Ceremonies and the Start of School

One thing that I've noticed about Mozambicans is that they love routines, and one of their favorites is a good ceremony. There are ceremonies for almost everything, and they all follow a specific pattern. I will illustrate with the example of our Start of School Ceremony that took place today.

1. Ceremonies do not start on time.

I was told by my director yesterday that our ceremony would start today "around nine."  When I got to school, it was pretty much deserted. Of the few people that were there, everyone seemed to have something to do except me -- and when I asked if I could help, people just told me to go sit down and wait. So I sat and waited. And waited. And waited. I clearly have not gotten the hang of Mozambican time yet.

2. Ceremonies always involve parades and singing.

At half past ten, we walked down into the heart of the village and sat under a huge, leafy tree and waited for the administrator from the Ministry of Education to come so that we could march through the town to school together, singing a welcome song. All the village elders were gathered and seated on stools in front of the tree. The community members perched on the vast web of roots extending out from the enormous tree-trunk. Poppy decided that she really needed to sit smack in the middle of all the professors, and crawled over half of the townspeople to get there.

We were told that the representative of the Ministry of Education would be there daqui a nada ("in no time") and so we waited there for him a little more than an hour, only to find out he wasn't coming to the parade. The group trudged back to school, singing anyway (because why walk in silence when you can walk in song?) All the songs were in Nyungwe, so I only understood a few words and grammatical markers here and there -- to my Linguist Ears, the lyrics were thus:

"School" blah blah blah verb in the infinitive blah blah noun class blah
Blah "you" blah adjective marker blah blah third person pronoun
Blah blah "Mavudzi-Ponte" blah blah "Tete"
Yayayayayaya!

3. Ceremonies include Very Important People giving Very Important Speeches.

At the front of the biggest biggest classroom of the school, a long table stood draped in capulanas and the Mozambican flag with a row of seats for the guests of honor and the community elders. The ceremony began with a painfully slow rendition of the painfully long and painfully repetitive Mozambican National Anthem, followed by a wonderfully concise prayer by the church leader.

First the Pedagogical Director introduced himself and the director, and then all the teachers introduced themselves. My director had joked that he was going to make me sing "an American song" for everyone, and I was more than a little worried he wasn't joking -- but thankfully my introduction came and went without incident.

The director then went over statistics from last year -- how many students in the school, how many teachers, exam results, pass rates, etc.  He then gave an overview of what the challenges facing the school are and what they hope to achieve this year. More on that later, as it was very interesting and deserves its own post.

The rest was decidedly less interesting -- a really long series of speeches by people representing other people ("O Senhor is representing the Honorable and Glorious Assistant Vice Deputy Secondary Undersecretary of the Ministry of Who-Knows-What.") Thankfully, these speeches were in Portuguese, though I'm not sure if that helped or hurt my urge to fall asleep -- at least the polite clapping following each speech and was enough to jolt me temporarily back into wakefulness.

4. There are refrescos and lots of hand-shaking at the end.

I met a lot of people today, whose names I am expected to remember, but will not. My director is a jovial man, but has an unfortunate habit of pointing to random people and loudly saying "Pop quiz! What's his/her name?" and it's really embarrassing when I don't know -- which is the case most of the time. My colleagues are my priority and I'd say I have about half of their names down.

In any case, I met lots of important town and district people today who I wouldn't recognize tomorrow if they passed me on the street (so let's hope they don't!) At this point it was two hours past my normal lunch time and I was running on empty. Needless to say, when Redi told me I was free to go home for the day, I bolted.

And that was a typical Mozambican Ceremony. Now, the school year has officially begun, and classes start tomorrow. Ironically, I still don't have my class schedule, but that's apparently not a big deal because no one comes to school until the third week anyway. Lovely.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's report of my first day of teaching.