Last month, I spent a couple of weekends traveling to remote areas of the region of Mozambique where I live to check out communications projects – in these cases, in theater, photography, and journalism – going on in secondary schools there. The projects are supported by JOMA, a program that I've become quite involved with in the past year.
JOMA, a sort-of acronym for Jovens para Mudança e Acção (Youth for Change and Action), is an organization founded by Peace Corps volunteers to support communications clubs in theater, photography, journalism, and community art (like mural-making) in Mozambican secondary schools. JOMA focuses not so much on teaching students technical skills in a specific medium, though it does teach students necessary fundamentals - for example in photography, of such concepts as composition and how to take portraits. Rather, it focuses on using communications clubs as means to develop communications skills, self-esteem, leadership capabilities, and a sense of civic responsibility in young men. JOMA provides manuals, funds, and a yearly training conference staffed by Mozambican communications professionals to clubs in schools across the country. The clubs themselves are facilitated by Peace Corps volunteers who work as teachers in these schools.
Until classes ended about two weeks ago, I worked with a handful of students to put together a weekly school newspaper at my high school. I've written about this before, though I often referred to my work with photography. What began as an experiment in teaching a few of my students how to take photos in my first months here became, eventually, a newspaper for our school. The newspaper, which is really a news-wall, existed before I arrived at the school (then, as now, under the moniker Jornal Despertar - The Wake Up Journal). The professor who normally advised the student newspaper, however, was overwhelmed with his course load this year (50 teaching hours/week) and I fell into his normal role, bringing to the newspaper with me the students I was teaching to take photos. The students of Jornal Despertar made great changes this year: publishing their handwritten stories on the news-wall once a week instead of every few, adding an Opinion section, and learning lessons such as how to write headlines, leads, organize stories, and chose which stories to publish. We spent a lot of time talking about ideas such as perspective and stereotypes, and the social function of the media. JOMA provided us funds for pens, paper and a couple of cameras and invited us to their annual conference. And the students, all incredible kids, enjoyed it perhaps as much as I did.
Lately, I've become involved with JOMA administratively, helping develop teaching materials that are best suited to our students. That's how I went to see the theater group at a mission school in the bush of Mangunde; the journalism project in Buzi village, where, earlier this year a hippopotamus left the river and wandered through the village (giving the students something to write about); and the photography project at a mission school in in the sandy boondocks of Barrada.
---
To get to Barrada, I took a chati, a small wooden boat with an outboard motor, that serves as public transportation to small villages down the coast from Beira. In Beira, the boats board at the Praia Nova, an amazing stretch of sand scattered with old wooden boats torn apart by the tides and rotted through with salt; a beach bustling with fishermen selling their freshest catches and women selling crates of fruits and vegetables to voyagers of long distances. Most vividly, I will remember this beach as perfect white sand littered with crushed tomatoes.
Waiting for the boat, I met a woman butchering meat on the beach. When I asked, she told me that the meat came from a stingray. I told her that I must have misunderstood. What? Yes, stingray. She swore to me that she caught it from a dugout canoe with a hook in line in the bay. I must have grinned funny, looking at the pink-white pieces of meat in the sand. You don't believe me – she grinned, too – I'll prove it to you. And so she reassembled an entire stingray from the sandy slabs until she constructed what reminded me of a phrenological map (this, the generous area; this, the greed area...) of a stingray. A few feet away in the sand, she reached to grab a tail and laid it in it's proper place (this the pain area) as a finishing touch. That, she said, is a stingray. Take a picture of it and show it to your family, too. (And so I have).
