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Hello again,

There have been some developments here, and although the rest of our year here isn’t completely secure we’re OK for the next couple of months.

Our project has been suffering financially and the future was looking uncertain, to the extent that courses after April were looking unlikely. Although it could be worse: we have heard that a boarding school project in Chile has burned to the ground recently, making our problems seem relatively unimportant. During a visit from a Project Trust representative it was suggested that, to save money (we have halved our monthly rent from $600 to $300), we move the Learning Centre into our three-bedroom house. Less then a fortnight later that had happened, and for the past three weeks we have been living and teaching in the same house. At least its now a very short walk to work!

However, at the moment we are still only looking at one more course. The contract for our accommodation is up at the end of June and there is no more money in the charities account to renew it or pay for more courses to take place. Our flight back to the UK is on 13th August however, so we will have a little time to fill before then.

My second English course finished in March, and I am pleased to say that only two out of ten students who took the final test passed, although one only made it through on exactly the pass mark, and then only after a resit! This course went a lot better then my first one, which I taught last year. My Portuguese has much improved as well as my confidence, and this allowed my teaching strength to improve. I am looking forward to this third and final course, and have already developed some ideas on how to improve my teaching further.

My current Computing class is not, unfortunately, going as well. Since moving to the Centre, and even before, attendance was a major problem. The class is made up of six students from EDM, the national electricity company, and so have had frequent work related commitments. As a result, I can only foresee one of them even passing the course at the moment, although most of them are actually more then capable. They have already had a one-week extension to the course and have failed to take advantage of it, so there’s little more I can do.

We are registering students for the new courses this week. Computing has, as always, proved very popular, and filled up very quickly, in about four hours in fact! There are currently about ten students for English, which is a good number. They are however currently spread over three classes, which is less then ideal, but I will wait and see what uptake is like over the rest of the week. We have been doing our maths (since starting teaching Computing I have really begun to enjoy playing with spreadsheets!) and calculated that at the moment we are expecting to get $350 from the small fee students pay. This is enough for one months rent.

Outside of the classroom (and as that’s our house as well now we have to find excuses to get out!) last weekend was a particularly interesting one. It was my partner’s birthday on 17th April, and he shares this birthday with another British guy working out here. To celebrate we organised a barbeque at his house, which was a pleasant evening. Dancing is usually a big things at these types of evenings here, and I tried to get things going by asking Fatima, one of the workers in the office, to teach me how to dance. She reluctantly accepted after some coercion from her friends, and so we started dancing, but she got cold feet when her boss arrived at the party and left me! No one else followed us up to dance, so perhaps it was just as well. After the barbeque the evening carried on to Fazenda, a disco, and there was plenty of dancing going on there.

The following evening was a leaving party for Mel, another British woman out here. Dancing at that party was a lot more successful, largely down to the higher percentage of locals there. Mel has been here for a couple of years and although her contract ended in January hasn’t quite got around to leaving yet. In theory though she will have left by the time you read this, although she has promised never to use the word definitely again.

A few weeks ago I finally made my first venture into a Mozambican church, and I’m much regretting not going sooner. I was invited to go by a Christian couple out here, and we walked the short distance to an Anglican church not too far out of town but surrounded on most sides by mud huts. The sermon was completely lost on me unfortunately, not only the Portuguese but a quiet speaker as well. As I was familiar with the Parable of the Lost Son already, I was able to follow the reading in the Portuguese Bible, and a lot of the words in the hymns seemed to make sense, even if not all the sentences did. The singing from the choir in Makua, one of the local languages, was superb as well, and it was great to see so much enthusiasm. Because of the lack of facilities for printing a newsletter or a notice board the notices went on for a long while, it seems the congregation was unhappy with the non-existent efforts of the previous weeks cleaning rota!

Shortly before the moving of the Centre we invited Constantino, the Mozambican computing teacher we work with, and his family to dinner. He turned up half an hour early, but fortunately we were pretty much ready. It was a mixed evening, with our limited Portuguese, his limited English and his quiet children, but the conversation flowed fairly well and they seemed to approve of my cooking too. It was the first time we had invited any of the locals into our house and I was quite nervous at the time, but it well and we enjoyed the evening.

During the preparation for the aforementioned birthday part we had the opportunity to go to his home, a mud hut just outside the main town. It is a very small house for a two-child family, especially as it is crammed with a large music system, computer and television (which I’m not convinced works). You would struggle to sit three people in the ‘living room’ together, not that there is that many chairs to sit on. We also saw the new house he is building, just a short walk from where he currently is.

He saved for two years to get the £200 he needed to buy the 1000m² of land, and has been building the house slowly since the beginning of 2003. At the moment it is a brick shell with a roof, although we tells us he does own the windows and doors. There are three bedrooms, a living room, dinning room, kitchen and toilet, which are all currently empty, and the living room opens on to a balcony with a wonderful view over the Mozambican countryside. All being well he hoped to move in at the end of this year, and after that the plan is to demolish the old house and build a new one for his children when they are older. I admire his ambitions and also his patience to build a house over the course of four years.

I hope you all had a pleasant Easter. We were only just aware that it was happening and ‘celebrated’ briefly by decorating some normal chickens eggs with board markers. Tim then proceeded to smash them as he prepared our lunch.

I have noticed my updates have been increasing in length recently, so I have tried to make this one a little shorter. If your still reading I’m glad to see I have maintained your interest until the end! Oh, and the good news is: the rainy season has finished. Every time I say that it rains again of course, but it seems the umbrellas all over town have finally been put away until October.

Até já,

Nic

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