Journal Entry September 21

I just need to write about something that happened tonight. One of the chemistry teachers, Aman (sp?) came to my house about some university English homework. I invited him inside to work on it together but then I realized he wanted me to do the homework for him (there were several pages) and later he would pick it up and I would explain it to him (which means I would do it for him, and then when he comes to pick it up later he tells me he is busy and I’ll explain it to him “later”). So I asked him “isn’t it you’re work?” and then I offered to help him through it right then. I looked at the first page and it was tough - there were sentences using the conditional and subjunctive tenses which I still struggle through after nine months of being immersed in Portuguese. But I tried to help him as much as I could and we worked through several problems. It was difficult because the questions were way above his skill level and he was not confident enough in his English to try to construct the sentence by himself.

Before we even made it through the first page he asked me if my hired worker - Chris - knew English. “Yeah“, I said. “He’s from Zimbabwe“. So Aman calls Chris over to help him. Chris had been cooking dinner for me in the kitchen. I had an idea of where this was going so I left and continued cooking in the other room. About 5 minutes passed and Aman was already outside my house, on his way back home. “Yeah, I gave it to Chris and he’ll complete it. I’ll pick it up later and he can explain it to me. In the meantime I can work on spelling and how to write”.
“OK” I said. “Boa noite”. I walked back into the kitchen to talk with Chris, who thanked me for continuing to cook dinner.

“Thank you” I said. “It looks like you have some new homework.” I explained to him that I won’t do other people’s work - I’m willing to help people as much as it takes to get the work done but I rarely have to because people usually give up before then. All they want is the answers, they don’t care about learning. “He’s just lazy”.

“Yeah, people here are lazy. He grew up copying and not doing his work and he‘ll continue to do the same thing. He won‘t change.” It was sad but true. Chris later told me he didn’t mind doing other people’s work because he would end up learning from it. “It’s their own loss. I get to learn from the work.” It seemed like an incredibly insightful thing to say from someone still in high school who had grown up in Zimbabwe and been living in Mozambique for two years. Granted the education system in Zimbabwe was a lot better (not sure about it now that Mugabe is really messing things up) but I still wouldn’t expect someone else in Chris’s place to view things so… lucidly. But Chris has a way of surprising me like that. He has his dull moments, but his sharp ones, too. After all, he did win the regional science fair ;)