#javanhane

Guija is the capital of our little dusty district, but the nearby town of Javanhane is also getting an English teacher for the first time this next year. I have a lot of students from there (because their school only goes up to grade 10 – after that they come to Guija to complete grades 11 and 12) but I’ve never been there myself.

Last week I decided to go visit the new trainee (Rachel) at her site, and see the town for the first time.

I was chatting with some of my students, asking them about the town and how difficult transportation was. One of my sweeter students, Pedro, found out I was planning to go to “JavaCity” by myself for an afternoon, and said, “Oh, no, Teacher, you can’t do that. I’ll come with you and show you around.” And so it was planned that Pedro and I would go together and spend the afternoon in JavaCity, returning to Guija that same night.

Meet Pedro and his father.  Aren’t they adorable?

We left right after classes, meeting Rachel on her way back from doing banking in Chokwe. This was serendipitous because a storm the previous night had knocked out the power, and I wasn’t able to reach her phone. My plan was just to go to Javanhane and start asking around for the new teacher, but on our way to the chapa station we ran into her on the road. Thus began a series of unusual coincidences.

We delayed a little while showing Rachel around Guija and then waiting for the chapa to fill and leave, but the real problem was when we were stopped by the police about ten minutes outside of Guija. This is a common occurrence in Mozambique, and usually the chapa drivers pay a small bribe and everyone goes merrily on their way. This time however, the police decided to arrest our driver, prodding him into the back of their car with an AK47, and declining to call another chapa or explain any of this to the 20 or so people now stranded on the side of the road. Our cobrador (aka the 2nd in command of our chapa) said he didn’t know how to drive the bus, and didn’t have a phone or know the numbers of any other buses. Stranded indeed.

Pedro, Rachel, and I waited along the side of the road, but hasn’t been a lot of traffic since the road was destroyed by the flood four years ago. What used to be a 15 minute commute between Guija and Javanhane now takes easily over an hour, and what used to be a through road is now only used to access a few small villages.

A few other chapas passed us, but they were already full with their own passengers.

And so we waited.

In the end, we were picked up by, of all people, Pedro’s dad. He was on his way back from Macia where he was buying inventory to sell at their bakery.

All told, by the time we made it to Javanhane, it was after 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and I decided it would be best if we spent the night and left early the next morning.

Once there, the agenda was to see the town, visit Pedro’s family’s bakery, and see my student from last year, Piedade.

It turns out Javanhane is quite a lot like Guija, a dry and dusty farming village, just smaller and even more rural. There’s a reason my students refer to Guija as an urban center, even though it pales in comparision to places like Chokwe or Macia or Xai Xai. However, where Guija has a small vegetable market, Javanhane has one single stall, and whatever people sell out of their homes. Where Guija has a few stores in old Portuguese buildings lining the main street, Javanhane has nothing. Where Guija’s Secondary School has 10 classrooms, Javanhane has 4. Urban indeed.

Urban indeed.

Next we visited the home of my former student, Piedade. Piedade was my student in 11th grade last year, and she was one of my very best students. The kind of student who does all the homework and sits in the front of the class and answers every question. The kind of student where I feel like the lesson could easily turn into just a conversation between her and me, excluding the rest of the students if I wasn’t careful. She was amazing.

However, this year she didn’t come back to school. And while that’s a common enough story here in Mozambique, I wasn’t expecting it to happen to a student like her. It turns out she has a 4 year old son named Noe, and her parents had sent her to live in the house of her child’s father. Likely it was because the last year has been a difficult year for everyone, what with the drought and the inflation and Mozambique just generally going to hell in a hand basket, and they probably didn’t have the extra money to provide for her and send her to school in another town.

In any event, I was very curious to see her and see how she was doing in her new home. It turns out she’s living in the compound of her “husband’s” family, which is huge, a neighborhood unto itself. There are 8 sons in that family. But Piedade has her own one-room mud house with a nice bed in it, and she seems happy enough. I was a little worried for her because being the newest, youngest wife basically means you’re at the bottom of the family pecking order, but she seemed just like her old self. She introduced me to the family and showed me her house and pictures of her husband, and then, even though it was past 8 o’clock at this point and long dark, insisted that Pedro and Rachel and I eat a meal in her house. She took us inside and set a beautiful table for us by candle-light (the power was still out) and served us an impromptu meal of spaghetti and fried fish. It was beautiful.

Me with my students Pedro and Piedade, and her young son Noe

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Days like this remind me of one of the main reasons I love doing Peace Corps – namely that there are so many more new experiences here, and it helps me to be mindful and grateful. (And of course the personal connections, obviously – seeing Piedade again – but that’s always true.)

However, even in this foreign country all the way in Southeastern Africa, it’s still all too easy to get settled into a routine. Go to work, visit friends, cook food, live your life. And the thing is, it’s a good routine. It makes me happy. But still, having experiences like this reminds me how important it is to shake things up, to do something new purely for its own sake, even now with just a month left in Guija.

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Here are a few pictures of the bakery at Pedro’s house. It’s cool because it’s a wood-fired bakery, and supplies bread for the whole town.  We took these pictures at 5 o’clock in the morning as we were getting fresh bread before catching the bus back to Guija.

Preparing the dough that’s been rising overnight

Putting dough into the oven with a long paddle.

Bread baking

Taking it out

Fresh bread!

The burning wood. The coals are hot enough that when it was time to add a new log, it ignited instantly, despite being solid chunk of wood.

Constructing a second wood-fired oven