Mozambique blog 11

Yesterday, as some of our students would say, we were biz. Portuguese seems easily to lose the ends of words: greetings in the latter part of the day are usually heard as boa tard and boa noit without the final e. So at Khovo we are often told that our students have been too biz to come to the lesson; and knowing that we too are biz people make frequent offers of coff to see us through the day.

Apart from working on this Sunday’s service, yesterday we had a session with Ernesto looking at how to develop prayer partnerships with our Synod, and also were part of the lunchtime celebrations to mark the opening of the Sewing Project – which I will write up separately for the main part of the website. But for Hillian and me the main event was our final English lesson.

We’ve been offering these lessons for less than five weeks – one group in the morning and one in the afternoon.  So the perfect attender (and I think there may be just one or two) will not have spent much more than twenty hours with us: hardly doing more than scraping the surface. All our students have been workers at Khovo, the Church HQ, or somehow or other attached to it, and they have ranged in age from early twenties up to sixty. Everyone has had some English already – but needless to say (and a challenge to the teachers) these have been very much mixed ability classes.

When I began (a few days before Hillian joined me) the first shock was the formality of the setting, which was matched by the students’ expectations. The small classroom was set out with desks – those very old fashioned ones with chairs attached, so that there was absolutely no chance of moving the furniture round and sitting in a circle. Not that they would have wanted that. When I started the lesson by trying what I hopefully imagined was the Berlitz method of direct conversation, I was shouted down: everything was to be written in chalk on the blackboard!

But somehow we have slotted into the system. We’ve gone through the auxiliary verbs, to be and to have and all the rest of them ad nauseam.  I love doing the past simple of “to have” and saying to them “Isn’t English easy?” We’ve struggled over the days of the week: Portugal seems to have been the most Christian of nations, dismissing all heathen gods from its calendar, with the result that between domingo and sabado come days 2 to 6. We’ve tried to explain that though this may make it difficult for the students to learn a set of names, it is also difficult for the teachers to have to count up on their fingers to work out just what day it is in Portuguese.

Somehow, despite the rows of desks and the chalk and the blackboard, not to mention the sheer impossibility of the subject, we’ve had a lot of fun together. I’m not sure how much this is a different experience for our students, but I suspect we are really supposed to sit on a chair behind the teacher’s table rather than walk around the room and sit on the desks and generally make fools of ourselves acting some of the concepts out. I hope it’s been a refreshing experience for them all: at any rate, with a few exceptions they’ve continued to come. They’ve struggled with irregular verbs and inconsistent pronunciation and our inadequate explanations of when to use the perfect tense rather than the past simple. They may not have been as diligent as they could have been in working at it between lessons: but who am I to talk? I sort of worked my way halfway through Learn Portuguese in 13 Weeks, and yet haven’t dared to speak a word beyond “Estou bem, obrigado.”

And yesterday we were more than a little touched by the things said at the “Bye-bye session” – by the traditional gifts of kapulanas, and by the solemn assurances that they would follow Hillian’s advice and speak a little English to each other every day. Practise, practise, practise!

For people in Mozambique, of course, there is a real pressure to learn English which is much greater than our need while here to speak Portuguese. They are painfully aware that their country is effectively a Portuguese speaking island set in a sea of English: every surrounding nation has a British imperial history, all the way from South Africa up to Tanzania; and English is the unifying language spoken right across Southern Africa. Significantly Mozambique was the first nation that had not been part of the Empire to join the Commonwealth. In this post-colonial age, it is clear where it needs to belong.

But things are not easy for people like our students. Here in Maputo everyone speaks Portuguese, but that is far from being the case across the country. So there is need to reinforce Portuguese as the nation’s own unifying language, before ever turning to another European tongue. Most families speak local languages, such as Ronga or Shangana, at home; and it is only on starting school that children study Portuguese seriously, so that it becomes the language in which their whole education is offered. So by the time they are of secondary school age they will have had to become fluent in two languages before ever tackling English. It’s become clear to us that, not surprisingly, the quality of English teaching in schools can vary considerably; but even the best is not likely to bring the pupil to fluency before school days are over. No surprise then that there are English language schools all over the city. And the pastor who told me that he is taking English language lessons with a view to studying theology at a higher level is no doubt typical of people in all sorts of professions.

So we sadly said Goodbye to our students yesterday with all these thoughts in mind. They know that they need English, but they are realistic enough to know that they are not all going to reach the level of competence that they might wish. I would have liked to have done more to help them – but we did what we could in the time that we had. I hope that they will remember us as fondly as we will them.

John Durell