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.