On Saturday, two weeks ago, I caught a 5AM chapa from the vila where I live to the Junta in Maputo. The Junta is a large open lot of dirt and intersecting roads, crowded with chapas and machibombos (larger busses, like Greyhounds) coming from and going to nearly every city in Mozambique. Among the chapas, men hawk homemade bajias (fried, breaded bean paste – tastes like a Chicken McNugget), sandwiches, Tupperware containers of fried meat, cookies, pens, Coca-Cola and cell phone minutes.
I took a chapa to a city in the southern Gaza province. It took three hours. We fit 24 people in the 15 passenger van. I sat on the bench in the back, next to a kind man who told me how to comfortably keep my bag on my lap and to shut the bus window when he saw ninjas (Mozambican pickpockets) outside, sticking their hands inside and into passengers' bags.
I spent the week until Wednesday with an English teacher volunteer there. I stayed at the volunteer's house and accompanied him to school, where he was proctoring final exams for his classes. A couple of Mozambican teachers showed me how they keep grades in the school's pautas and I spent some afternoons playing games in the Speak Up Project room with English students.
The Speak Up Project, the creation of another volunteer, is a school room stocked with English books and games that students use as a hang-out and study space between classes. Students speak English after they enter the room – for some, it is their only regular practice outside of class. They goof off in English. I watched two Mozambican boys play chess; one took the other's glasses and put them on his own face and said, “Do I...Do I look handSOME?”
