Science Fair photos

1) Science Fair starts. More people showed up, but not that many more...
2) The first place winner explaining to the public how to run a calculator with several lemons (and no, the calculator isn't solar powered!)
3) The students went to town with my colored chalk. In front is also one of my favorite students who should have been a winner in the fair...
4) Explaining how to recharge batteries by boiling them? I'm still skeptic...
5) Which soil holds water the best?
6) Chris, vividly explaining distillation
7) The winners + me and my counterpart
8) All the participants. I swear, they are happier than they look.

Local Science Fair of Sussundenga

Science Fair (July 24)

The Secondary school of Sussundenga had its Science Fair today at the Joao Paulo Center (I rented a room owned by the Catholic Church). I have been planning and meeting with kids now for over a month so it was relieving that the day had finally came.


I started out meeting with the students every week and then as the big day approached we met twice every week. After the first meeting of constructing a giant timeline I taught the students about the scientific method over several meetings. I really tried hammering it into their brains that the scientific method has an order to it and it starts with a question. Almost all the students started off wanting to do a demonstration of some scientific concept they had learned about in class or read about – making glue for example. But this is not an experiment; it is just a procedure without real science. I encouraged them to think of a question (or use a question from the idea bank) that could be tested. It was difficult for students to think of a question that could be possibly resolved without many resources and using creativity all at the same time. However by the end I was satisfied by what most students had chosen to work on and impressed by others.

As the weeks went by I started to help each student with his/her own project. It was difficult enough to understand the Portuguese, let alone give advice on the science of the project and tips for kids who had no idea what the scientific method is. By the end though I figured out it was a lot easier if they came to me with something written down, that way I could read it at my own pace. My counterpart, Narciso (a Mozambican physics teacher) also helped a lot at meetings, although I have doubts about him running science fair without me after my service ends.

The last week the kids wrote up their reports and mounted them on cardboard for the public to see. I also had put up public notices around town and talked to the director at my school about coming.

The day of the science fair I woke up and was very happy to see that it was sunny outside, since it was raining the day before. I rode to town early to open the center where we were doing science fair so the students could set up their projects (we didn’t have it at the school since it’s kind of far from town and there’s not really a big enough room). I had no idea how many people would show up to watch, or even how many kids would participate since I had also invited another school but hadn’t heard back from them.

Students slowly trickled into the center as well as people who wanted to watch. Two teachers from the other secondary school showed up and told me no one was going to participate from their school. That made things simpler. My counterpart showed up, as well as Bao and Meghann (PCVs from Buzi and Catandica, respectively. I had been a judge at the Catandica science fair the week before and now Meghann was returning the favor. Bao was our photographer.) My counterpart told me that one of the judges, his friend who worked at the hospital, couldn’t make it. This is a textbook example of what can go wrong during an event like this. No problem, Professor Tomas was there, who was more qualified to judge anyway, and more than happy to judge projects. One of the chefes from the Direcção Distrital came, possibly the most important VIP at the fair (the Director of my school never came, gave some excuse later). I thought it was telling when we shook hands and he immediately commented on a movie a teacher was holding, some action flick with a shirtless dude on it. Yes, it is a good film.

I think there were about 10 people in the audience when we decided to start. I was disappointed that more people didn’t show up – many people had told me they would and I thought the color advertisement in the market would really get some attention. As the fair went on though we picked up more people, maybe until about 25 total.

For some reason I still do not understand, it is required that the most important person does the opening for the science fair, even if he or she had nothing to do with the organization of the fair and probably knows nothing about science. So the chefe of the Direcção Distrital started us off. I don’t really know all that he said but there seemed to be a lot of rambling. Next I asked if I could say something, and nervously gave a speech (I suck at public speaking) I had prepared first by writing in English and then translating to Portuguese with the help of Chris, my empregado / helper. I quixotically spoke of the future of Mozambique and the joy that science can give, even to someone who doesn’t have a job in science.

Science fairs in Moz run a little differently than in the states. Students have already completed their projects but they like to re-create the experiment, if possible, for the public. I think it makes things more interesting for the public, too, and having each student present individually allows them to practice their public speaking skills. After the student presents the judges and the public can ask questions, but I am going to change this to only judges next year. I got really tired of wasting time having students answer ridiculously pedantic questions like what is the chemical formula of X, etc. The kids don’t really have that many resources anyway, and I was more interested in the design of the experiment – why they did what they did.

First place was given to a 10th grader who did a project on generating energy from different metals in lemons. He showed that by using many lemons he could power a calculator. I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t more creative (essentially read the project description from wiki) but his presentation was good and research was thorough. He had come to me a lot for help, which I don’t feel guilty about because I helped everyone who came to me.

Chris, my friend / helper was also a winner. He had distilled dirty water which was cool, but what I found most impressive was that he proved it was pure by showing that the water was clearer, didn’t have a salty taste, and didn’t conduct electricity (the last one is admittedly my idea). His presentation was thorough and crowd-pleasing but I was disappointed when he didn’t answer my question correctly about why he used a light to show that the water was pure. I think he knew but students here are very unused to getting open-ended questions.

I don’t really know what else to say. I hope the kids got something useful out of it. The provincial-level science fair will take place in Chimoio on August 28.

falling behind

So I'm falling behind in blog posts. I'm on vacation right now (school has ferrias) in Northern provinces so it's been hard to do email / blog. I'm writing this post from Russel's Place in Pemba city. Tomorrow will be diving or snorkeling, then possibly going on a legendary journey for the biggest crabs in the world.

Before I left Suss I also had a science fair for the secondary school. I'll just say now that it went about as well as it could.

More soon...

Journal entry 7/11/10

I will write about going to church today, since it isn’t something I have done in Suss yet and that’s about the only noteworthy thing that happened this Sunday.

I don’t really know why I decided to go, it was a kind of perfect storm of events. I guess the main reason is this pastor has been bothering me to go since the time I met him way back when I was still running by my old house. He sent me a funny text message yesterday: “I want to say halo dave I am longing for you can I invite you tomorrow for a Sunday church plz dave”. The guy was longing for me. How can I not go to his sermon?

So I got there at 10:00 this morning – the church is actually attached to the police station – and before I entered the building I could hear the chanting. There were four people inside pacing back and forth with eyes closed, saying some prayers or something rapidly in Shona and Portuguese. More people showed up and started chanting. It was kind of creepy being in an echo-y building with people chanting, not really sure what was being said.

Next there were a lot of Hallelujahs. They don’t get tired of them. Pastor Magara introduced me to everyone (there were maybe 30 people) and thanked me. Then he started preaching. It was interesting that there were three languages being used – Shona mostly, but it was being translated into Portuguese by a helper, and also Magara kept throwing in some English here and there. Trilingual sermons - something you don’t see in the US.

As the minutes trudged on my mind began to wander, although I was trying to pay attention to the Portuguese translation to improve my listening. However I couldn’t help thinking about other things. One thing that leapt out at me was that the Shona word for church is, well, church (or chuch). So this would imply that there were no churches here before the Europeans arrived. I wonder if Magara or anyone else has thought about this before. It seems a little ironic that they are having the sermon in Shona but no one stops to think that, although they are using their mother tongue, this is not their mother religion (traditional, that is). Reminds me of the time in Namaacha when I was looking through my host father’s illustrated bible which was written in Shona but all of the people in it were white.

I was also thinking about how the belief of an individual is really a product of a person’s upbringing. Here I am, an atheist in a church, everyone else is a devout believer. I can’t see why people would do otherwise though, because we are humans and we do what our family and our community does. If a kid sees his mom and community members in church every Sunday, why wouldn’t he do the same? We all need to belong.

But for some reason, be it an accident or a new culture of un-believers, I do not believe in God. Maybe I found a way to belong to something outside of believing in God. (I can think of one friend in kindergarten who didn’t believe in God, thanks Evan.)

Sometimes I do envy people who believe in God. In my life I want to have a wide range of experiences, but I’m thinking believing is not one I will have the pleasure to enjoy. I looked around the church and some people were just so happy, so emotional. One woman was brought to tears while chanting. However believing can probably bring about problems as well, namely confusion and horrible inconsistency. Anyway it doesn’t matter either way for me at least. I am set in my ways and am incapable, as far as I know, of changing. Even if I truly wanted to believe, the problem is I am so sure I’m right.

So by the end of the sermon my head hurt from trying to understand the Portuguese translation and I had Magara’s voice ringing in my ears. When I commented to Chris that maybe Pastors speak so loud because it is the power of God, Chris disagreed and said it’s because “they think that God is so far away”. Hah! After Magara blessed a bunch of people it was just about time to leave, but first he had to ask me something. Magara spoke to everyone and thanked me multiple times for coming, then he said he had discussed with his helper how great it would be if I could give sermons because white people are so respected here. He asked if I would work with him, giving sermons. I was thunderstruck… I’m also positive I’ve told Magara I don’t believe in Jesus. I declined and said I wasn’t the right man for the job but thank you for the offer.

So that’s the story of how I failed at religious revival but was offered to become a pastor in the process.

Go go Science Fair!

This morning was the first big science fair meeting. Yesterday my counterpart Narcisio and I went into all of the morning turmas (10,11,12 grade) and announced that science fair was starting. For the first meeting I decided we should do something fun so I figured we could make a timeline of the universe. That night Chris and I spent a while in the school office typing up a list of events that I wanted to put on the timeline (birth of the universe, first humans, independence of Mozambique, etc). I woke up and went to the office to see if the printer had really ran out of ink. Indeed it had, and I was writing up the table by hand before a secretary came and put in new ink cartridges. Phew. I sat down and pretended to be thinking about planificação for about 3 minutes and then prepared for the meeting. Oh, I also saw my pedagogical director and counterpart Jamal, who I think has returned from a month-long vacation.

When we started I was disappointed when it was just me, Caetano, Albino, Hilario, and one other student. But when we went over to the (unfinished) basketball court Narcisio joined us and a bunch of other students. Now it was beginning to look like a real club, which was a little rewarding I guess. We started and in my broken Portuguese I tried to explain what a timeline was and how most of the dates of the events on the timeline had to be figured out by scientists since no one was alive to write it down. I talked about the sun, the closest star to the Earth, and said it was part of a group of stars called the Milky Way. Any scientific question can be tried to be solved with the scientific method. Even the biggest question – how the universe was born – is at least partially solved by scientists. I explained that scientists saw these groups of stars, or galaxies, moving away from each other. If they are moving away from each other now, in the past they must have been closer together. This leads scientists to believe that the universe started from a very hot, dense point. About this time my counterpart Narcisio was away talking on the phone but I did notice some students nodding their heads. I had passed out three copies of the list of events that had the date, name, and description of each event, and now it was time to make the timeline.

Making the timeline was more difficult for the students, and less interesting, than I had anticipated. In retrospect, I guess I could have gone with 1mm = 1 million years, but I thought 2 mm = 1 million years was easy enough. I ended up doing the measuring but after some motivation and coercion I had a couple kids helping me make the timeline as others sat around doing nothing. My counterpart had left for I don’t know what, I think he said something about a call from Maputo. When we finished I wanted to read every event from start to finish, but by then people weren’t really interested I think (it was 11:00 and we started at about 9:30). I was so concerned with everything else I think I actually forgot to stand back for a moment and look at the 28 m string and think about the history of the universe.

By the end I was exhausted (without eating breakfast – my fault more than anything else) and I realized people probably wanted to go home. I failed to explain enough about the science fair – I just told them to come next week with three questions about any scientific topic, but I didn’t give enough information about what is science fair and the scientific method, or sample questions which could have helped them since the kids aren’t really that curious or creative. I thought that the kids would be more interested in the project, and I guess I mistook my own interest and awe in the age of the universe as the inevitable interest of the students. It may have been with some, such as Albino who is one of my favorite students and an incredibly motivated and smart person, but with most it was not so. Most students had never heard of dinosaurs. Some of them did not know that man had walked on the moon (I showed them a picture on my laptop). The events I had chosen for the timeline weren’t very interesting because the students did not understand most of them. I came away from the meeting feeling disappointed and with a feeling of failure. It had not met my expectations but then again I was expecting too much. I need to remind myself the amount of knowledge that students have here. A better project would have been a science experiment (maybe a flashy chemical reaction) to demonstrate the scientific method. These kids do not have the mental tools to fully appreciate something like a timeline of the universe or a tree of life. And I can not foolishly assume that students will be impressed with the same thing that I am.

Perhaps the trick is finding what interests them, what grabs their attention, and then bending their interest to my will…

Guebuza came, and a lobolo

1) Guebuza, the President of Mozambique came to Sussundenga. Yes, the president. It was pretty exciting. The banner reads Children of Sussundenga salute Papa Guebuza.
2) There were TONS of people at the house where Guebuza was staying for the night. The school children were dancing and there was music playing until the guards told everyone to go away because we were making noise.
3) I went to the lobolo of my friends mom and step-father last weekend. A lobolo happens after a marriage and the mans family gives money (or many times and this case alcohol) to the family of the woman. Some words are spoken and then the fun commences.
4) My friend Caetanos step-dad on the left and me.
5) The bride and groom. Caetano is in the middle. Yes, his step-dad is offering whiskey to his mom in the picture. I now know why Caetano is such a goofy guy.

My day today

To give people a sense of what my daily life is like. It's not always this busy.

• Woke up at 9:00. It’s the latest I’ve slept in for a while.
• Quickly checked email, fb, and nytimes on my nokia 2630
• Was walking to the market when I realized I didn’t have any credit to call Brian so I went to the shop by the school (centro social de esperança) to buy credit.
• Turned out the shop had egg sandwiches so I ate breakfast there as well as chatted with Brian
• Decided to walk to the mato-market anyway to buy leaves for dinner, onion, and tomatoes. Also bought two wire-y things to try and ground my electric stove that always shocks me.
• Planned for chemistry class
• Taught chemistry class. I have first period of the afternoon on Thursday and about half the class comes in late.
• Went home and spent 15 minutes playing around with eurotalk learn Shona before realizing it was pretty useless.
• Did some exercises and took a bucket-bath. It smelled like pee in my shower because a primary school kid snuck in and used it. He could have at least used the other side, but then again I did realize the latrina-side is a mosquito breeding pit this morning when there were about 30 on the wall next to the hole. I really need to do something about that.
• Cooked pasta and red sauce for lunch.
• Got a text from Nelson, my JOMA counterpart asking if I was at the school so I left lunch to meet him there. We went to his house and picked up the Moz-soft CD with the JOMA manual on it and I installed Adobe acrobat and Lingoes dictionary on his new computer.
• Nelson and I chatted while I ate lunch at my house. It was good to have company while I ate. He was telling me about how the higher-up direction of the school is against the teachers. I didn’t really catch all of it because that part of the conversation was in Portuguese. Something about teachers having different diplomas.
• We went to the school together to print the JOMA manual. I was glad the secretaries were kind enough to let us use all that paper. (Nelson also asked to take some paper for home haha).
• I biked down to the Oficina Pedegogica for my English class. With no time to plan (and some admitted procrastination) I only had a general sense of what I would teach before I went.
• Taught English class. Turns out my students like writing dialogues. I also discovered the wrong way to teach comparisons in English.
• Stopped by the market on my way home. I love it when there are potatoes.
• Got home and discovered Chris had already cooked dinner but was gone for the moment. I played some violin until he got back.
• Ate dinner (leaf curry – something called repe) and watched part of “The Goonies” with Chris. God I haven’t seen that movie in a long time.
• Chris left to prepare for a test tomorrow
• I read some Alistair Reynolds for a bit and now I’m writing this entry.