Voltou?

Sim, voltei.  For the past 2 weeks I've been liiiiiving it up.  I'm on trimester break, remember?

Last week I returned the provincial tests to the kids.  Some of them passed.  Really my grades were awful for the first trimester and I'm worried that someone will be mad at me?  I don't know.  The students have 2 more trimesters to bring their grades up and pass the class.

I was supposed to go to class to return the tests to the kids, but none of them showed up.  Instead they were knocking on my door ALL DAY for TWO DAYS.  It was like the worst Halloween ever. 

After I got all the tests returned to the kids and turned in my trimester grades I hot-tailed it to the BigCity to eat a delicious hamburger before getting on a plane to Chimoio.

I've been in Chimoio for the past week at a mid-service training.  I think it was a training at least.  They called it training but really I think all we did was complain in depth about a variety of topics. 

1. Housing.  Dirty and roach infested. 
2. Transportation.  Slow and unreliable at best. 
3. Schools.  Unorganized and a heartbeat away from anarchary at any second. 
4. Coworkers.  Incomprehensible and unreliable. 
5. Food.  Some people don't have it. 
6. Water.  How far is YOUR waterpump?

We've all been at site for almost 5 months and have had our MINDS BLOWN with how different Mozambique is than our lives in the US.  Though complaing and comparing battle-scars is not productive per-se it was good for my mental health to know that the challenges I was having were not specific to me. 

After we finished complaining and everyone felt a bit better we had a seminar about literacy in Mozambique to really put everything in perspective.  This country is as challenging and sometimes incomprehensible as it is beautiful.  The statistics were sobering.  They tested 3600 2nd and 3rd graders in two northern provinces and only 180 of those kids could actualy read.  86% of them couldn't recognize a single letter.  That means that they may know the alphabet but when presented with printed letters out of order they couldn't name them.  Now I understand why some of my 8th graders still can't read.  Good news though, there's a program that will give us books and training to open a library and reading program at our sites. 
Kim and I are going to apply so hopefully we can get our hands on some of those books. 

The rest of the conference time we spent eating food.  So much food.  So much delicious food.  So much delicious food that I didn't cook.  Last night I ate squid stuffed with ground beef and hotdogs.  I LOVE this country.

I'll be chilling in Chimoio for a few more days before I head back south.  I expect to spend the next 3 days at the office using the internet to upload pictures to projectnoah.org