Back in Moz

It has been a very humbling week teaching the people in the Beira area. On Monday I taught the Care for Life Coordinators the first half of the new Health Booklet. Until you begin to teach new material you have no idea how to present it to your audience here until you get started. It went fairly well. On Tuesday we taught the health promoters from Ngupa 1 and Ngupa 2. This is where the frustration began. Many of the individual's could not read and did not fully understand Portugese. Justin Larkin translated to Portugese and Annamicus translated into Senna. Thank goodness she was here and helped us salvage our training. On Wednesday and Thursday we taught the health promoters in Motel Bispo 1 & 2 and Vilamassane. These people ate it up. They were hungry for more information as we introduced them to simple concepts of nutrition and health. On Friday we taught in Subida and we were back at square one. After 2 hours of training the promoters struggled to name the 4 basic food groups. I don't believe it has anything to do with their intellect, but more of a failure on our part in not adapting the information to their way of thinking. It's a big world and most of it does not think the way we do. Next week we start all over and see if we can build upon what we have learned through this excercise. There is nothing more exciting than to see into the eyes of an individual and detect they are learning and comprehending new information. It motivates you to work harder to share more. I see why educators often continue to teach in spite of challenging circumstances and low pay, it is made up for in the satisfaction of information shared and imparted into a mind ready to absorb more.