When we arrived in my village on that first day – I'd come up from Maputo with my housemate and the director of my school – the first thing that we did was drive to the house where I would live. And the first thing I remember seeing as I got out of the car: a funnel of wind only about a yard in diameter, but as tall as I could see, hit the sand, sucking up a plastic bag, dust, dry leaves and other detritus from the gully – a chivurivuri, I recently learned it is called in local dialect.
That was 10 and some months ago. Since, I've started teaching 8th and 11th grade biology (human physiology and taxonomy – what, in the States would be called evolutionary biology – respectively). I've made friends. My Portuguese has improved. I've learned to speak some of the local dialect. I've fixed up the house – building a fence for the yard and garbage pit, planting a garden and some fruit trees.
That first night, we didn't stay in that house. Someone was still painting it ... it'd be ready tomorrow. And so I slept in one of the village's rented rooms, where I sat up most of the night, sweating. The fan mounted to the wall didn't turn on. The heat of the tin roof was so strong it was audible. The metal sheets winced and writhed and pulled at the nails holding them in place.
That was my first impression of this little village: It's hot here. I walked everywhere I could those first days, trying to figure out what and where this place is, how it lays. Within a couple of hours, I, the white man in town, became the bright-red man. When I finally settled into my new home, we didn't have any furniture. I sat on the concrete floor, where it was cool. Unpacking, I opened a box of medical supplies that the Peace Corps gave me and saw that the chemical-dot single-use thermometers that I'd recieved had all peaked at 104 degrees.
I spent most of that first day on the cool cement of our porch. While sweat dripped off of my nose, my feet and legs stayed comfortable. When a couple of boys saw us, their new neighbors, they came over to say hello. So did their neighbors. And their neighbors. Soon, there were 30 kids sitting in the sand alongside the porch. I was glad for the welcome. We talked. I asked them how old they were, if they went to school, what they liked to do – the kind of things you talk about with young kids. We talked about the yard, the heat, the weekend – the kind of things that you talk about with your neighbors. And then – then, we ran out of things to talk about. And 30 little kids sat in the sand in front of my porch and stared silently at their new, white (well, once white, now red) neighbors. It was no use to go inside – it was hotter in the house, and, there was no place to sit, anyway.
A lot has changed since those first days here. I thought about that this afternoon as Matias and Luis, a couple of those little boys who stared at us so many hours that first day sat on my front porch playing with a set of Duplos that my family sent me. “Teeeee-chah,” they called to me when I opened the door. “Como está?”
