that want to get money only dress up because some idiot will allow them to cut in front of them, and it happens all the time (also best perk for being a woman here). And it continues to get worse. A typical ATM machine will break down and go off-line once in about twenty withdrawals or it will run out of money. And the worst, the only way to withdrawal money is from the ATM outside. Can’t do it inside the bank where there is AC for some reason… that would be too logical. So how do you avoid these problems? Wake up early and be there at 5am. Go at night. Go when the teachers are not getting paid. And pull out a lot of money to avoid going multiple times a month. Oh and don’t wait in a line and if you do, bring a book. NO LINES!!!! Best day ever!

#3 Boiled Roots Must be Served with Tea

Don’t be amateurs like us and serve boiled roots in Mozambique without tea. We got put to shame the other day when we had boiled some exotic roots that were brought to us by a friend and tried sharing them with our friends in the absence of tea. We might as well insulted them by offering them papayas before 10am. Anyways it resulted in us boiling water for them just so that they could use half of our sugar with their tea.

#2 Would you like some tea with your sugar?

Continuing with the breakfast themed rules... It’s hard to describe in words what it looks like when my neighbor, Anli, puts sugar in his tea. You just have to be there to see it. One spoonful, and another, and another, and another, and then one more for good measure. And this is for a small cup of tea. One day when this blog gets savvy enough I’ll add a video so you can believe me. But it makes sense why Anli and others do this. With the diet here the way it is, sugar goes a long way for providing the energy and calories they need for a long day of work. Even for me, I’ve never been prone to using sugar in coffee or tea or even drinking sodas, but I’m drawn to it every time its put in front of me. Like a moth to a flame, sugar is the elixir of life.

#1 No Papayas Before 10am

Believe or not this is an actual rule. Papayas consumed in the morning are believed to give you stomachaches and possibly hernias. Derek and I normally eat them for breakfast. We wake up, pick a papaya from our tree, and enjoy a nice, fresh way to start the day. Our neighbors are horrified how casual we are and it’s great for us to offer to share because we know they will always turn it down, hence more for us! Side note on papayas: The trees here grow like weeds which is great. They can grow about anywhere and with little water, but when they get water they shoot up like crazy. Twice a year we will have a month of fresh papayas. Beautiful trees too. Thank you to Sam and the other previous volunteers for planting them years back.

Introduction to the MCR (Mozambican Cultural Rulebook)

Going a day without observing or hearing about a new "rule" Mozambicans have is a rare thing. These rules are basically cultural norms and control to a degree how people here live their day-to-day lives. Some rules are quite odd, others actually make sense, and the rest only make sense having lived here for a year. Through this blog I hope to pass along stories and cultural experiences of which I observe by means of a "rulebook". Each blog post will be a rule that I have either been explicitly told or a rule that I will create through observations in order to summarize an unique aspect of Mozambican life. The idea of a blog like this is not to make generalizations about Mozambicans or Africans so please take notice that these stories may just be what is found in my neighborhood or within my immediate surrounding. My posts should not be perceived as to make statements about all Mozambicans in general, but to comment on my time spent in Mozambique as an English teacher in the Peace Corps.