Those of you who know me, know that I am not the most patient person. In high school it used to drive me crazy how long Dena, my younger sister, used to take to shower before school. I do not like waiting around for things to happen, and I am usually busy doing three or four things at once.
In Mozambique, you are lucky if you do three or four things in a week.
Things move much slower here. Its really not a bad thing, but it took some getting used to. When I make a meeting for 10 AM, I am no longer surprised when we don't start until 11:30 or 12. I know see the value in the kibitzing I do in that “waiting time.”
In Mozambique people take time to talk about the weather, how their fields are faring, and gossip about the neighbors. Its considered rude to walk past someone you know and not stop to say hello. And I have grown to love it. Some of my favorite interactions each day happen underneath a shady tree when I run into someone in the road. Then, if that conversation makes me ten minutes late, no one seems to mind. I am learning to appreciate the day for what it is and to stop being in a rush all the time.
Despite what I consider to be great strides in my patience, I still have a long way to go.
The greatest test of my patience so far has been a series of computer classes I started teaching last month.
I teach to two different groups. My REDES girls come in in the afternoons and I teach to a few of the Mozaic team and church members a couple times a week in the mornings.
My favorite Mozaic student was Mama Fatima, who is the wife of one of the Pastors in our network. Fatima is the mother of three beautiful children, the youngest of which is only about six months. I think she just liked that she had the opportunity to get out of the house everyday and do something a little different. She would bring her youngest son, and with him either strapped to her back or propped on her lap, we was content to “type” for hours.
I was able to install a typing program on the computers. The program prompts you to type a word and then times how long it takes you and how accurate you were. Each level adds different letters and characters and becomes a bit more difficult. Fatima would sit and work with this program all morning. One day I looked over her shoulder and realized that she did not care at all how accurate her typing was. She said she liked how it felt to tap the keys. She was sitting for hours typing gibberish. She was doing about 35 words per minute but only had about 2% accuracy. When I explained that she was supposed to try to type the words on the screen, she said that she knew but she liked doing it this way.
To her the class was much more about the prospect of something different every few days than it was about learning computers.
I think its this prospect that really made me excited about teaching computers, despite the test of my patience.
At my first lesson with my REDES girls, I had a short passage I wanted the girls to practice typing, then save in a folder that they create for themselves on the desktop. When Etelvinha, one of my favorite, most dedicated REDES girls, sat down and pushed the start key like a touch screen when I told them to click start, I knew I needed to take a step back.
You take for-granted how much you know about computers. I am anything but tech savvy, but I know how to turn on a computer, to hold and use mouse, and am familiar most of the basic functions of the computer's software.
I was starting at square one with my girls. Etelvinha, Fatima, and Neuzia came in almost everyday before the holidays, other girls did not come in as regularly, but were also excited to have the chance to play on the computer. They were happy to practice using the mouse in a paint program, play solitaire, and try to pass different levels in a typing program. While at times, teaching the difference between a right click and a left click made me want to pull my hair out, and sometimes ended in a mysterious malfunction of the entire machine which I still am unsure how they managed so many times, seeing the girls get better and better at typing was really fun. It was also fun for them to be able to sit down at the computer and open “their” folder, filled with paint documents cluttered with hearts and smilies and long letters that had no punctuation at all (punctuation is at the end of the typing program and we have not quite gotten there yet).
What is exciting about teaching computers to this group of girls is the fact that knowing the basic functions of a computer puts them among a small percentage of Mozambicans who can boast that. Knowing how to create and save documents is a marketable skill that will help these girls find themselves in a position where they can do something other than sell cookies in the market or work hard in the machamba all day.
And that prospect is worth my frustrations when I explain for the tenth time how to shut down the computer.
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