My work cont.

So here is a quick rundown of what has been happening in my organization and in my head since I finished with my fist home visits.

First I came to realize that the whole first 2 months at site I was making lots of notes about problems I perceived and solutions I could provide to them. By the end of October I realized that this was totally the wrong approach. It is ironic because I knew from the start that the way that aid agencies and orgs have made big mistakes in the past is when some guy from the west shows up, thinks he knows better than everyone else and then creates a project based on his own assumptions rather than the self identified needs for those in the community. So after doing a lot of thinking and reading (particularly two very good books which I recommend. "Mountains beyond Mountains" and "Pathologies of Power", the first is a biography of a Man named Paul Farmer and the second is a book written by Paul Farmer) I decided that I needed to start from the beginning by conducting a community needs assessment or CNA. Basically it is just a tool to figure out what the biggest problems are for a group of people. But I had a lot of questions about the details and how to go about it as there are many different types of CNAs. Most importantly, would the CNA be for my activistas, the neighborhood in general that the office was located in, or directly for the HIV positive people that my org already was providing services to? Thankfully I had my reconnect meeting coming up, so when I arrived in Maputo I had a list of questions to ask my Peace Corps supervisor. After a really good session of sitting down with her I decided that I would focus the CNA on the individuals that were living with HIV in the surrounding neighborhoods in which my organization operated.

After a lot of time spent back at site trying to get something off the ground and a lot of frustration, I held a couple in prompt to CNA with all the activistas after one of their normal meetings. I asked them if there was one problem that their "patients" had in their lives that was common amongst all of them and was very serious. The answer was the same amongst all of them. The people in our area who are HIV positive don’t have enough food to eat and also don’t have money to pay for transportation to go to the hospital to pick up their antiretrovirals or even to get to the hospital if they have a serious health problem. I realized that CNAs are really more important for outsiders to understand what is going on in a community than the people themselves. The activistas knew what the main problem was and have for some time. First I focused on food. I said to myself, ok we have Identified the problem and now I have to figure out a solution. At first I was really excited about developing some form of food security project, but then the real world happened.

My org got a surprise visit from one of its large American donor organizations. They got all the activistas together and held a big meeting that was for me very awkward. It was very hierarchical and obviously intimidated the activistas, therefore it was not very useful in my personal opinion as an independent observer. Next, a couple of the activistas took some of the representatives from the donor org on some home visits and I went with one group. This was a very depressing experience for two reasons. First, the people we visited were living very hard lives. The first person was a very sweet soft spoken 10 year old boy who was blind in one eye and also HIV positive. The second was a single mother of two who was working 3 house cleaning jobs and barely making enough money to feed her children. The third was a man who was extremely skinny and suffering from something that cased him to walk with a serious limp. The second reason this was all so depressing was because I realized that the plots of land that these people lived on were very very small. They had no chance of being able to grow any significant amount of food in the small patch of sand that their entire family called home.

So I was back at square one, I knew that food was a big problem, especially because HIV positive people need to eat more calories than uninfected people. (Also the antiretroviral drugs hurt peoples stomachs when they are not taken with food, so it is very common that people will not take their meds when they do not have food. This causes an individual to take their meds irregularly which in the long run is even worse than not taking them at all because it increases the chances of creating a drug resistant strain of HIV, which puts the individual and possibly other in much greater risk.) However, I had no clue as to what the solution was and this was extremely frustrating for me so I reached out to some people at the Maputo peace corps office and had some good conversations with them. The country director just so happened to stop by that week for a routine visit, so it was good to run things by him. He validated my frustrations, validated the fact that I live in a very rural spot and also validated that I was doing good work, he also gave me some cheese and dark chocolate from Maputo, so that was very cool. Also I talked the whole thing over with my mom and that helped me get everything organized in my brain. Basically the end result was me realizing that it was my responsibility to help my org find a solution and improve itself but it was the responsibility of the org to actually find the solution, implement a program and “help the people.” This was a big relief as it took the responsibility of having to "save" the whole community of HIV positive people in my area off my shoulders and gave me a better perspective of what my role should be over my period of time here. So I came to the conclusion that my main responsibilities were that of a teacher and a question asker.

I have started out just teaching things that people told me they wanted to learn and then moved on to asking questions about problems and then asking if people wanted me to teach them something I thought could help them. I started giving computer classes to people in the office and a few have really gone from 0 to 100 (well maybe 75 but 75 is 100 in Mozambique). I sat down and helped a colleague make a December calendar of events for the acvtivistas. Right now in the office everything is organized by word of mouth and there is no official calendar or any list of upcoming meetings or activities in the office. So helping people in the office get calendars up has been a small but important project that they have really responded to. I felt really proud when my colleague came into the office one morning and put up a calendar she made on her own the day after I taught her how to do it. I also gave a class to some colleagues and activistas on how to conduct a CNA so that in the future they could go out and do it on their own. So at the next activista meeting they did a CNA with all the activistas (it was basically the same thing I had done and we got the same answers but this time they were doing it, which is the whole point, so that was good.) After everyone had spoken I raised the question as to what they thought the solution should be. I also asked a lot of random questions about stuff that I thought may be possible solutions, and it probably all seemed like stupid questions to them  but it got them thinking about what things could work and what things could not work. By the end of the meeting they decided that the best thing to do would be to organize all their "patients" into groups according to what neighborhood they lived in so they would not have to travel far to see each other. Each group would have an income generating project that they would work on together. Each group would have a project that was best suited to their skills, resources, and abilities. So hypothetically one group in a more urban area would make clothes while some in a more rural area would grow pineapples, and another would raise pigs etc...

So that is more or less where I am: trying to keep them at the lead, finding the solutions on their own. Now I need to just keep asking them questions about how they think it would be best to more forward and what are the next steps. So that is my plan. I think....

Other stuff cont. (dont worry there are no more stories about killing things)

At the end of october I went down to Maputo for the Moz 16 “reconnect” meeting. After being at site for about 3 months everyone in a Peace Corps group reunites for an additional week of training and reflection on our individual site placement situations. The primary goal is to come out of reconnect with a solid idea of what your role in your organization will be. These long sessions took up most of our time, usually 8 in the morning till 6 in the evening.

It was really really good for everyone to see each other again. Everyone in our group gets along sooo well and we all just love each other to death. It is ridiculous and was to cute, but true. So part of reconnect was just all of us running around hanging out with each other and laughing a lot. In addition, we ate a lot. A lot! We took full advantage of the fact that the hotel provided us with free buffets for each meal of the day. This was a welcome relief to the normal diet of rice and beans for dinner and bread and peanut butter for lunch and breakfast. It just so happened that the first day of our conference was also Halloween. Only a few people dressed up that evening. I had the best costume. I dressed up as our country director (the person who is in charge of all Mozambique Peace Corps activities). I still do not know if he has seen the pictures but when he does I think he will have a good laugh. He is a good guy.

On the Thursday of that week we were given some “down time.” We got out of our session at 4 instead of 6. So I walked downtown and accomplished my two main goals. First eat some gelato at one of the two gelato places in Maputo and also all Moz. Check. Two, buy a Portuguese novel that I could begin reading to improve my language skills and vocab. Check, but it cost $40 USD because in Moz novels are apparently luxury items that are imported from Portugal that only the wealthy elite buy, lame.

After getting down with some gelato and novel, I met up with some other volunteers for a beer and some pizza before heading back to the hotel. Upon arriving at the hotel some of the other volunteers suggested we go to the carnival that was two blocks away. A carnival with rides and games and beer in the middle of Maputo at night? That sounds like the right mix between a bad idea and a really good idea. So I went with them to check it out. Unfortunately they were just closing everything down as we got there but we walked around anyways. If you think walking around an empty carnival is a surreal experience, try walking around an empty carnival in the middle of a large third world city. So then we walked home and on the way found a hip little bar/dance place close to our hotel.

The next night was our final night, after having snacks and wine at the country director’s apartment overlooking the Indian Ocean (nice) we all went to the hip bar. It was very interesting to so the wealthier young Maputo scene. It is very ethnically diverse, white, black, Indian, and people of various mixed ethnic backgrounds. There were a lot of ex-pats as well, South African on vacation or who owed businesses n Moz, European and American tourists and transplants. People that were in country for a year or so for work, and others just kinda bumbling around that found themselves in Maputo, Mozambique of all places. Some of the music was American pop, some was popular Mozambique techno. It was our last chance to all be together for another 6 months. So we danced and laughed and all gave each other big hugs goodbye. The next day I took the long bus ride back to my home and got back late and tired, and when I opened my door I saw that my living room floor had lots of lizard poop on it. I was too tired to do much so I just swept it all out, went into my outhouse/showering area and poured a bucket of water over my body, dried off and went to sleep knowing that the next day I would have to thoroughly clean my whole house. And I did, but that really is not much of an interesting story.

Two of the volunteers who are placed in the north took the opportunity to travel up to my city and hang out for a couple days. It was really awesome to hang out with them because they are both absolutely hilarious and really good guys. Unfortunately they had been having a rough time adjusting to the towns they are living in so it was good for them to get some R&R and hang out with some of us in the south. So we did our best to get them some nice western style food and hang out at a couple tourist sports. One evening we all had dinner at a volunteer’s house in the middle of town and when I showed up they were both passed out on the couches and bright red. They had spent toooo much time at the beach and were in a miserable state. But on the up side the food was really good.

In the middle of November I went to visit another volunteer in a town in a more inland, dry part of the country. Getting there required me to take a 3 hour trip on a really really really bad dirt road away from the national highway. The scenery was nice, all really typical African bush, very green, lots of butterflies, reed huts every once and a while, large Baobab trees and oh ya… land mines. Mozambique was basically in a state of war from 1968 to 1994 and there are still a lot of land mines laying around. But the good news is that most of the fields are clearly marked. So on my chapa ride through the bush every once and a while you would see a whole row of sticks along the side of the road that had been painted red and white and some had animal skulls on top. This is how you know where not to take a bathroom break.

Eventually the road just ends at a small roundabout and you look over and you are in the middle of what looks like an old west town except it is in Africa and all the buildings are made of cement instead of wood, but same basic layout. One main strip of road filled with general stores, bars, hair cutting places, hardware, and then a central market place. The rest is surrounded by bush and cattle farms. Normally, they get 3 hours of electricity a day. When I was there, there was none at all. It was really hot there and I look at that as being the official start of my first African summer, because when I returned to my site it started getting really hot here too.  So the down side of that is that it is just terribly hot right now and no air conditioning anywhere. The up side is that its Mango season :-)mmmmmmm ya! I eat one or two mangos a day now. And let me tell you. That is pretty awesome, and I can get 4 for about 40 cents.

The next week I took a trip down to Xai Xai where a bunch of volunteers from Moz 16 met up because it was one volunteer’s birthday. Originally I was not going to go because I had been away from my site the week before, but I had a very stressful week at work (I will cover that in “my work cont.” post) so I decided, to hell with it, im going to have a couple beers with some friends and…drum roll….eat at the Indian restaurant there. Yes, there are plenty of Indians in my town but not a single one has decided to start an indian restaurant and since Indian food is my favorite I went straight there before I even said hi to any of my friends. It was soooooooooooo good. I ate lamb curry. I think this mostly rice and beans diet I have been living with has seriously changed the amount of meat I can eat because I was really full after eating about a half of what I normally could eat. But I still ate it all and washed it down with a chai tea. That was an amazing lunch. Then we all hung out on the beach followed by getting together and making ginger black bean tacos for dinner. It was just a really nice time to hang out and talk with some good people and eat good food. I am becoming more and more aware that my general attitude is very dependent on the quality of food I eat and how much I eat.    

So on the food theme: the following weekend was thanksgiving! We held thanksgiving at the house of a volunteer that lives in the center of my town because she has a full stove and oven, and place for people to sleep. Basically I arrived just before 11 in the morning and we started snacking and then people just went up to the stove in shifts. Some people had bought a large plastic jug of cheap wine and some spices. They wanted to make mulled wine because it reminded them of autumn but were not totally sure how to make it. As it so happens, I love making German mulled wine, so I took it on and spent a solid 3 hours making one batch after another of mulled wine. It was good, and now we know the best thing to do with the nasty cheap wine they sell allover the place here but no one wants to drink. As the day went on we continued making one course after another.  Some people would make some stuff and then we would eat it and then other people would make other stuff and then we would eat that, We did not get to the main course of deep fried chicken, garlic rosemary mashed potatoes (made by yours truly), mac and cheese and cranberry sauce until like 7:30 at night. Then we had pumpkin ice cream with ginger cookies. I was so full I was only able to eat half my desert and that was sad because the pumpkin ice cream and ginger cookies were home made and really amazing.

The following weekend I went back up to Vilankulo, really it is my favorite beach I have ever been to. It is just gorgeous. Though the two highlights were really unrelated to the beach. When I first arrived I had lunch with a friend at a cute little café that reminded me a lot of beach side cafes in smaller towns on the coast between LA and Monterey. It was really cool to sit down and have a nice bowl of pasta with vegetables and feta cheese and then enjoy an espresso and then read a few articles in a recent news magazine. It just kinda took me back home for a bit. Like as if I were living a normal American life again. It was a good two hours.

The next day I went to the sending off party for a volunteer who is apart of the last group of volunteers to be sent home of the group that arrived in 2009. It was an interesting experience to be one of the new people who has a solid 19 months left saying goodbye to someone who has completed their two years. It also made me think about what it will be like for me when I am on the opposite end of the peace corps time line. I am sure it will be very strange to look back on a completed 2 years of living and working in Mozambique.  I really do not have any clue what my thoughts and feelings will be 19 months from now. I just know that I will probably be hoping I have a job lined up for when I go back home.

Work and other stuff

My work (why I flew half way around the world)

In mid October I went on a couple home visits with an activista. It was the first time I was able to see the on the ground work that my organization was involved in and what in effect I was there to support. We visited two homes. The first was the home of a woman who was extremely skinny and elderly. The activista had a good relationship with her ad they talked about general family happenings and the activista then moved on to making sure that the woman had been taking her anti retrovirals. We then gave her a kit of health supplies (soap, condoms, bleach for water purification, and a health handbook with lots of different information about preventing disease). This kit was a part of a USAID project to dispense these health info booklets along with some basic supplies. There was a young boy living with the woman, I am still not sure if he was her son or not as she seemed much too old to have give birth to him but she could have been younger than her appearance, so the activista registered him in a program for vulnerable children so he could receive some food since his care taker was obviously burdened with the task of caring for herself. The second home we visited was relatively uneventful and the individual was fairly healthy. I did lean that the neighborhood next to mine was occupied primarily by people from another part of the province and they moved there a few years ago when there was a large flood and some nuns built 60 houses for these people so the neighborhood is now called “sesenta casas.” Apparently the whole area that I live in (the outskirts of the city) has only recently been built within the past 5 years. Before that it was all just coconut and cashew trees. That would explain why my house is in such a rural area but at the same time close to the city.

The next day I went on a trip with the same activista to a school where she gives weekly classes on health and HIV prevention. The school was kinda out in the bush and was very simple. it was maybe 4 large reed huts with palm leaf roofs and all the children sat on the ground as the teachers stood in front of the class with a blackboard. I was much more of a distraction than a help as all the kids wanted to do was just stare at the white guy. SO I played two games with them that are linked with teaching HIV prevention and education and it all went fairly well. Then the teachers invited me to the 10 year anniversary party of the school, I said I would be happy to, they said great and that because I was not a student I would have to pay about $10 USD to attend the party (what?!?!, I could go to a fancy restaurant in the city and have a nice meal with that much money). Sensing some strange scheme to get money out of the American I told them that I would get back to them.

Other stuff

I had some interesting run ins with wild life in October. Of course there is another rat story: One night I woke up to hear my rat trap go off, when I checked it there was no rat but three whiskers attached to it. The rat had just barely avoided death. I think I set the trap too sensitive. SO I reset it but found no rat the next morning. The following night, just as I was settling into bed I saw the rat trying to claw its way into my plastic chest where I keep things like pasta and beans and rice. I realized that the rat had learned not to take the tasty food sitting on the rat trap. I then realized that this rat would never be killed by the rat trap and I had to kill it any way I could or accept it as a new room mate for some time. So, as it was occupied with trying to claw through plastic, I gently got out of my bed and grabbed the broom next to me. I crouched down and snuck up behind the rat very, very quietly. Then I lifted the broomstick and quickly brought it down on the rat’s body. I had thought that the rat would try to run, but I must have broken some bones or something. So I smacked it a couple more time to put it out of its misery. Then as I started to slide it away with the stick and towards the door it woke up and started coughing blood. SO I guess I didn’t kill it I guess I just knocked it out, so I slid it out of my house as quickly as I could as is was convulsing and spitting up blood on my floor. Finally I got it on the veranda where a few more well placed smacks to the head finished it off. Oh how I yern for the days when the most disgusting animal killing experience I had to deal with was sawing off the head of a chicken.

My other wild life I have had to deal with has been scorpions which I have encountered in my bathroom twice now but thankfully (knock on wood) no stings as I was able to scare them away with rocks. Also I had a flea plant a sac of eggs in one of my toe. I had no clue what it was, just a half bubble of dead skin raised from my toe and all the skin around it was numb. The peace corps Dr. I talked to over the phone told me that any Mozambiquan house wife would know how to remove it with a needle. So I went to a Mozambiquan hose wife and she showed up at my house not with a needle but a twig that had been sharpened to a point. I took out a needle and was like “This would be better right, nice, clean, sanitary needle that I washed in bleach?” “No.” she replied, the pointy stick was in her mind obviously the better option, so I washed the pointy stick in bleach and let her go at my toe with it. So she tore off the dead skin and revealed a large sack filled with black puss and then she pulled it out with a dirty, sandy piece of plastic. Then I poured bleach over the crater in my toe. good times.

A few short stories from Mozambique.

The Activistas (ActiveeSHtaSH)

The organization I am working with recently started a program for home based care of HIV positive people in several districts of my province. When someone tests as HIV positive they are added to a list that the hospital keeps for people that are to receive anti retroviral medications. The activistas are health advocates of sorts. They visit the people who have tested positive and count out their pills and help them make sure that all the propor medications are being taken regularly and in addition check up on the general state of the household. For example, if there is a child that is in need of food then the activista places the child on a vulnerable child food distribution program.

Recently my organization trained a group of about 30 activistas to begin this program.  I was observing several of the days of the training so they all have gotten to know me. Now every couple weeks they hold meetings in my office to hand in paper work and organize themselves into groups. I have spent time trying to learn different Gitonga words from them and singing and dancing to Mozambiquan songs. Mozambiquans are very energetic people so on one hand when I am actively trying to talk and joke around with them they are very happy, but if I am trying to read something or I just don’t feel like talking a lot they all think I am either sick or very angry. It is a very strange situation to be I when you have a group of people telling you to immediately go to the hospital because you do not feel like dancing today. But in general I feel very happy to have gotten so integrated with this group of 30 activistas. It is with them that I hope to learn the most and achieve the most over my next 22 months (I have now completed my second month at site). My time has mostly bee spent making observations about the org and the activistas and how I may be able to contribute to their success. However I recently realized that I have not yet just sat down with a group of activistas and asked them what their greatest challenges are in trying to help the HIV positive people they work with. I felt very silly having made scores upon scores of notes about my perceptions of what the greatest challenges are but I never just sat down and asked any of the activistas. SO this is my next goal. Wish me luck.

Home

A couple weeks ago I took a 6 hour journey up the coast to Vilankulo, a beautiful beach side large town. The town is in an area of rolling dunes filled with coconut trees right up against the ocean. At low tide a very large sandbar is above the water and you can walk over a huge area as if the ocean had just dried up. It is a very surreal experience. in the close distance there are several islands that make for a pretty view. They also block the rough ocean waves making it nice and calm swimming water. Also, this gives the water a wonderful bright blue color. I was never one that yearned to be relaxing on the beach in some exotic tropical location, but I have to admit, it was pretty nice.  Then when it was time to go I took my 6 hour journey back to my home and when I got to my city and started walking around I realized that things were starting to actually feel like home here. For a while I would step out of my house and look at ll the trees and houses and people that were around me and I felt that I was in a place that was very foreign and it makes you feel kinda small. But now I feel more and more that I am at some level connected to the rest of it. Now, when I look up at the stars that are totally different from the stars back home, it just doesn’t feel that intimidating anymore.

No electricity, no water and I think I smell a rat

Last weekend the electricity went out for 42 hours and when the electricity goes out so does the water. I had a large bucket of water and that was what would last be, but of course I never knew when the electricity would come back and therefore the running water. I spent most of my time reading because there was not a whole lot else to do ad the first day all I ate was raisins peanuts and crackers. I had some shrimp in the fridge that I was worried about going bad. I had dropped a significant amount of cash for these shrimp and I wanted to make the meal worth it but by lunch time on Sunday I was just worried about getting to eat them at all. my stove is electric so the only way for me to cook them was to build a fire, so I dug a pit in my year and filled it wit the various materials of a coconut tree and the whole thing went up in flames and burned itself out really really quickly. This was disappointing for two reasons, firstly, it meant that I was going to have to collect a lot more coconut tree material and use it more carefully in order to cook my shrimp. Secondly, this was a little surprising because many many people in this area build their entire houses out of coconut leaves. So basically my whole neighborhood is a tinderbox. Eventually got a fire going and cooked my shrimp, they ended up being a little dry but they were good enough to satisfy my hunger for something that was not peanuts, raisins and crackers. Ironically about 2 hours latter the electricity came back. I was so ecstatic to just be able to take a bucket bath! I was particularly interested in just getting everything in my house clean as well. I had had a rat a few days prior and I did not want another one to come into my house, attracted by any filth that accumulated.

A few nights prior I was woken up by the sound of some silver wear falling from my table. I turned on the light and saw a small but extremely fast rat dart from my table to the wall and then out under the tin roof, all in about 1.5 seconds. I locked down anything with a food sent but I could still hear the rat enter my house as soon as I got in bed, and then as soon as I turned on the light it disappeared again. After repeating this a few times I resigned myself to just go to sleep. The next day I bought a rat trap and set it out with a piece of tomato as bait. I remembered hearing the rat enter the house that night and thinking to myself, you are sooo F*&ked. I woke up the next morning thinking to myself, that’s funny I did not hear the rat trap slap. I went over to the trap and it was exactly as I left it the evening before except for one thing. The tomato was gone. So, I experimented with setting the rat trap supper supper sensitive (almost destroying my hand at one point), until I got to the point that I could set the trap so that it would go off if I dropped a small piece of paper on it. I set it with another piece of tomato (who knew that rats love tomato so much), and the whole day I was absolutely filled with the anticipation of the kill. I wanted to get this guy so bad by now. During my lunch break I went back to my house just to check on the rat trap, no dice rats usually don’t come out in the middle of the day. Then after work I took a bucket bath and when I came back inside, there it was, the rat trap bar had hit it exactly on the neck, a perfect kill. Right or wrong, I was very satisfied.

ps when I chose this backgroud it was a little bit ironic because it was so cliche tropical, but now I look at the palm trees in the background of this blog I I say to myself, "Hey thats like my site."

Highlights of the Past Month

Here are a few highlights of my past month and more or less my first month at site.

In the beginning of August my whole group had to say goodbye to our host families so we held a big party with lots of meat. We gave our host family members presents and they gave us neat capilanas (shirts for the guys). Then on the last night we packed up all our stuff and left our town at 6 in the morning as we waved goodbye to our host families and got on the big bus for Maputo.

We then had our swear in ceremony. Our group chose a capilana pattern that we would all make one piece of cloathng out of. A lot of the girls went all out taking the oportunity to live out their "project runway" fantasies of designing their own dresses. I just showed up at the tailor with a button up collared T-shirt in one hand and the capilana material in the other and asked the talor to just make me an identical of the t-shirt. Some of the other  guys had bow-ties mad (mad props).

So we all arrived at the house of the Ambassador of the US to Mozambique decked out in our capilana gear sitting in the hot sun on some plastic chairs , in the back yard overlooking the indian ocean, with a bout 100 people looking at us, most of whom we did not know. Most of us latter commented that it felt like graduation but sadly our families were not there. So then some people got up and spoke about their wishes for our future success  and finally the Ambasador came to the podium and had us repeat after her as we swore into the Peace Corps to become full fledged volunteers (woohoo!). Then we stood up and all sang our rendition of "Home." I forget the artist but its a good song and fairly recent and you should check it out and i will try to get a link to the video of our performance to my mom and on my facebook.  Then we stuffed our faces with lots of tasty orders before we were shuffled out and onto the bus to take us to our hotel. (Which had a very nice view of the whole city from my room, very cool) 

  All of the people that went up North left the next day so the night after the swear in we all had to say our sad goodbyes as our very united group was split in 2. Those of us who have site placements in the south had the weekend to explore Maputo and enjoy such things as gelato, expresso, thai food, indian food, and fresh lunch at the Maputo fish market which is a large open air fish market with restaurants attached that will sell you the fresh fish grilled and served with rice and hot sauce and salad.

We then had our supervisors conferance where we met the people that would be our organizational bosses for the next two years. The conference lasted two days and was in the hotel where we were staying. One of my friends described it as being like a blind date that lasts 2 days and you know your stuck with each other for the next 2 years. So it was a little odd at first but on the up side the food was very good at the hotel and fore some reason fancy places in Mozambique have the best chocolate moose ever.

Then I had my big drive up to my site. It took a while but it was very beautiful to see the landscape turn from the typical dry African bush  to a luch tropical setting with lots of Mango and coconut trees. We got there aty night and I did not have a materes to sleep on so my org placed me in a mozambiquan version of a hotel for the night. Unfortunatly on the way from my new home to the motel we got rear ended by a van but there was not serious damage. Then I got to the hotel at took a shower and then I realized that the wires attached to the small watter heater were touching the watter and I was getting a little electrocuted every time I touched the faucet. So I stopped taking a shower. Then my supervisor took me to a place to get some dinner. The woman behind the bar did not speak much portugese but she really liked me so she kept speaking in Bitonga to my supervisor and he was translating everything she said to me in portugese.  More or less she invited me to spend the night at her house because she thought it was really important for me to learn gitonga  and she promised me that  she was a good language teacher and I would learn really quickly. I told her that I was sorry but I need to focus on learning portugese right now. This was a very odd conversation to have using my new boss as the translator.

The next day I woke up and had a breakfast of cashew nuts, cake and overly sweet tea that was provided to me by the motel. This was a bad combo for my stomach for some reason and durring my trip into the city to buy everything I would need I ended up throwing up in the street in front of one of the shops. (to this day if I ever go back to that shop they people working there will start making fun of me, I guess that is a form of community integration).
All in all my city is very beautiful it has lots of run down but pretty buildings and an unbeatable naturallandscape. I live in the rural outskirts of the city (about 20 min bus ride) so it was very disorienting to go between a nice western style store or restaurant to houses with roofes made of palm leaves. Ingeneral it just took a while to feel ajusted. Just getting a rutine together for making sure yuo have enough time to do laundry, take a bath, wash dishes, cook your meals, clean your house, do all your shopping and be in the office several hours a day is very difficult. Its alot like cmping, everything just takes a long time to do. Also, I had rats at first but I killed them with rat poison (which is called "Medicine  for  rat killing" here). It was pretty gross placing the stiff little bodies of the ratts in plastic bags, even their tails were totally stiff.

My first week my organization introduced me to the neighborhood by holding a big community gathering where all the older men and women showed up to meet me. It was classic Peace Corps. I was sitting in a circle with all these people that live off the land and basically live the same way the people have lived here for the past few hundred years. They asked me random question and I answered and then they all sang a song and I went around shaking everyones hand and that was that. The other days my org took me around the city and introduced me to government and local NGO officials. A few days latter one of the men from the community that I had me invited me over for dinner. He is a little better off. He owns several markets around town and had a nice house for his family. We ate small fish (head and all) in a very spicy sauce and drank gin from a plasic bottle. After talking to him a while he told me that he grew up in germany and spoke german. i thought it was the gin talking. But then he broke out in fluent German. I was able t understand most of it from what I remembered of my college german classes. His father worked in East Germany when he was a boy, a little outside of Dresden. So his frist language is actually German and then he learned Portugese when his family moved back to Mozambique.

A couple weeks ago I went to the Tambila festval which is a Mozambiquan instument a lot like a zailaphone, but bigger. I staied at the house of an toehr peace corps volunteer. It was really cool becuase there wer about 15 to 20 volunteers all camped  in abd around her house.  I got to meet a lot of the volunteers that arrive almost a year ago that live in the southern region. They were all super cool and we all had a great time listening to the music, hanging out with a large group of japanese volunteers that have a similar program to peace corps and then going to a big open air dance club. This town was really beautiful as it overlooked a huge light aqua blue colored lagoon cerounded by bright green treas.

Last week I finally made it out to a big rural market I had been hearing about for some time. it is only on tuesdays and fridays and people from very distyant villages come here to sell their goods. I was told that if I wanted to get any seafood I would have to get there between 6 and 7 in the morning and it is a 40 min walk. So I woke up at 5:30 and started walking just as the sun was coming up. There was a thick and very creepy layer of fog coverng everything just about 15 feet in the air. It was very pretty to walk past all the little farm fields and coconut trees and reed houses as the sun was comming up,. Finally i got to the market which was a clasic, large outdoor African market filled with lots of fruit and vegtables for dirt chep prices. I made my way over to the sea food area. Most of it was very small shrimp and different form sof small dried fish. I was not down for that. But they did have a lot of clams and decent sized crab so I bought about 2or 3 pounds of crab for about 70 US cents. not bad. I recently bought a refridgerator with a small freezer (I know, posh corps right) so now I am able to keep frozen crab in my house all the time. I have pretty consistant electricity but I have to walk maybe150 feet to the closest watter faucet where I fill up my large watter bucket and carry it back to my house. Its not a bad deal at all considering the fact that a lot of other people in this country have to walk a long while to get to their clossest watter. The only anoying thig is that when the electricity goes out, so does the watter and when the electricity comes back, the watter takes a long time to get back.

Right now with my organization I am just doing observation until mid november when I will present my findings and define a role for myself and responsibilities in order to contribute to the long term sustainable improvement of the organization. I already have a few ideas but just in case wish me luck.

Cultural Experiences

So a couple weeks ago I went to a sort of mozambiquan baby shower. Once a baby survives being alive for one month it is taken out of the house for the first time. Then freinds and family say some prayers and then they start chanting "The baby has nothing! Give to the babby!" and everyone places presents on the table that the baby is laying on. Then they place a blanket over the baby and everyone start throughing coins at the baby and then give larger amounts of money. I was the only white person there so a lot of people took pictures of me. Then when it was time to eat I was apart of the first group of people that got up to get food (the older men) then different groups of people went up to the table as the food became less and less. Most people just got beans and rice. (which is what I took  in the first place along with a little chicken and french fries) The young children were given a slightly fermented, sweatened corn porage. it tasts like apple sauce that tickles your toung. But it does not have any sgnificant amount of alcohol. Then it was cake time and the proud mother and father had the first peace of cake. The Father(late 40s early 50s)  was the father of my home stay father(26). The mother is another wife (between 18 and 24). I am not sure if this man has multiple wives or if one has died.
Then I got to eat cake which i was very happy about because I was very hungary,.  I did not eat much of the food because I felt bad about eating much when there were more people at the party that the food could have posibly satisfied. Then after cake I got dinner. My plate consisted of two chicken feat and chicken liver on rice. (I ended up just mashing up the chicken feat into some of the rice so it looked like I ate them. I actualy like chicken liver a lot. Then for the next few hours I danced with a lot of the children along with my homestay partents. They really like to dance and play withy kids so it was a lot of fun! Then we took a car back home and an old woman we were giving a ride to sang a bunch of traditional songs. It was very cool.

A week later I had a very different cultural experience. I few people and myself wanted to take a trip to a small shopping senter in a suberb of Maputo. The chapas that go there were telling us that they would not take us to that suburb but that they would take us to another suberb and then we could take another chapa from there, but first they wanted moe people to show up (and no one was around because it was sunday mornign). SO instead we decided that we should embark on the Peace corps Mozambique tradition of Balaying (hitchhiking). Hitchhiking is very common in Mozambvique and the only people that do it are travelers and very poor people. And givven the poor conditoin of a lot of the chapas, hichhiking is a lot saffer than public transportation. So I waited on the side of the main road with two other volunteers and 20 minets latter a wealthy Mozambiquan in a big SUV stoped and was happy to give us a ride (the shopping center is along the main road and he was going to Maputo anyways). SO initiation into 3rd world hitchhiking compleat! Then going to the shoping center was very strange. It was like a little american minimall. There was a big suppermarket and nice cloathing shops and a couple restautants. I had a straight up feast. Thin crust pizza with capers, olives, and anchovies, followed by a greak salad with feta chease. Then I ate some chocolate I bouyght at the suppermarket. It was so good to eat really nice food and a big salad. If you had told me a year ago that I would be having a nice thin crust pizza for lunch in late july 2011. I would have saied to you: Nope, I will be in peace corps. oh well!

The last week and a half

The last week and a half has been an emotional roller coster ride for the pre-service training group. Once we got back from our site visits everyone was very happy becauswe we all had so much fun getting to see a day in the life of the current peace corps volunteers. However soon after we returned we discovered that one third of all the people in the group did not pass the language exam that we had taken prior to our site visits. I was very happy that I had passed the test but overall I was sad that the group as a whole did not perform as expected. This feeling was shared by many as we feel like it was more a group failure that the failure of individuals. It is still quite a mistery as to how such a large percentage of us did not pass as we have all been  very enthusiastic about learning the language. So now instead of moving on to learn local languages, our trainers have decided that we will just focus on learning portugese for the next few weeks. Before I was in a language class of people that all lived close to me. Now I am in a class of people that had the same score as me. I feel like I am learning a lot more portugese now and even though I will not be learning a local language during training I feel like I will come out of training with strong portugese.

The day after we were told the bad news we had our placement interviews were we were able to express what time of site and job we would like to be placed with ofr the next two years. I told them that I wanted to do organizational development of a smaller local Mozambiquan NGO and also simultaniously work with a larger international NGO. I told them that I would prefer to be in an area with several other volunteers and that it would be nice to be in a larger town so I could focus on learning Portugese and not a local language. Then from Friday (the day of the interview) to wednesday the day of site anouncements) everyone was just crazy anxious with anticipation. I even had a dream a few night before site anouncements where i saw a sheet of paper with eveyone's name on the left side and their towns on the right side. In the dream i scroled downwith my hand to my name and then saw the name of a southern mozambiquan city next to it.

And then it was wednesday....We were all standing together in a school basketball court with a chalk map of Moz in front of us and the names of all the site writen out on the map. We were given envelopes and said that when we were tole to open the envelope we would all open ours at once and then go stand on our site on the map. 5.....4.....3...2....1....."Open your envelopes!" it took me way longer then it should take a normal human being to open an envelope becauser I think my hands were shaking a bit. Finaly I tore it open and looked at the piece of paper. For the first few seconds i only saw the words describing the NGO I would work with and I was very frustrated that I could not see where it said what site i was going to (that was a very long 2-5 seconds). And then I saw it. "HOLY S#!t!" it was the same damn city i had the dream of. Crazy! So I went over to my site on the map and saw the group of people i would be living close to for the next two years and the ni looked over my sholder and saw the 2 thirds of my group that are all going to be living and working in the North of the Country. it is a little sad that so many of the people I have become friends with will be living so far away but it just gives me reolve (and resorces) to make a big trip through the north of the country at some point in the next 2 years.

More or less everyone is very excited about their placements and group moral is at an all time high. Though we are all so ready to get to site now that we for sure have trouble paying attention during the technical training sessions. I will be working with a larger local mozambiquan organization that runs the spectrum of HIV prevention and treatment. They recieve funding from 2 large INGOs and the US embasy. So it should be a really good experiance. I will be living in a city that is very beautiful and I am excited about exploring it and the serounding area.

A day in the life

I am in one of my extremely vivid Larium dreams right now. I am in some sort of situation that is completly not my life at all. All the people in my dream are people I know from different times and places of my life but for some reason they are all in this dream world as well, but the way that I know and relate to the all is completly different from real life. This dream is dragging on and on as if it were a full day and everything feels so real. Even my sence of smell is more real in my dreams since I started taking Larium.

Suddenly i am awakened by the sound of screams! Wait, no thats roosters...and now is dogs...and pigs squeeling too...and now cats. It is still dark but all the animals in the town have decided that it is time to wake up at about 3:30 in the morning. The mix of animal noisies blurs together and creates what I would amagin to be the sound track to hell. The wind is blowing hard, cold air is pooring through small cracks and the vent hole at the top of the wall and my room is getting colder by the second, good thing I am wearing a sweater, sweat panta and thick socks. The wind is blowing twigs and dust on the tin roof above me and i combination with the cats on the roof it sounds like im in the inside of a snare drum. i get up an relieve myself over the black bucket I have in my room because the out hose is always locked in the night.

I then go back to sleep for another round of Larium dreaming. At 6:30 I am woken up by my host mother and told that it is my turn to takea bucket bath. I walk into the bathing room which is a small room with a small drain at one end and underwear hanging from the walls (it is not considered proper in mozambique to dry your underwear outside so people do it in their bathing rooms). The air is still cold but the water is worm so I crouch over the bucket and bath myself. After i get dressed i eat breakfeast. Today I am a lucky boy my homestay mother made me frenchfries and a deep fried egg for breakfast. I only get this about once a week. Usually it is peanutbutter on bread. I eat my food and drink tea before grabbing my language books and note books before heading to class at 7:30.

I walk over to a neighboring coleague`s house were i and three others share the attention of our Portugese teacher for two hours. We take a five minet break to eat a snack that each of our home stay mothers have packed for us. Mostly we get juice and crackers ant are slightly sweet. The crackers make me think about hard tack that sailors used to survive off of, because we all have been eating these for almost 2 months now every day for snack once in the morning once in the afternoon.

After Language class we go to our technical training session where we learnign about how to become good peace corps health volunteers in Mozambique and sometimes we get guest speakers from the Mozambiquean government or from the US embacy. Then we walk back home for lunch. I live down the road downhill so myself and my language class coleagues always spend about 15 min walking back home and 20 min walking back to tech class after lunch. My lunch us usualy plain pasta with vegtable oil, breat and a lemon soda. Today I am lucky, I have a little extra time to wash some cloathes durring my lunch break. I take two buckets of water I place my dirty cloathes in one bucket and soap them up and scrub them between my fists then I rinse them off in the bucket with clean water. Then I empty out the bucket with the dirty water and fill it up with clean water and rinse the cloathes out in the water for a final rinse. Then I squease them as best I can and hang them out to dry on the cloaths line beforegrabing my back pack and walking 30 min to the building where we are having a session on preserving our own health.

The woman that does all of our personal health sessions is the head doctor for the Mozambique Peace corps. She is supper funny and has tons of crazy stories, but in general she is a very sweet woman and everyone is very happy when she comes to speak with us. if we ever get sick she is our main go to person.

Its about 4:30 now and we are finnished with our classes for the day. Now it is time for all of us to get in some chill time and hang out with eachother. There are just under 30 of us. Overall it is a very positive and easy going group. There has not been any drama to my knowledge and everyone gets along pretty well. So we hang out for a couple hours at a small bar/restaurant to chat. Im enjoying a nice dark South African beer and a piece of meat with spicky sauce becauce I do not eat dinner until 8. We have a cerfew of 7 so at 6.30 I am walking some people home. Less than a third of the group is male and a lot of the girls get cat called so I am walking a few of the girls that live by me homein a big group.

I am at home by 7 and my home stay mother is at night school and my father is about ready to head out to teach a night school class. I sit with the  2 year old girl and her 15 year old aunt and we watch Portugese who want to be a millionare and I do my Portugese home work. Then i take another bath (you want to take two baths a day when you live in a town where all the trash is burned) and at 8 I eat dinner (a bunch of rice with chichen in a salty tomato broth) Then I brush my teath, change into sweapants and a sweat shirt, climb under my covers and fall into a larium dream in the protective bubble that is my mosquito net.

Into the Bush

Last week everyones life here in training was about tests. We had a writen portuguese exam on tuesday, an oral portuguese exam on friday and an oral technical exam on friday as well. We will not know the results untill later on the week but depending on how we did on the portuguese oral exam we will either be able to move on to studying a local mozambiquan language and continue technical training or be placed in intencive portugese classes. I feel fairly confident in how I did on all exams. I have been learning Portugese very6 rapidly copmpared to other languages I have studies in the past. The small language group sizes combined with the home stay family experience has really forced a lot of portugese into my head. Additionally the previous latin languages i studied have helped me get a hold of the gramar.

On SUnday all of us trainees we sent out on shadowing visits with active volunteers. One of my coleagues and myself were sent off to a small district capital in the center of the Gaza provence. We were very close to the city of Chokwe, if you feel like google maping it. The volunteer we shadowd has been there for over a year and a half so it was good to get some insights from someone who had experienced the majority of the 2 year service. She was also supper busy and supper experienced. She is totaly proficiant in portugese and knows basic chengana (local language), works with the local cealth center, a large INGO and a couple small comunity based organizations. So I was able to get some insights into whatever my responcibilities may end up being eventualy. My fellow trainee and I we also very lucky because the volunteer we visited and her education volunteer site mate cooked us awesome curry and pasta dishes. Mmmmmm.....
On Monday we went out into the "community" which is an other word for a small town out in the mittle of the african bush, It was very cool to take a chapa for 15 min and then get out and walk down a dirt road through the bush for another 20 min before getting to a village with not running watter or electricity. We then did house visits with a local health activist. The job of the health activist is to check up on people with health problems in the community and make sure they are taking care of themselves properly. A lot of the time this inculdes people that are HIV positive and need to be keeping up on their meds. So we walked around a large area in the "community" for about 3 to 4 hours visiting about4 or 5 houses. Then my coleague and myself called it a day but the volunteer we were visiting went ot the health center to help out with an overflow of patiants.
The next day We went to the health center qand had a little tour of were people recieved treatment and where the babies were waied and given vacinations. If someone has an easily treatible condition then they are treated in the health center by health technitions (there is only one doctor per health center because for the whole 22 mill population of mozambique there are only  1000 doctors) If someone is very sick then the health center will put the on an ambulence to the closest hospital. If the hospital is having trouble carring for them because they are really really really sick, then the hospital will put them on an ambulance and send them to Maputo. Ambulances to not puck people up from their home they are so few that they can only be used for taking peoplefrom one health building to another getting to a health post orhealth center if you are sick is your own resboncibility. The volunteer showed us all the paperwork she usualy has to do throughout the day for the hospital and the INGO she works with it was a lot of info but it made me think "hey, I could do that and that would be somthing I could do to really contribute to a health center." So that was very encouraging and in general the whole experience made me feel very eager to get out of training and into my site (which I will not know for one more week).
On wednesdaty I navigated 4 chapa rides from the small town, then to Chokwe, then the big bus/chapa terminal just outsode of Maputo, then to a smaller chapa terminal in Maputo, wandered around maputo with my coleague (causiously and with care to my seroundings and my belonings and to always know how to get back to the chapa terminal of couse, no worries mom). Then When we went back to the smaller chapa terminal in Maputo we mety up with some other trainees who had gotten back from their visits. We waited around for about an hour for the correct chapa to show up. Our group was first in line but when the chapa showed up a bunch of Mozambiquans tried to cut in line in front of us but the people that worked on the chapa argued with them for about 10 min and made sure that we got on first because we were first in line. That was very curtious. In my experiance the chapa drivers and the "cobradors" (guys that controle who gets on and oof a chapa nad colect all the money. Are some of the most reliable and trusworthy resorces when traveling (I was origonaly suspicious of them but the volunteer I visited confirmed my geneneral trust of chapa drivers and cobradores). By the time I got back from maputo to the town we are doing training in I stoped in a little bar/restaurant and got a cheap bowl of soup half, a large piece of bread and a big beer. It was excelent and exactly what I needed after the long day. Then I went to my host family's house took a bucket bath, watched a Brtazilian soap opera episode, ate dinner, told my family baout my trip, gave them some cashews straight form the region they are grown and went to bed.     

Church, SIDA, And the 2nd of july

Last weekend I went to a Methodist chruch in the town. It was a small cinder block building and about fifty people sitting sholder to sholder on a few benches. There was no preacher or anything just a girl in the front of the church that called off songs for everyone to sing. That lasted about an hour. The next hour was filled up with individuals getting up and singing and if anyone liked their singing then they gave the person a few coins. The singer would then deposit all the coins in the collection tray. Then at the end, everyone kinda formed a conga line to the collection tray and gave more money. I had thought that over two hours of church was quite a lot (but im no expert). Then I found out that some of my colegues were taken to an apcolistic church. They arrived a 9 in the morning had a lunch brreak at noon and then went back to church until 5 in the afternoon.

During this past week we have been focusing on the AIDS epidemic in mozambique (11.5% of the population is HIV positive). Part of everything we learned has been very depressing because the problem is so big and there is no easy way to counter it. The idea of using a condom just is not taking hold and in addition to that, infadelity is not just common its expected. However. about 50% of people that get HIV in Mozambique get it from a faithful spouce that had contracted the virus from a previous partner. The good news has come from all the advances in anti retro viral drugs and an effort to make sure people that are HIV positive get a good diet and good nutrition. There are people that have been living with HIV for over 10 years in Mozambique by simply kepeing up with their meds and having a good diet and their immune systems are still doing well.

yesterday we had a 4th of july party on the 2nd it was really great to hang out with all my coleagues informaly and eat some hamburgers and cake.

Food

Food has for sure been the big theame in my life over the past week and a half. Last week i went into the out house to find two chickens sitting in the corner. I knew that they were going to be killed for eating probably that day. i had been told by Peace Corps that we were all recomended to learn how to kill a chicken. I suspected this was my day. However, Nothing happened. And the next day the two chickens were still in the out house. i thought it was a little strange to have to do my businesss in front of an animal I would eventualy kill. But there was not much choice. Later in the day one of my other coleagues said that there was also a chicken waiting for her to kill it but that her family was waiting for the weekend. I then realized that Peace Corps had asked all the families to teach us all how to kill chickens this weekend. But the very next day (Thurseday) the mother of my house came walking out of the kitchen with a knife and a bucket of hot watter. I asked her what she was doing. She said she was going to kill the chickens. At this point I realized that I almost missed my oportunity. So I asked if I could help and learn how to kill a chicken. She asked me if I was scared and I said no. So we went outside and took the chickens out of the out house. She killed the first one and showed me how to do it. Then it was my turn. I was a little nervious  but I felt that it was somthing I should know how to do and that since I have been a meat eater all my life I should experience the process of killing an animal that I would eat. So I knelt down next to the chicken and asked myself one last time if I thought that this was an ok thing to do. Is there a concious complex life inside there? Was my vegetarian father, high school teachers and friends right? Nope, I looked at that thing in the eyes as it dumbly sat there and randomly jutted its head around and realized that there really was not a whole lot going on in there. So I grabbed it by the wingsand placed them under my left foot. I pulled out its legs and held them down with my right foot, I streched out its kneck with my left hand and I sawed its kneck off with a very blunt serated knife with my right hand. Then I waited for the pulsing to stop and that was that. Not going to lie, it was pretty grose. But my only regret is that I wish I had a sharp knife to use. That would have been better, but thats just no how they do it in Mozambique (pernouncee as I recently found out , Mozambikeee)

I got sick last weekend. There has been a cold that has been going around the peace corps trainees. I spent the whole weekend on the front porch of my house studying verb congigations for a test that was on monday, and watching the local kids run around yelling randomly and getting very dirty and then getting my newly hand washed pants very dirty by huging my legs. (not cool, it takes a very long time for me to hand wash a pair of pants) But in the end I got a good score on my test which has ben a great relief for me as i really weant to become very good at portugese and language learning has been a big chalenge for me in the past. I cant even spell in english.

On tuesday my language group and I (4 people total) made a mexican/american meal for each of out home stay mothers. We made guacamole (its avacado season now) Pico de gallo, pinto beans and fried green pepers with onions. it was soooooooo good to eat guacomole again. our house mothers tought us how to plucj and gut a chicken after one of my coleages had his first oportunity killing a chicken (he had some difficulty at first so his homestay mothergrabed his hand and killed the chicken with him)

On Thursday and friday All 29 PC trainees learned how to do permagardening (permanent gardening) whcich is a techneaque used to create high producing vegtables gardens in small areas. It was origonaly designed for people living with HIV/AIDs so they could have a strong healthy diet easily accesable to them. The gist of it is that you dig very deep and fill in the land with soft soil mixed with compost so you can plant lots of plants closer together and you can reenergise the land with the compost over and over again to the soil never gets depleated. This was a lot of fun. I really enjoied the oportunity to get outside and do some gardening work. 

My Host family calls me Irmao Jack but they say it so fast it sounds like "Man Jack"

From May 30^th to June 12^th 2011. I have experienced a lot. I had my last gelada in Phoenix. It was not great quality but it was hazelnut gelada and that was good. I met up with my group of Peace Corps volunteers headed to Mozambique. (Mos. 16) We had a quick intro to Peace Corps. We got vaccines (except for me because I already was vaccinated for yellow fever from when I went to South Africa. I took a quick trip to the liberty bell and the outside of Independence hall, got some sushi and had some last microbrews and American food with the other volunteers.

Then I woke up at 2:00 in the morning to get on a bus to JFK and fly 15 hours to Johannesburg. I got to see all of Manhattan at night and that was really cool and then we drove right across the city at 5 in the morning when no one was around. The flight to Job burg was relatively boring except for when we landed and someone played Toto “Africa”. That was awesome. I was really excited to be back in Africa and see all the South African stuff in the airport. It was very nostalgic. Then I got in the plane to Maputo for the hour flight. I was so anxious that thistles hour was almost painful. Then we flew past Maputo and it was solo beautiful. It is a city perched on a little peninsula separating a bay from the ocean. Thins but the city is on the north side, its smaller, it’s always sunny and it’s in Africa.

For the next couple days my colleagues and I got more intros into Peace Corps and more info about Mozambique and more shots. We then got some info about what life would be like for the following 10 weeks of training. We also are lots of good food and drank lots of good mango juice. We were in the hotel the whole time so we never got to see Maputo.

Last Sunday I met my host Family. I am in a town in the mountains about an hour and a half drive inland from Maputo. It is called Nemaha. I and all the other trainees are staying with host families as we are trying to learn as much Portuguese as possible. My host family consists of a 26 year old father 19 year old mother 2 and a do year old doubter and a 15 year old sister of the father. They are all very nice and funny and they enjoy my company even more than I enjoy theirs (at least I think so).

Every day I wake up at 5:30 in the morning (with the sun) I take a bucket shower and eat a simple breakfast of fresh baked bread (really good bread in this town) peanut butter, and tea. Then I have a Portuguese class with 3 other volunteers and one teacher. This is from 7:30 to 9:30. From 10 to noon I have some sort of introduction to some form of PC activity or health info session. Then I go back to my house for lunch (lunch and dinner are either pasta with a little tomato and onion or rice with a chicken stew with a little tomato and onion and sometimes green pepper, all with a grape Fanta and an orange, its orange season right now). Then I go back for some PC lessons or cultural event until 4 or 5. Then I do some homework at home and talk with my family and take another bucket bath until 8 when I eat dinner and then I go directly to bed at 9 or 9:30 because I am so tired and then I do it all over again. This weekend I went to Maputo to buy a cell phone. That was cool Maputo is a lot safer than Durban and prettier to so it  has been a welcome relief to my fears of spending time in a city where I have to be worried about getting stabbed. I got Chinese food with some colleges at the Chinese cultural center in Maputo. It was nice to eat lots of vegetables.

Today I did a lot of our door work for a hospital and for my house it was nice to do that I like out dory gardening work a lot. (Sorry about spelling and stuff imp in a rush)

Background Post

So, to make sure we’re all on the same page I will begin from before the beginning.

About a year ago I began my Peace Corps application amongst the over 300 job applications I sent out after finishing grad school with a Masters in International Relations. In mid July I had an interview with a Peace Corps recruiter in LA. My original interest was to be sent to a French speaking African country to work on some form of development project. I had focused much of my studies on Africa (studied in Durban, South Africa for a semester in undergrad) and had a great interest in becoming fluent n French. The recruiter informed me that she wanted to place me with an NGO development program, which I thought would be perfect. However, she said that the only one that was open in the appropriate time line would be in Spanish speaking South America. She gave me the option of that position or a youth program in some other part of the world that would not have been French or Spanish speaking. I chose the South American program and she nominated me on the spot. She said that nothing was for sure so getting some sort of leadership experience would be good for my competitiveness. Then I had to sign a paper stating that I would commit a significant amount of time studying Spanish. She informed me that I would have to take the CLEP Spanish exam eventually to prove that I had acquired a working knowledge of Spanish.

Fast forward after taking many medical exams, getting legal clearance, working a 5 month stint as a union organizer etc… to March 2011. I received an e-mail asking me for an updated version of my resume. I sent the updated version and asked when I would be expected to take the CLEP Spanish exam. I received an e-mail back thanking me for the updated version of my resume, stating that I no longer had to take the CLEP exam and that I would hear from someone in the next 6-8 weeks with more info. Ok?...

Two or three weeks later I got a call from someone at the Peace Corps HQ in DC. She asked me several general questions about my interest and commitment. I replied by assuring her of my total commitment and desire to be a part of something bigger than myself and hopefully significantly improve the lives of those I interact with. She then informed me that the South America program had been canceled due to new federal spending cuts. She did however say that she would make it a priority to find me a new post. I said ok and asked her if this meant that I was guaranteed an “invitation to volunteer” (the official acceptance into the peace corps). She said “Anything that would change that would have to come from your end.”  I said “So I basically just have to avoid getting arrested and I’m good?” “Exactly.” She replied.   

About a week later I got a call on my cell when I was in the shower. I checked the voice mail at about 11 am. It was another woman from the Peace Corps who said she wanted to discuss a possible placement. However, she said that the only way for me to get this placement was for me to confirm with her before 5 pm eastern time (2pm my time). I called periodically at first and semi-frantically as it got closer to the end time. Then 5 min before 5pm eastern time I got a call on my cell, it was her.

This lady explained to me that there was a recent opening in an NGO development program and that it would be the only one for the next several months. She said that it was in a Portuguese speaking African Country. She said that I would be working with NGOs that are working to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and helping them build their capacity. THIS WAS EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED! (well ok, not exactly, the whole Portuguese thing was sort of out of the blue) So I took up the offer even though I only had 6 weeks before I would leave, May 30^th. I got an E-mail telling me that I would be sent to Mozambique for the next 2 years.

Over the past few weeks I have been getting all my stuff together (including a bad ass new Swiss army knife and a hand crank radioflashlight) and stuffing basic conversational Portuguese into my head. It’s a good thing that Portuguese is very similar to Spanish. I basically just have to add a sh or oo sound to the end of every Spanish word. Right now my brother is visiting me and my parents in LA from NY. I am spending time with them before I take a plane to Phili in one week. I will be given a bunch of shots and some orientation in Phili with 29 other new Peace Corps Volunteers and then they will fly us out to Maputo, Mozambique for more orientation over a few days. Then we will be bused to a small village for a 10 week training. The 10 weeks training will focus on getting us to a working knowledge of Portuguese and getting us ready for the jobs we will be undertaking. Then the superiors will analyze my brain and decide which part of the country to send me to and to what specific project. This could be in a small village or a big city. I could have easy access to the internet or it could take me a five hour bus ride. I may have electricity or I may not. I just won’t know until the 10 month training is over.

So there you go. The next time I post I will be in Mozambique. I will try and post it myself or I will send a letter to a family member who will then post it.  

Wish me luck,

Jack

Ps: Over the next two years you always have a place to stay in an unknown location in Mozambique.

ETA back in USA : Mid September 2013.