Last month was our annual Girls Empowerment conference. A sort of summer camp—like Salute Your Shorts on crack. Thirty Mozambican teenage girls from across the four northern provinces tossed together to share and learn and essentially have a good time. It was manic and stressful for us as organizers but so rewarding in that it seemed completely motivational and life-changing for the impressive young women.

But instead of horseback riding, canoeing, and camp fires with s’mores like traditional summer camps, we had sessions on nutrition, self defense, study skills, public speaking, sexual education, the anatomy of a woman’s body, the mechanics of HIV and how to prevent it, gender debates, and the most disturbing for me—an entire session devoted to what the girls can do if they are being blackmailed, extorted, or harassed by their teachers for sex.

Camp Nowhere…meet Mozambique.

I’ve been racked for over a year with apprehension on how to present this or even if I should. I tend to try to focus on the good things, the things that make me love Mozambique. But sometimes there are things here that also break my heart. And after our big conference, I realized if our girls were brave enough to talk about it and denounce it, then I should be too.

I guess it really started to sink in about a year ago—the first time I called home crying to my Mom. Every week at our REDES meeting (REDES is the name of our girls’ empowerment group) we do “Melhores e Piores.” This is when we go around and each girl essentially talks about the best and worst thing that happened to her that week.

Anyway, one of the girls relayed to the group how her worst thing was the fact that her friend was being harassed by a teacher who was threatening to fail her if she didn’t sleep with him. This led to all the other girls accounting a similar version of this exact same scenario. Every single one had a tale of harassment. They said of around the 50 male teachers at their secondary school, most of which are married with families, there are maybe ten that don’t actively pursue and sleep with their students.

Now, I know sometimes Peace Corps volunteers can get on their high horses—we’re talking Clydesdales here. But in this situation, I felt justified in my fury and sadness. I remember hysterically telling my mom what a fool I was preaching to these girls the importance of an education when it is at that very institution of learning where they are subjected to this sort of treatment.

Well, with another year in Mozambique under my belt, I can now say that I still think the majority of teachers here make the folks at Enron and the characters on The Wire look like honest, enterprising fellas.

But, with time comes the humbling clarity of hindsight. And it is with time that I realized just how much I did not understand. I originally thought it was just a problem of horny, pervy teachers preying on their helpless female students. And most of it is! But the problem is also so much bigger and more convoluted than I had imagined. I called my mom crying thinking I was dealing with a haiku. Really it was Tolstoy.

You see, so much in Mozambique is cyclical and interconnected. HIV and poverty and education and corruption and sexual debut and rites of initiation and transactional sex all come in a packaged deal. You don’t get one without all the others.

Let’s just say a well-meaning but slightly inebriated mechanic wants to do some work on your car. And let’s say your car is Mozambique and the mechanic is developmental aid. So he starts with the steering column. But that shows there are problems with the brakes. Which shows there are problems with the key-less entry pad. Which shows there are problems with the carburetor. Which shows there are problems with the windshield wipers. One problem just illuminates another problem, all of which were seemingly unrelated. But upon further investigation and the onset of sobriety, our mechanic can see how holistic the problems really are. And neither he nor all of Jiffy Lube will be of any real use to the car until they understand how all the parts are connected.

Now that I have explained the necessity for context, I am going to harness a bit of my initial, only slightly premature rage to explain what goes down. Basically, what happens is that these teachers approach female students in an effort to “conquistar” them. Yes, that’s the verb they use. Conquer. And like Cortes and Pizarro they are relentless and callous in pursuit of what they want.

If the girls say no to this hanky panky, the teacher threatens to fail her or worse. The girls cannot go to the Director because he is, if not equally involved in the system, completely indifferent. It is just something that is not only accepted but expected—like a bad Jennifer Aniston rom-com.

Sometimes I swear being a male teacher in a Mozambican school is the equivalent of having a coercion-based harem. The teachers can just pick and choose who to bully into having sex with them.

However, there are several other, darker ingredients in this Mary Kay Letourneau jumbo pie. For one, oftentimes parents will encourage their daughters to try to sleep with a teacher in the hopes that the professor will give some of his relatively large disposable income to this young girl as hush money. She in turn will donate it to the family fund. If they’re really lucky, she’ll become pregnant with the comparatively rich teacher’s baby and then she will become his burden and not her parents.

Money plays a very large part in this cycle because essentially after girls here go through their rites of initiation, many of their parents just plumb stop supporting them. Not all, but many. In which case, they are told to use whatever means necessary to get what they need and want. This leads to the sad fact that many girls actively pursue their teachers, knowing full well that out of the deal they’ll get a passing grade, or money, or other little presents. They call it transactional sex here. To me, it’s essentially a more technical way of saying prostitution. Young girls will have relationships with older men with the premise that the men will buy them things. If they want a cell phone, or a new weave, or a soft drink, or a new capulana, the sure-fire way to get it is to go on the hunt for a “pito.” Pito roughly translates to “sugar daddy.” Sugar daddy often translates to Biology Professor.

A lot of this behavior is whetted by the EXTREMELY popular sex and drama-filled Brazilian soap operas that nearly everyone watches here. They make The Young and the Restless look like Veggie Tales. The girls see these novelas and want to imitate the characters—what they are wearing, how they style their hair, and how they interact with men. But characters in Brazilian soap operas don’t have to worry about a 20% HIV rate. Girls in Mozambique do.

They see these characters with high heels, skirts that could double as slap bracelets, and a laissez-faire philosophy about sex, and a lot of times it doesn’t register that it is not real.

Regardless, it is my firm belief that these girls could channel Lady Godiva and strut around in their birthday suits seductively eating cherries and challenging their professors to a game of naked Twister and it still would absolutely not be okay for their teachers to act on that forwardness. Teachers are in a position of authority and the responsibility rests with them. It’s not fraternization. Most of the time, it’s statutory rape.

I wish I could say there was a solution. But each person I talk to blames something else. A good friend of mine (a wonderful professor who is known as one of the ones who does not sleep with his students and is consequently lauded or mocked depending on who you ask) blames the Rites of Initiation for the forwardness of his female students. The whole situation I tend to blame on the shameless professors who take advantage of these girls, the willing and the unwilling. Others blame the novelas. Others poverty. Others corruption in the schools.

But really, it’s all of them.

And as much as I now know this, and as much as I know that this happens in America too, I still can’t help but remember the casual way our girls told me they are harassed by their teachers. As if it were okay, normal even. And as much as I try to see all sides of the story, I mostly just see this.