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.
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