Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End!!)

 

Well, folks, I’m coming up to the two week landmark here at site.  Two down, 102 to go, not that I’m counting.  Given this special occasion, I think it’s time to reflect on what has been an interesting, at times quiet, at times overwhelming, but all the same, enjoyable two weeks here in Mangunde, and also look forward to the exciting holiday coming up.

In two weeks, here are a few things I’ve accomplished:

          -Watched 7 movies

          -Watched the entire first season of Big Bang Theory!

          -Written my first 2 singles on guitar (“Shrimp Samosas” and “They were saying tudo bom”)

          -Built an outdoor casa de banho because I was getting tired of nearly falling into the toilet every time I try to shower in my cramped bathroom

          -Created a legit garden behind my house – four beds, double dug

          -1 crossword puzzle without cheating, about 10 with cheating

          -Read one book in full and the first 20 pages of 5 others

          -Invented three killer dishes – peanut curry rice, cashew pineapple fried rice, garlic naan with tomato basil pasta

          -Learned that if your bread doesn’t rise, just make tortillas

          -Gave a sermon and played the offertory at the Acacia tree church

          -Volunteered at the health clinic

          -Learned two words in Ndau – mamuka and tamuka

Let me stress that this is not going to be my life for the next two years - as much as I enjoy crossword puzzles and movies I don’t thing that would be a good thing.  When the school year begins January 15^th, there will be students on campus and plenty of work to do planning lessons and going to classes.

Today I want to tell you about my experience at the health center the other day.  To give you some background, there is a small health center here on the school grounds.  The health center is funded and run by the Italian mission, ESMABAMA, which runs the school.  As far as I can tell, there is one Italian doctor, 4 or 5 foreign nurses and a number of Mozambican nurses and technicians.  The health center services some 1,700 chronic patients from the surrounding villages, many of whom are HIV positive and come to the center monthly to receive their anti-retroviral medication.  There is also a maternity ward, a lab, and a lady outside who sells 5 mangos for 1 metical (about 3 cents).

Whenever I walked past the health center in the past I noticed that it was packed with patients waiting by the dozens outside of the wards and in the waiting gazebos outside.  Since I know that the health center is very understaffed I decided to ask if there was anything I could do to help during these weeks before school starts.  They accepted my offer I began the day by observing her consultations with patients in the Banco de Socorro.  The very first two patients who came in were two young boys who had been attacked by crocodiles in the river earlier that day, seriously, that river warning was no joke.  Both kids had one leg fully bandaged in a cast and had their hands and arms heavily bandaged.  I must say, the kids were remarkably stoic for 10 year-olds who had just been attacked by a crocodile.  One thing that is for sure is that Mozambicans are tough cookies. 

The next patient who came in was a gaunt woman whom I was told was severely anemic.  Apparently she was only 20 years old, but she was very weak, could hardly stand up and could only generate enough energy to whisper.  This was particularly difficult to watch, because the doctor ordered a blood test and then a blood transfusion, but the nurse could not get any blood to come out when he tried to take the samples.  As the woman was grimacing, the nurse must have tried 4 different veins before being able to squeeze enough blood out for the samples.  They tried to get some basic information out of her, where she was from, what family members she had with her, etc.  What I noticed throughout my day, however, was that even the simplest things can be extremely difficult to figure out in this setting.  Some things as perfunctory as age, family members and address can be nearly impossible to ascertain with language and cultural barriers. 

The last patient I observed was a very emaciated woman with her infant who couldn’t have been older than a 6 or 7 months.  The woman was HIV positive and the child had not yet been tested.  What struck me with this interaction was how difficult it was to get across what seemed to be, to me, simple instruction.  She had been taking ARVs but was clearly confused about the different pills and the schedule of when to take what drugs.  She had also been given nutritional supplements for her (because she was gravely skinny), but she had been giving them to the child.  In addition, they had been giving here powdered formula milk so that she would not breast feed the child, but there were complications in the milk running out, and mixing it with the contaminated river water instead of well water. 

When dealing with language and cultural barriers so deeply entrenched, what may have seem like simple yet vastly important instructions turn out to not be simple at all.  If she doesn’t take her ARVs regularly and continues breast-feeding the infant there is a fair chance he will be infected with HIV if he hasn’t already been infected.  The Italian doctor spoke Portuguese, but, like almost all of the patients, this patient only spoke Ndau, the local language, so a translator had to be used.  While very knowledgeable, neither the doctor, translator, nor the company making the drugs and other supplements could possibly understand all of the deep-rooted cultural, economic and environmental barriers to following a drug regimen in this context.  I watched this happen over and over while I was there - with ARVs, malaria medication, formula milk, and other things, patients were simply confused, and it was difficult to watch. 

This is not to say that the health center isn’t doing important and very impressive work.  Besides being struck with some of the difficulties that they were encountering, I was also deeply impressed with the amount and quality of work that the clinic does on a daily basis.  In addition to providing HIV tests, ARV regimens, malaria treatment, and emergency treatment of other ailments, the health center has a team of activistas who do community education about HIV/AIDS and do home visits for patients who are too weak to come to the center.  This health center is truly indispensable to the health of its surrounding communities.  Due to this, I was surprised to hear that the government of Mozambique is actually trying to make it difficult for these types of NGO-funded organizations to do their work in Mozambique.  Within the last two months, the government has raised the price of a yearly visa for Mozambique to over $1,000 USD, which is a huge increase from what it was previously.  As Peace Corps Volunteers, we have also had to deal with this visa complication.  We don’t actually have our passports right now because PC is trying to work out a solution with the Mozambican government.  Anyway, I assumed this was just an economic decision, but apparently it may have been motivated by Mozambique try to reduce its dependence on foreign aid.  I think, however, that this could have grim consequences for the thousands of communities still relying on NGOs for vital health services.  Something to think about. 

Sorry, no one probably finds this interesting except me, so I’m going to move on.  Here’s a vignette: the other day I noticed my maid, Gracinda, was collecting the millipedes from under the shower mat and between the cracks in the house outside.  I was suspicious about her intentions for these little critters after my experience on the first night here with the fireflies (we collected them by the hundreds outside on our window and then they proceeded to eat them like chips the next morning).  To give you an image, these millipedes are grotesque but kind of cool looking creatures - about 5 inches long and 1 cm in diameter with exactly 1,000 legs, maybe.  Once we had a good size bucket full of them, they are everywhere, literally (every time I take a bucket bath I lift up the mat and kick out 5 or 6 from underneath), she proceeded to the kitchen, and I was like, oh no.. 

Fast forward to dinner that night.  Sitting at the table, hungry from a long day in the heat; two covered pots sit expectantly on the table.  First pot…rice, phew, safe.  Second pot…a mound of fried millipedes.  Oh no..  In her defense, Gracinda cooked them well so that they, in fact, didn’t really look like millipedes anymore.  I mean, you couldn’t really distinguish all of the 1,000 legs or the waxy exoskeleton.  At this point, they looked more like crusty fried tootsie rolls.  I could not stifle my laughter as they dug into the crusty tootsie rolls.  My plate looked like this: a mound of rice, with one lonely millipede staring at me from the top of the rice mountain.  I threw it down the hatch.  I don’t think it tasted too bad, but I really couldn’t tell.  The repugnant association with having a millipede in my mouth overpowered any flavor I may have found in the little guys.  I think it was like an over-salted piece of burnt popcorn if I had to guess though.  Both Gracinda and her husband found it very odd that I had this guttural rejection of eating millipedes and asked me earnestly whether we eat these in America.  I couldn’t help but have a good laugh after that. 

Now I’m off to Gorongosa, a site a few hours north of here to reunite with other Sofala volunteers for Christmas.  There won’t be any snow, Christmas lights or Christmas trees, but I’m excited to see some familiar faces again and enjoy the company of friends for the holiday.  I’m hoping to at least have a creative Christmas cookie decorating competition and watch “A Christmas Story” 3 or 4 times.  We’ll see!

Merry Christmas!

At church today under the tree!

Buying mangoes!

Easy Like Sunday Morning

I’ve been finding that it’s very difficult to sum up all of the diverse thoughts, experiences and feelings that I’ve been having in one concise blog post.  It seems that it doesn’t do justice to everything that I’m seeing and doing here.  Recently, I’ve been sitting down, poised to write a comprehensive, funny and inspirational entry that sums up all of my joys, challenges, and cross-cultural moments in one grand slam blog post.  This, I’ve realized, is not feasible.  I get overwhelmed and end up not writing anything.  Thus, I’ve changed my approach to the blog posts.  From here on, I plan to focus on one or two interesting stories or observations in each entry.  Hopefully, all together, they will be a mosaic of sorts describing my experience which can be patched together to get a clearer picture of what I’m seeing and feeling over here.  Here is today’s story:

Last week I decided to passear around the villages outside of Mangunde.  For those of you new to Portuguese, passear is probably the most important verb you will come to learn.  You can passear to anywhere you’re little feet can take you, and the beauty is, you don’t actually have to do anything because you are passearing!  I’ve spent hours simply passearing and never actually going anywhere, just making loops, and it’s a perfectly acceptable usage of time.  This is especially useful when you are bored without purpose or direction (a situation I often find myself in now as I wait in my empty house for the school year to start and the students and teachers to arrive).

So I was passearing through the villages, what they call the zonas here, outside of Mangunde and I stumbled into one of the village chiefs that I had met earlier in the week.  He was very excited to meet me and spoke decent English so I sat with him and shared a bowl of mangos in front of his hut.  Lest you think I’m cooler than I really am, it’s not like he was a tribal chief with face paint and jewelry (I hope that didn’t offend anyone), he is simply a respected government representative for this particular cluster of villages.  He was wearing second-hand business casual (which is very common for men here) and a red blingy hat with dollar signs and Ben Franklins on it when I ran into him.  On a side note, some of the hats people wear here, I just don’t know.  Today, I saw a guy wearing an immaculately clean orange, leopard skin pimp hat and smoking a cigarette; what made it interesting was that he was clearly destitute, on crutches, missing a leg, and wearing dirty and tattered clothes other than his shiny hat.  It’s bizarre.

 

Anyway, back to the story.  We sat down with our bowl of mangos in front of his hut.  I don’t know if you have ever eaten 5 large mangos consecutively, but it’s a lot of mango.  If it weren’t for not wanting to be outdone by the chief, I would’ve stopped at two, but I’ve noticed that when people eat mangos here, they eat a lot of mangos, and I wanted to make a good impression.  Apparently the chief plays guitar too, so after we finished the mangos, we walked back to my house and grabbed my guitar and drum and sat outside under the tree playing and singing.  It was quite a time.  You just can’t really describe listening to the chief with his heavily accented voice and $100 bill hat singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” out of tune.  It’s a classic memory, and if I ever get access to a fast internet connection I’ll post the video I took of it.  As it is now, facebook tells me that it would take 355 hours to upload the 3 minute video.

What made this a particularly intriguing encounter is that, as I was leaving, the chief told me that his full name is Aaron Dlakhama.  I recognized his surname, Dlakhama, as the same as the former leader of political/rebel party Renamo, Afonso Dlakhama.  Apparently, Afonso, former leader of Renamo, is his cousin and actually comes from a village not far from where I currently live.  To give you a little perspective on the significance of this, here is a shamefully simplified history of Renamo and Mozambique:

Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975 led by Samora Machel and his former socialist party, FRELIMO.  Frelimo was formed 13 years earlier in Tanzania and supported by other global Marxist forces like the USSR and China, among others.  When Frelimo took control of the country a rebel group named Renamo, citing anti-communist aspirations formed in neighboring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  Supported primarily by South Africa, Portugal and other interested anti-communist countries, Renamo instigated a brutal civil war in Mozambique that lasted from 1975 to 1992 when a peace agreement was finally reached.  Renamo is now the minority party in Mozambique, but has yet to win a presidential election since they began in 1992.  If you want to read more about this very interesting but complicated war that crippled Mozambique for 17 years and continues to affect all aspects of Mozambique’s education and development, I invite the casual reader to follow this link to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozambican_Civil_War) or the more interested reader to pick up A Complicated War, by William Finnegan, at your local library. 

Anyway, all of this is to say that the chief I met last week may prove to be a very interesting source of insight on the times of war and how remnants of war continue to affect Mozambicans.  I have yet to broach the conversation with him, as I have found that, in general, Mozambicans are very reticent about discussing their experiences during the war.  I don’t know if the memories are too painful (it was a very brutal war in which many lost family members) or they simply don’t see the purpose in talking about the past.  It will, however, be interesting to see what kind of stories I hear as I get more comfortable in my community and the people get more comfortable with me.  The central region of Mozambique, including Sofala, the province that I live in, was a particularly active region during the war because it contains the Beira corridor and Zambezi river, two main shipping lines that lead from Zimbabwe to the coast, so there should be a wealth of stories to draw from, and hopefully not too many land mines to step on (that was a joke, family, you needn’t worry about landmines – they are well-marked and quickly being disarmed where they do still exist). 

This is turning into a boring history lesson, so let me briefly finish my story as it relates to Mr. Dlakhama.  Today (which is Sunday), he stopped by in the morning before church and asked if I wanted to accompany him, with my guitar, to the service.  I agreed and what proceeded felt a lot like a processional straight out of the Bible.  We were both decked out in Sunday whites with a refulgent sun and a bright blue sky to set the scene.  We started walking, me with my guitar in my arms, and him with an African drum over his shoulder striding stoically towards a church some unknown distance away.  We headed out on the path that cuts through the rural zonas around Mangunde and began to encounter the small clusters of mud huts and thatched shelters that are characteristic of African rural life.  Walking through this so pleasingly pastoral setting while I played guitar and we harmonized to “I’ll Fly Away,” I couldn’t help but have a moment – “how did I get to this place, and what am I doing here?” 

When we got to the “church,” which was nothing more than an epic and statuesque acacia tree with a few benches resting under its shady embrace, we waited for the congregation to arrive.  We sang “Amazing Grace,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” among a few other songs I knew as the people filtered in and found open benches under the tree.  In total the congregation was only about 20 people and the service, which I was told would start at 930, didn’t end up starting until 11 (not uncommon here).  The surprise, but one that I half expected, since I was the guest of honor of sorts at this small church, was that I was asked to lead the prayers two or three times throughout the service.  Now, I’m not what you would call a deeply religious man.  I don’t hold any ill-will towards the church, but let’s just say I went today primarily for the music and cultural experience.  Thus, when I was asked to look deep into my heart and find God’s words to lead us in prayer I was a little flustered.  The one thing I had going for me though, and this dawned on my as I was stumbling through a line about God having hope for all of his creatures (I had know idea what I was talking about, to be honest) was that no one there spoke a word of English, except the chief whose English was basic at best.  Since I was giving the prayers in English, as instructed, I realized that I could essentially say whatever I wanted to and no one would have known the different.  I just had to deliver it in the bellowing tone of a preacher bringing his people into deliverance from the gates of hell.  I was pretty proud of myself and did my best to imitate this grandiose tenor.  I even threw in a couple “diz-la Amen’s” mid-sentence which preachers love to do here because the congregation always echoes you with a reassuring and rousing “Amen.”  Other than these crucial details, I honestly don’t remember what my prayers were about.  I think I tried to tie it into Christmas and advent, and something about having faith that God would deliver the savior Jesus, but really, who’s listening?

After the service, we played a few more tunes and then packed up to start heading home.  I was instructed (because I have no control over what happens to me in these occasions) that I was to attend lunch with the chief and that some kids would take my guitar and drum home for me.  So I saw my instruments vanish in the hands of these two 10 year old boys as they jaunted away happily.  At the time, I thought that there was a good chance I would never see my guitar again, which would have made me very sad, but, thankfully, the kids managed to return all items intact.  How that small child carried my drum, which is at least 30 lbs, all the way back a good 2 miles to my house remains a mystery to me.  This is another subject for another day, but one thing which is totally culturally acceptable to do here is to send a kid, an action which is officially referred to as mandar uma crianca, to do absolutely anything you want them to do.  “Here’s 5 mts., go buy me a sac of mangos and leave them on my porch.”  Totally cool, you don’t even have to know them, and they will drop whatever they are doing to go get you a sac of mangos.  Thus, sending the criancas to bring my instruments home, while anxiety-provoking, was very normal.  I’m getting off topic.  We ended up passearing around the zonas for an hour or so, stopping to eat some mangos here and there, and then returning to Mangunde after a tiring but very interesting afternoon.

If that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, then it went ahead and finally rained later this afternoon, what a day!  It was a welcome and auspicious occasion.  It has been cloudy, very humid and thundering the last two days, but the rain which was so dearly needed had yet to fall.  It bucketed down for 15 glorious minutes while the setting sun still glowed across the landscape to produce a full and magnificent rainbow.  It was a site to behold.  And that's my story for today.  Merry Christmas everyone.  Don't get snowed in!

My bright green running shoes

I’ve taken up running in the mornings.  There is essentially one road that comes into Mangunde and stops, so I have generally been running as far as I can down that road stopping to do 10 minutes of very poorly executed yoga and a few push-ups before heading back the way I came.  There are a couple of things that make this a particularly interesting experience every morning..

                          

First of all, today two kids no older than 10 who had been walking on the road when I passed them decided to join me on my run.  What made this a thoroughly depressing experience was that they were both lugging large jugs of water and were not wearing shoes, yet they easily kept pace with me for a good 10 minutes without even breaking a sweat while I was on the verge of collapsing from heat exhaustion.

Speaking of shoes, and the second point I wanted to make, I bought these new Asics running shoes that are silver with neon green highlights before I left the states.  At the time, I thought that I was looking pretty sporty in my shiny new kicks.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  It is so embarrassing to wear those shoes here in Mozambique.  Most people don’t even wear shoes; if they have any kind of foot-ware at all it might be a mismatched pair of tattered flip-flops.  So when I come strutting along in my fluorescent moon shoes, it’s a site to behold. Everyone is completely and utterly distracted.  It’s horrible, I can’t even have a conversation with anyone because they are so entranced by these ridiculous shoes.  You would think I was wearing human heads on my feet the way people stare.  The problem is that they are my only running shoes, so I think I’m going to have to just deal with it.  I tried covering the neon green parts with dirt, but that doesn’t seem to do much to help.  

Even if I was wearing normal shoes, people would stare.  I don't think that the concept of running for exercise or leisure is entirely understood here.  Life is difficult enough, why would you voluntarily put yourself through that physical pain (a pain which is very apparent when you watch me run).  When I run by, people glance up curiously as if thinking, "what is that mulungu (white person) running from."  They look behind me, but there doesn't appear to be any pressing danger, so just continue to stare and laugh.  I must say, the staring doesn’t get any less intense when I stop in the middle of the road to do a dilapidated Warrior 2 into a half-moon (which are the only two yoga moves I know), and then finish off with some lunges.  At that point, I think people have just accepted that I am indeed from outer space.

Daylight savings anyone?

Fifth day in Mangunde.  It is hot here.  Word on the street is that it’s going to rain soon, but I don’t see it happening.  What is bizarre is that it seems to be hottest early in the morning.  You wake up at 6, step outside, and are like, whaa..come on, now.  You would think that you might have a couple hours of nice cool morning air before it starts to really boil mid-afternoon, it starts out with a bang though– really humid and at least in the 90s before noon.

The problem is that the sun rises at an ungodly early hour.  5am and it's already bright and starting to heat up.  The roosters start their thing at like 3, and maybe the sun gets the hint and starts poking its head above the horizon come 445 or 5, and then it’s dark by 630 at night.  Has anyone heard of daylight savings here?  We could salvage another hour or two of daylight here people.  I think it could be the solution to the pervasive problem of sweat-soaked t-shirts at 7am.

When it does rain, it rains hard.  Rain here is a sign of auspicious things, so while you are miserably slogging your wet ass through the mud, someone is sure to chime in that this is boa sorte or good luck.  It’s never quite as uplifting as they think it is when people say that to you.  Really the worst thing about the rain, and this is how I know I have changed in Mozambique, is that you always, without question, have to wash your pants after it rains.  You only got a half day’s worth of clean pants usage?  Too bad.  Here is the problem with the pants and rain; there are two immutable truths here in Mozambique that stand in the way of a peaceful co-existence between pants and rain: (1) As far as I know, no one has ever successfully navigated through a day of heavy rain without getting mud all over their pants.  It simply cannot be done. (2) Potentially even more prohibitive that number 1 is that no one has ever left their house under the watchful eyes of a mother, grandmother or maid with mud on their pants.  Mozambican women have a veritable sixth sense for detecting even the smallest spot of matope on your pants.  It’s much akin to their other pant-related skill, which is to detect when someone is trying to fugir the house with un-ironed pants.  It doesn’t matter if you are already 15 minutes late for class; she will make you go back in the house, get the iron and engomar those calcas.  Showing up to class with un-ironed pants is a much more grave concern than showing up a half hour late. 

I’m trying to develop theories to explain this uncanny extra-sensory perception as it relates to pants, but so far the best I have come up with is that Mozambican women are just not human.  This non-human theory is consistent with other observations I’ve made: first, the women here can balance an in-human amount of weight on their head without it falling.  Second, they have no discomfort in pulling out a breast mid-conversation to start feeding the infant that you didn’t even know was wrapped up on their back.  Seriously, it can be very distracting if you’re not accustomed to it.  When I arrived at my site and met the maid that I would be living with for the next two years, the very first thing I saw of her, even before making eye contact and greeting her, was her nipple.  I didn’t know whether I should look away and give her time to re-adjust things, or just carry on as if nothing was strange.  I now know, based on the amount of times I’ve seen that same nipple since our first meeting, that the appropriate response was to just pretend it’s not out there and carefully maintain eye contact.  

My new house in Mangunde (the one on the left).

Crocodiles, Christmas and Culinary Independence

How is it that one day can change everything?  After a thoroughly depressing day yesterday, today was refreshing, inspiring and hopeful.  I took a tour of Mangunde, the aforementioned isolated catholic mission with nothing to offer but solitude and a broken internet where I'll be living and teaching for the next two years.  Mangunde is awesome!  There is a high school, an agrarian school, a vast garden/farm, domestic animals, including pigs and rabbits, an HIV/AIDS and health clinic, soccer fields, basketball and volleyball courts, a beautiful river, and a broad expanse of villages surrounding the complex.   I am actually really excited about the different possibilities there will be to work outside of the classroom, whether it would be a project with the health center, an environmental group, or any community outreach interaction with the many villages.

A few things to keep in mind from the tour:  the river has crocodiles, they eat many people every year, so be careful.  The biblical plague of bugs that attacked our house yesterday was today’s lunch for many Mangundians.  In fact, we swept up all of the bugs that were dead on the floor last night (presumably to throw them away, right?).  Well, the same bugs that were on the floor yesterday were drying in a tray on the veranda ready to be happily munched on by everyone today.  Ta nice.

I made my own lunch and, oh culinary independence, how sweet you are.  I’m salivating just writing about it, seriously.. omelet with onion, green pepper, garlic, tomato, seasoned pepper, cheese and piri piri all in a sandwich.  Pineapple for dessert.  Another highlight, during dinner tonight: I had the opportunity to introduce Gracinda to the concept of Santa Claus (I know right, who doesn’t know about Santa Claus).  I have to say, it was more difficult than I thought it would be.  Words I don’t know in Portuguese: reindeer, sleigh, pull, chimney, north pole, elves.  Because of this, Gracinda’s current understanding of Christmas in America is a little like this: A fat bearded man named Santa Claus lives in a house in the north with a lot little people who make presents.  On the night before Christmas he flies around in a car driven by gazelles.  He lands this craft on kids’ houses and enters the houses via what Gracinda understood to be some sort of heating duct and leaves presents under a tree…Let me just say, this was a far more difficult concept than I originally thought I was getting into.  Yes, the tree is inside.  No, you have to cut it down outside first and then bring it in.  There are lamps on the tree, but the fat bearded man doesn’t put the lamps on the tree, he puts some of the presents under the tree.  The rest of the presents he puts in a sock hanging above the indoor fire.  He then climbs the heating duct and rides away in his gazelle-driven car.  Apparently in Mozambique, they just get together with family and have a nice meal.

Arrival, training and the beginning!

Hello everyone (which is probably like 3 people, but still..)
   
Welcome to my blog.  I've never done this before, so we are embarking on this blogging journey together.  It took me a little while to get things off the ground here (consistent computer and internet access is not easy to come by) but I'm anxious to start sharing me experiences with the thousands of people who have been wondering, "what has Ian been up to?"  Here goes..

I arrived in Maputo, Mozambique with a group of 70 other prospective Peace Corps Mozambique Volunteers at the end of September, 2010.  We were the 15th batch of PCV's to arrive in Mozambique (they have been taking volunteers since 1998) and represent two different lines of work.  Roughly two thirds of us (including me) are education volunteers, which means we will be placed at secondary schools throughout the country to teach English, chemistry, biology, and/or math; and the other third of our training batch are health volunteers, which means that they will be placed with various health-related NGOs throughout the country to promote, among other things, HIV/AIDS awareness, hygiene, malaria prevention, etc.

All 70 of us spent two months together in a small town called Namaacha outside of the capital city of Maputo for training before being sworn in as PCVs.  During this training period we took language classes to learn Mozambique's official language, Portuguese, and technical classes to learn essentials about the Mozambican education system and teaching strategies such as classroom management, creative use of resources, lesson-planning, etc.  Essentially the goal was to prepare people with no teaching experience whatsoever to stand in front of class of 70 kids with no books or resources except a chalkboard and teach in Portuguese.  There are other challenges as well, including corruption, gender issues, and literacy which I'm sure I'll will get into as my experience progresses, but I will leave it at that for now.

That said, training was an interesting time.  I stayed with a Mozambican family and became acquainted with Mozambican culture - how to cart water, wash clothes, eat a steady barrage of xima, couve and feijao (mozambican staples), and to appreciate the beauty of Shop-rite (a South African grocery store chain that is 2 hours away but sells cheese and chocolate among other things).  To try to summarize the past two months of training in one post would be impossible, so I'm just going to leave it at that and get on to the current events.  I will just say that training was a lot of fun - I made a lot of great friends, both fellow PCVs and my Mozambican family, had a killer Thanksgiving feast which included the best mashed potatoes I've ever had and even turkey (not that easy to find here), spent a magical holiday weekend eating pizza (also not easy to come by) on the beach and got prepared to embark on the next two years as a teacher.

So fast-forward to almost present day..The week before swear-in, in what was a very emotionally charged atmosphere, we all received our site placements for the next two years.  This crucial decision would, some believed, determine which other volunteers you may never see again and which ones you might be stuck at a site with for two agonizing years.  After coming to terms with this decision and successfully completing training, we swore in as official Peace Corps Volunteers on Dec. 3rd at the US Ambassadors house.  We had our last night together as a group in a ritzy Maputo hotel before embarking to our sites the next day.  I boarded a plane bound for Chimoio, the provincial capital of Manica, a province in central Mozambique.  

I was placed at a site called Mangunde and assigned to teach English (despite the fact that I came in as a Chemistry teacher and was trained throughout training as a chem teacher...water under the bridge, I've come to terms).  You will hear a lot about Mangunde if you continue to read this blog.  If you've read this much are never going to come back to this site, then I'll just say this: it's a large catholic mission school with grades 1-12 essentially in the middle of nowhere.  It is in the central province of Sofala, but the nearest town in a good hour and a half away, that is, if it's not raining..when it rains it is completely inaccessible.  I have a small house which I am sharing with a continuing volunteer who I have yet to meet and a maid named Gracinda.  Right now the school grounds are pretty empty, as school won't start until January and really, there is just a school here (students and teachers generally live on campus during the school year, but then go home during the holidays).  I have, however, been finding the positives of a nice quiet life here in Mangunde, and I promise that, if you keep reading this now obnoxiously long blog post you will come to learn what my life is like here.  I'm going to stop there for now.  Anyway, this concludes my first ever blog post.