The 1st of June is International Children’s Day. This is not a well-known holiday or event in the United States. In the relatively urban areas of Mozambique, children spend an afternoon doing school dances and having a lunch and special celebration. In the rural areas, this holiday wreaks havoc on the academic calendar. Kids in the rural areas basically take charge and assert their collective willpower. In the weeks leading up to the 1st of June in the community where I stayed in Maganja da Costa district, kids in the 5th through 7th grades who normally walk 5km to school decided to stop going to class and dance with the primary school kids in the small school 1km away. The professors stopped holding class for these students, since they didn’t know what to do to bring the children back to school. Every afternoon, kids in 1st through 4th grade would end classes early with their professors and begin practicing dance routines for the June 1st celebrations. Not a whole lot of academic learning took place in the weeks leading up to the holiday (kids normally have class either in the morning or in the afternoon).
On the actual holiday, my host family came to my newly installed door and informed me that unfortunately the wild bird that a man up the road had been raising and that they tried to buy for our special celebration dinner, got away. So they gave me back the $3 worth of Meticais that I had given them and suggested that we use half of the money to buy a hen from our neighbor instead. I agreed, and about half an hour later João (pseudo. for the 14yr. old boy in my host family brought me the live hen). It was my job as the buyer to pick up the hen and feel how heavy it was to see whether I would agree to spend the $1.80 to have it killed. I didn’t see any other chickens running around (it’s a massive chicken slaughter on Christmas, Easter and International Children’s Day here in the community), so I approved the kill and sent the bird to it’s fate.
A few minutes later the chief of the locality’s son rode up on a bicycle and handed me a handwritten invitation on notebook paper. I was a special guest at the festivities today, where the professors had organized a table for the guests to eat a late lunch in a covered area while other families ate in the shade of the mango trees, followed by front row seats for the children’s dances.
When I arrived, the chief greeted me and we waited for the professor to get the attention of the students and their parents, as we crammed into one of the school rooms (it began raining). After a brief greeting by the professor, the chief’s nephew stood and read an open letter to the community about the meaning of the holiday and the goals that he has for the community regarding the wellbeing of the children in the community. The Frelimo govt. has been involved in various programs to reduce the sexual abuse of children in Mozambique. Of particular concern is the high prevalence of teachers who sexually abuse their students. Several Peace Corps Volunteers who teach in local schools have told me that there are professors that are abusing young girls and manipulating the girls’ grades based upon whether they submit to the professor’s advances.
The chief steered away from this topic when his nephew sat down and when he decided to elaborate upon the open letter. He focused on the fact that no one from the community had completed 10th grade. There are a select few students who have passed 7th grade (note: this does not guarantee that they can read or write) and who were currently studying in 8th or 9th grade in Maganja village, but beyond that the levels of education are very low. He attributed this to the youth’s love of sex and the fact that so many girls were getting pregnant at the age of 14 and up. While he held young teenaged boys accountable too, he mostly proceeded to name specific girls who were currently not studying due to their being pregnant. After putting the burden of lower educational achievement on these visibly pregnant women’s bodies, he then asked me to stand.
Confused, I slowly stood up. He then explained that I was still studying and working to set up my life and work before having children and then asked me if I needed a man. Taking the question literally, I said “no”. He then made a jump of logic…that I must have never had sex to be 27, still in school and without any kids. While a moderate number of condoms are available to the population here, they are more often used as children’s bracelets or balloons than in protecting against STDs or pregnancy. Access to birth control, however, outside of the few traditional methods using specific plants known by curandeiros (“witch doctors”) and some older women for preventing pregnancy, is very limited. Unbeknownst to me, I was suddenly hailed as a 27 year old virgin in front of the entire community without him asking me if this was acceptable or appropriate to say.
When the speeches ended, families brought out their plastic containers and tin bowls and began eating the food that they had brought for the festivities. I tried to sit with my host family to eat a bit of the chicken that I bought, but I was called to the special table for “important guests”, where I was served pork and chicken with spaghetti and rice. The chief had brought me a beer all the way from Maganja but I had to give it to another person at the table, since I do not drink while I’m in the community unless it’s to taste someone’s homemade cachasso and tell them what a nice job they did on their brew.
The dancing began with a series of practiced songs and moves in which older girls did more complicated moves than the lines of younger girls. Some boys also joined the ranks of dancers. Community members placed coins, juice, biscuits and sweets in a bowl in front of the dancers to show their appreciation (the dancers later divided these among themselves). Eventually members of the community joined in some of the dances, but the rain intensified and what would have been a celebration into the late night hours ended at around 6:30pm. Most parents and adults were wasted by that point. The following morning all of the children didn’t show up for school. In the rural areas the kids just collectively decide they need a 2-week vacation after this International Children’s Day. On the first day of playing hookey, the parents are too hung over or drunk to tell their kids to go to school. In the next few days the kids tell their parents that there is no school and the parents, most of whom haven’t completed 4th grade, believe them and do not force them to go to school. The professors know about this widespread practice in the rural areas and decide not to hold class (discouraging any child who did show up to learn, from coming the next day). After about 2 weeks of this standoff, the chief and other community leaders make announcements in church, so that parents know they need to motivate their kids to go back to school. Eventually classes resume, with kids in the rural areas way behind the national curriculum, a curriculum that they are behind in anyway due to the fact that education in Mozambique is officially only in Portuguese, when these rural kids barely speak Portuguese as a second language and have professors who are from other areas of the country who do not speak the local language.
In total we are talking about 4 weeks of missed opportunities to learn in class in May and June…and the collective willpower of rural students.
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