THREE moves?

The Saturday-Kid's program started last Saturday.  I rolled out of bed around 7, drank some tea, jumped in the bucket and then headed on down the road.  As I was walking towards the village I passed a few fellow professors.

"Oh....we have a meeting today, don't we?"  I asked
"Yes.  Where are you going?"
"Uhhh I didn't know we had a meeting," because, as usual NO ONE TOLD ME! "I'm headed into the village to meet Prof. Luis."
"Then you should go to the village, it's not a problem to miss the meeting"

Ok, so I wasn't heart broken to miss the meeting, but a little confused why Luis would schedule the Saturday Kids meetings for the same time as the Professor meetings.  Or maybe...I understand EXACTLY why he would.

Mozam-meetings are the WORST.  The Worst, you guys.  Everyone shows up 35 minutes late.  Then they sit around and gossip for an hour.  Then we do the 5 minutes of work the meeting was called for--in this case it was a planning meeting--so we have to copy a few sentences from one form to another, sign it and put it into our discipline-binders. Done.  After that the Pedagogical director speaks for 30 minutes then we're done.  2 hours, for 35 minutes worth of work.  Ugh.

When I got to the park there were a handful of older kids hanging around.  Most of them were my 8th grade students.  Even though it was a Kids-Meeting it was still a MOZAM-Kids-Meeting, so we still had to wait the customary 35 minutes to an hour for everyone to actually show up.  Luckily Serge had brought jump ropes so the waiting wasn't too excruciating.  I blew their minds when I demonstrated a Criss-Cross move (which is the actual name in Portuguese...no translation necessary).  Then, they blew MY mind with a synchronized jump rope routine.  They did moves I didn't even know existed.

All at once, like a flash mob, the park was INUNDATED with criancas.  I have no idea where they came from or how Mozambicans manage to be so synchronized in their disorganization, but suddenly the park was  hopping.  There were kids playing volleyball, soccer, doing cartwheels (I cringe...watch out for the broken glass kids!).  I got sent to play chess with a couple of kids.  I was glad of this because I'm doing my best to maintain that I don't know how to play any sports--because I know I'll just embarrass myself.  However, chess? How bad can that be?  I know how to move the pieces.  Ok.

Except, turns out the kids here in Mboacity are LITTLE CHESS GENIUSES.  This kid, Junior, beat me in 3 moves. And then he beat me 4 more games in a row. Oh boy.

This is the park in town.  Serge and Luis were trying to decide if we should mandar the kiddos to tumba-tumba the grass (tumba-tumba is a verb and a noun to describe the action of hacking away at tall grass with a thing that looks like a dull machette), but they decided in the end that the grass would just go away after the kids run around enough.